And... Action

The well-publicized behaviors of Amy Cooper and Officer Derek Chauvin strike me as odd. Not in the fact that they happened; that much is par for the course in the grand scheme of things. But in the sense that they didn't seem to realize that they were doing things, and being recorded doing them, that were more or less guaranteed to blow up in their faces once word got out. And, since they were being recorded, it was going to get out.

Perhaps I'm a bit too cognizant of the fact that just because one doesn't care, that doesn't mean that people aren't paying attention; I suspect that I'm too quick to ask myself how something would play in Peoria, as it were, even when it's something that I consider relatively (or absolutely) innocuous. And maybe that's what's at play here; it would never occur to me to engage in the sorts of behaviors that caught out Ms. Cooper and Officer Chauvin if I had any inking that I'd be performing for the cameras.

And these things do strike me as oddly performative in nature, which may be why they stand out for me. While I understand intellectually that they were heat-of-the-moment, when I watch them, I have to remind myself that it's not staged. That the act of performance, such as it were, was not deliberately intended as such.

In the end, it's harder than it should be, I think for me to see this as something that someone would just fall into. It seems strange to me that someone would openly note their intent to make a false report to the police or openly place someone at such grave risk of harm, while on camera, without that being somehow the whole point. It seems to be a situation in which someone is shouting "Hey! Look at me and what I'm doing!" and then is surprised when they find themselves the center of attention.

Bad Advice

The time to make the case for Trusted Advisor status to someone who doesn't believe they have a reason to trust is not when that trust is of paramount importance. And the case shouldn't be made by casting aspersions on the untrusting party. I am, at once, both impressed and not surprised that we don't seem to understand this. While the overall number of people who have decided that the public health community is untrustworthy is small, it's both motivated and vocal.

Despite appearances, the only thing we have to fear is not coronavirus infectious disease 2019. Mainly because there will always be other things that frighten people, and people are free to choose what scares them the most at any given time. Attempting to steamroll people into setting their fears aside rarely works. Or, I suppose, it's more accurate to say that it rarely has what people claim is the desired effect. It clearly works on some level, otherwise the practice would have died out by now. Which raises the question of what the actual goal is. But I suppose that like people's greatest fears, it's different for everyone.

No Difference

The man was sitting with a group of his fellows, under a tree in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood. As was common for a Sunday, there were a number of homeless men in the park, minding their own business, and not bothering the tourists and other passers-by that wandered through, or stopped to take a photograph of the firefighter's memorial there. This particular man was either Hispanic or Native American - I'm leaving towards Hispanic, but not enough to be certain. As one might expect, his clothing was shabby and grimy, clearly wanting some time in a washing machine.

"Hey, man," I hailed him. "Could you use a sandwich?" I didn't really raise my voice, and so I wasn't sure that he'd heard me. I held up a ham sandwich, packed into a Ziploc bag. In a paper lunch bag there was an apple, a granola bar, some chips and a bottle of water. Not the least bit interested in how pretty the presentation was, the man nearly jumped to his feet and quickly walked over and took the sandwich and paper bag from my hands, while at the same time appearing to be careful not to encroach on my "personal space." I was sitting in the tailgate of my previous car (this was a while back), which counted as armor of a sort, so I wasn't really worried, but if I remember correctly, the homeless in the Pioneer Square area had earned the ire of local businessmen for being too aggressive in their panhandling, and so had dialed it back a notch or two.

Anyway, the man thanked me and gave a deep nod, then went back to his spot by the tree to settle into his meal. The three other men that he'd been speaking to, caught off guard by his sudden exit from the group, had watched him come over to the car, and now they looked at me, wondering. I didn't leave them hanging for very long, quickly fishing out another sandwich and proffering it. Without a moment's hesitation, the men hustled over to the car, and each received a sack lunch, for which they were appreciative. The park isn't very large, so it didn't take long for word to get around, and within the space of half a minute, an orderly line of homeless men had formed.

