The Antidote of Mirrors and Windows

Another unprecedented event for 2020: the first ever documentary evidence of a gathering of the avian ruling council of elders known as the CORVID-19.

So . . . some fun and silliness first, followed by more thoughtful, meatier content for the majority of the post.

Something my wife recently shared about our five-year-old:

I asked [him] what he would do if he found a wallet on the sidewalk. He said, "leave it alone and don't touch it because it might have germs!" Then he went on to tell me that he would run home to get tongs and then we could pick it up without touching it to figure out how to get it back to its home. I wonder if the answer would have been different before Covid.

I was pleased with the reading practice I created for him using some of his new sight words to supplement his virtual schoolwork. (If only I could get him to read it instead of rip it.)

I can be a cat.

The cat can be me.

We like tuna.

We can purr.

We can run.

We can meow.

I am the cat.

The cat is me.

Reports from a day-long saga struggling to get him and his six-year-old brother to do their virtual work:

Me: "No more Kindle, TV, snacks, or dinner until you do your school work. You can have water if you need."

Older: "What did you say we can't have? Water, food, air, love, and Kindle? For three whole days? You know we're going to die, right?"

Later, with his mom:

"I'm hungry! Make us dinner."

"I can make some oatmeal."

"Oatmeal!?!"

"I know it's pizza night, but you never did your work. I can make oatmeal or you can do your work and I can make pizza."

"I'll take oatmeal."

What 🤣 slayed me was how he said it. Flat with an arched eyebrow. "You're not going to manipulate me into doing your bidding, parental units!"

Then, finally . . .

So, [Older] at 7:30 p.m. decided he was ready to do work. [Younger] is crying because he still doesn't want to, but thinks he has to because I told [Older] I would make pizza for him even though it's crazy late.

I said "Mom is so mean. You guys have a really mean mom."

[Older]'s response "You're not a mean mom. You love us and you want us to learn and grow our brains and open lots of windows and doors in the future, so we have choices."

Umm . . . crying here. They do listen!

And this popped up on my Facebook memories today from two years ago. Excellent wisdom from a four-year-old:

Mom: "Grr. Why won't you guys listen when we tell you, 'No?'"

Son: "Mom. You were a little kid once. You know why."

Recently used for bedtime stories:

• The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
• Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan (also the background to my drawing above)
• The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

The other day I tried playing with a couple of random poetry generators. I wasn't really pleased with the results, as they weren't as random as I would have hoped. Here is one of the results, based on a few vague prompts I provided. I hope its awfulness makes you shiver as much as it does me.

Loneliness

by Degolar

I cannot help but stop and look at the lovely fleetingness.

Never forget the endearing and beautiful fleetingness.

The sadness that's really murky,

Above all others is the forlornness.

Female, forlornness.

Never forget the opaque and muddy forlornness.

Pay attention to the transience,

the transience is the most yellow impermanence of all.

Never forget the lily-livered and irrational transience.

Pay attention to the mournfulness,

the mournfulness is the most big sorrow of all.

Does the mournfulness make you shiver?

does it?

Don't believe that the desolation is infertile?

the desolation is fertile beyond belief.

Does the desolation make you shiver?

does it?

I saw the the enchanting ordinariness of my generation destroyed,

How I mourned the everydayness.

An everydayness is captivating. an everydayness is enthralling,

an everydayness is attractive, however.

On to more serious matters. Last spring in What Was the Middle Part Again?, before the pandemic craziness began, I shared some work I'm involved in. A good bit of it was the introduction I created for a workshop I was leading. We had to pause that work a month later when school was cancelled for the year. This fall we're picking it back up with the same schools, offering everything virtually this go round. I'm currently prepping the revised version of the same workshop, covering the same content in different ways. This is the new introduction I've drafted. It may change before implementation, but I'm going to share it now because it's relevant to what follows.

Windows and Mirrors. In the library we like to talk about how books function as windows and as mirrors.

A book that is a mirror is one that you see yourself in. It’s comfortable and familiar and it makes you feel seen. It validates you, because it is someone else sharing experiences you know and feelings you have, and in doing so affirming that you are not alone. It makes you feel connected to the story, to the storyteller, and to others who also recognize themselves in that book. And, when it’s a really good mirror, it helps you realize new things about yourself. It finds words for things you know but haven’t yet figured out how to express. It helps you see dimensions of yourself you didn’t know were there, or to see them in new ways. The right book helps you see yourself more fully and accurately.

