Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Which Economy

It's a simple enough question:

I mean, have you SEEN the economy these new adults have graduated into?

And I understand the reason for asking it. It's a plea for understanding and grace to be extended to young people, who, having put in the time and effort to undertake a college education, now find themselves in a situation in which jobs, especially entry-level jobs, have become scarce. And I understand the invocations of "the economy" or "this economy," as way of explaining it. It's a simple shorthand for the position that the United States finds itself in now, with depressed demand for labor.

But hasn't this been the goal of "the economy" all along? The modern United States is very good, and has been for some time, at creating all of the goods and services that people are ready, willing and able to pay for without need of the entirety of its labor force. And while many people seem to value their own vocations quite highly, it doesn't take much to reveal that any number of them begrudge others theirs; if putting some number of people out of work is what it takes to feel wealthier, then so be it. Couple this with the understanding, expressed to me by a small number of people I know, that the demand for labor moves, but never really goes away, and one can see the dilemma that many people over the years have found themselves in; the fact that they can't find work that's valuable enough to support them, in a society that believes that there's enough valuable work for anyone who wants it.

Which leaves out the fact that the government has taken it upon itself to prevent labor from becoming scarce enough that employers are forced to raise wages (and thus, presumably, prices). And that means that somewhere in the area of one in twenty to one in twenty-five people who are actively engaged in looking for work (remember the Unemployment Rate is dependent on the Participation Rate).

For people in that 4 or 5 percent (which can be a few million people or so). every economy is a bad economy, simply due to the perception that government interventions or none, there's enough work out there for everyone who wants it. And this leaves people wondering both what's wrong with them, and what they need to in order to fix it.

And that leaves aside the efficiency gains that businesses chase as a matter of daily operations. Because every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar that isn't going to shareholders, some of whom can become quite upset about that fact.

So there are always going to be new adults who graduate into a world that's actively hostile to them making enough money in for the formal employment sector to support themselves, even in the "good" times. It's the nature of the beast. It's receiving a lot of attention right now, because the overall consume outlook doesn't seem rosy for anyone. But maybe the problem is that it's seen as actively bad for it to be rosy for everyone.

Blotted

The Culture Wars make things strange.

I live in a sleepy suburb of Seattle. Almost nothing happens out here. But from time to time, I'll be online, and someone will ask "I'm thinking of moving there... is it safe?" And one can tell by the answers which side of the Liberal/Conservative divide that people come down on.

For a certain segment of the online Conservative population, playing up their concerns of crime, and their responses to/preparations for it is a form of virtue signalling. They will list off the things that happen in their neighborhoods, even petty offenses like vandalism, and inform people that they carry mace when walking the dog (even if they make it a point to say they leave their guns at home). Every trip out of doors is a cause to be vigilant and ready.

For me, the Seattle Eastside (those suburbs on that sit East of Lake Washington, like Redmond, where Microsoft is located) are about a safe as your average pre-teen sleepover. Most of the crime out here is an annoyance, Cars are broken into, and occasionally stolen and there's a certain background level of property crime in the service of financing drug habits. When I lived in Chicago and Evanston, on the other hand, a roommate was mugged, a co-worker was raped and I knew more than a few people for whom the sound of gunshots didn't warrant a response. (My car, however, was left alone.) By comparison, crime here is more bothersome than worthy of concern. But then, I don't pine for the 1970s. Mainly because I realize that I don't have an accurate picture of the 1970s... after all, I was in grade school for most of it. It had its own problems, but internet culture and high levels of partisanship weren't among them.

Concerns over crime mean different things to different people. For some, they're about the collapse of good government (a.k.a., what they remember as draconian punishments for criminals), for others, it's about the inherent wickedness of mankind and the immanent return of the divine to earth. There are, however, those people for whom it's a real, day-to-day, concern. But when you live were I live, those people are few and far between.

Unpolitic

I think that what stands between me and being politically active, as opposed to being just somewhat politically engaged, is my lack of a sense of outrage. When I made a go of being more political, now two decades ago, I found that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were a fit for me, because I wasn't angry about the things the party members were angry about. I could understand why they were angry, but I couldn't share their anger. And their anger was most of their motivation for the policies they wanted to see enacted (or, for that matter, repealed).

