There Was Music Playing When It Happened

Life carries on. 2020 continues to be uniquely challenging. Ruth Bader Ginsburg unexpectedly died not long ago, with everyone immediately fighting about her potential replacement. Earlier this week we had a train wreck of a first presidential debate for the upcoming election. Wait But Why captured it beautifully, with the parody being much less exaggerated than one would think. And just last night the president reported he tested positive for COVID-19. The cracks of disagreement about these and other issues in our society grow wider every day.

More personally, I shared this status on Facebook recently:

Weary. I don't understand how everyone else seems to be showing up to work and getting all their tasks done so well, when I can barely muster the motivation to do the minimum, plus weeks of constantly fighting the kids to stay motivated to do virtual school. Glad it's Friday.

I've been spending my mornings shepherding my two kids through virtual school then rushing to work when my wife gets home from her job early, making up my lost time in the evenings and weekends. Next week they go back to in-person school part-time, then in three weeks full-time. It's extremely debatable whether this is safe or wise, but we're going to take the risk and hope for the best. Masks and other safety measures will be in place. It will be wonderful to have my mornings back. We'll see about the rest--if I can muster the energy to do so.

It's not just me. I love what Chuck Wendig wrote in his post You're Not The Fucked Up One.

Your response is that you’re not okay because things are very much not okay. It is perfectly acceptable, normal, and expected to feel fucked up in a fucked up situation. Broken politics, Zoom school, gender reveal forest fires, Patriotic Re-Education, Herman Cain tweeting about the hoax virus that he actually died from — in this endlessly scrolling set of brand new WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE* verses, it’s easy to feel like you’re the broken one. But you’re not. You’re just responding to a broken world. And not just broken in a normal way — but broken in a way that’s hard to parse, that doesn’t form clean fractures. The difference between a snapped femur and someone who stuck one hand in a blender. We’re tip-toeing across a tightrope, and on one side is a chasm of Absurdist Incompetence and on the other is a pit of Active Malevolence and we’re just trying not to fall.

Much more at the link. Oh, and that asterisk:

And the excellent article I shared about surge capacity in We Were Visited by Whales Many Times a month ago has been getting shared widely by my colleagues at work. It's clearly speaking to many people.

Never think of it as a mental breakdown;

think of it as life.

That statue is the Crying Giant, from one of our local museums on a recent attempt to get out of the house while avoiding people. I might have to use one of those pictures for my profile if things get worse in November.

Rose Coffin

Where I come from, there aren't any monsters or abominations, not like the kind here anyway, but our horrors keep coming too. One thing after another. Sometimes . . . sometimes it just becomes too much. It takes everything from you. Everything. Any happiness you might have. Even the slightest bit; it's just snatched away, over and over again, until you're . . . blank. Empty.

For something with a bit more substance, the following presents an absolutely fascinating case study of randomness. I especially like what it implies about the purpose and value of art in relation.

The Value of Uncertainty

Despite having fit his life almost exactly to his preferences, he felt trapped – as if he had optimised his life to the point where his own role had become superseded. Hawkins responded by using new technologies to introduce greater variety into his life. For two years, he lived his life according to a series of randomisation algorithms. A diet generator told him what to eat, an algorithmic travel agent picked out the city where – having gone freelance – he would live for the next two months, a random Spotify playlist provided music for the journey, and a random Facebook-event selector told an Uber driver where to take him when he got there.

The algorithms took him to acrobatic-yoga classes in Mumbai and to a goat farm in Slovenia, but they also took him to the small-town pub of Holy Cross, Iowa, and to an eighth-grade flute recital, and to a small family Christmas in Fresno, California. Anywhere that would break him out of the comfortably predictable rut of the affluent San Franciscan tech worker. Reporting back from the frontiers of uncertainty in talks with titles such as ‘Leaning In to Entropy’, Hawkins said that the algorithms dictated not just where to go, what to eat and what leisure activities he should engage in, but even what clothes and hairstyles (he ended up needing several wigs) he should adopt. He even has a chest tattoo selected randomly from images on the web.

