The New Thing

But many Americans are bereft of people to lean on. The demise of tight-knit communities has had a profound effect on us. We’re increasingly living our lives on the Internet, alone amid vast digital crowds. Social media have replaced socializing. We’re all guilty of staring too often at our phones. We curl up at night with the latest Chrome browser.

The loneliness is killing us.
Soaring suicides are another sign of our toxic social disconnect (By the way, I'm not sure I recommend following this link. Some of the ads this site serves up a pretty sketchy.)

But this individual, isolated experience of church is the poorer one for those of us who are able to go. (Live-streaming services are of course important for the homebound.)  In an era when everything from dates to grocery delivery can be scheduled and near instant, church attendance shouldn’t be one more thing to get from an app. We can be members of a body best when we are all together — we can mourn when we observe and wipe away tears, just as we can rejoice when we can share smiles and have face-to-face conversations. Studies show that regular attendance at religious services correlates with better sleep, lower blood pressure in older adults and a reduced risk of suicide. I doubt these same phenomena occur when online church is substituted for the real thing, because the truth is that community is good for us. We need one another.
Internet Church Isn’t Really Church

I admit to being an old man. After all, I'm a Gen Xer, and the last of us rolled off the assembly line when Jimmy Carter was still President of the United States (depending on how you slice your age cohorts, anyway). But hopefully, I'll never grow so old that I can't appreciate the fact that things can be done in a whole new way, and that can still be the right way.

Technology allows change. The tight-knit communities and in-person-only church services of the past didn't suit everyone's needs. And the technology of social media and streaming events allows people to get something they want without having to pay at least some of the price that those older structures demanded. People don't invent new ways of doing things simply because they have nothing better to do with themselves. They do it in order to solve problems. And those problems don't have to be relevant, or even visible, to everyone else.

Making friends remotely via social media or meeting spiritual needs via streaming webcast allow people to have a different experience than the one I grew up with, where meeting new people required encountering them in person, and most community churches had no way of granting access to more people than could fit in the pews at one time. And I can understand how someone whose life had only ever included direct interactions with the people they called friends
or going to a specific building to worship their deity of choice would understand these as lesser options.

But when I was a child, I didn't go hunting around the neighborhood for new children to meet because I'd done some sort of cost-benefit analysis version a dozen other options. It was simply the only way I knew to go about it. Logging onto a social media site and "following" someone who seemed interesting simply wasn't a thing when I was high-school student in the 1980s. And so I made that work, and I spent years honing the efficiencies of it, until I'd gotten to the point where it was a well-oiled machine. And so is it easier for me to socialize in person than via social media? Sure. But I'm pretty sure that the more or less 30 years of practice that I'd had before Facebook and company came along have something to do with that.

We are not the end of history. Just like our grandparents weren't. The world will continue to change and grow, and people will create new ways of doing things that other people believe have already been perfected, up until the day that they pass from the world. There was a time when the only way to see a movie was to go to the theater. And before then, the only way to see the performance of a story was to see it enacted live on stage. You can make the point that for each transition, something was lost. And yeah, I like to go to the show with friends, and when I watch movies on my couch, it's not quite the same. But the moviegoing experience of my childhood is different, rather than better.

Technology doesn't mean that we have to be lonely, or cut off from vibrant faith communities. The epidemic of suicide can be solved, and people can attain better sleep with the new tools at their disposal. People will create the means to obtain the benefits that they want in their lives.

The New York Post article concludes with "Let’s be the people who step in when someone is hurting or in trouble. Let’s put down our phones and laptops and make connections on our blocks and in our neighborhoods."

I have a better idea. Let's find ways to allow us to have the same connections, via phone and laptop, with someone a nation away just as easily as we can make a connection across the street or around the corner. Being there for someone doesn't have to mean being there with someone. Let's support the ways in which new technologies can create the richness and depth that we understood that our old ways of doing things did.

Numbers Game

Seattle has a fairly sizable homeless population. While a lot of people blame this on the presence of Amazon in the city (although I've never understood why them, specifically) the large homeless population here stood out for me when I first arrived at the end of 1996, long before Amazon was hiring large numbers of people for high salaries.