As much as I tend to consider my politics "Not Republican," I don't see myself as being anti-Republican, in the sense that my policy preferences are driven by opposition to whatever the Republicans happen to be up to. Rather, the two parties have drifted somewhat over the years, and having a somewhat "small-government liberal" mindset, the Republicans are generally (much) farther away from me than the Democrats are. I don't see that as having any moral or ethical valence... it's simply the ways things currently stand. If I'm still around in twenty more years, things could be completely different.

But I understand that not being emotionally attached to politics means that I'm not fired up about the sorts of things that tend to get people fired up. The idea that President Biden and/or Donald Trump are actively plotting against the good of the nation simply isn't top of mind for me.

I've been told, multiple times, that lacking the ability to become outraged over some or another thing that a member of the political class has done is to be actively complicit in whatever, well, outrages, they've perpetrated. To which I shrug my shoulders. I suspect that whatever sense of outrage I may have had is long gone. And given how other people interact with theirs, I don't really want it back.

Watching

I went to see Thor: Love and Thunder yesterday. It's a serviceable movie, even if it's one that leans a bit too hard into its tropes, tired though said tropes are. The theater was in a new shopping center and apartment/condominium complex that's not very far from my home. Not being a movie person, however, I'd never even known it was there until the friend I saw the movie with suggested we go there.

While the entrance is on the ground floor, the actual auditoriums (auditoria?) are up a couple of long elevators; at the top of which there's something of a lounge area where one can look down onto the plaza below.

Standing there, watching the people pass through and/or use the area, I was reminded of how long it had been since I'd just gone people watching. Not to take pictures (even though I did snap the one above) but just to observe. And learn. People are fascinating in their diversity... even in the overwhelmingly White suburb that I live in, and there is always some little detail about humanity that can be gleaned simply from watching them for a while.

And so, I watched them. For about ten minutes, as I waited for my friend to arrive, I watched people and their interactions in the carefully constructed artificiality of the outdoor plaza. In full view, yet more or less completely out of sight. It was interesting, and relaxing, and a bit illuminating. I shall have to do it again, sometime.

Play On

I was in a store this evening, when the sound of accordion music filled the place. While it seemed unlikely that an instrument was being demonstrated for sale, it wasn't impossible; but my first guess was that someone was loudly testing some or another sound system with the most annoying music they could find on their phone before store staff stepped in to stop them.

What I found was a youngish man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, although I have no real way of being certain of this, contentedly playing the accordion while his mother pushed her cart full of items through the line to check out. It didn't take long to realize that the man was mentally disabled in some or another fashion. He didn't have the distinctive facial characteristics that I've come to understand are markers of Down Syndrome; perhaps it was a form of autism, instead. In any event, when the line would advance, the mother would push the cart forward to the new place in line, then come back and take the young man by the arm, and bring him along. He played the accordion the whole time. When the mother would release his arm, the young man would turn around to face the people further back in line (and, by extension, the rest of the store) and keep playing, without a thought to anything going on around him.

I felt for the mother, who was likely at some point in her fifties, to guess from looking at her. This was her life. It had been for at least a couple of decades up to this point, and it seemed likely that unless something happened to one or both of them, that it would continue to be so.

But while I considered the mother unfortunate in what had happened to the child she loved, I realized that as a society, the young man and his accordion were signs of wealth. As a nation, we are long past the point where a person who was unable to meaningfully contribute to their community would be considered a serious liability to the collective. Sure, he may have been a disaster to his mother's prospects for a comfortable retirement (in a few different ways) but for the rest of us, he was simply something between a curiosity and an inconvenience. Of course, this has likely been true for some time. Perhaps in the middle ages, he would have been a village idiot, cared for by the rest of the community out of obligation, pity or some mixture of them.

In the modern United States, however, it seems less true than perhaps it should. People begrudge the disabled any number of minor accommodations. Personally, I didn't have to listen to the young man play the accordion long enough for my patience to wear thin. Still, I'm happy that I'm not a neighbor.

