The Rain Returns

For all that the Pacific Northwest, and the Seattle area in particular, have a reputation for being rainy, it's more accurate to say that they're often gray and cloudy. Not that I mind, myself. Bright sunlight and I are not friends. So now that Autumn has arrived, it's the best part of the year, as far as I'm concerned. Especially on the days when it does, in fact, rain.

Fresh Produce

"Feral" tomatoes, I believe, found growing outside of a local Whole Foods Market. I suspect that someone made the decision to allow them to continue growing. They look much more like berries under these conditions.
 

Just a Moment of Your Time

To be clear, [Erika Marie] Rivers explains, it’s not about asking for more attention or being in “competition” with white people — it’s about other groups getting the same attention as white victims and having their lives honored in the same ways.

“I’m talking about getting investigations up to par with what is already going on,” she explains. “And I think when we bring that awareness, especially when it comes to Indigenous women and with Black women, and we’re like, hey, we exist as well. It’s not to say stop searching for that white woman. It’s like, search for our women as much as you do anybody else and make sure that whatever energy that you place into one case is the same energy that you place into others.”
Tens Of Thousands Of Black Women Vanish Each Year. This Website Honors Their Stories

According to the story, in 2020, 268,884 girls and women were reported missing in the United States. If each of these stories were to receive a full two minutes of media attention, there could be a channel, running night and day, with nothing but stories about missing girls and women. And I mean that literally. It would be 24 hours a day, every day, with story, after story, after story. So I’m unconvinced that there is a genuine ability for the public, or the police, to put the same resources into every investigation as some “fortunate” few manage to receive. (It’s difficult to describe a woman who had been murdered as fortunate simply because her death attracted attention.)

In this sense, I think that the focus on the inequality in attention and resources, and accusations that law enforcement and the media are “ignoring” the cases of Black and Native American women in favor of White women, is misplaced. Let’s grant that America’s old bogeyman, Racism, is, in fact, the culprit here. When the public and the police decide to dole out their limited resources of attention and investigative manpower, they deliberately pick the cases of White women first. That’s bad, but changing that simply means that the distribution of cases changes; it doesn’t create more resources to deal with hundreds of thousands of cases every year. Swapping Mariah Edwards in for Gabby Petito is simply rearranging the deck chairs. What’s needed here are far fewer suspicious missing persons cases on an annual basis. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, more than 540,000 people went missing, including more than 340,000 minors, over the course of 2020. Granted, that doesn’t seem like very many, in the grand scheme of things, being less than one in six hundred. But that’s more people than were reported to have died of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States last year. Of course, the two phenomena aren’t directly comparable, so it’s something of an apples to robots comparison. With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I think that people understand a solution to be much easier to obtain.

A case can be (and has been) made that the United States is a stupidly violent place for an advanced, industrial and allegedly religious society. While the intentional homicide rate here (about 5 persons per 100,000) is roughly middle of the pack for the planet in general and fairly low over all (given that the rate tops out at just above 50 in El Salvador), it’s pretty much the highest in the developed world (even if it isn’t as high as many Americans seem to think that it is). There would be a much better chance of equity in news coverage and police resources if there weren’t as many cases vying for a share.

I wonder if the United States hasn’t come to a place where it simply resigned to what many places in Europe and Asia would regard as insanely unacceptable levels of violence and crime. I think that part of it is the fact that the United States is not a particularly unified place; there is a tendency to think of “those people” (members of groups other than the one an individual belongs to) as being the problem and beyond or not worth helping. A large part of the focus on gun control in the United States operates under the implication that incapacitation is the best way to curb violence; access to the tools of violence is what begets violence, and blocking that access will reduce the incidence. The logic is simple, but it misses the fact that Americas are still more likely to kill one another with knives than Britons are to kill one another via any means. At some point, we have to look beyond how people are being violent, to why.

And maybe that’s what’s really being ignored. The fact that violence has become simply background noise, and that the people who are calling for more attention to be paid to individual cases have a difficult time being heard over it. Perhaps this is for the better. I suspect that, given the state of things, many people would be disappointed with the equality they seek.

Good For the Gander

A famously Christian state failing to accommodate a non-Christian inmate is disappointing but predictable; the same state flatly refusing to accommodate a Christian inmate suggests a more pervasive problem.
Elizabeth Bruenig “The State of Texas v. Jesus Christ”

This article is subtitled: “Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to pray while holding a dying man’s hand is an offense to basic Christian values.” And this highlights something that I have come to believe that many American Christians have forgotten, namely: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [...]” And it’s been established that the states, even “famously Christian” ones, may not do this either. Even if Patrick Murphy’s request for a Buddhist spiritual guide to be present at his execution in 2019 was being made in bad faith (yes, yes, I know), that doesn’t change the fact that the Texas prison system’s rule that only its own chaplains (who were either Moslems or Christians) could be present would be considered a violation of the Establishment Clause, and there appears to be plenty of jurisprudence to back this up. But the article never mentions the Constitution. Its sole focus is on why the state of Texas should accede to a putative Christian’s desire for a specific ritual on the occasion of their execution. But the whole point of the Establishment Clause is that a state may not find the failure to accommodate a non-Christian inmate as “disappointing but predictable” yet point to “a more pervasive problem” when it comes to a Christian convicted of a capital offense and thus offer them a fix. This is why no accommodation for Christians was being made; the state could not offer accommodations to some faiths that it was not ready, willing or able to offer to all. And in the Patrick Murphy case, Texas was not prepared to offer accommodation to someone asking for a Buddhist, sincerely or not.