It's always interesting to deal with people in this way. Whenever the homeless make into the local news around here the coverage tends to revolve around fears that the homeless are only slightly less dangerous than an al-Queda cell in the neighborhood. Of course, the truth is nothing like that. Confronted with someone offering something, they're deferential and polite almost to a fault. One man was intent on telling me a good chunk of his life story and telling me that I was just like Jesus, until one of his fellows bluntly reminded him that he was holding up the line. He was particularly talkative, but most of them will have something to say. Thank yous are always in order, and some will tack on how long it's been since the last time they'd eaten. Many will be effusive in their thanks, and "Bless you" quickly becomes the word of the day. But some will have a story to tell. I listen as well as I can, mainly because it does seem to unburden them somewhat to relate these things to someone.

It's been a while since I last did this. My current car is a sedan, rather than a station wagon, and I haven't attempted to pile that much stuff into it yet. But I also never figured out if I was helping anyone in any real way. Sure, giving a meal, even a small one, to someone who doesn't know where their next meal was going to come from does them a service. And I suppose that it helps them to understand that someone out there cares enough to something for them. But does it do anything? I suspect that as I type this, those selfsame people are in doorways and on benches, hoping that it won't rain tonight. I came into their lives and swept right back out again.Their problems, however, remain. And with a pandemic working its way through the population, they have new ones. This is something that won't be solved by showing up out of the blue with a sack lunch once in a blue moon.

Perhaps I should focus on the immediate action that I'm performing, rather than trying to make a dent in the bigger picture. I never know. Or maybe I should concentrate more on deriving a warm, fuzzy, feeling for myself. I suppose that working with a group of people would be better than going it alone. That would give me a broader perspective on things. Or maybe the answer lies in the realization that making a difference is too large a goal. We'll see.

Out on the River

Placement

As I watched the House of Representatives debate its proposed $3 trillion relief bill last week, it occurred to me that no one was quite saying the obvious thing: We are all poorer now, and nothing the government does will fix that.
Megan McArdle. "We’re all poorer now. Nothing the government does can fix that."

This is going to be a post about language and baselining.

I find Ms. McArdle's use of the term "poorer" to be interesting, even though it is an accurate way of putting it. American English, as it is commonly spoken, doesn't require a positive, even when a comparative is used. It does, however, often imply one. That is to say, one can, as Ms. McArdle has, use the term "poorer" without someone or something having to be first "poor." But the use of "poorer" often implies "poor." And I wonder to what degree this sort of phrasing primes people to see themselves, either as individuals or in an aggregate, as poor. After all she could just as easily have noted that "We are all less wealthy now," and it would have conveyed the same point.

America’s per-capita gross domestic product stood at $58,392 in the fourth quarter of 2019. If that were to decline by a third, that would put our per-capita income back to roughly where it was at the end of 1993. Needless to say, 1993 was not a Hobbesian dystopia where lives were nasty, brutish and short.

But it was "poorer." And I wonder if that paints it as less desirable than it would appear if it were described as "less wealthy." Of course this all (quite literally) semantics, but I am curious about how the priming effect of such language works. If I say that Alice is poorer than Bob, and also that Daniel is less wealthy than Carol, how would a listener's mental images of Bob and Carol compare? Even though the listener knows nothing about how Alice and Daniel, or Bob and Carol, compare to one another, would they believe that they understand the ordering? While Daniel < Carol < Alice < Bob would be a perfectly plausible ordering of the four, would that be just as likely to come to mind as Alice < Bob < Daniel < Carol?

And this is where the baselining comes in. When we say that Alice is poorer than Bob, does it imply that both of them are poor, but in different degrees? Or only if it's also noted that Daniel is less wealthy than Carol? As you have likely gathered, I believe that it does in either case, but that could be just me.

