Not Necessarily Deep Thoughts

What can I say, that hasn’t been said? Blogs, newspaper columns, social media in general, TV, they’re virus, virus, virus, 24/7 (and who knows for how many weeks more). We’re in Arizona, and it hasn’t yet been hit with the force seen in places like New York, but our lives are still impacted. I’m not complaining; I’m glad that we, like most other people, are reacting by trying to save others (and of course, ourselves) by reducing in-person contact. And, as has always been true in my life so far, regardless of any difficulties I’ve had from time to time, others have it far worse. That’s not just a platitude; I’ve been incredibly lucky.

Over the past few years, my work has transitioned from technology and science to politics. By 2015 I became convinced that, outside of my family, what was most important to me was changing our government to make it more conscious of the real needs of its people. I wanted to work towards a future in which improving the lives of everyone becomes the dominant thrust of government, rather than having leaders making policy based on selfish motives or ideology. We’ve seen so many decisions made to benefit the few, or which were based on little or no evidence, particularly with the current administration.

Our country is a young one, and sometimes it acts like an adolescent (which is probably unfair to adolescents). When I think of maturity, I think of, for instance, Switzerland. I’m not upholding it as a perfect society; it has its own flaws. But what I’m thinking of now is that, as a society, they have a long-term perspective. Here, we react to what is happening NOW (and often not that well); and that often means, we react without sufficient preparation. In Switzerland, things are built to last, and much thought is put towards what will be needed in coming years. They are far better prepared for crises like the current one. I might be wrong, but I expect that they will come through this pandemic better than we will.

Much of our current problem in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic is due to the lack of action in preceding years (as well as an insufficient reaction once it was well established as a pandemic). It’s pretty easy to blame the Putz-in-chief and his cronies – and they do deserve a lot of blame, ignoring earlier warnings and focusing on PR rather than solutions. But our lack of a long-term focus goes back much further (even before 60+ million Americans voted for a reality TV faux-billionaire, rather than an experienced public servant).

A quarter of a century ago, Laurie Garrett wrote a book called “The Coming Plague.” And, as with early warnings about global warming, the message about our vulnerability to pandemics was largely ignored by policy makers. We are in a precarious spot, and while any crisis like this one is always a surprise to most of us, this one shouldn’t be a shock.

As for the personal impact, so far the pandemic has had only pretty minor effects for me. I tend to stay at home most of the time anyway. Now that I’m retired from my Berkeley work, and have no students, most of my interactions are virtual, by phone and video conference. I miss many things that we can’t do now (dinners with friends, movies, some political events, etc.), but as my dear friend Adi put it, “being locked up with my best buddy isn’t the worst of all possible temporaries.” It’s harder on Anita (my spouse and “best buddy”), who is more social than I am; and it does put a serous crimp in the political effort to turn Arizona blue with grassroots action. All of that is important. Hopefully people here will keep their physical distance and shorten the time for sheltering in place.

But in the meanwhile, I am calling many friends that I have contacted far too infrequently in the past, especially since we left California. We feel the need for community with our network of friends, and we reach out. That part has started to feel pretty positive.

This blog isn’t an espousal of yoga; and it isn’t just repeating the obvious, that, as humans we need oxygen. It’s not even primarily a statement of environmentalism. It’s more a personal observation from the last few days here in Northern California.

My wife and I definitely realize that we are fortunate, something we often note when we learn of tragedies elsewhere. The fires are not here in Richmond, and they are far enough away that we have little risk of our condo complex burning down, at least not this time. We see so much desolation on the news reports – so many missing, dead, newly homeless. As with so many earlier disasters, we feel sympathy, we do what we can to help (usually with donations), and then we go about our day.

But something was different this time. The air is barely breathable, right where we are. It’s true that we don’t drop dead from taking it in, but it is polluted enough that extended exposure would be dangerous. We uncharacteristically have all of our windows closed, and we sharply limit our outside time.