It is true that the Establishment Clause doesn’t apply to private actors. Ms. Bruenig, and The Atlantic more broadly, are free to advocate that states give Christians privileges, while merely wringing their hands piously when they are denied to others. But a state is not free to act in line with that advocacy. This is why the recent Texas law designed to make most abortions into civil torts has created the response that it has. It is recognized, and rightly so, I suspect, as an attempt to code a specifically Judeo-Christian-Islamic value into secular law, at the expense of forcing people who do not believe in this particular doctrine to pay lip service to it or face civil sanction.

To the degree that a number of secular laws can be said to mirror religious values, it’s understood that knowing where to draw the line can be tricky. But in the case of abortion, there is a general lack of secular organizations that argue for the “life begins at conception” standard that many anti-abortion advocates advance. This is, of course, not to say that there are none; the world is a big place, and I am not familiar with it in its entirety. But I suspect that people are correct when they understand the abortion debate in the United States as being driven mainly by a tension between a Christian ideal of sex as being only justifiable when it has procreation as a goal and a broader social view of sex as intimacy and/or release.

The First Amendment to the Constitution has been broadly interpreted to say that government actors, whether at the Federal, state or local level, may not conclude that they owe followers of one faith something that they do not owe to followers of all faiths (and that can extend to followers of no faith). If being treated in the same fashion as other belief systems is “an offense to basic Christian values” so be it. This is what living in a pluralistic society with freedom of (and from) religion entails. Christianity writ large, and it’s many and varied denominations in particular, claims a monopoly on truth; the Vatican once held that “error has no rights,” and the state should grant the right to practice incorrect religion. But government authority in the United States must be secular, or at least religiously neutral; it cannot make life better for followers of one religion as opposed to another as a matter of policy. An argument can be made that, because of the importance of touch and prayer to Christianity, the state is better served by finding a way to offer this to everyone, rather than issuing a blanket ban in an effort to remain compliant with the Constitution, but no such argument is put forth.

To be sure, most of the respect paid to freedom of religion in the United States is lip service; many Americans would be perfectly content for their own faith to have official sanction not granted to others, and many of the devout would be pleased to have the nation return to a time when their understanding of Christian values, basic or not, were more openly encoded into the laws of the land. So why not simply make the argument that the Constitution is in error, and that Christianity is entitled to special treatment? Pretending that there is no legal framework that the states are beholden to is somewhere between disingenuous and specious, and it serves no-one well.

The Ratings Game

The case of Gabby Petito is making international headlines. In fact, the BBC News page for the United States and Canada has two stories about her up as of this morning. And, accordingly the case has made the Wikipedia list of Missing white woman syndrome cases.

While I understand the inclusion of the Petito case on that list, I'm not sure that it does the situation justice. Because the perceived need of news organizations to cover this story in order to prevent their detail-hungry audience from going elsewhere is down to more than just the fact that Ms. Petito was White (she is, as I understand it, now presumed dead, as a body has been found). The Wikipedia article notes: "In addition to race and class, factors such as supposed attractiveness, body size and youthfulness have been identified as unfair criteria in the determination of newsworthiness in coverage of missing women." (Personally, I would replace "supposed" with "conventional" or "mainstream." While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the women in question may not be "hot" by college standards, they do tend to fit into a rather common Western standard of desirability.)

The idea that conventionally pretty, young, fit, middle/upper-middle class, White women don't deserve to be murdered, and are the type specimen for people who deserve better than their fate leaves more than just non-White women out in the cold. While I am no less likely than anyone else to find such whining tiresome, the idea put forth by some conservatives that "men are expendable" can also be tied to Missing white woman syndrome.

Western media outlets tend to find themselves on the horns of a dilemma in this. The public's creation of a class of victim and family that are singularly deserving of justice and closure is fed by the media's response to their desire for same. And while it's easy to proclaim that journalists have a responsibility to push back against the public in the name of principles, idealism doesn't sign paychecks. Principles are wonderful, but eating is required and principle is inedible.

There is, however, another problem with expecting "the media" to take the lead on making this change. This presumed that journalists and other members of the media ecosystem are themselves separate from, and more enlightened than, the public at large. I caught myself in this while listening to the BBC podcast series Who Killed Emma? I found myself faulting Samantha Poling for seeming to go out of her way to cast Emma Caldwell as being deserving of justice, despite the fact that she'd been a prostitute, by concentrating on the standard list of Missing white woman characteristics. But perhaps Ms. Poling was just as convinced as others seem to be that this list of characteristics, lottery-like as they are, were what made here innocent enough to be entitled to proper justice. There was irony in the fact that sex workers interviewed for the podcast series were incensed by the police rating them as less worthy of resources, while the podcasts themselves seemed to reinforce that same sense that worthiness could be measured and some people had more than others.