A book that is a window is one that helps you see outside of yourself. It relates experiences you’ve never known, feelings you’ve never dealt with, perspectives you’ve never considered. It takes you somewhere else, gives you an opportunity to know life as someone you’ve never been. A window is for new information and new insight. It teaches empathy for difference, connection with others. A good one makes you bigger because it takes you outside of yourself in ways that, when you return, you bring some of the outside back with you. The right book helps you see the rest of the world, and those who live in it, more fully, more accurately, and with more understanding, appreciation, and love.

In Race Project we call this our Identity Workshop. It is for expressing and exploring yourselves, who you are and what has made you that way. And our goal is to create an event that allows you, like a library full of good books, to be windows and mirrors for each other. We want you to tell your stories today and to listen to the stories of others. As you do, we hope you will encounter stories that resonate, that you recognize, and that help you see yourselves more clearly. In those, we hope you find connection. We also hope you experience stories that challenge you with their unfamiliarity, that push you outside of yourselves and give you pause as you consider things you never have before in ways you’ve never thought to. Then move past the discomfort of unfamiliarity to appreciation and connection. And realize even as you are being gifted with windows and mirrors from others, that you are providing the same in return through the stories you are sharing about yourselves.

We’ve done our best to bring you together with schools different than your own—from different parts of the city, other types of neighborhoods, different racial makeups, and different socioeconomic statuses. We want you to connect with peers you would be unlikely to encounter in your normal, daily lives, and maybe not at all. More opportunities to find windows. Yet we also expect you to find surprising mirrors in your new friends from those other schools and unexpected windows in students from your own. We’ll do this in a number of ways throughout the workshop. Big conversations and small ones. Structured activities and hanging out. Some with deliberate racial lenses, but some with personal ones for fun and bonding. Because your race informs your identity, so, as long as you are sharing who you are, you will be talking about race in one way or another. So let’s talk about race today, but even more let’s talk about ourselves. And listen. And connect, by discovering our common identities.

Extending that idea to all aspects of life is a needed antidote to many of the problems below.

This is such a succinct and effective summary. It came across my Facebook feed, and I'm afraid I don't have an original source.

The Reality of How America Was Built

White man climbing on the back of chained Black man: "I'm doing this for your own good."

"Not."

Climbing: "So we can go forward together."

"Hey!"

Standing on the back of the Black man, reaching for a ledge: "Puff, puff."

"You're hurting me."

Achieving ledge: "Phew."

Now unchained: "Enough's enough. I'm getting up too!"

Looking down: "I'm sorry. That was racist, but I know better now."

Reaching out: "Cool. Give me a hand up, will ya?"

"I got up here myself. Why can't you?"

That's how I see things, at least. There are others who would vehemently disagree, who believe in an entirely different reality.

Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered

A whirlwind of uncertainty landed on us this year, and it’s stirring up extremism.

We will remember 2020 as many things. The year we spent alone. The year we spent online. The year so many died. The year of protests. The year of QAnon. The year of domestic terrorism. The year of the election.

Most of all, perhaps, it is the year of not knowing. . . . 

When people don’t know what’s real, they turn to others for reassurance. But in a world overrun by social media, that process results in a smorgasbord of confusing and conflicting inputs, a problem deepened by the Trump administration’s relentless three-and-a-half-year assault on the very notion of truth.

When no clear, authoritative source of truth exists, when uncertainty rages, human nature will lead many people to seek a more stable reality by wrapping themselves in an ever-tighter cloak of political, religious, or racial identities. The more uncertainty rises, the more alluring that siren call becomes. And some Americans are responding by seeking out exclusive, all-encompassing identities that are toxic and fragile—and hold the seed of violent extremism. . . . 

Our perception of reality depends on feedback from people we trust. We have to check our facts against the perceptions of others. The more people who agree on a fact, the more we understand it to be real. . . . 

Social media revolutionized the art of finding consensus. The numeric nature of such platforms lent itself to easy scoring, and the business incentive of the firms that operated them was always to boost every point of view, to give credibility to every opinion and theory and fantasy. These sites operated as judges with their fingers on the scales, inexorably biased toward indiscriminately promoting content, any content, all content. All clicks were created equal. All posts were entitled to a shot at virality.