As Joni Mitchell sang, in “Big Yellow Taxi,”:

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone

We can’t see the air, and we really don’t think about it. Before this week, when we went out from our condo, we would breathe, just like we do inside our condo. Breathe in, breathe out. We’d do it consciously, as in a yoga exercise, or unconsciously, as in, almost always. It’s just part of being alive, just like beating your heart …

But suddenly, it hits you: oh, yeah, air! Maybe we can’t take it for granted! Here we are on the only habitable planet we’ve got (we won’t be moving to Mars any time soon), and the air and the water (I’m thinking of you, Flint) are our most basic essentials. How bizarre it is, not to be able to count on one of these!

My dear friend Julene Bair writes (and podcasts) about the disappearing aquifer in the Great Plains (https://www.julenebair.com/blog) … and I just noticed that we need air to breathe. I can sometimes be a little bit slow to notice things …

People out near Paradise, California are the ones who are really getting clobbered right now. If you can, go to one of the many charities helping people displaced by the Camp fire and help however you can. One of these is the North Valley Community Foundation, at https://www.nvcf.org/.

This last weekend, my wife and I were part of a team that helped Menbere (Menbe) Aklilu pack up her closing Richmond California restaurant, Saluté e Vita Ristorante. The restaurant had been quite successful, but disputes with the landlord led up to her decision to leave. It was a sad day – she and her restaurant have become a fixture in Richmond life. Her Thanksgiving dinners (free to around a thousand of the local homeless) and her many other contributions to the community have made her a Richmond favorite. And her life story (born in Ethiopia, escape from an abusive marriage in Italy, transition from restaurant employee to owner with a passion to give back) has earned many awards and much press.

I probably can’t improve on the news coverage, being no closer to Menbe’s history than the reporters that generated these stories. Instead I’d like to give some personal impressions of Menbe and of the volunteer efforts that I’ve observed over the last few years.

When you get out on the road, you see so much bad behavior from drivers – sudden lane shifts, tailgating, aggressive tactics – that you can sometimes feel that people are selfish and unkind. And while the local TV news is sprinkled with “feel good” stories about kitten antics and such, the bulk of it is stories about bad behavior in the extreme; not only violent confrontations, but even such petty unkindness as people stealing packages from doorsteps. And then there is the current national administration, which seems to focus on cruelty, especially towards those who can least defend themselves.

But there is also a very different side to the public. We’ve seen this in the selfless and self-endangering behavior of citizens helping one another in emergencies like floods and fires. And in the case of Menbe and Saluté, you can see the best of humanity in the actions of enthusiastic volunteers, not only to help the homeless one day a year, but also in appreciation of Menbe and all that she does.

She had ultimately found it impossible to work with the continuing demands from her landlord. So, on Saturday, a core group of volunteers worked to pack up decades’ worth of much of what had been Saluté. It was sad, of course, but it was also hopeful – not only because there is likely to be a rebirth of the restaurant in another location next year, but also because the spirit of the volunteers was so positive and so appreciative of what Menbe had done – and not what she had done for us, per se, but what she had done for others.

Menbe herself has a delightful veneer (smiles and hugs for customers), which covers an inner self that is just as delightful. I can say that without being privy to her personal life, because who a person is can be seen from what they actually do. She lifted herself up from poverty to owning an extremely successful restaurant; but while she worked to keep the business going, she put in effort after effort to help others. She not only did big, visible events like the Thanksgiving event (which not only fed homeless folks, but also provided them with flu shots and warm clothing); she also added individualized, personal acts of altruism, like bringing abused women into the U.S., getting them surgeries, and empowering them as much as she could to move forward in their lives.

We are divided in this country, and many of us are (rightfully) appalled at the actions of a government that claims to be for the common man, but that actually implements policies that hurt the weakest among us. But we need not be in a continual state of depression about our country, when so many acts of kindness are all around us. Rather, we need to accentuate those volunteer acts, and also work to bring them to the political sphere, where we can potentially improve the lives of so many, and in the short term, slow the worsening of our country’s condition.