And so I see an implication in that. An implication that 2020 and 1993 are both "poor," just in different measures, even though the positive measure of "poor" is never used to describe 1993 or 2020. Saying that to return to the GDP of 1993 makes us all poorer assigns poverty to it, even if we understand that life then was neither nasty, brutish nor short. In contrast, to say that one person, or one time, is less wealthy than another implies that both are wealthy; that they lie above whatever arbitrary baseline that divides wealth from poverty. But to say that we become poorer when we move from 2019's GDP to that of 1993 makes us poorer sets both of those times below the baseline. The tragedy is accentuated, as people become more acutely aware of their own feelings of poverty and deprivation and anticipate them becoming worse.

Or, maybe, it's just the language pedant in me, seeing a problem where none exists. Here's hoping.

Success

If there are no guarantees in life, then hard work, perseverance, ethics and other personal factors may still be necessary for success, but they cannot, by definition, be sufficient. And so the search for a personal factor that is, in and of itself, sufficient for success continues. It is motivated, I believe, by a general understanding that it must be there, somewhere. This is, after all, what a number of social judgements communicate.

But success is rarely simply a personal choice. Mainly because the world isn't set up to operate on purely personal actions. While a recluse may live or die solely by the results of their own labor, and be beholden to no-one, for members of a given society, there are a lot of people who have choices to make. And there is no viable way to remove the freedom of people to prefer things based on factors that are important to them. While it's common, especially in business, to think of customer preferences as something that businesses have a high degree of control over, the reality is less clear-cut.

But, I think that for many people, a world that can apparently be controlled, even if the feeling of control is only an illusion, is more comforting than one that comes across as random. Although perhaps "capricious" is a better word, and one that I hear often. And so I wonder if that's not what lies at the heart of things; the idea that there is always something in control, and it's better that this something seem reactive, rather than simply chaotic.

Uncovered

A few days ago, Dalia Lithwick wrote an article for Slate, which the publication titled: "Refusing to Wear a Mask Is a Uniquely American Pathology." It was subtitled: "The obsession with individualism and the misinterpretation of constitutional freedom collide into a germy mess." It was, of course, designed to be eye-catching. Slate is, for the most part, a free commentary site, which means that most of its operating revenue comes from advertisers. And that means driving clicks.

When I went for a walk late this morning, something stood out for me. While people were somewhat touchy about perceived violations of social distancing or other items related to the current COVID-19 outbreak, things like right-of-way and other trail-use guidelines were, for the most part, completely ignored.

Given this, I expect that when people don't wear masks (or other face coverings, given how difficult formal masks can be to obtain) that it's less about some "obsession with individualism" or a misinterpretation of the constitution, and more about a simple lack of fear. Riding a bicycle on a narrow sidewalk when it's been clearly posted that cyclists should dismount simply doesn't carry the same perceived level of consequences as walking, or breathing, too close to someone, even though it's entirely possible to kill someone by striking them at speed. Knocking someone down on concrete is nothing to be taken lightly. But dismounting a bicycle, walking it fifty yards, and then mounting up again is an inconvenience that many people would rather not deal with, and they don't see the harm.

And perhaps this is part of the reason why there seems to be so much fear-mongering in the modern United States. Not specifically related to the current coronavirus, but in general. Fear of consequences drives compliance, and people tend to be poor at understanding the general level of risk of any given action. So it becomes about scaring people.

And we can relate this back to people not wanting to wear masks. Given that the CDC says that even a t-shirt can supply the materials to make a serviceable covering, it can be understood that people may detect a whiff of the theatrical in all of this. After all, many t-shirts are made of very thin materials, and not very densely woven. Sure, it's not meant to be up to the standards of a surgical mask, but that may be why people find it odd. After all, surgical masks aren't respirators and "They are not designed to protect the wearer from inhaling airborne bacteria or virus particles," according to CVS. So why should a makeshift face covering made from a shirt do any better? So, if someone's not particularly afraid of becoming sick, and most face coverings aren't designed to prevent illness in the first place, why bother with it?

There is a degree to which one might legitimately see wearing a face covering as being more of a concession to public piety than public health. And I'm not sure there any real pathology in not following the crowd.