They monetized the consumption of content, with business models built only to amplify. That amplification was predicated on engagement, and engagement was explicitly framed as evidence of an emerging consensus. . . . 

COVID-19 pushed a teetering nation off a cliff of uncertainty, leaving Americans with a staggering number of questions, worries, and unknowns.

Consensus is a tool for reducing uncertainty, so it becomes much more important during times like these. But in the current information environment, the search for consensus is fraught. When we reach out to others for a gut check, we find a new level of chaos—multiple competing realities, often in violent conflict. . . . 

People who are experiencing uncertainty tend to assign a higher value to the in-group’s most distinctive traits, such as skin color or religious practice. They are attracted to in-groups with rigidly defined rules and boundaries, and to in-groups that are internally homogenous—filled with people who look, think, and act in similar ways.

More destructively, people who are experiencing uncertainty tend to develop hostile attitudes toward out-groups, seeing them as threats, and entertaining dark fantasies of hostile actions toward the hated other. Some in-group members may go beyond fantasy, engaging in acts of violence, terrorism, even genocide. They gravitate toward social movements that are bigoted, hateful, and authoritarian.

They become extremists. . . . 

In-groups have become vital to establishing what is real, but the normally overlapping circles of consensus have drifted apart, and the less they overlap, the more divergent our realities become.

New Research Explores Authoritarian Mind-set of Trump’s Core Supporters

Data reveal high levels of anti-democratic beliefs among many of the president’s backers, who stand to be a potent voting bloc for years to come

Trump has tapped into a current of authoritarianism in the American electorate, one that’s bubbled just below the surface for years. In “Authoritarian Nightmare,” Bob Altemeyer and John W. Dean marshal data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.

They also find shockingly high levels of anti-democratic beliefs and prejudicial attitudes among Trump backers, especially those who support the president strongly. . . . 

Many fervent Trump supporters, Altemeyer and Dean write, “are submissive, fearful, and longing for a mighty leader who will protect them from life’s threats. They divide the world into friend and foe, with the latter greatly outnumbering the former.” . . . 

Roughly half of Trump supporters, for instance, agreed with the statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.” . . . 

Fix America by Undoing Decades of Privatization

Investing in public infrastructure should be at the center of a 21st-century civil-rights agenda.

As the covid-19 pandemic continues into the fall, the Trump administration has ruled out any further action on a federal relief package. Meanwhile, state and local governments, lacking federal support, are considering deep cuts to budgets and public services. These measures reflect a deep problem in American policy and culture: the systematic undermining of public infrastructure.

When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s. . . . 

On an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. . . . 

Our public-investment decisions reflect who and what we value: Too often, the decision to underinvest in public infrastructure has stemmed from a desire to restrict access to those  goods and services for people of color, in an attempt to preserve the benefits of public infrastructure for wealthier and whiter communities. . . . 

The public needs to broaden its conceptions of public goods and infrastructure. Beyond roads and bridges, reformers should focus on those services and systems that are essential for full-fledged membership and well-being, that expand the capabilities and capacities of individuals and communities, and where leaving the provision in private hands would create too great a risk of exclusion or unfair, arbitrary, and extractive pricing. Concretely, this means focusing on two types of public infrastructure in particular: foundational back-end services such as water, electricity, mail, credit, broadband, and the like; and the safety net and systems for community care, including health care, child care, public schools, and more.

Second, we need to ensure that these infrastructures are, in fact, public. That means subjecting them to stringent regulations ensuring quality, nondiscrimination, fair pricing, and equitable access. It might mean outright public provision—either through a public option as in the health-care debate, or through outright nationalization or municipalization. And it means creating oversight to ensure racial and gender equity in access, just as the Civil Rights Act led to the creation of administrative offices charged with preventing discrimination and resegregation in access to services including hospital health care. . . . 

If we are to survive this crisis—and imagine a more equitable, dynamic economy to come, we must start with a recommitment to the value of universal, inclusive public infrastructure.

The Sacredness of the Earth as She Is

We’ve been trained to think on an individualistic level in the United States. When European peoples colonized Turtle Island, they replaced our Indigenous ideas of communal living and identity with individualism, with every man/woman for themselves ideas that eventually became the rallying cry of the United States, a land that prides itself on the American Dream. If you work hard enough, you’ll succeed. Don’t show weakness. Masculinity is the key, and patriarchy is the rule of the land.