In Richmond, you might be tempted to think that a landlord’s attitude defeated Menbe and her good works. But this would be short-sighted. Menbe’s attitude and actions have spread good will and community engagement in ways that will affect many lives. And her story is not yet over.

It may be the ex-flower child in me, but I still think “Love is all you need” is not far off – as long as the love is expressed in action. And Menbe has shown us how well this can work. She’s applied the energy from years of painful experience to active, productive love.

When I was much younger, I generally would tell people just what I was thinking, on just about any subject. And as email became a common communication mode, I would also send emails that sometimes were quite inflammatory. One time in particular, I sent an insulting note to a very prominent academic who had rebuffed my request to inform his students about a job opening I had, based on his (what I thought of as stuffy) opinion of his school, in comparison to the comparatively modest reputation of the industrial lab I worked at. It took me a little while to recover from the fallout.

I make no claim of deep wisdom, despite my advanced age, but there are a few things I’ve learned, and one of them is this: when you feel anger and want to point it at someone, go ahead and write it down – but don’t send it! Come back to it when you’ve cooled down and are in a position to better assess the best thing to do.

I don’t mean that youth is wrong to act on these impulses, or that a more senior restraint is right; youthful enthusiasm, even when extreme, can be a powerful force for good (or for other things, admittedly). But experience did teach me that a more restrained approach was far more effective, and I often counseled others to try this approach rather than to inflame animosities.

In our country in 2018, we now have a significant part of the population shouting at our screens. We can’t stand what the current White House resident is doing, or what his minions are doing. We are alternately depressed and angry. We sometimes seek relief by focusing on anything else but him, and sometimes wallow in cable news coverage (or topical comedy shows with our own perspective) and shake our heads in disbelief.

There’s nothing wrong with these reactions – they are natural and human. I’m right there too – the current administration is an abomination, in so many ways. But what then?

In today’s New York Times, Frank Bruni argues for restraint. He suggests that public figures back off from incendiary remarks about the president, and notes:

“When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din.”

He is probably right; public figures on “our” side acting out in this way may not really be helping. But in this blog I’m more concerned with the rest of us, not public figures. Once we have finished yelling at the screen, or enjoying the guilty pleasure of agreeing with a 4-letter description of someone in the administration, what next? Don’t we want to change things?

I suppose that part of the attraction of being stuck in the anger is that we often don’t know what we can possibly do to change things. But recent post-2016 elections should tell us otherwise – some of them were extremely close, and progressive candidates either won or lost by a tiny margin. Not only do our votes really count, but our activism counts as well – can we convince other depressed friends of the importance of their vote?

To specifics: the upcoming midterms provide an opportunity to have a significant check on the outrages of He-Who-I-Don’t-Feel-Like-Naming and his sycophants. But given widespread gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the fundamental Constitutional compromise that gave so much weight to low population states, among other factors, turning the House blue in 2018 is far from a given (and the Senate is going to be even harder). It’s going to take a sustained effort.

A blog like this gives me the opportunity to pretend that I know what others should do. So, here’s my opinion: yell at the screen all you want, enjoy inflammatory rhetoric without guilt, but then set it down and start thinking about making sure that everyone you know actually votes in November. 2018 and 2020 give us the opportunity to turn what has happened into a blip rather than a trend. It’s important!

A recent internet meme is an audio recording of someone saying – well, what he’s saying is kind of the issue. Some listeners hear “Laurel”, and others hear “Yanny.” It’s been pointed out (in the Times “Upshot”and elsewhere) that this is the result of a somewhat muddied recording. When a sound is ambiguous, your brain will still try to make some sense of it, and what you decide the sound was will just depend on … many things. In a related case three years ago, an image of a dress was seen by some as being blue and black, and by others as gold and white. This too went viral.