Resources for justice, like public attention, are limited. And this makes them valuable. Societies have never been good about doling out valuables equally, and people are loathe to concede that they've received as much as is appropriate when they've received less than they understand they need. "Missing white woman syndrome" is a pithy, but inaccurate name for the phenomenon that governs this uneven distribution. But it's also one that can lead, perhaps, to an uneven understanding of the factors that lead to it, and the thinking that drives it.

Bioethicality

I was introduced to a video today that put forth some of the logic of C. S. Lewis' belief in moral realism, as laid out in his 1954 book Mere Christianity.

I rate it a solid "meh." But I guess that it's like a lot of other apologetics in that it's likely most convincing to those people who are looking for reasons to believe, or to maintain their belief. But the logic is a bit too focused to be a good argument on its own.

Long story short, Mr. Lewis puts forth that some moral principles are objectively correct, and people have an intuitive sense, something like a Sensus Divinitatis for them. As an example, he proposes that being unselfish is one such idea. As it's explained int he blog post linked above:

[Mr. Lewis] says one culture might believe you should be unselfish to your family, another may believe you should be unselfish to your family and your fellow countryman, and another culture may believe that it must be extended to every single person. However, they all agree you should not put yourself first.

Personally, I think that there is something of an is-ought problem here, and a bit of selectivity. After all, one culture may believe that certain things taste good, and another culture believes that other things taste good. I don't believe I've encountered an argument that the fact that they all agree that certain foods taste good is evidence that deliciousness is somehow a fundamental property of the universe.

And what I think is missing here are the roles of biology and society; mainly social learning. Human beings fare remarkably poorly, unless they're Bear Grylls or someone like that, when they are left alone to their own devices. While people may not be very good at understanding which animals they could beat in a one-on-one fight, the overall consensus is that humans don't fare very well, they outrank geese, but that's about it. So a human being who manages to alienate anyone who may otherwise assist them places themselves in difficult position. People need food, clothing and protection from the elements and despite what Don't Starve might have one believe, obtaining them on the fly is a tall order for most people who find themselves needing to do so without significant preparation. People understand this, and so they're aware that dealing with people who might double-cross them at first opportunity could be damaging to their own prospects, and so avoid them.

And one can see the evolutionary advantage to the creation and dissemination of this helpful piece of human culture.

So the problem becomes not the attempt to link this back to something greater, but to explain why it couldn't be something other than this greater thing. Simply noting that all cultures have the concept doesn't help, since there are no non-human cultures, or human cultures where absolute self-sufficiency are the norm, to be compared to. So to the degree that all human cultures need to find a way to cooperate, one would expect cultural rules to foster cooperation would spring up, in the say way that susceptibility of all human beings to toxins would lead to taboos connected to eating certain foods that had proved dangerous; there is no pressing need to fall back on a some metaphysical idea when simple biology will serve just as well.

Everyday People

As LinkedIn has become a blend of business networking and Facebook-style validation-focused social media, it’s also become something of a repository for morality stories. There are several different genres of such tales, but two in particular have caught my attention recently, perhaps because the overall library of stories is small enough that the same ones tend to recur over and over.

The first such genre of morality story can be viewed as “simple lessons from famous people.” The story of Albert Einstein writing 9 x 10 = 91 on a blackboard or the poem attributed to Frida Kahlo that says “If I have to ask, I don’t want it” fall into this category. These are stories with dirt simple morals, such as “be more focused on a person’s successes than their failures” or “if you really love someone, you’ll give them what they need without them having to ask” that are given relevance by their association with this or that famous (and supposedly virtuous) person. Most of these stories, at least in my experience, are bogus. Despite the fact that the famous person at the center of them had a very well chronicled life, and was often an author themselves, no verifiable documentation of the event or quote in question seems to exist anywhere.

As an aside, there is a subgenre of this, like the story of a woman cutting the head and tail from a fish before cooking it without understanding why (other than her mother had done it), where there actually is a real story there, but the original isn’t tied to a famous enough person and so they’re dropped in favor of an anonymous “everyperson” protagonist. In this case, the specific moral of the story, that “[the traditional gender role was not] a malevolent system designed to oppress, but [...] something that had outlived its usefulness and needlessly hemmed people in” was lost, and “don’t do things just because they’ve always been done that way” was subbed in. And former National Organization for Women president Karen DeCrow is no longer credited as the story’s source.