As we continue to enter deeper into the crisis of climate change, into the reality of human rights abuses and eruptions of violence happening not just here but all over the world, perhaps we need to take a different approach in our relationship to one another and our creature-relatives all over the earth.

Perhaps we need to remember that being a recipient of a gift is different than demanding a gift be given to us in the first place.

Perhaps being aware of the sacredness of the Earth as she is, is more important than worrying only about how we will be affected as humans when she is hurting and reacting to our mistakes.

Perhaps if we returned to loving the land, waters, and all beings that live and breathe around us, we might learn how to love our human relatives again.

Donald Trump, the IRS and Rich People in General

The Internal Revenue Service is understaffed and underfunded and continually overmatched by the high-priced lawyers rich people can afford.

So the IRS ignores the Great White Sharks that are bigger than their boat and goes after minnows. For example: people with an annual income under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate than those with incomes up to $500,000. . . . 

From 2012 through 2015 the most-audited place in the country was Humphreys County, Mississippi, which is 76% percent Black and has a poverty rate of 37% – more than three times the national poverty rate. And Humphreys County is just part of a larger pattern:

• The 10 most-audited U.S. counties were 79% nonwhite (mostly Black).
• The 10 least-audited U.S. counties were 93% white.  

The AP story speculates the IRS auditors are focusing their diminished resources on easier targets. . . . 

The system – and by that I mean the IRS, law enforcement, the courts, the Electoral College…you name it – is for the most part, working just the way it was intended to work; it just wasn’t intended to work for you. . . . 

Most things are set up to benefit rich white people and if you’re one of those you probably think things are hunky dory and get pissed off whenever someone demands change. Black Americans getting pushed around by the cops and screwed by the justice system and the IRS is a sign that all is right in your world.

This is another one that recently came across the Facebook feed and says a lot with just a few words

"Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we can't satisfy the rich."

I shared something that extends that idea a couple years ago in The Self Is a Society. Here it is again.

It's Basically Just Immoral to be Rich

Here is a simple statement of principle that doesn’t get repeated enough: if you possess billions of dollars, in a world where many people struggle because they do not have much money, you are an immoral person. The same is true if you possess hundreds of millions of dollars, or even millions of dollars. Being extremely wealthy is impossible to justify in a world containing deprivation. . . .

Because every dollar you have is a dollar you’re not giving to somebody else, the decision to retain wealth is a decision to deprive others. . . .

What I am arguing about is not the question of how much people should be given, but the morality of their retaining it after it is given to them.

Many times, defenses of the accumulation of great wealth depend on justifications for the initial acquisition of that wealth. . . .

But there is a separate question that this defense ignores: regardless of whether you have earned it, to what degree are you morally permitted to retain it? The question of getting and the question of keeping are distinct. . . .

It’s one thing to argue that you got rich legitimately. It’s another to explain why you feel justified in spending your wealth upon houses and sculptures rather than helping some struggling people pay their rent or paying off a bunch of student loans or saving thousands of people from dying of malaria. . . .

Of course, when you start talking about whether it is moral to be rich, you end up heading down some difficult logical paths. If I am obligated to use my wealth to help people, am I not obligated to keep doing so until I am myself a pauper? Surely this obligation attaches to anyone who consumes luxuries they do not need, or who has some savings that they are not spending on malaria treatment for children. But the central point I want to make here is that the moral duty becomes greater the more wealth you have. . . .

We can define something like a “maximum moral income” beyond which it’s obviously inexcusable not to give away all of your money. . . . everyone who earns anything beyond it is obligated to give the excess away in its entirety. The refusal to do so means intentionally allowing others to suffer, a statement which is true regardless of whether you “earned” or “deserved” the income you were originally given. . . .

Of course, wealthy people do give away money, but so often in piecemeal and self-interested and foolish ways. . . .

The central point, however, is this: it is not justifiable to retain vast wealth. This is because that wealth has the potential to help people who are suffering, and by not helping them you are letting them suffer. It does not make a difference whether you earned the vast wealth. The point is that you have it. And whether or not we should raise the tax rates, or cap CEO pay, or rearrange the economic system, we should all be able to acknowledge, before we discuss anything else, that it is immoral to be rich. That much is clear.

If only the rich would experience more people as windows, they might eventually come to know us as mirrors--and treat us accordingly.