Misuderstanded

The Black English gap, as one might call it, matters: It can affect people’s lives at crucial junctures. In 2007, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissent claimed that when a black woman said, in terror, “He finna shoot me,” she may have been referring to something in the past, when in fact “finna” refers to the immediate future. “Why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dog?” Warren Demesme asked the police when accused of sexual assault in 2017. The statements one makes to law enforcement after requesting a lawyer are inadmissible—but Demesme’s rights were ignored because, it was argued, he’d requested a “lawyer dog,” not an actual attorney.
John McWhorter. "Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?"

These don't strike me as mistakes made by people who don't understand Black English. Or, to use it's longer name, African-American Vernacular English; "Ebonics" in the vulgar tongue. And while John McWhorter's broader point, which is that court transcribers who are unfamiliar with how many Black people speak can place into the record distortions of what people actually intended to say is well taken, it's worth separating that from what appear to be cynical attempts to use the fact that many White people find the way Black people talk to be something between bizarre and bastardized as a weapon against them.

Although I'm black myself, I don't speak Black English. Mr. McWhorter's opening example of “He come tell ’bout I’m gonna take the TV,” may as well have been Greek. The fact that “He come tell ’bout,” negates whatever comes after it (presumably, it means "he lied about") was complete news to me. But despite the fact that I haven't lived in a majority Black neighborhood (outside of my freshman dormatory in college) since I was too young to remember, I'm well aware of the fact that “finna” is short for "fixing (as in "preparing") to" and that in Mr. Demesme’s case, "dog" is effectively a synonym for "dude," "guy," "bro," mister," "pal," buddy," "fella" et cetera. These aren't particularly obscure usages. After all, I heard them on television all the time.

People who are tasked with either finding ways to win a person's freedom or place them behind bars don't really care if Black English is deficient or alternate when compared to Standard American English, or any other dialect of the language. What matters to them is that the language is different enough from what likely jurors and or judges are familiar with that nonsensical definitions of “finna” or “dog” will sound plausible.

And in that case, even the best educated and precise court stenographer won't make much of a difference.

Conception

NPR interviewed Miami Times columnist Carl Hiaasen about his decision to write about the killings of five women in a SunTrust bank in Sebring Florida. Mr. Hiaasen's brother, Robert, was one of those killed in the shootings at the Capital Gazette.

At one point, Mr. Hiaasen notes:

And what Rob would have wanted - and I knew he felt because we talked about it after Parkland. We talked about it after Sandy Hook. We talked about it after the Pulse shootings - was that every one of these is a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale. And you can't rate them or put them in order.

To borrow a line from Star Wars, I don't know... I can conceive quite a bit worse.

And my point isn't to be flippant. I can conceive of tragedies much larger in scale than any given mass shooting in the United States that you care to name. Like the Rwandan Genocide. The estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to over a million people. And this is in a nation that only had a population of a little over 7 million people in 1990 (and it was steadily declining by the time the genocide actually took place in 1994). So even at the lowest number, the death toll was about 1 in 14 residents of the nation. At the upper end, it's one in seven. That's well above the percentage of Black or White Hispanic people in the United States. So imagine that in the space of now, until the end of May, every Latin person in the United States with a White racial background was murdered. It's a horrific thought. But I, at least can conceive of it. After all, it's happened before.

Now, for the record, this isn't to say that President Trump is likely to ever play the role that Théoneste Bagosora did in Rwanda, or that anti-immigrant sentiment will boil over in a level of bloodshed that would dwarf the Holocaust. Only that a population determined to wipe out a significant portion of itself can do so, and rather quickly. When one considers what the carnage that was inflicted in significant part with "machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons" it doesn't take much to imagine how much worse things could be in the United States, where guns would likely be a much larger part of the equation. And the United States has had genocides in the past, even if we've largely forgotten about them.