Tipping the Scale

I was talking to a friend about the general state of the world around us, and we came to a simple conclusion: Humanity does not scale well. It was something of a triviality at the time, a basic aphorism that arose out of a conversation because it neatly explained the central theses of that particular conversation, but in the intervening years, I've noticed that it seems to be more generally applicable.

It is, however, not a particularly obvious conclusion to come to. After all, by some measures, humanity is a remarkably successful species, mostly due to its spread across the globe. While people are sometimes given more credit than they are due for the impacts that humanity is capable of having on the environment, the fact of the matter remains that human beings have the capacity to deliberately create a mass extinction event that rivals any of those in the fossil record. And for quite some time, the fear was that this would come about because of rivalry and hostility between different groups.

People are, it seems, expert at not getting along with one another. But that, I think, ignores the fact that all animals compete for resources, and not necessarily only when said resources are scarce. Humans  have come to inhabit every ecosystem on Earth that is even marginally livable, because for many people, time and again, the answer to competition was to look elsewhere for sustenance, if not always prosperity. The human migrations that have produced the phenomena people refer to as race and foreign languages were all driven by the fact that human groups could only grow so large before they found themselves incapable of meeting the challenges of their local areas through cooperation. It's built into the basic architecture of the species.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that humanity does not scale well because there are legitimate barriers that mean that it cannot scale well. Humans, like all animals, are driven to reproduce. While there are large numbers of people for whom being parents is a sub-optimal choice, for many others, it's simply the thing to do. Sometimes that's for reasons of economics and other times out of reaching for a form of joy, but whatever the reason, there are a myriad of reasons that people seek to multiply.

I don't know how that tension will ultimately resolve itself. It's possible that it never will. But I suspect that eventually, the limits of humanity's ability to scale will catch up to humanity's ability to use technology to expand those limits. This will not result in the end of humanity, more than likely. But it will be highly disruptive, even though it's become more and more clear to me that the inability of humanity to scale indefinitely is known, if not always understood.

Inside Out

According to philosopher Thomas Nagel, people tend to see their own interests and harms in moral terms.

Someone could escape from this argument if, when he was asked, "How would you like it it someone did that to you?" he answered, "I wouldn't resent it at all. I wouldn't like it if someone stole my umbrella in a rainstorm, but I wouldn't think there was any reason for him to consider my feelings about it." But how many people could honestly give that answer? I think that most people, unless they're crazy, would think that their own interests and harms matter, not only to themselves, but in a way that gives other people a reason to care about them too. We all think that when we suffer it is not just bad for us but bad, period.
"What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy" 1987

Professor Nagel's general point is that this works both ways. The "argument" he posits someone attempting to escape is that people should see others interests and harms as matter in a way that creates a reason to care about them. But I think that people might work "from the inside out" on things like this. Just as children are often keenly aware of when people disregard their personal interests and harms, yet are less attuned to those of other people, I think that even people grow out of that, they still start with themselves and work outward.

Immanuel Kant rejected the idea that people were motivated by the sole sake of doing something wrong. Instead he identifies two primary motivations: the love of self and the moral law.

And while I'm not sure that either Mr. Kant or Professor Nagel would approve, I'm going to link the two of them. Kant's love of self can be thought of as people's understanding that their own interests and harms create moral imperatives for other people, and the moral law can be thus linked to people's understanding that others persons interests and harms create binding moral rules for the self.

If we presume that most people do work "from the inside out," their first considerations would be what they understand that other people owe them; care for their interests and harms. And while they're focused on this need, they have less, or even no, bandwidth for other concerns. And I think the United States, with it's generally low level of social trust, illustrates this. Not just in the fact that Americans are notorious for acting in their own interests at the expense of other considerations, but also in the sense that many people seem to have difficulty understanding that this is what other people are doing, too.

I started this with a quote from Thomas Nagel, because of Professor Nagel's offhand remark about a person being crazy not to think that their own interests and harms should matter to other people. It irks me a bit, since I think that a person can be of the opinion that other people don't owe them anything and not have any mental health or ethical problems in need of addressing. But I understand that what's really at work here is an understanding of ubiquity. As far as Professor Nagel is concerned, pretty much everyone subscribes to that theory of moral obligation. And I don't think I blame him for that. Because that's the way our society behaves. In the end, Professor Nagel is attempting to put a more formal framework around "treat others as you would wish to be treated," and so he starts by defining how he understands most people wish to be treated.