The second genre of morality story can be termed “life school.” The story of students needing to search a hallway for a balloon with their name on it or a class being easily divided when goaded into a witch hunt are recent examples of this trope. Again, these stories deal with simple, or even simplistic morals, namely, “helping other people find their happiness will lead to you finding yours” or “don’t allow ‘élites’ to divide you against one another.” The vehicles for these tales are anonymous students of unspecified ages, attending anonymous schools in unnamed locations and being taught by brilliant, but anonymous, teachers. Generally, the teller of the tale claims secondhand knowledge of the event; either a child of a friend, or a friend of their child, learned the alleged lesson and reported back. (Which means that the poster should know some, if not all, of the absent details.) While vaguely uplifting, these stories are often dubious on their face, something obscured by the lack of detail. It takes an awful lot of balloons to ensure that no-one is capable of finding the one that belongs to them in under five minutes. And the initial student behavior, the thing that sets up the lesson of the story, is often itself suspicious. Because let’s be real: there’s always that one student (if not those half-dozen students) in any classroom who have such a bold, decorative and unique way of writing their name on large objects that its recognizable from low Earth orbit. It’s unreasonable to presume that none of the students suspected that there was a scavenger hunt in the offing. And oddities in the way the alleged teacher behaves are also glossed over. Setting up a situation in which a failure to determine which students the teacher has secretly assigned the role of “witch” results in a “failing grade?” When there are no clues other than what students might drag out of one another by interrogation? Not likely, even as a lesson in unity.

And again, there is a subgenre of these stories; the wise adult (usually dying of age or disease) who imparts a powerful life lesson, like finding one’s “true worth” by sending a clueless adolescent on a quest to find a buyer for a watch, book or classic car by speaking to a series of conveniently-available acquaintances of the adult, rather than just entering the details into a search engine. This, of course, is likely because the stories pre-date the internet, even if the valuable item in question is updated to something that would be understood to be prized by modern collectors, rather than those of the past century.

I have a theory about these stories, and it is, I will admit, a somewhat uncharitable take on American culture. People attribute wisdom based on the understanding that a person is already wise, and simple lessons are best directly delivered to simple minds. The idea that valuable insights can come from ordinary people, or that adults can benefit from simple statements without being simple-minded, seems to meet with resistance.

Take the balloon story. I know that making other people happy makes me happy is very true for me. Encountering a person on the street for whom I can do a good turn literally brightens my mood for the rest of the day. And I doubt that I’m the only person this is true for. So why not just tell one’s own story of making someone happy and then feeling good about having done so? And I’ll admit to being part of the problem, to a degree. I don’t normally tell stories about myself; I find my life to be dull and uninteresting. So I can’t image that people would find value in hearing about the time that I brightened an admin’s day with the simple gift of a set of colored pencils. But clearly there’s something there, the number of “likes” that the balloon story garners on LinkedIn (which I presume is part of the reason it recurs so often) speaks to that. And I’ve found things I’ve considered deeply wise in all sorts of banal places.

Sometimes, I think, people aren’t really the problem. The stories people tell themselves about other people are the problem. And this includes me. I’ve admitted to an uncharitable take on American culture. Because the uncharitable take, that Americans are unwilling or unable to see one another’s life experiences as sources of wisdom, speaks to me. It becomes a tidy explanation of an observed phenomenon. But that’s different from it actually being true. Despite the joy I find in bringing joy to other people, I’m still a cynic at heart; someone who believes in the idealism of other people only when all of the other explanations have been exhausted. Perhaps it’s time that I devoted more of myself to being the change I want to see in the world.

Occupied

 

Signs carried by protestors during Occupy Seattle, now a decade past.

In Fire

Where do Republican officials think this is going to end?
Damon Linker "The Republican lies about election fraud are a ticking time bomb"

That's easy. Back in 2012, Richard Mourdock (I keep coming back to this guy, don't I?) said in an interview with CNN: "What has motivated many people to get out and work for us and we are at that point where one side or the other has to win this argument. One side or the other will dominate." And I suspect that Republican officials have determined that now is their chance to win the argument and dominate. Because their constant assertions that the only legitimate elections are those clearly won by Republican candidates will motivate people to "get out and work" for Republican candidates by refusing to accede to Democratic politicians taking office.

As many people have pointed out, democratic government and peaceful handovers of power can only happen with the consent of all parties. One side consistently withholding consent results in a crisis. It's possible that Republican lawmakers hope that this crisis ends with Democratic voters understanding that their first choices to represent them will be unable to do so, and will settle for Republican leadership (and perhaps, in Republicans' sweetest dreams, succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome and deciding to back, however tepidly, the winning side). It's just as possible that they've bought into the more belligerent of their supporters' claims and decided that if it actually comes down to a literal fight, that the bloodletting will end with a Democratic surrender.

Either way, I suspect they think that they can use the fear and disaffection of their most ardent supporters as tools. Presumably, they would put those tools to use to make better lives for everyone, but I suspect that revanchism has become too deeply ingrained for that, and what would actually happen is simply a collapse into score-settling and reprisals, as the United States returns to a phase in which the law is meaningless, because people's personal understandings of right and wrong are considered more important than petty considerations of legality.

Republican backers of the narrative that they are the only legitimate officeholders in the country think that it's going to end in an enduing political victory at best, and likely a consequence-free return to the status quo at the very worst. And so far, there's nothing to demonstrate that they're wrong about that. It's unlikely that they'll manage to weld the rest of the nation into a coherent block of opposition, and that's more or less what would need to happen to overcome the structural electoral advantages that Republicans, especially at the national level, have. And if the Supreme Court becomes the openly partisan institution that many have hoped it would become and others believe that it now is, they can count on those people who follow the will of the institution wherever it leads them to be their allies in imposing their wills.