Boys' Club

There is a cliché that's been making the rounds for a while; it goes a little something like this: Problems that impact women's health don't inspire legislation to remedy them because the United States Congress is made up of mostly men. If these problems impacted men as much as they do women, Congress would have addressed them some time ago.

Okay, I'll bite. Why?

I get that this is conventional/received wisdom; male members of Congress are a bunch of unreconstructed sexists who are card-carrying members of the Inner Circle of the Evil Patriarchy. But doesn't this presume that members of Congress are somehow more sexist than Americans at large? After all, Congresspeople (one presumes) are human, too; they have mothers, wives, sisters, daughters et cetera that they care about. (After all members of Congress don't seem to be any less likely to be married or have children than Americans as a whole.) Are we really presuming that election to the national legislature somehow makes the men of Congress more likely to sacrifice their female family members than the rest of us? Or that these same female family members are somehow more likely to be on-board with this than other women?

In other words, is the problem really Congress? Either Congressmen are a reflection of the public at large, or said public has a penchant for electing people more sexist than themselves into office. Either way, the problem seems to be with the public, rather than the few hundred men in Congress. But I understand the impulse to blame Congress for this. It's the nature of populism to divide the world into the virtuous "people" and the corrupt "élites," and Congress is always a convenient bastion of the élite that can be cast as a pit of vipers.

The cliché has the ring of "truthiness" about it, in that it seems plausible and offers a conveniently simple explanation for something that is likely quite complicated. As long as one doesn't examine it particularly closely, anyway, and that's kind of thing about truthiness; once a statement has acquired that quality, people tend not to look into it that deeply, in much the same way that people don't bother to closely examine a lot of mundane information. But maybe a closer look would serve well here, as a means of mobilizing the voters who act as the power behind the throne.

Being Very Afraid

Screencapped from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/ahmaud-arbery/611539/

A question can be appropriate, even pressing, yet still, perhaps, be the wrong question. When Ibram Kendi asks "Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?" I think that it is the wrong question. In no small part because the answer is "everyone." After all, much of the point behind "Pandemic Shaming" is the attempt to get people who aren't behaving with sufficient fear of the current respiratory disease outbreak to fall into line with the people who are. So, if the SARS 2 COV virus is any indication, not only is everyone allowed to be afraid, but the people who aren't afraid are a deadly threat that everyone else should be afraid of.

So there's no real question of "Who gets to be afraid in America?" The question is, what are people allowed to be afraid of? I'm not a member of Black Lives Matter, and so I don't presume to speak for them, but, as I see it, the whole reason why the movement came into existence is the habit of meeting fear with deadly force, and the idea that the consequences of this lethal response are often overlooked, because it contributes to a reduction of the (immediate) fear. And, also as I see it, a lot of the pushback against Black Lives Matter is driven by the idea that Black Americans have no legitimate reason to be afraid of encounters with law enforcement, "if they don't have anything to hide." It may be because every Black person who appears to have been killed in some encounter or another was genuinely a violent threat, and so the tales of innocents being killed are fictions, or it may be that there are only a few "bad apples" to be looked out for. (A viewpoint that misunderstands the message of the saying concerning "bad apples" in the first place, it should be noted.) But in any event, it's a narrative that says that Middle America is allowed to be afraid of Black America, while Black America's fears of Middle America are considered somewhere between naïvely overwrought and deliberately fraudulent.

Back when Ta-Nehisi Coates was still writing regularly for The Atlantic, and back when the site still allowed comments, I encountered the phrase "The exculpatory power of fear." I wrote about it at the time, because it stood out for me. I find it interesting that the author of the comment, "bear report" effectively makes the same point as the headline: "Of course, the privilege of fear is not uniformly extended because of the political and legal power it grants." But the "privilege" of killing others in self-defense is not reserved for anyone in particular. Had Father and Son McMichael themselves been Black, it's unlikely that the police in Brunswick would have been any less likely to take their story at face value. And for many, the counterfactual that they compare the scene against is one of Ahmaud Arbery and his father gunning down Travis McMichael as a suspected burglar. The message isn't that Black people aren't allowed to be afraid. It's that they shouldn't be afraid of White people, history and the present day be damned.