For any of Parland, Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, Thousand Oaks or even Las Vegas to be "a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale" means not thinking about what people have shown themselves capable of time and again. It's one thing for "another angry, white, male loser who had access to a weapon" to vent their frustrations on even hundreds of people at a time. And yes, those instances are tragic. But are they tragedies on a scale with the willingness of a population to stand by, or even participate, when entire families of their fellow citizens are wiped out for the crime of not having the correct distant ancestors? Maybe they are. Maybe the difference between 5 dead, 50 dead or 500,000 dead is simply some number of zeroes. After all, there are plenty more where those came from, no matter how many die violently. Maybe the deaths of 12 people should lie as far outside of our imaginations as the deaths of 12 million. Maybe the fact that I can so easily picture a large segment of people of United States setting out to murder people they see as unlike themselves is evidence of a darkness that has overtaken me.

Mr. Hiaasen calls on the media to "shine a light on it and write about it and react with some humanity and horror every time it happens." This is, in his view the only way for us to "get better as a society." I don't know that I agree with him on that. In part, because I look askance at the implied questioning of the "humanity" of people who don't respond in the way that he would like. As many times as dehumanizing others, questioning their "humanity" has lead to the very worst of human tragedy, giving people reasons to judge seems counterproductive. And I'm sure of the helpfulness of constantly staring into the abyss, either. There's already a certain normative quality to violence (whether guns are involved or not) in the United States. The news needing to make room for some thirty or so stories of people who have died violently every day would eventually become simply a grim background hum.

Creating a world where a man executing five women in a bank would be universally, genuinely shocking to people is going to take something other than constantly reminding them that violence is part of our everyday lives. It's going to take removing much of the violence from our everyday lives. That's not going to be a function of the media. It's going to take all of us deciding that we have better choices, and choosing to reward one another when people avail themselves of those better choices.

Run Howard Run

Howard Schultz is mulling over a run for President of the United States as an Independent, having come to the conclusion that the current Democratic party has moved too far to the left for his liking. Over on the BBC's website, the blurb for the story trotted out a familiar objection to his not-quite-yet plan...

Democrats say ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will re-elect Donald Trump if he runs as an independent.
Howard Schultz: Starbucks tycoon roasted over 2020 plan

In other words, Mr. Schultz will prove popular enough that people who want "Anybody but Trump" in the White House come 2021 may see him as a viable choice. And since Mr. Schultz is running to the center, he's more likely to have appeal in the more conservative states, where in order to win a general election, the "Anybody but Trump" vote needs to be unified.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a particularly astute political strategist, to understand that as an Independent, Mr. Schultz would have no viable path to winning a general election. This is, after all, why Senator Sanders ran as a Democrat, and Donald Trump as a Republican. They may have not cared much for "their" parties as a whole, but outside it them, neither wouldn't have been taken seriously. And it's unlikely that an Independent candidacy by Mr. Schultz would be treated as anything other than a sideshow.

It would allow voters in the center, however (people who the increasingly left-leaning Democratic activists would rather not have to spend much energy on), to vote for someone other than President Trump without needing to vote for whomever the Democrats nominate. To be sure, there will be a non-zero number of "third-party" votes cast. There are usually around five alternatives to the Democratic/Republican duality on the ballot here in Washington state every four years. But most of them don't make it to the status of also-rans. Jill Stien and Gary Johnson were able to garner some lasting attention, but everyone else effectively ceased to exist on election day (and for many people, only barely had any real presence before then). Howard Schultz allows protest votes for someone who doesn't come across as hopeless, a lunatic or both. And it's understandable that the Democrats would rather have people protesting President Trump than themselves.

In order to head that off (assuming that Mr. Schultz does rum as a protest candidate), the Democrats are going to have to find something other than dislike of President Trump to run on. Something that unites both centrists and left-wingers. And that's going to be hard. The Democrats have always come across as a more fragile coalition than the Republicans. Coming up with someone who can appeal to the left, while appealing to the center more than Mr. Schultz does could be difficult. Mainly because anyone who votes Howard Schultz, Independent, for President understands that he's not going to win. And even if he does, he'd be unlikely to be an effective President, given that he wouldn't have much in the way of a consistent Congressional caucus backing him up.

