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.