This is not to say that American society never grants special rights to be afraid. One can imagine, say, a twenty-something White woman (let's call her Alexis, for the sake of this example) being in Ahmaud Arbery's place. She certainly would have been granted leave to be terrified that the McMichaels meant to abduct and/or sexually assault her. And it's possible that the same would be true had she been Black. The story that the McMichaels were defending themselves against a dangerous felon would likely have been viewed with much more skepticism. regardless of the color of Alexis' skin. (It is, of course, highly debatable how that well such skepticism would hold up if we assume a Black or Hispanic Alexis, as opposed to a White or Asian one.)

But the differences in people's fears make for a difficult situation, and always will. Because how does one set up a scenario in which trusting those that one is afraid of consistently leads to the best outcomes? I believe that it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who first put it this way, and I think that he was on to something: White America's history of injustice towards racial minorities has created a situation in which present injustice is seen as a shield against the justified anger of those same minorities. Vulnerability is seen as too high a price to pay for a just society, and so the injustices will continue until unconditional forgiveness can be guaranteed. Thomas Jefferson predicted that there would be "new provocations" as time went on. I wonder if he had come to the same conclusion.

A lot of the fears of modern Americans can be chalked up to what one might call a form of Affluenza; people have enough that they are afraid to lose it. I doubt that this is going to go away anytime soon; there is little sign that even the wealthiest people in the nation are sanguine about the idea of losing even relatively small portions of what they have. And when that fear suits people's purposes, it is stoked. It doesn't take much to conclude that many people fear elements of the world around them much more than they actually understand them. Even if the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself, that still means that there is plenty for many people to be afraid of.

Gone Fishing

More found object photography. Perhaps predictably, I cam across this on a bridge.

I Don't Do This Often Enough

Sometimes, one should recognize that it was a beautiful day, note that fact, and then say nothing else about it.

Today was a beautiful day.

Self-Interest

Psychological egoism can be described, briefly, as the idea that people always act in what they perceive their own self-interest to be. It is, to be sure, the way I commonly understand the world to work. Interestingly enough, there appears to be a strain of psychological egoist thought that holds that all human actions fall into one, and only one, of two types: self-interested and altruistic. Philosopher James Rachels took exception to the validity of psychological egoism on that basis, as follows:

The man who continues to smoke cigarettes, even after learning about the connection between smoking and cancer, is surely not acting from self-interest, not even by his own standards—self-interest would dictate that he quit smoking at once—and he is not acting altruistically either. He is, no doubt, smoking for the pleasure of it, but all that this shows is that undisciplined pleasure-seeking and acting from self-interest are very different.

This is normally the point where I wisecrack that: "If doing something that brings good feeling now, but has the possibility for nasty consequences later is self-evidently bad, one wonders why anyone ever marries."

Misogamistic snark aside, this seems to raise something that can be considered a problem with both psychological egoism and Professor Rachels' outlook; the question of what determines self-interest. Professor Rachels' seems to be in the camp that the individual themselves may not be well-placed to understand what is best for them, when compared to some outside, objective, criterion. Since there is nothing that demands that this criterion define any (let alone a strict) dichotomy between self-interest vs. concern for others, one wonders how proponents of psychological egoism deal with it. Even the normative commitments of rational egoism that Professor Rachels appeals to above don't always resolve the problem.

On the other hand, how does Professor Rachels decide that he is aware of what a person's standards for acting from self-interest are? Consider: from the ages of 15 to 34, Assault (homicide) is the leading cause of death for Black males according to the CDC/NCHS (pp. 80-81) and "[t]he very high risks tend to be concentrated in medium to large cities and low income neighborhoods within those cities, especially for homicides committed by guns," according to this University of Pennsylvania Fact Check.