Sure, as I've noted before, democracy is not intended to be a means by which mutually hostile groups determine which one suffers for the benefit of the other. But this brewing conflict between two incompatible notions of justice and right isn't new. Republicans have simply decided that they are better served by following the example of former President Trump and raising the boil, rather than keeping the lid on things.

The 12th of Amnesia

I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone who thinks that this is what September 12th, 2001 was like missed the day itself, too.

I understand the idea of nostalgia for a time in which Americans didn't seem as petty and divided. But that's mostly a misrememberance of a fictional time. Because while Americans are fairly regularly divided, those divisions are rarely petty.

The class divides in the United States are fueled, in large part by a group of people, on the one hand, who feel that they have earned their advantages by their own virtue and being rewarded by a just universe, while on the other hand, people feel that the rightful wages of their hard work are stolen from them by people who are able to extort benefits through having been given the upper hand.

More than Christians simply believing that they are mistaken in their rejection of the divinity and messiahship of Yēšūaʿ of Nazareth, Jews have to contend with a sizable minority of Americans who believe that they are scheming, grasping cheats and thieves; again, taking the rightful wages of others hard work to enrich themselves, and clannishly locking other people out of positions that would allow them to better their material conditions, if not outright controlling hapless world leaders and preventing them from acting in the interests of the people they are supposed to be championing.

Likewise, Republicans and Democrats don't believe themselves to have different means towards achieving the same broadly-desired ends. Rather they have come to regard one another as Evil, and the intentional enemies of what is just and beneficial. For example, Republican voters often feel that Democratic efforts to control firearms is a cynical plot to render the public unable to fight back against tyrannical government, while Democratic voters are quick to believe that Republicans seek to install themselves as a permanent minority government in the service of further consolidating wealth in the hands of the business class.

Even the Chick-fil-A versus Nike comparison ignores deep differences in people's basic understandings of right and wrong. Chick-fil-A's corporate values are heavily influenced by the Baptist religiosity of its founder, which had lead the company to take direct stands against expanding the rights that society grants to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and other groups identified as "Queer", while Nike has publicly moved in the opposite direction, coming out in support of LGBT+ Pride activities and dropping endorsements of celebrity athletes that made disparaging remarks about queer people. Both sides have their defenders and those factions are sincerely convinced that the other is decidedly wrong, if not actively malicious.

And these are only four of the ways that Americans have come to regard one another as not only wrong, but either unintelligent, credulous or deliberately immoral. The entire list is remarkably long.

So even without those specific factors, for September 12th, 2001 to have been a day where "what matter more was what united us, than what divided us," it would have needed to be utterly unique in the whole of American history. Because "what 'divides' us" is a very, very, deep well. Not even the Second World War was able to completely suppress the American tendency to see those noticeably different from themselves as "the other," and use that "other-ness" as a justification for taking advantage or withholding what people wanted for themselves. It was, and still is, going to take much, much more than a small bunch of religious fanatics to bridge those gaps. Sure, they managed to stake up some of center stage on the Fear and Loathing chart, but they never owned all of it, and they didn't hold their position for very long.

But, let's say, just for a moment, that this halcyon view of September 12th, 2001 actually did reflect the truth of that day. Let's say, just for a moment, that Americans were willing to wave flags, be Americans and hug together, despite their differences. A brief papering over of the myriad fault lines of American society is not, and will never be, a substitute for learning how to disagree without devolving into prejudice, disdain and hatred. A one-day pause in the habit of regarding others with a combination of rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust, born shock and terror is nothing to be longed for.

People can miss what they believed September 12th, 2001 to be, because even while it was supposedly happening, it wasn't valued. And its currency has only dwindled since then.

The Odds

Two Decades After 9/11, Are We Safer?

I don't know. Define "safe."

I will admit to a certain level of "safety fatigue." Any number of events that have occurred over the past twenty years have prompted people to question how safe they are and government and business officials to scramble to make people safe. But what does "safe" actually mean?

A lot of the time, I am left with the feeling that safe is taken to be a state of affairs where nothing bad happens to anyone, ever. No matter what the threat, someone swoops in with something that renders it, at most, a mild inconvenience. I understand that, were I to ask people for their understanding of safety, that this isn't what they would tell me, but when I observe people, and the way that "the powers that be" respond to people, that's the impression that I'm left with.

For myself, my life tends to feel "unsafe" as a matter of course. This morning, I narrowly missed having the front end of my car removed by a Tesla driver who didn't appear to think that red lights applied to her, and I've seen enough overturned vehicles and multi-vehicle smash-ups to realize that every time I casually run down to the mall or to the bookstore, I'm taking my life into my hands. The sneaking suspicion that one day, I'm going to take one too many unnecessary jaunts never really goes away.

Having made it to middle age, I'm no longer in the group of Black men for whom homicide is the number one cause of death; other things have taken its place. Technically, I was never in much danger of becoming a statistic in that manner; I've spent almost all of my adult life living in neighborhoods that one might accurately describe as "lily White." Of course, that comes with its own set of problems, but they are somewhat (if not entirely) less likely to be lethal.