This has been making waves again because of a new count, which places the number of homeless people in Seattle at somewhere north of 12,000 individuals. What I heard about this, more than once on my drive home this evening, is that means that Seattle ranks 3rd in the nation in terms of its homeless population. This article by Zillow from a year ago breaks out the numbers, estimating that Seattle had 12,763 homeless citizens. But the number two slot went to Los Angeles with 61,398, nearly a factor of four. And it would take every homeless person in Seattle moving to L.A. for that city to catch up with New York, with its estimate of 76,341.

What strikes me as strange about the emphasis is that it seems to call attention to the problem, but not really help put it in perspective. Using per-capita numbers, which give (based on 2017 figures for homelessness and population) approximately 1 in 113 people in New York as homeless, 1 in 65 in Los Angeles and 1 in 57 in Seattle paints a much more useful picture, but makes the city come off worse in comparison, with a higher percentage of homeless people. (It's worth keeping in mind that homelessness is concentrated in urban areas. Between them, Seattle, New York and Los Angeles had nearly a third of the nation's estimated homeless population in 2017. Add in San Diego, the other metropolitan area with a homeless population above 10,000 individuals, and you're pretty much there.)

I suspect that the reason for the framing is that this is how the information was presented. I was able to find a few different news stories scattered around the nation at the top of a Google search, and they all ranked the cities in terms of the overall numbers. It's likely that this was simply repeated, because it makes for a good headline.

How Seattle sets out to tackle the problem will be interesting, given that, housing affordability and housing as an investment are at odds, at least as long as we're talking about the same home. (It's possible, as was pointed out in the comments, to get around this, as long as someone tears down the older homes and builds more units in the same general footprint; in other words, subsequent generations receive less for their money.) Given that a lot of the run-up in home prices that has been driving homelessness is a result of regulations that many Seattle-area residents are wedded to (because it drives up home values) it's going to be a difficult mountain to move.

The Parent Paradox

So I was reading "It's Almost Impossible to Be a Mom in Television News" in The Atlantic. At first blush, "Yawn." It's yet another in a never-ending series of stories that bemoan the fact that women suffer career consequences of some or another sort when they become mothers. This one, dealing specifically with television news, may be more narrowly-focused than others, but it's the same old song.

I had more or less despaired of finding anything new and interesting the piece when I came across this: "Moms need people at the highest leadership levels of TV news who can help promote a culture in which working moms are not expected to work as if they don’t have children." This caught my attention, because many of these articles, concerned as they are with an overall culture of perceived sexism, tend to cast the conflict almost entirely as being one of men versus women. Just prior to the quote above, Ms. Goldman points out that:
Many of the TV-news moms I spoke with said that when men broach child-care issues, management celebrates their fatherly duties and usually bends over backwards to accommodate them. One reason may be an assumption that a man’s caretaking responsibilities will be temporary, while a mom will always ask for special accommodations. “It’s still considered so unusual for a man to be an equal or primary caretaker that there can be brownie points associated with that,” said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at NYU who studies gender dynamics in the workplace.
This common assumption (and in this case it is an assumption, given the use of words like "may" and "can"), which has been around for some time, makes for a tidy narrative of male chauvinism and privilege, but it may hide a deeper understanding.

Ms. Goldman quoted Fox Business Network anchor Trish Regan as saying: “The pressure [to come back before my leave was up] was certainly self-inflicted in that I’m driven and ambitious and wanted to succeed. But at the same time, I was very aware that if I was gone for that amount of time, I was perhaps replaceable with either a man who could do the job or a woman who wasn’t having a baby. These were very real concerns of mine, and there was no one in my environment at either of those networks [who] was encouraging me to think otherwise.” (Emphasis mine.) As an aside, again, there is an assumption here, embodied in "perhaps." Assumptions are pernicious because we act on them as if they were true, but the inability to substantiate them means that they're easily denied. Fox Business Network can say that they had no intent to replace Ms. Regan has she taken her full leave, and so the topic becomes a matter of whose story fits in with one's emotional worldview.

If we cast the story as mothers vesus the childless, it become a different discussion. "Anti-mom bias" is a different beast than sexism, with different battle lines, and perhaps, different solutions.

The idea that "Moms need people at the highest leadership levels of TV news who can help promote a culture in which working moms are not expected to work as if they don’t have children." begs a particular question: Should women without children be expected to work harder, be more committed or "live the job" more than mothers? It's pretty clear to me that the idea believes the answer is "yes." But because it never addresses the question, it can't tell us why.