The Democrats have more than eighteen months to come up with something. And if they were smart about it, they've been crafting that message for the past two+ years already, even if they haven't rolled it out yet. Because this isn't anything particularly surprising. The Democrats should have been prepared for the idea that a reasonably popular/charismatic/well known name would enter the race as an Independent. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been working on their overt appeals to the many and varied unaligned voters recently.

It's fine and good to complain about Mr. Schultz providing another choice in the race, and resenting the added difficulty that such a choice represents. But almost the only votes that he is going to gain will come from people who really don't have a strong opinion about who wins. Democratic energy would be better spend giving those people someone to vote for, rather than attempting to limit them to only one person to vote against.

Failure to Communicate

Box-a-Bye Baby

So I found this story on the BBC about Baby Boxes; boxes designed to keep infants alive so that their mothers can drop them off into the care of professionals without needing to perform a warm handoff to another human being, who might ask uncomfortable questions, know the person involved or cause other complications that the presumably desperate parent is anxious enough to avoid that their efforts to do so may place the child's life in jeopardy. While I'd never heard of the concept before landing at the story online, this is an international phenomenon and one that goes back to the middle ages.

Of course, not everyone is a fan. The BBC doesn't spend much time speaking to people's objections to the concept, but it does take a moment to toss out this mostly throwaway line:

Fathers' rights groups object, saying they allow only one parent to make the decision.

And, me being me, that was the line that caught my attention.

Back when I was a child and youth care worker, and then a foster-care case worker, I'd developed a rather low opinion of the men who were the fathers of the children that I worked with. While I'm not going to claim that they were a representative sample, only one of the children appeared to have a father who cared about them more than their mother did; and the mother in question was a remarkable piece of work, the sort made sterilizing people unless they qualify for a parenting license seem like a good idea. Typically, if a child was only going to have a single parent ever show up for anything, it was going to be the mother. But the idea that nearly the entire gamut of these mostly low-income (if not simply unemployed) men were of the infamous "love 'em and leave 'em" type was uncharitable, and I've mellowed as I've grown old.

So while it's easy to dismiss the concerns of fathers' rights groups as disingenuous or even actively dishonest, I do find myself wondering about the circumstances that prevent men from being more available to the women who bear, but cannot bear to keep, their children. And how many of those circumstances could be prevented if either or both parties had more access to support. To be sure, I understand that men can simply walk away from a responsibility that they don't want. But I wonder how many of them find that they're effectively pushed away.

I'm curious as to what the actual, verbatim, objections of fathers' rights groups to drop-off boxes for infants is, because the irony of "saying they allow only one parent to make the decision," is not lost on me. Back in the day, I worked with a number of single mothers who didn't have a choice in no longer being with their child(ren)'s father. He had simply disappeared, and that was that.

I understand the objections that people have to the boxes. The UN's objection, that nations would do better to address the factors that cause people to give up their infants, is well taken. The boxes are, like any number of other things, a means of making a broken system less damaging, rather than less broken. But I don't think that many people are willing to do what would need to be done to repair that particular system, which I suspect has been damaged by the technological and social progress of the past several decades (or even the last century or so).

And in that respect, the concept is here to stay. Everyone will have to become used to it.

Linked

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963

There has been a lot of debate about this passage from the speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that is now widely known as "I Have A Dream," from, after singer Mahalia Jackson exhorted Reverend King, "Tell them about the dream, Martin."

I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal."

The rest, as they often say, is history.

The idea that we in the United States judge people, or at least we should judge people, "by the content of their character," has become something of a "self-evident truth" itself over the intervening fifty-plus years. And so it's hard to find anyone who would openly admit to contravening it, despite the never-ending accusations that people often do.

And in this, I'm not sure that either side is wrong. In my own experience I have yet to meet someone who openly judges people based on the color of their skin. Seeing the color of a person's skin and the content of their character as being related, on the hand, is a different matter.

And people don't take these shortcuts out of malice, but because, evaluating the character of every person someone has to make decisions about likely requires more time than they have. So treating skin color and character as dependent variables is an adaptive, if inaccurate, mechanism. Given that we live in a world of scarce resources, the fact that treating people who are different from the self as lacking in character means justifying retaining more resources for the self is a convenient fringe benefit.