The problem arises, I think, because for many people, it also ends there. People understand how they wish to be treated, see other people acting in accordance with that the moral law, and only once they are satisfied can they really flip the script, as it were. I suppose that one can think of it as a variation on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People may have a need to act in accordance with the moral law, but until they satisfy the love of self, they're not really positioned to act on it. And maybe this is why one can say that people don't scale well, in the sense that larger communities have difficulties that smaller ones do not. Put enough disparate people together, and people are likely to find someone who they don't feel respects their personal interests and harms, and therefore. And this lack of social trust becomes as reason to act out of the love of self. After all, if others won't do it, then the individual has to, in order to have their needs met.

Of course, this is a remarkable hodgepodge for what should be a simple concept of people wanting others to treat them well, and then returning the favor; and the resulting waiting game where no one wants to make the first move. But it's interesting to posit, given how much of philosophy is about how people can, or even should, break the impasse.

Both Ways

For all that I like to think of myself as an observer of the world around me, and at least somewhat attentive to it, I am left with the realization that because I can't ever genuinely know what other people are thinking, I won't ever actually understand the world. And that's something of a frustration, I think, because I have difficulty letting go of the idea that the world is an understandable place. At least in part.

I am, more or less, at peace with the idea that the world around me will often present as "random." The myriad interactions of people and organizations that shape the world occur mostly out of my sight, and so when their impacts reach me, I understand that I am seeing the effects of hidden causes. But it's more difficult than it should be, I think, to shake the idea that the effects link strongly enough to the causes that I should be able to work backwards and paint the picture.

It's strange, to understand that one both believes something and understands it to be false at the same time. I realize that one of those impulses is fictitious, but I can never seem to settle on which one. I suppose it's because I've never really needed to. It's a hedged bet where I've never actually been forced to commit one way or the other. And I think that a lot of things in life work this way. On theory, they don't make any sense, but in practice, it doesn't really matter.

Precious

So a ways back, when I would find interesting short news articles, I would copy them into a text file, and store them away. This digital clipping book soon became unwieldy, and I stopped adding to it, and eventually forgot about it entirely. I was wandering through some old folders, from old computers, and found them.

One interesting story was about an acupuncturist in Japan, who, when he found his marriage foundering, turned, of all places, to his library of business books to figure out how to turn things around. According to the article, he hit upon 8 simple precepts:

1. Listen to your wife attentively at least once a day without asking her to hurry up or get to the point.
2. Share the housework.
3. Do not forget to say “Thank you” and “You are kind.”
4. Never look down at your wife.
5. Do your work together with your wife if you are self-employed.
6. Do not fight. Listen to your wife patiently at first, even if you think she is completely wrong.
7. If there is something you really need or want to buy, persuade your wife daily so that she will come around to understanding why you want it.
8. If you want your wife to change, you need to change, too.

On the face of it, it all seems rather quaint, really. The kind of stuff that you expect to hear from elderly couples on how they managed to remain married for 75 years or some such. Although I will admit to being a bit dubious about number 7.

To be sure, the article that I'd found treated the whole thing with a mix of "news of the weird" and "oh, those wacky foreigners." Of the acupuncturist's choice to scour business books for marital advice, the article gushed: "Yet as preposterous as it sounds, this unusual approach actually worked." But looking on the whole thing some 15 years later, it seems pretty clear. Because all of the precepts presented can really be summed up in one:

Value your spouse, and your relationship with them.

And isn't the central point of most business books to treat your business as something valuable, and therefore worth spending the effort to nurture?

I'd noted that I've been wandering the Internet recently, and I've been reading some think tanks. Having found my way to the American Enterprise Institute and from there to the Institute for Family Studies, I popped back over to read some of their articles on marriage, and what was interesting about them was the high value that they placed on the institution, and the societal benefits thereof.

And I'm sure that valuing the institution of marriage works for a lot of people. But I wonder if the reason so many marriages fail is a lack of the sort of valuing of the partner that I saw in that old article.