As a non-parent, I am often considered both fool and freeloader. I have cut myself off from the joy, fulfillment and meaning of raising children, while cynically mooching off of the indispensable benefits that parents bring to the society in which I live. Both of these are considered failings, but parents are unable to do anything about my being a fool. They can, however, lobby against my being allowed to be a freeloader. As children have been pushed by the definition of "childhood" and child labor laws from being an economic benefit (or even necessity) for families, they've been re-cast as an expensive luxury good. But they're also become viewed as social benefits, or possibly, necessities. I've been told on more than one occasion that by being childless, I am taking advantage of other people by availing myself of the goods and services that their children provide, despite the fact that all of these things come at a direct and tangible cost to me, whether that's paying taxes or simply paying the tab.

So the question becomes this: Does the very existence of children create a benefit to society that must be paid for? It's understood, more or less, that having children is a benefit to parents. They may be unable to put their children to work, or monopolize their services in their old age, and thus reap exclusive economic benefits, but we consider that crass. But, as I noted, I've been considered a fool (when people haven't simply questioned my humanity outright) for deciding that I'd rather be doing other things. People extol the happiness and pride that their children bring them as turning points in their lives, and the childless-by-choice are deemed pitiable as often as they are deemed irresponsible. But if parents have managed to make children into a luxury good for their own benefit, does that obviate any entitlement to social supports that non-parents are not offered? Is flexibility in working arrangements without a career cost a privilege atop a benefit or deserved compensation to mitigate what would otherwise be a sacrifice? And if it's both, which carries more weight? Should the economic pressure to be parents be reinstated in a different form? Should transfers from the childless be costly and constant enough that the perception of freeloading is erased?

I understand these to be important questions because they aren't limited to child-rearing. I find the same thing comes up in regards to entrepreneurship. Being a successful entrepreneur brings clear benefits, yet there is still an argument that it should bring more, and at public expense, because a) entrepreneurs bring benefits to society and deserve to be compensated for them and b) it's better to be an entrepreneur than not, and the better the lives of entrepreneurs are, the more entrepreneurship. And there is some logic to this. Loving one's work is wonderful, but it doesn't pay the bills, and so we don't see the lack of a "fulfillment discount" in many areas of life as inappropriately double-dipping.

And so "Who are children for?" needn't be an "either/or" answer. But it does need an answer. The expectation that employers will tax their childless employees with greater demands of effort, lack of flexibility and commitment to deliver those to the parents on the payroll will likely work out better if there is at least some buy-in from everyone involved. It's true, however, that many parents didn't agree to a standard that refused to exempt parenting from the list of choices that needed to be balanced against career. But simply demanding that the shoe be moved to the other foot isn't necessarily progress.

Winter Mountains

Free To

I was talking with Christian that I'd encountered while standing in a line, and I made the mistake of letting them know that I didn't believe in deities, spirits et cetera. This started the usual questions. Eventually, we wound up on the subject of Free Will, and this gave me a chance to ask a question that I'd been looking for an answer to. From the Christian perspective, I asked, what was Free Will for? What purpose does it serve? Disappointingly, it turned into a stumper, with my interlocutor unable to articulate any real answer other than, "God wanted it that way."

Now, to be sure, I don't know if I actually believe in Free Will. I tend more towards a belief in a deterministic universe, where things only appear to be random. Instead they simply governed by rules that are too complicated to work out in real time, and so while we can often simulate things (albeit sometimes at a slower pace than the real thing), we can't look at the world and understand from that how things are going to unfold. There are simply too many factors to be taken into consideration.

But I've come to find the concept of Free Will in Judeo/Christian/Moslem thought interesting. Because it doesn't seem to serve anyone's purposes. There's never a time when disobedience to divine will is shown to be the correct course of action. It only leads to suffering. So why have it in the first place? And with an omnipotent and omniscient deity, there's no need for anything else to have the power to make decisions. What possible choice can a person make that it wouldn't occur to the Abrahamic god to implement? There's no need to "crowdsource" decision-making. And in this sense, Free Will seems like a trap; any use of it ends poorly.

I suspect that sooner or later, I'll meet someone who can give me a perspective that I hadn't considered that will demonstrate a logic to it. I'm curious to see what that perspective is.