Complaint Department

Some people on the left can be snide, reductive, and needlessly aggressive in dismissing others’ viewpoints. It’s a thing.
Sweet Jesus, Will the NYT’s Conservatives Ever Write About Anything but the “Intolerant Left” Ever Again?

As you may have guessed, the central theme of the article is a complaint the David Brooks and the other conservative writers at the New York Times repeatedly take issue with “the Left” for their perceived “intolerance.” Fair enough, but... maybe if you want people to quit bringing that up, you should ask that your fellow partisans refrain from being snide, reductive and needlessly aggressive. And maybe even dial back the dismissing others’ viewpoints bit.

Because simply counter-complaining about the fact that conservative columnists keep harping on it doesn’t change the fact that those columnists are making a valid point; the admittedly snide, reductive and needlessly aggressive dismissals of others’ viewpoints are crap. And if David Brooks and company had genuinely popped the liberal bubble, the practice would have ended by now.

It doesn't take a degree in the social sciences to understand that Mr. Brooks and company are preaching to their choirs - using this particular brand of liberal self-righteousness to bludgeon a dead horse in the service of allowing their conservative readers to revel in the perceived moral superiority of being “victimized,” verbally or in print, by obnoxious and hostile social justice warriors. It gives them something to talk about; and their readers eat it up, just as the typical Slate reader clicks over to get the latest on why conservatives are bad.

But if the place for the behavior that the New York Times columnists are complaining about is an abandoned coal shaft, then it seems the way to shut them up is to start dumping things down the shaft, not calling on one’s critics to be silent - which, if I may be allowed to point out, simply reinforces the point that liberals are intolerant of disagreement with them.

I was in a conversation with a self-described social justice warrior who also labelled themselves as a change consultant, and they were adamant about the need for, and utility of, creating crises in the lives of those they disagreed with, in order to lever them into coming over the correct side of today’s issues. I would submit that they are a better audience for requests to tone it down than the people who take exception to that particular brand of spreading tolerance and acceptance.

But of course, it’s unlikely that a group as large and diverse as “the Left” would ever be coordinated enough to ever eliminate snide, reductive, and needlessly aggressive dismissals of viewpoints that are considered to be insufficiently enlightened. And in that sense, Mr. Brooks and his compatriots will always have someone whose behavior illustrates the institutional hypocrisy of liberal America. In the same way that the liberal behavior that Mr. Brooks and other conservative commentators complain about is a means for liberals to inform each other that they hold, and are committed to, the right views, those complaints serve the same function for conservatives. That need to find a foil to compare oneself against isn’t going away.

Second-Handed

An acquaintance of mine directed my attention to an online comic about the links between "Pickup Artists," the "Involuntarily Celibate" community and the Alternative Right. It was interesting, if fairly predictable.

It hit the expected progressive notes and all that, and included nothing that you wouldn't have known if you'd paid halfhearted attention to the evening news. And in that, it seemed like a missed opportunity; but one that you may have expected to be missed. The author was a biracial woman seeking to explain a mindset that she attributed mainly to young White men. Which is fair enough. We're often called upon to explain the viewpoints of people unlike ourselves. But about midway through the piece, I found myself with a question that I wanted to ask: "Have you actually spoken to any of these people?" When the stories that people tell themselves, and one another, about third parties are deficient, it's often because they haven't.

And that tends to leave out part of the story, because "what I would think if I were you," and "what you would think," are not the same as often as we like to think that they would be.

Equality

The most difficult thing about having compassion for everyone is letting go of the idea that the natural state of the world requires that people be unequal. Whether it is a matter of having the same compassion for the self as one does for others, or avoiding conditioning compassion on any other factor, the idea that all people are equal is central. And with that comes the understanding that the divisions we make between people and the levels of hierarchy we create to rank them are fundamentally arbitrary.