Not, of course, that I'm one to talk. I am, after all, an Ineligible Bachelor™, one of the roughly ten percent of Americans (according to Pew Research) who has no intention of ever walking down an aisle. The person who sidles up to a friend who has just announced their engagement and stage-whispers with a broad smirk: "Run for it. I'll cover you." But even with that, I get it. Love is about valuing people. And while that might seem obvious, I'm not sure that it really is. Fortunately, there are always people out there who come to understand this, and are unashamed to tell us.

Unknown

According to Wikipedia, "Many of the beliefs traditionally attributed to the historical Socrates have been characterized as 'paradoxical' because they seem to conflict with common sense." Two of these supposed paradoxes are as follows: "No one desires evil," and "No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly." (I would rephrase the second statement as "People only err or do wrong unwillingly or unknowingly," since that strikes me as a more accurate rendering of its meaning.) Oxford reference describes "Socratic paradoxes" as "surprising and unacceptable conclusions."

I had encountered the Socratic view of wrongdoing previously, and, as I understand the world, it's a true statement. I remember it as something of a revelation, in the sense that it clearly articulated something that had occurred to me previously, but that I hadn't actually directly articulated before. So I was surprised to find it viewed as surprising and unacceptable. In conflict with common sense, I understand a bit more. I understand that not everyone believes that no one desires evil or that people only commit evil acts unwillingly or unknowingly. But why that dissenting view should be labeled the common sense one seems arbitrary, although to be honest, the whole sorting of ideas into buckets of "common sense" and "not common sense" strikes me as arbitrary.

In any event, it reminded me of my father's old saying that "Obvious is something that is so crystal-clear that you are the only person who sees it." And while I don't claim to have anything in common with Socrates, it occurs to me that just as I found that the "paradoxes" fit well within my lived experience, I suspect that there was something within his lived experience that lead him to that conclusion. (Or someone, given the trickiness of proving that Socrates was a real person.) The thing about lived experience, however, is that it is personal, and that means that it can be difficult to truly share with others. So while I can ask what it is about my lived experience that leads me to agree with people, such as Immanuel Kant, who believe that humans are never motivated solely by the desire to do something wrong, I can never really answer that question; because even if I had perfect recall of my own lived experience, I have no similar access to anyone else's.

All of which, I suppose, is merely a long-winded way of noting that I often find my own understanding of the world to be as opaque as other people's understanding of it. Which then, leads to a fascination with understanding people and how they think; because I feel that I understand myself better. Of course, the flip side of that is that if understanding others is a requirement for understanding myself, I will likely never understand myself fully. I'm not sure yet what I think of that.

Amnesia

Today, I was able to help a guy who needed to jump-start his car. It was a simple thing, but it brightened my day as much, if not more so, as it did his. I enjoy doing things like this for people; the short, one-time connections always cheer me up. And so when this one was done, I wondered: Why, given how much I enjoy these sorts of interactions, am I so bad at remembering them?

Back in April, I'd helped out a young woman who'd wiped out on her skateboard. She was pretty banged up, so I drove her to a nearby ER so she could be checked out. Again, being able to be of assistance like this had really brightened my day at the time. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

The fact that this sort of thing doesn't happen every day can't be the only factor. There are a lot of little events in my life that don't come along all that often, and don't have the same emotional resonance, yet I have much better recall of them. Or, to be more accurate, I recall them more frequently; ordinary, day-to-day events don't seem to be as able to crowd them out of my memory. I wonder if my memory of things in general is, in some sense, inversely proportional to the emotional content of them.

One's life is, in the end, basically the collection of memories that one has of it. I tend to understand my life as boring, and I realize that is, in large part, because I manage to remember the boring parts of it. Back in April, I spent an hour or so with the young woman skateboarder, and we spent a lot of time talking while waiting for something or another. I remember thinking at the time that she was a very interesting person, yet now I recall almost nothing of her.

So I wonder if I don't have it backwards. Maybe I've become so convinced that my life is boring that my memory simply dumps the interesting bits, even when those are the events, in the moment, that completely change the course of things?

Half-Alarm

Even the Peanuts gang is getting in on the act.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that 2020 has received a bum rap. Not in the sense that it's been an awesome year, and is due some recognition for that fact, but in the sense that 2020 has been made into the fall guy for something that the world could, and perhaps should, have been prepared for.