Given this, would Professor Rachels have argued that, knowing this, I, as a Black man who chose to live in Chicago from the ages of 22 to 27 to be closer to my job, was "surely not acting from self-interest, not even by [my] own standards" as self-interest would have dictated that I move someplace else, regardless of any other consequences or considerations? After all, it could be argued that being unemployed in, say, DeKalb was safer than living and working in Chicago.

Cigarette smoking is "low-hanging fruit" in these sorts of arguments, because there's already been a societal consensus that it's somewhere between moderately unwise and actively stupid (with "stupid" being as much, or more, a moral descriptor than an intellectual one). So it's easy to dismiss as not being worth any trade-off. This is where the understanding that smoking violates the rational egoist's normative commitment to their long-term well-being comes from. But risking violent death because that simply comes with the territory of being well-employed enough to support oneself using the skills one paid four years and tens of thousands of dollars for. Is that as easy a call to make? I'm sure that there are people who would tell me that rather than going to college and thus finding that the best job prospects were in cities, I should have sought out some relatively tolerant small town, taken up some low-to-medium skill job and hid out from the risks of urban life there, but in the end, who is empowered to make that call? Who is allowed to tell me that it was irrational of me to live in Chicago, and take advantage of the personal and professional opportunities it afforded, given the risks?

When the choices are not clear cut, is it still understood that a rational egoist's normative commitment to long-term best interest only allows for one correct answer? And if so, what factors are at work in it? This is why I find philosophy interesting, yet rarely useful; too many of the answers it's willing to stand behind are those that have been somehow predetermined to be correct.

In the Toolbox

Although sometimes the problem is that the wrong task is chosen. Distancing is a good measure for slowing the spread of a disease. But expecting it to be useful in eradicating the disease in the face of a lack of effective treatments or prophylactics seems unrealistic. Not that I think that the epidemiological community would say that it is. But I think that there are a number of people in the public who believe that COVID-19 can be "stopped" by simple distancing. A side effect of this is that there is less emphasis on the tools that would do a better job and pushing people for accountability in making them available.

Inconvenience

The best way to get the public to continue the current restrictions, which, while inconvenient, are saving lives, is not through draconian police enforcement (though that has a role to play) but rather through consistent, credible public health messaging. This messaging is how we have shifted public opinions and practice about seat belts, smoking, and safe sex. We can do it for COVID-19, too, using three simple strategies.
This Chart Explains Why Reopening the Economy Is Still So Risky

I was unaware that wearing seat belts, lowering rates of smoking and being careful when sexually active contributed to the ongoing unemployment of millions of people. I presume that this is just the media that I am most likely to have access to, given my habits, but it seems to me that there is a massive downplaying of the ongoing effects of the current crop of stay at home orders and mandatory business closings. Describing pushing people into a situation where they potentially stand to be unemployed for years is not merely "inconvenient." There's an assumption that "the government" is "taking care" of people, and that those who find themselves furloughed or simply let go have everything they need to continue their lives as usual. The current situation is, in effect, a crappy form of "staycation." Okay, they might not be pulling in their full paychecks, and so they have to tighten their belts a bit, but as long as they don't die (or make some old person sick enough that they die) there will be no lasting harm done. This is not true. A lot of the businesses that have been forced to close are never going to re-open. Their owners simply weren't well-capitalized enough to manage a month or more with zero revenue, but ongoing expenses.

People, in my experience, tend to conceptualize "the economy" in terms of money, rather than goods and services. Therefore, if there's an economic problem, all one has to do is print more money. But while modern economies work on the exchange of money for goods and services, money is not itself a viable substitute for those goods and services. Printing money to make up for a shortfall in actual economic output is simply a driver of inflation. And while the United States is unlikely to find itself in a hyperinflationary spiral, or even return to the high inflation rates of the 1970s, in the near term, that doesn't mean the problem is non-existent. While the quest for a crisis that can repeal the laws of economics is ongoing, I doubt that Coronavirus infectious disease 2019 is the Holy Grail that people are looking for. It doesn't change the fact that people need goods and services to survive. And, in a modern economy, to continue the production of other goods and services. There are very few things that require no inputs other than what a person can supply on their own, and only a very few of those are thought to provide significant value. In this sense, "the current restrictions" are more than simply inconvenient.