But, all things considered, I'm likely to live until natural causes, like cancer or heart disease, catch up to me. In that sense, my life is "safe," and nothing about the past twenty years, neither terrorism, heat waves nor worldwide pandemic, has changed that. And maybe that's the thing. The attacks on the World Trade Center were flashy, but in the set of risks that existed in my life, it barely registered. I was, quite literally, on the other side of the continent. For all that it dominated the news cycle for a time, my life went on as usual. I hadn't felt to rate my life on some sort of "safety index" prior to that point, and I feel even less incentive to do so now. Tomorrow is unpredictable, and so I don't put any effort into worrying about what it might bring. At least, not if I plan to sleep in the intervals between todays and tomorrows.

The likelihood that I will die one day is, more or less by definition, 100%. Many questions of safety become caught up in attempting to understand what the chances are for any given day, between now and that indefinite point in the future. (Of course, not all threats to one's safety end in death, but since this came up in the context of the al-Qaeda attack on New York City, death tends to figure in people's assessments of safety as concerns a repeat.) For me, that chance has been the same for quite some time, vanishingly small, but not zero. How many decimal places are in that percentage isn't of interest to me.

Canceled Windows

An observation: By moving to shut down what are construed by some as trivial signs of disrespect, "Cancel Culture" mirrors the "Broken Windows Theory" of community and law enforcment first articulated in The Atlantic in 1982.

Both Cancel Culture and Broken Windows methods of policing seek to signal that social monitoring is high and that social norms will be rigorously enforced. The goal is to convey the message that more serious infractions, whether they be overt social bias or major criminal activities, will be detected, defended against and punished. Both rely on a high degree of discretion in their enforcement, which means that many incidents that would otherwise fit the definition are allowed to go unsanctioned. Accordingly, in each case, persons committing minor acts they see as harmless or victimless feel that they are being singled out for overly severe punishments and marginalization, which, in turn, is taken as a signal to the community that is attempting to maintain cohesion and control that these people are outsiders who do not care for the community's members and their well-being.

People with a low tolerance for perceived disorder tend to favor immediate and harsh interventions that, in turn, make other people feel unsafe, because they feel that the power being called upon to intervene is unpredictable, and maybe either capricious or partisan. Those sanctioned, therefore, often feel that the stated goals of maintaining norms and reducing disorder are simply covers of score-settling and persecution of difference. And if they feel that people have been lead to support such policies by dishonest brokers, they tend to respond to the sensitivities of those with low disorder tolerance with mockery, which increases the perception that they are hostile to the community and its concerns.

In the end, both Cancel Culture and Broken Windows can be tied to notions of civility, which can be seen as a means of informal social control, enforced in communities by the community itself; and has often been criticized as a means of maintaining a status quo that benefits those who currently enjoy advantages at the expense of others. While supporters of both postures may say that they should be free from sociopolitical biases if "implemented properly," there tends to be a dearth of people who are ready, willing and able to watch the watchmen to enforce such "proper implementation," so long as their own oxen are not the ones being gored by improper action.

Discards

Here in King County, Washington, masks are to be worn in indoor places open to the general public, and for any outdoor event where there will be 500 or more people. They're touted as the second-best response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic after becoming vaccinated. But for all that, they've become an everyday sight as litter as well as a prophylactic. I don't recall a day recently in which I haven't seen one on a lawn, in a street or by a sidewalk. Even last year, when masks were in demand and difficult to come by, the disposable nature of many of them meant that there was a time when one had a better chance of finding one discarded in a park than in a drugstore. And now that they are readily available, the need to keep up with them has lessened, and they are becoming ubiquitous as trash.

In Plain Sight

White officer kneels on Black man's neck until he suffocates.

White woman calls police and tells that them that a Black man is threatening her out of resentment over being asked to leash her dog.

Police arrest Black CNN reporter and camera crew, live on air, while ignoring their White colleague.

Woman confronts Black teenager for stealing her phone after forgetting hers.

Sometimes, race relations in the United States feels like a deeply intentional farce, and no-one told me that it's all a send-up. I try to be an understanding, compassionate, person (Yes, stupid, I know, okay?) but I simply can't wrap my brain around any intelligent reason to, in effect, say, in public: "Don't mind me, I'm just going to crush this guy's windpipe until he's completely inert. I can't see how this could end badly; you guys freaking out over there are just overreacting." Okay, I wasn't in the officer's shoes, but how did he not seem to have any inkling that what he was doing carried a high risk of killing a man? Live on cell phone video? I've long said that police work doesn't pay well enough for the risks involved to attract the élite of society, but this guy seems completely unreal.

Likewise: "Hold on a second. I'm about to call the police, then blatantly lie to them, while you're recording me on a cell phone, because you caught me openly breaking the rules of the public space I'm in." Did they invent time travel to and from 1950 when I wasn't looking?

It was like someone put in a call to central casting and said "Hey, I need some people, including some police officers, who appear to lack anything in the way of higher mental functions and just can't understand how to deal with people different from themselves. Who do you have for me?"