This is not to say that they are wrong. One person may be more valuable to us than other, or people may differ in terms of how we regard them. And those distinctions may be perfectly legitimate. But they are born of ourselves and not the people themselves, and for that reason, they do not alter the persons to which we apply them, as even though they may seem real to us, they have no reality beyond us.

Therefore, if compassion is to act within the world as it is, rather than as we judge it to be, it should transcend our judgements, rather than reflect them.

Expendables

A Republican county official in Texas has survived a vote to oust him after several local party members took issue with his Muslim religion.
Texas Republicans fail to oust Muslim official over religion

When I first heard about this, I was suspicious. It seemed to be just enough of a parody of Islamophobic Republicans that it couldn't possibly be genuine. But, of course, it is, because Islamophobia has gathered enough of a following within the Republican party that [Grand Prairie precinct chairwoman Dorrie O'Brien had] "previously slammed her Republican colleagues for not intervening in what she called a 'stealth jihad' and 'Leftist/Shari'a Zuckerberg-ization of Tarrant County'," without being laughed out of the group.

While it does make for an eye-roll-worthy change to point and laugh at a group of people who see bent on confirming people's stereotypical view of the Republican party, it does point out one of the problems that arises from a two-party system that is effectively composed of roughly equally-sized coalitions of voters with widely differing interests. Each party has set of voters (and thus, officers) for whom "can't live with 'em, can't win elections without 'em" is an apt description.

While the Tarrant County Republican party may have responded to Dale Attebery's resignation with a heartfelt "don't let the door hit you on the way out," the fact of the matter remains that if there are too many people like Mr. Attebery in the ranks, their disaffection with the party's refusal to go along with their belief that party Moslems are untrustworthy potential fifth columnists will result in their losing elections.

Now, given that Texas is a fairly Red state, the number of defectors that it would likely take to destroy the party's hold on local electoral office is fairly high. Embarrassing sectarians, therefore can easily be shown the door. But this isn't true everywhere, and it's those places where Republicans feel they need every vote they can get where questions of who is able to have their opinions mirrored back to them by the party apparatus will really become important.

Another Brick

Yesterday evening, President Trump addressed the nation. I am told that the purpose of this was to broaden support for his wall along the border with Mexico beyond his relatively small base of hardcore supporters. I didn't bother to watch.

I've always been of the impression that physical barriers aren't really the best solution to the problem. After all, we see how well that worked out for the former East Germans. And for Hadrian, for that matter. On the other hand, once "the Great Recession" started going, net illegal migration to the United States was negative. Hmmm...

The simple fact of the matter is that the majority of people who are coming to the United States are coming here looking for work. And most of the work that they end up with are in sectors of the economy that the nation as a whole have more or less decided should be exempted from the American Dream. (As much as people complain that they need illegal immigrants because "Americans don't want those jobs," the fact of the matter is that immigrants don't raise their children to want them, either. They're low status and low pay. I suspect that almost no-one genuinely wants those jobs. They're simply the best that some people can get, and they're an improvement over what would otherwise be available.)

But if the problem is that destitute migrants from Latin America are showing up to compete for low-skill, low-wage and low-status jobs that people do want (or are lowering the wages and status of those jobs by expanding the pool of available applicants), the answer to that is simple: remove their ability to take those jobs. And there is a much simpler way to do that than attempting to physically bar people from entering the country.

There is a doctrine in tort law, normally applied to children, termed "attractive nuisance."The general idea is to establish liability when property owners leave things lying about that are likely to attract children. Instead of the children being liable for trespassing, the property owner bears the liability for not making their property unattractive enough. Were one to combine this principle with the concept of civil asset forfeiture, you could put in place a legal regime in which law enforcement could seize property, including businesses, that attracted people in the country illegally by providing them with jobs. Unless the property owners could then prove that no wrongdoing (hiring of people not eligible to work in this country) occurred, the government would then auction off the property. You could even go a step further and hold businesses liable for the acts of businesses that they contracted with who brought people onto their premises. So an office building could be seized if the property owners contracted with a company that couldn't prove its workers were legally allowed to work.