 

Both of these are examples of what’s called “categorical perception”, in which minor shifts along some axis result in sharp changes in what you see or hear. This was illustrated nicely by the Times article, which provided a slider to modify the Laurel/Yanny recording, so that most listeners can hear the sudden change in what was apparently said.

 

Our brains hate ambiguity; or, more accurately, we identify patterns in what we see or hear, whether or not they are there, and whether or not we identify the right pattern. Some of this is due to sensory bias, but often it is due to cognitive bias – what is our implicit or unconscious leaning in any given situation?

 

When we see (or hear) an explicit example of this, it is often just entertaining (or possibly mind-bending). But categorical perception affects us daily in ways that can be useful. It is important to be able to make decisions, and having our perception seemingly giving us direct evidence of one thing or another is probably important to our survival as a species (at least it’s mostly worked so far).

 

But in our politics … we’ve arrived at a point where significant chunks of the population think that people in another chunk are fundamentally awful. Coastal liberals may think of Trump voters as either morons or racists (or both); hinterland Trump voters may think of liberals as elitists who are unconcerned with the issues affecting “real” Americans.

 

[Side note: I don’t mean to imply that there is an equivalence between these two sides – I am indeed a coastal liberal, and my clear bias is that on policy matters, Republican voters are simply wrong. But here I’m talking about the “other-ization” of people from anyone in a particular group, which is pretty common for everyone.]

 

Are there real differences between the groups like the “urban liberals” and the “rural conservatives”, for instance? You bet! We often have different daily concerns. We have different backgrounds. We have, overall, quite different beliefs about many things, not the least of which is our view of the current President.

 

And yet …

 

In Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You America”series on Hulu, she makes a point of meeting with Trump voters and bonding with them. She is not shy about her views (or seemingly about anything else), but she connects quite warmly with all kinds of people. She also explores how some people ultimately moved from extremism to acceptance of others. In one of her shows, she interviewed Megan Phelps-Roper, who left the Westboro Baptist Church (the one that pickets veteran’s funerals, says many horrible things about gays, etc.). Ms. Phelps-Roper was able to radically change her views after many encounters with people on the other side (she even ended up marrying one of her online critics!)  Previously she had been very sheltered, only encountering others in the same group. Change was possible!

 

We each see the world in our own particular way, conditioned by our previous world experience; and the resulting world view can be very hard to change. But repeated exposure to something different can have an effect, and it often is a sudden (or categorical) shift. This is how the brain works – it tries to make sense of its input, and it can take significant new input for that sense to change.

 

How does this work in the world of politics? I think that the works of cognitive linguist George Lakoff offer some clues. Lakoff describes two conflicting underlying world views: that of the “strict father” and the “nurturant parent”. I won’t attempt to summarize his extensive work in a few lines (his “Don’t Think of an Elephant” book as well as his current podcastsare where you should go to begin to understand it), but for the purpose of this note, let’s just say that many people have both the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” and the “let’s help people who need it” sentiments about different things. And this suggests that conversation is possible between the two “tribes”, however difficult it might seem.

 

For progressives, what does all of this say about talking to our fellow citizens who like Trump? I think the main point here is that nearly all of our population doesn’t deserve the “monster” category, but many people with very “strict father” views for some topics have pretty open views for others; and while we should not be shy about saying what we think about any topic, we should not denigrate those with opposing views personally; and in seeking common ground on other issues, we can make our policy opponents aware that we too are not monsters, and progress actually can be made.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … or, in ‘Merican, that’s, the more things change, the more things stay the same. When you’ve been around for a while (and yes, I have been), you see connections and repeats over the years; but it’s always good to appreciate what’s new as well. In this blog, I hope to express some of the things I’m seeing and musing about. Some of these may be of interest to someone, some will only be for me. But in the course of this, I will probably also open up some of my own, older doors. I’ve had a funny life, and some of the things I’ve seen and done might make their way into this record.