I read an article from 2007 that discussed a pair of papers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in mitigating the 1918 influenza pandemic. I mention this as a way of noting that the idea of a repeat of 1918, and the measures taken to contain the outbreak are not new. But the public wasn't prepared for what happened. In this interview from Marketplace, aired on December 10th, a Los Angeles cheese seller tells host Kai Ryssdal that she thought that the business closures and the like would last about a week. Mr. Ryssdal's response: "Right. Yeah, we all did."

But once it was clear that the SARS-2 CoV spread was expanding, why were people thinking that this was something that would have been contained in either a literal or figurative week? Part of it, I understand, comes from not wanting to panic people. But there is a problem that lies beneath that; that substantive changes spark widespread panics.

The world does not owe humanity anything. Earth was doing perfectly well for itself prior to our coming, and will likely continue to do so after we are gone. Perhaps, if we can work out the physics of it all, we'll be able to move the planet out of the way of the expanding shell of the Sun, when the star enters its expected red giant phase. This might be enough to be able to say that the Earth itself is in our debt. Until then, I suspect that humanity still has a lot to repay.

Generally speaking, American society is structured to be efficient, rather than resilient. Just-in-time is the order of the day. And this is a functional choice, not an ethical one. Neither of them is more or less "right" than the other. But they both have costs. And the way that 2020 has unfolded has revealed some of the costs of efficiency, by laying them in our laps.

I don't know if there will be a change. I suspect there won't. The American public, by in large, is actively disinterested in the systems that surround and support it. It's all somebody else's problem. But that, in the end, is what may 2020 such a difficult time. Suddenly, it wasn't just somebody else's problem, and people were unprepared for that that would mean. And given long enough, society as a whole will go back to being unprepared. It's the way of things, and most of the time, it works. And that's the downside to it all; that when things work, when they don't require constant attention, the time and energy that would be devoted to them becomes a form of dead weight loss, until things would have otherwise broken. The example that I like to use are fire extinguishers. The trouble, time and expense in buying and maintaining fire extinguishers is wasted; up until the moment that there's a fire. So far, I've never had a fire. And I might not ever. It's actually pretty likely that I'll never need one of the fire extinguishers I have on hand. And so they represent resources that I could have put to better things. But I can never be sure of that until I die without ever having needed them. So were they a good investment? I don't know. And there's only one real way to find out. But either way, the day, the month or the year won't be the culprit, or the hero.

Inattention

I have to admit that I've been paying even less attention than normal to the news recently. The steady diet of infectious disease and racial injustice news has become repetitive and it seems to crowd out, or inject itself into, everything else. Of course I understand that for many people, this is exactly what they're interested in. After all, this is why "doomscrolling" is a thing.But I'm not in that demographic, and so the constant stream of stories has no interest for me. Mostly because they've already reached the point where there's little new information in them. What's happening in the world of the coronavirus today, or what random things happened at the most recent protest just isn't useful. It feels more productive to catch up on all that perhaps once a week, after enough new information has been gathered that stories at least appear to be informative.

But being the sort of person who likes to read, and who likes to feel at least somewhat informed about the world, this has left me feeling a bit out of the loop. So I've been bouncing from thing to thing, trying to pick up on some of all of the other things that have been happening in the world. Which is an interesting experience. Still, given that most of what passes for news is "for entertainment purposes only" (because I'm a cheapskate), I'm not sure that I found it an informative one. But no news cycle lasts forever, and I'm certain that I'll find myself being nostalgic for the current ones, given enough time.

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.

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.

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.

Out Of Sight

South, and a bit East, of downtown Seattle, in the International District (sometimes also called Chinatown), Interstate 5 is above ground level, but not by much. There is a parking lot there. And there are tents. The number varies, but there are usually a least a half-dozen. It's one of the smaller of the many encampments that homeless people have created around the city. And this one is particularly visible. There are more tents further south, but they're scattered among the trees along the side of the expressway, and so while they are somewhat visible in the Winter if you look up, when the foliage is out, they're much more hidden.