If a media outlet is speaking to an audience where "everyone is working from home," they may not see it, and if they're correct in their assessment of their audience, it's unlikely that anyone will call them on it. Because the demands of juggling children, pets and the noises of the neighborhood may be new problems, but in the grand scheme of things, they can be portrayed as a small price to pay for staying healthy.

But for the person who has lost their ability to provide goods and services to trade for necessities, it's something of a time bomb. The American economy was already well past the point of being able to operate and have a significant surplus of labor. As small businesses die off, and larger ones pick up whatever pieces they chose to, that efficiency is going to ratchet down even more tightly. The person who  works for a small retailer that never reopens is unlikely to simply be able to count on demand creating a new role for them at a large chain retailer. Not because there won't be an increase in employment as customers shift to the businesses that survived the enforced shutdown, but large businesses are simply more efficient than small ones in terms of personnel needs.

It is, however, likely that retail workers and the like are not a large part of the audience of media sites like Slate, which strike me as catering more to a young, left-leaning, (sub)urban professional demographic. And there's nothing wrong with addressing articles and commentary specifically to that audience. But they aren't the whole of the set of people impacted by the mitigation measures that have been implemented. And sidestepping the effects that will linger once the immediate impacts are over doesn't do anyone any favors. A lot of people are going to be looking at long-term unemployment in a culture that tends to see that as indicative of a personal failing. The competition for work is going to be intense, and it's going to be an employer's market for the foreseeable future. That's more than simply inconvenient.

Clever

While I was out today, I came across some young people having a socially-distanced "picnic" of sorts. They'd all showed up at a movie theater parking lot, spread beach towels out on the pavement, with a good ten to fifteen feet between them and chatted with each other.

It was a clever adaptation to the circumstances. And I found myself wondering how many other clever adaptations to the world are out there, but that we may never know about, because they've been foreclosed by The Powers That Be. And I'm not just referring to government. There are a lot of forces that are interested in only having the status quo change in ways that they are familiar/comfortable with, and cleverness is sometimes neither familiar or comfortable.

The world is going to need a lot of cleverness in the coming months and years. But I wonder if the willingness to let go of comfort and familiarity in order to nurture cleverness will be there. It's unlikely that we'll remember 2019 as the last year in which prizing efficiency over resiliency was the accepted wisdom. In order to get things back to any semblance of "normalcy," there will need to be system that is highly efficient at distributing resources (as opposed to our current one, which tends to be an efficient consolidator of resources). The instinct to hoard will have to be pushed back, and that will likely result in a lot of people feeling stressed and unsafe. It will be a challenge for the greater society to deal with.

I look forwards to seeing how that challenge is met.

No Choice

One can make the case that the response to COVID-19 has been overdone in a number of ways, all of them arguable. For my part, I think that I'd argue that the attribution of things to the virus has been overdone. A lot of the effects that society is dealing with are not a direct result of the virus itself, but our response to it. This is not to say that not responding would have changed all of them. But many of the specific things that we see are the result of the stay-at-home orders, mandatory business closures and other measures that have been enacted by people.

And this is important because it tells us that we have a certain level of control over things. Not in terms of the events that occur in the world on every give day, or even in how things play out in the end, but in our responses to them. The idea that taking whatever option one believes is the lesser of the available evils is not a choice is a recipe for feeling out of control, and that feeling of being puppeteered by outside events often leads to anxiety and stress.

Still I understand the impulse. Being understood to not have a choice often frees people from the accountability that comes with decision-making. But I think that taking ownership when it's there is a better course in the long run. Not, I suspect, that people would agree with me on that.