I guess, in the end, that I thought I understood, at least generally, White people. And maybe I actually do. To the degree that someone can understand anyone else's lived experience. Maybe what I can't wrap my brain around is that it's possible to come across as that much of an outlier and still manage to function in everyday society prior to doing something that sparks widespread public outrage. I think what I'm having difficulty with is the idea that the people involved had somehow managed to never let on prior to their moments of infamy that they didn't get it.

The behavior of Amy Cooper and (former) Officer Derek Chauvin strike me as so blatantly bizarre that I suddenly find myself asking if the world around me changed when I wasn't looking, or if I never understood it to begin with. (And the implication that I don't understand it now.)

It's weird. The whole thing with the SARS-2 coronavirus, while it has people running around like chickens (sans heads), it just seems like one of those things that happens. It's to be expected, even if it can't be predicted. But even though Ms. Cooper's and Mr. Chauvin's actions fit into a broader historical narrative, they seem so out of place in the here and now that they strike me as actively chaotic. And my discomfort with that chaos prompts me to think that I'm missing something, even when I know that they were just a couple of those things that happen. I've already mentioned Ms. Cooper and Mr. Chauvin, and my difficulty with understanding them before, but it goes beyond them.

It strikes me as weird that the open public performance of "white privilege, systemic racism, and police brutality" are still things, given that they meet with clear and swift public disapproval. So when Miya Ponsetto decided that she was going to have it out with a teenager, because she just couldn't believe that he happened to have the same model cellular phone as she did, did she really think she was going to come out of that situation looking reasonable?

Maybe none of them were really thinking about it at all. And I guess that's where the disconnect is. I've come to see myself as constantly under a microscope, and so I've developed a habit of thinking about the "optics" of the things I do in public. (Which sometimes comes with its own problems to be sure.) And I guess that it's just become so natural that it surprises me that other people don't perceive the need to do the same.

Non-Event

I went to a pair of events this summer, a Renaissance faire and a gaming exposition, that are normally annual events but were canceled last year due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Both times I'd guessed that attendance would be very light, and both times I was wrong. While the gaming exposition wasn't anywhere nearly as crowded as it had been in prior years, there was still a pretty decent crowd there; my concerns that it may have turned out to be a ghost town were unfounded. As for the Renaissance faire, the crowd may have been smaller than it had been previously, but I really couldn't tell.

But what was very noticeable in both instances was a sharp decrease in the number of vendors and exhibitors on hand. Once one moved away from the main gate of the faire, large swaths of empty space where vendors used to set up were visible, and for the gaming expo, there was really only one major company in attendance.

It made for an interesting disconnect. People are looking to return to medium and large-scale in-person events, and organizers are willing to put them on, but the attractions themselves are starting to become comfortable with staying away. I suspect as businesses learn to connect with their customer bases online and via other "virtual" and remote methods, the return on investment will lessen, leaving mainly those businesses that rely on foot traffic and face-to-face interactions to fill out venues. As with a lot of things, this was likely a shift that was accelerated, rather than created, by the pandemic. Watching the future unfold on fast-forward makes evident things that previously may have been too slow to easily notice. But of course, it also hides things that once may have unfolded slowly enough to be visible. So we'll see how the disruptions shake out in the end.

What's This "We" Business?

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.

Tom Nichols "Afghanistan Is Your Fault"

This analysis is fair enough, I suppose, but I do have one problem with it: there is no "we." And that's been the problem all along. The American public is not a single, unified body with common aims, interests and understanding of the world around it. In a group of appreciable size, there will be a multiplicity of interests, some (if not many) operating directly at cross purposes to one another, even in the absence of zero-sum games. In an intensely partisan environment, and one driven by negative partisanship, at that, there will always be someone looking to criticize. And since partisan criticisms will typically find a receptive audience among co-partisans, regardless of what the criticism is or it's overall coherency. These facts, taken together, call into question the idea that "we" can directly tell anyone anything.

President George W. Bush had this problem. This perfectly reasonable assessment: "I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world," was seized upon by Democratic politicians like Senator John Edwards and even now-President Joe Biden as a declaration of defeat and "unacceptable." The debate over whether President Bush's analysis was partisan then, and the debate over leaving Afghanistan is partisan now. Now that it's President Biden presiding, rather than Senator Biden criticizing, it will be Republicans leveling charges of unacceptable defeatism. Because it will work. It will elevate their stature in the eyes of people for whom President Biden can do nothing worthwhile and become a demonstration of right thinking that's independent of the argument itself; in much the same way that Senators Edwards and Biden found a receptive audience in Democrats aggrieved with the Bush Administration.

But even if it weren't the case, all that someone's critics need have in common is an understanding that the person being criticized isn't doing it right. Everything else is just detail. And so critics need not agree with one another, even if they are being consistent over time. And in a society where disagreeing with "them" is how people prove both worth and loyalty to their social reference groups, the idea that a national debate could have lead to anything approaching a national consensus is a pipe dream. (And even then, that pipe needs to have something pretty strong in it.) And while the specific form that negative partisanship has taken may be different, this fracturing of the polity is nothing new. As I understand it, the United States has never been a unified population, outside of a few very short-lived instances. The immediate aftermath of, for instance, the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC, resulted in people being united in grief and anger at a common enemy, but partisan divisions quickly made themselves known, and many Americans demonstrated an inability to distinguish a different-looking citizen from an Islamist fifth columnist or infiltrator (presuming those making the mistake cared about the difference in the first place).