Hawkins reported finding great fulfilment in multiple unexpected ways, and feeling (paradoxically) more present as a person as a result of escaping what he had come to see as the dictatorship of his own preferences and preference-optimised lifestyle. He talked of escaping the tiny ‘bubbles’ of places to eat and things to do that kept on dragging him back time and time again. . . . 

 . . . inquisitive creatures like ourselves. Such creatures must productively surf the waves of their own uncertainty. To do so, they probe and sample the world in ways that aim to reveal just where the key uncertainties lie, so that by future actions they can resolve them and move on. They seek new information, and they engage in complex rituals such as art and science whose role (we’ll argue) is in part at least to safely reveal and stress-test their own deepest assumptions.

Hawkins was actually doing something rather similar – stress-testing his own deepest assumptions about who he is and what he likes so as to more fully explore a space of human possibility. His methods were extreme, but his general project is both familiar and distinctively human.

Cheer up! Don't you know that you are looking extravagantly, absurdly fascinating today?

And with that little detour into more positive contemplation over, let's get back to darker topics.

I don't know much about Wade Davis, but I love the following quote (though I wish I could find a proper source) about being less egocentric and his article from a couple of months ago.

“The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

The Unraveling of America  

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. . . . 

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes. . . . 

What surely [stands out as a turning point in history] is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America. . . . 

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes. . . . 

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand. . . . 

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.

So much of what is wrong with our country is based in that cult of the individual and denial of society. So, so much.

Fellow countrymen

they want to destroy you

The cult of the individual certainly makes it hard for people to see racism as structural and white supremacy as cultural. Someone just shared this quote in a discussion I was part of, and it really resonates:

"The most dangerous place for black people to live is in white people's imagination."

~ D.L. Hughley

Certainly black people are more dangerous in white imaginations than reality.

Last week I helped facilitate a discussion about Ijeoma Oluo's excellent essay Raising a Black Family in White America. These are the questions we had at the ready as prompts, though for the most part they weren't really necessary:

• “Mom, I understand the protests, but I don’t understand the broken windows or the buildings set on fire. It’s not right to burn down a building you don’t own.” - How would you respond? (Oluo writes she was unable to condemn the rioting, but couldn’t initially explain why.)

• Oluo compares her twelve-year-old's reactions to recent events to her response to the Rodney King protests. Do you have a similar experience to share, a young awakening awareness of racial conflict and strife related to calls for justice? (“I was starting to understand that what had inspired them was bigger than a few bad officers or one instance of brutality.”)

• “With each action—each protest, each meeting, each rally—I felt that I was part of something much bigger and more powerful than myself, and that we were changing the course of history. Each time, I believed that we were on the verge of great change. Until I didn’t.” - Can you relate to and help articulate the feelings behind this statement? Why do you think she stopped believing? What changed? (Refer to the paragraphs that follow the quote for insight.)

• “Your storefronts are made unsafe not by the violent nature of Black protesters but by society’s refusal to listen to any peaceful form of protest. Black people have tried. Disruption works. Rioting works.” . . .  “We’ve made more progress toward de-militarizing the police in the past few months than we have in years of protest. Anything to stop the destruction of property.” Explain what you think about this. Is it true that disruption and rioting are what has to happen?

• “I know that my anger, desperation, and even resignation are valid. But so is Marcus’s fire.” - How does Oluo reconcile these two conflicting feelings? How do you react to them?

• Oluo concludes with: “I do know that our children will still be Black, and they will still fight, and we will still have the opportunity to honor them by doing everything we can to support their fight for liberation.” What are ways we can support them? What happens when those trying to make change do things in a way we aren’t comfortable with?

• The story of someone calling the police, pretending to be Oluo’s son, saying he’d shot his parents – the weaponizing of police, “the experience underscored how often and how easily, police forces are weaponized against Black people.” Discuss

It was a good discussion and the essay is definitely worth reading.

Where Happiness Begins

Where Happiness Begins