I would suspect that, if a law like this could be passed, that the market for migrant labor would collapse fairly rapidly, especially if enforcement was even moderately pursued. No property would likely even need to be auctioned, the expense of defending the property alone (and recall, in civil asset forfeiture, it's the property, not the owner, that's involved in the dispute with law enforcement0 would be the deterrent.

Of course, this would create problems of its own. But they likely wouldn't be much more serious than what would happen if, somehow, the United States Government could manage to catch and deport every single person who wasn't authorized to be here and keep them out. And reducing the incentives to have people migrate for economic reasons would make policing the border easier. People who saw themselves as refugees wouldn't have to worry as much about being mistaken for would-be sub-minimum-wage laborers, there would be enough resources to manage them and you could be pretty sure that someone who decided to go way out into the middle of nowhere to attempt a crossing was likely up to something shady.

The wall is an idea of a way of keeping people out that would likely still allow enough people in that the United States could support its current standards of living by importing poverty. Which is what we have already.

The Godless Vote

So this is an interesting video that was posted to The Atlantic a couple of years back. The central premise is that Democrats have a problem with religion. But it leaves something out.

It makes the point that about 28% of self-identified Democrats "don't identify with any particular religion," twice the percentage of the Republicans, and up from 10% in 1996. According to Pew, in 2015, about 23% of all Americans identified as "Unaffiliated," most of them claiming to be "Nothing in particular."

And what this tells us is that while Americans who lack a religious identity and/or affiliation are over represented in the Democratic party, it's to a lesser degree than they are under represented in the Republican party. So I wonder: Would it also be accurate to ask if the Republican Party takes non-religion seriously?

Because maybe the problem isn't so much that Democrats are bad at speaking about religion as it is that they have to meld together a coalition that has a LOT more non-religious people in it, and who expect to be treated as equals. I know people on both sides of the Democratic - Republican spectrum, and I haven't had someone on the Democratic side openly disparage my lack of religiosity in 20+ years. On the other hand, my Republican acquaintances are much more likely to view me as either a target for conversion or as potentially dangerous - and tell me so, although it's been a couple of years since the last time it happened. And of the few people that I'm personally familiar with who are both staunchly Republican and devoutly Christian, most of them are fully in favor of laws that, from my point of view, would basically mandate that everyone effectively paid lip service to Christianity.

And I think that this factor is one that goes unmentioned. As the number of religiously unaffiliated people has grown, "Freedom of Religion" has, for many of them, become interpreted as "Freedom to behave irreligiously." And, let's face it - while the stereotype of Republicans as theocratic may not be accurate, it is widespread. When you hear about a bill that "would require teachers to spend no more than 15 minutes in the first class of each day to read, verbatim, opening prayers said before a meeting of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate" (even if you don't expect enough members of either party to vote for it that it has a chance of passing) which party would you suspect of having offered it? For all that Republicans offer secular reasons for things like opposition to same-sex marriage (well, sometimes, anyway) again, pretty much anyone who understands American politics at all suspects that the real reasons are found in a Bible or at a pulpit. And while the last politician who refer to an atheist student as an "evil little thing" was in fact, a Democrat, I suspect that most people would have bet the other way.

And so if you're a religiously unaffiliated American who actually cares about freedom of irreligion and wants to be politically active in a party that might actually win an election now and again, which party do you choose?

And maybe that's the issue. Because Democrats can't afford to alienate their non-religious voters and still remain a viable party, they can't rely on the same overt appeals to religion that were still workable when I was a child. The person who serves two masters my not be exemplary for either of them, but politics doesn't always leave one with a choice.

Evidence

I came across the picture above in a social media post that (sadly) degenerated pretty much immediately into sniping between camps. I can understand why some of the faithful were aggrieved at the comparison, but I found it ironic that they felt the need to comment on the post and tell people: "If you don't believe in the Bible, then don't read/talk about it."