In order to say that "we" are delivering a message, there first has to be an understanding that there can be a broadly shared consensus. Previously, that consensus was somewhat falsified, created by simply ignoring those people who disagreed, or whose interests were harmed. As more and more people obtained access to the public discourse and the franchise, a single social voice based on one group's understanding of their own interests became less and less tenable as an ongoing practice. And in such situations, it's more common, at least in the United States, for those groups to deliver their own messages, rather than to hammer out some form of compromise message. That cacophony of different constituencies results in a situation where there is no one message ever being delivered, even if one set of voices is momentarily significantly louder than the rest.

The Magic Returns

Someone on LinkedIn posted this picture of a billboard somewhere, and then had a bit of a rant about it. I agree that it's off, but it's not terrible. The problem with this isn't that it's necessarily inaccurate. I'm sure that a lot of people who started poor did all of these things on their way to becoming more well-off. The problem with this message is that it's facile and oversimplified. The citation of Proverbs 10:4 is a standard formulation in things like this: "hard work" makes one wealthy in and of itself. But I'm pretty sure that the world's wealthiest people would affirm that simply because work is difficult, highly time consuming or requires a lot of effort doesn't mean that it's effective or efficient at building wealth. There are plenty of ways to work very hard, yet come out in a worse position than one started in. This billboard may have just simply said: "Life outcomes are invariably tied to character" and left it at that.

And that's a shame, because there are things that people can do to make their lives better. The difficulty becomes that in the real world they tend to a) require some level of access to resources and b) entail the risk of those resources. If there are no guarantees in life, than there is no level of work ethic that can guarantee success in any given endeavor, including working one's way out of poverty. But then again, perhaps that's really what Proverbs 10:4 is there for: to offer, but not directly state, that doing the right things and showing the right virtues will lead to a divine intercession into personal economics that will ensure the desired outcome. Of course, that leads to the unfortunate tendency to judge what cannot be directly seen, namely a person's internal drive and traits, based on something that can, the external trappings of wealth. (Directly observing one's work ethic would likely require spending more time with a person than would be practical.)

Just like Juan Williams' understanding that conservative family values are the simple and self-evident answer to all of the problems of black America, to the point of referring to them as "magical" in Enough - The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It, this billboard works under the assumption that people have been ignoring obvious quick fixes out of some misguided ignorance, gullibility and/or immorality. But what's really missing is a lack of trust. People who work hard rarely do so simply because they get off on the expenditure of effort. Instead, they're expecting some sort of return on that investment. (And have I noted that all investments come with an element of risk?) Without that expectation, a standout work ethic is as likely to be seen as foolish as it is virtuous. As the Demotivator says: "Quitters never win, and winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots." And while the intentional systems that stopped many people from winning may have been dismantled, it's irrational to expect that this fact alone would have restored trust in the utility of striving.

To do that, people should be mentored through learning the skills, tools and processes they'll need to master to be truly successful. But billboards with magical thinking and Bible citations are easier. Okay, that's less than 100% fair. But this billboard simply replaces Juan William's exhortation to put off childbearing and replaces it with savings, investment and giving back to the community. It feels just as moralizing and directed at conservative Whites now as it did then. (And, to fair, maybe that is the target audience, as if often is in American respectability politics.)

Another problem with this billboard is, well, that it's a billboard. There really isn't room on it for much more than a few sentences, and I suspect that I wouldn't want to try to take all of it in if I happened to be driving by at highway speeds. As suspect as Juan Williams' statistics were in his book, the book format gave him the space to lay them out, and thus support his case. And sure, there's a URL for more information, but I am convinced that taking the time to either write it down or look it up on a phone while driving is a bad idea. So I'm not convinced that anything further would actually be read. And by itself, the billboard comes off as simply condescending, indulging in the stereotype of Black Americans as uneducated and disinterested in family life. Sure the marriage rate in the Black community is lower than it is for other ethnic groups (it started to decouple in the 1960s), but a majority still marry. (Given current trendlines, however, that may not be true for much longer.)

As an aside, there's a certain irony in expecting people to use marriage as an escape from poverty, given that many people tend to delay marriage until they've accumulated a certain level of wealth; disparities in wealth between Black and White Americans also show up in marriage rates, for that reason. And that leaves out the fact that marriage rates are lower and divorce higher, among those people with lower educational attainment (and this holds across the United States at large). People with the money to finish college are the most likely to be successful in marriage, but a college education itself does a pretty decent job of keeping people out of poverty. While it's true that the married tend to be better off than the unmarried, the causal relationship appear to work such that the better off are more likely to become, and remain, married, even if they wait to do so. And since trends toward assortative mating in the United States have closed off much of the mixing of classes in the marriage market, the potential mates those in poverty are likely to attract are going to be in poverty themselves. And while two may live more cheaply per person than one, poor families still have trouble saving.