These tends are out in the open. I don't go to the International District all that often, so I don't know if the residents rotate in an out, or if there are some people who are always there. Their tents are memorable only in the aggregate; I doubt I'd recall one if I saw it again, unless I had a picture, like this one, to compare it to.

We've come to treat homelessness as some sort of intractable problem, which really isn't true. The intractable problem is how to end homelessness, without imposing costs on people who a) don't want to pay them and b) can vote out of office anyone who attempts to make them pay. As a region, there is a desire to have the cake of big employers with well-paid workforces yet eat the cake of having land-use restrictions that prevent housing from scaling as quickly as hiring can. And since those land-use restrictions have resulted in a lot of legacy homeowners being very "house-rich," policies that negatively impact their home equity will be enacted over their dead bodies.

And so there are tents. For the simple reason that more people want to live here than there are homes for. And no-one has found a way to solve the problem that doesn't change one of those things.

Funhouse Reflections

I was riding the Blue Line L, back in the day, and a woman was standing near the doors. I didn't really pay much attention to her; I recall her as appearing to be an average commuter, but little else about her. At one stop, just before the doors closed, a young Black man, likely in is early to mid-twenties, walked in front of her, grabbed the necklace she was wearing, and slipped out of the doors. It was clearly a practiced maneuver; the doors closed immediately behind him, cutting off any chance of pursuit. Clearly pleased with himself, he casually strolled towards the platform's exit, while the train pulled away, and the woman whose necklace he'd stolen flustered about, attempting to call attention to the crime.

My initial response to this was one of anger. I was also a young Black man in my early twenties, and as far as I was concerned, this jerk was making us all look bad; cementing in people's minds the negative stereotypes of Black men. Stereotypes that I was going to have to deal with. Although, to be sure, I was already dealing with them, which was part of the reason I was angry with this guy. In the moment that it took him to snatch a woman's necklace and slip off of the L train wearing a self-satisfied grin, he had gone, in my mind, from just another young person whose idea of "the hustle" was petty crime to the personification of all of the lawless losers whose behavior I felt that I was constantly being held to account for.

Were it not for people like him, I "reasoned," I could open my interactions with the people around me without having to first prove to them that I wasn't one of the people like him.

I was in a stage of my life where the constant pushback against the stereotypes that seemed to define me in the eyes of so many people had left me tired of being angry with the people that held the stereotypes. Being angry with the people whose behavior could be used as justification for those stereotypes felt like a refreshing change of pace. And I cycled between them for some time; a period of years, really.

But eventually, the anger drained away. It left an emptiness for a time, but then I realized that it had served no real purpose, other than to perpetuate itself. After a few years of working with children who had been taken out their homes for abuse and/or neglect, I'd repeated the words "life isn't fair," often enough that I'd actually started to understand what they meant.

This guy was taking the best path he knew to making life better for himself. Maybe he'd pawned the woman's necklace; maybe he'd purchased some goodwill by giving it to someone as a gift; in the end, whatever the outcome, it had nothing to do with me. Just like my quixotic jousting with a few centuries worth of racial stereotypes and animosity had nothing to do with him. Likewise, the people who looked at me, and placed themselves on guard weren't escalating to DefCon 3 in order to injure me, it was those same centuries of race relations working through them. What they saw when I stepped into their field of vision was mostly out of my control, and nearly entirely none of my business.

I don't remember when I finally lost the ability to describe the guy. The episode in question took place more than a quarter century ago. The world has moved on quite a bit in that time, and I'm glad that I was able to do so, too. I now understand that I don't actually see anyone that I encounter for who they actually are. The snapshots of people's lives that are my fleeting interactions with them can't hope to capture the complexity and nuance of a life lived out of my sight. Instead, I see an image distorted by our own history, education and experiences. A smirking face watching the L carry the victim of his theft away from him was distorted by my life before that point into the sum total of the lived experiences and expectations of every person whose dismissal of me as just another potential criminal.. He had become curvatures of the mirror in which people saw me; mainly, I think, because as a single individual, he was a more convenient target for an otherwise unfocused anger at the world around me.

Being able to let go of that particular thread of Respectability Politics has been refreshing. Laying debts at the feet of people who didn't know me was fatiguing. Releasing them of those debts, which almost always went unpaid, became a form of self-care that was long overdue.