But Spider-Man isn't really all that much different than a classical Hero, like Heracles (Hercules) who has also been appropriated for modern comic books (despite the medium's general aversion to religion). One wonders, if there were a great catastrophe today, 1,000 years from now, would people think that some segment of the population regarded Spider-Man as a demigod? Or even a full-on deity? Would they be able to differentiate the stories that we tell to entertain ourselves or to make particular points from the stories that we understood to be true? Would there be arguments about whether these stories were meant to be history or allegory?

Back in the days when the scriptures of most modern religions were written, diaries weren't a big thing. The authors didn't include footnotes to tell us what they were thinking or attempting to get across to a reader. And so we argue about their intent, and their understanding of the world, and a lot of that argument is shaped by our modern opinions of what people were like back then. (And, it occurs to me, our opinions of ourselves as compared to them.) If you're convinced that ancient peoples were ignorant dirt farmers who needed to impose a cosmic order on a world they didn't have the knowledge to understand, that casts their belief systems in a much different light than an understanding that they were devout folk who were much more open to the divine.

And so I find myself wondering what people are going to think of us, when they look back after the centuries, especially if something happens to disrupt the transfer of knowledge into the future. Are we going to be seen as simple-minded ignoramuses, inventing stories of colorful strongmen to re-assure ourselves in an uncertain world? Morally insecure sophisticates, seeking to banish moral ambiguity? Overwhelmed and fantasizing about being powerful and animalistic?

I suspect that however the future looks back on us, we'd find it simplistic and, in being so, inaccurate. But I suspect that it will also be contentious. And I wonder what we'd make of that.

It's Taken Care Of

Perhaps this is a corollary to the idea that "Nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't plan on doing it themselves." The idea that "Unleashing the 'free market' is the simple key to solving the housing crisis," had come up, and, as usual, the proponent was someone who saw the "free market" as the answer for everything from acne to world peace, rather than someone who'd actually thought through how a genuinely free market would operate.

But what I found to be interesting about it was when the discussion turned to day care, and other ways that people could have their children looked after while they were doing other things. The speaker noted that surely it was possible for someone to simultaneously run a profitable business, charge low enough rates to attract a steady clientele and pay their workers enough to find adequate housing.

"Who do you know who has managed that?"
"I don't know anyone. But we all know that they're out there."

The conversation didn't improve from there. But what struck me about it was the confidence that interlocutor showed in the idea that what would be the holy grail of child care was lurking around out there somewhere, just waiting for people to find and replicate it. Especially when they showed no sign of wishing to get into (or invest in) the business themselves.

The idea that there are things that one might find to be worthwhile ideas, but have a high enough opportunity cost that it's worth taking a pass makes sense. One can't do everything, and so choices have to be made. But this idea, that I encounter from time to time, that since some really desirable thing is clearly happening somewhere, that there's no need to look deeply enough into it to understand if it actually pencils out seems a bit off.

But more importantly, if solving some of these difficult problems is easy, surely it's worth actually doing it, rather than simply assuming that it's solved. (And even in failure, new things are learned and breakthroughs developed.) And so I wonder if humanity wouldn't be farther along if more people set out to implement the solutions they think they have, rather than presuming that someone else will accomplish those tasks.

Once More 'Round the Sun

As a child, sometimes there are numbers that just mean "a lot." For me that number, when it came to hold old people were, was forty. I couldn't really imagine what life after forty was like. I turned forty a decade ago, but strangely, it still seems unimaginably old. It's that now, I'm unimaginably old.

And just like back in the day, when I couldn't imagine what I would do with myself once I was just old, I don't really know what I'm going to do with this year. New Year's Resolutions and I have never gotten along; I don't have the wisdom to pick things that I can actually sustain for an entire year, and so I always feel that I'd simply chosen poorly. (This blog, on the other hand, while it's nothing like I envisioned it back when I started, has shown remarkable staying power.)

That said, I think I do have an idea of what I should do with myself this year (other than travel). I'd embarked upon a project to become more accepting of those things about the world that I cannot change. Maybe it's now time to start gearing up to make changes to those things that I can. I don't really have an idea of how I plan to go about this, other than simply doing it and seeing what happens. Which has kind of been my life in general since I turned forty. And while I'm not sure that I recommend it, it's been working reasonably well thus far.