I hate the government

Here in the United States we have citizen government. As much as it has become a tool of the wealthy to impose their priorities on the rest of us, it does reflect the values of Americans. United we stand, in squabbling disunity.

Ordinary citizens could take control if we could agree on common values and insist that they be promoted. Unfortunately, the majority values its freedom not to pay attention, and to dislike each other factionally more than it wants to overthrow the influence of concentrated wealth. The problem is not the government. It is us.

I hate the government. I hate how the need to keep an eye on it intrudes on my pleasures. I hate how it has evolved to be hostile to oversight as much as I hate having to be that oversight. I'm terrible at paying attention to what elected representatives and government agencies are doing. But we do have access -- for now -- to those who govern.

The yellow vest protests in France are presented as an example of what committed, bold citizen action can accomplish. True, they pressed the Macron government for concessions, but two questions arise. How did it get that bad in the first place? And will there be meaningful change after the two sides stand down and the news cycle needs to move on to other things?

We have representative government to free up the majority of citizens to do other necessary work. It also provides a filter between the whims of a sometimes volatile majority and the actual implementation of long-term policy. But representatives have power as well as responsibility, which makes them susceptible to corruption. Some are truly incorruptible. Others arrive pre-corrupted. Voters have to decide who is worth keeping. Detailed information can be hard to get. The information itself can be tainted by an underlying agenda.

I hate it. But it's human nature. Even government by a computer system would only be as good as its programmed parameters. And it might be very hard to overthrow. You can pull the plug, but only if you can get to the plug.

The show ponies who run for office are well suited to their roles in show biz. Some of them are as stupid as a box of rocks, but they've all managed to win the reality show contests we call elections. The best ideas in the world do no good if they can't find a champion who can actually get elected. The process is most visible at levels high enough to attract mass media coverage. But it's happening all the way down to little dinky towns scraping together a budget to keep a handful of roads paved, and send their kids to school. Down where most of us actually live, decisions are made at public meetings by people we know, if we happen to be able to take the time to attend.

Time. Citizen government demands your time. As an ordinary voter, you have to dig out the information you need to make what seems like a good choice. As an actual official, you have to perform the duties of your office. In some places, you're expected to do it for free, so you still have to grub for money in the outside world while paying proper attention to the people's business in your governmental capacity. In a country that glorifies wealth for its own sake, that means a constant battle against inflation, and against competitors who would be all too happy to sink you.

Many hands make light work. If a really solid majority of citizens wanted to get involved and take turns doing the mundane, tedious bullshit of governing, it would become a communal activity instead of turning "the government" into this alien overlord run by idiots and scoundrels. How likely is that? No one wants to be in the handful of suckers who get stuck having to sacrifice their time for an ungrateful populace that automatically assumes they're up to no good. And we're all either too busy working or too busy looking for work to devote our best attention to the needs of government. That's how you end up with independently wealthy people and energetic profiteers holding office. No one else can afford to. So back we come to oversight.

Take a short time as soon as possible to jot down a list of what you would like from your government. Brainstorm it. Write down everything that your ideal society would have. If the list is "no government," write down what you're going to have to get from other sources: roads, energy, health care, defense... Then figure out who is going to provide it and how you all are going to pay for it.

Deep inside all of us in the modern world lives a hunter gatherer wondering what the hell happened. What happened was evolution. As much as we still get the desire to roam as happy nomads across a relatively pristine environment, the only way to get back to that is to destroy all that came after it. And it was other parts of our own nature that made us evolve into our current condition, simultaneously pampered and stressed out. We can't go back. We can only go forward, trying to improve.

In appreciation of those who govern

Everyone complains about the government, but how many of you really want to do that job?

Especially at the local level, willing talent can be hard to find. While the corrupt local boss is a stock character, the benevolent wise village elder is as much so. Both of them provide security by perennial consistency. They free up the other citizens to do other work.

In more than one social media comment thread, contributors have said that they believe elected officials should receive little or no compensation, "to keep them from becoming professional politicians." Who among you is willing to run for office and take that deal? How good a job would you do when you have to spend most of your time earning your actual living at something else?

If your actual living is related to the needs of government, you can blend your efforts, but you will frequently cross the line into conflicts of interest. This is true of developers on zoning and planning boards, lawyers in legislatures, and business people in any elected position. You may think that you are bringing your informed perspective to the discussion, but how often does that informed perspective willingly accept a disadvantage in a proposed policy?

There's no way to sift out all of the personal interests from everyone  -- or anyone -- who stands for public office. The synergy of those personal interests is supposed to yield the best result. It fails when the personal interests do not include things we call intangible because they can't be valued monetarily, but the fault lies with the participants, not the process.

A guy showed up on our zoning board several years ago and immediately irritated one of our longest-serving members. The new guy was outgoing and inquisitive. He went to training sessions offered at the state level, and researched town matters. The older board member had also taken training courses, and was familiar with town issues from long residence here. The enmity got pretty thick for a while, but both of them are still involved in town government. The new guy has gone on to the board of selectmen. That's a tippy throne in this town. For a small place, we have some strong political divides. Elections really do come down to one or two votes. For now, he seems to be trying to modernize our standards for maintaining infrastructure, which is the town's biggest expense. The other guy has returned to the zoning board after recovering from a stroke. He continues to provide a reliable conservative pillar around which to build our decisions, whether we agree with him or not.

I have never wanted to be in charge of anything. I don't even want the positions I hold in town government. But I have never been opposed in an election for the zoning board, and the conservation commission is appointed gratefully from among whoever shows up to volunteer. I do not have the broad vision and deep curiosity that makes a good leader. I have no urge to schmooze. I do not socialize. So I am really grateful for the people who do. I recognize their value in keeping us connected.

If everyone was an introvert, we would never have had a war, because no one would want to get together to form an army. But we would never have gotten together to form anything else, either. While that might be better for the environment, we passed that exit a long time ago. Our species has these divergent personality traits, for better or for worse. Our challenge is to try to maximize the better and eliminate the worse. "Accentuate the positive..."

When I see the eager beavers of government, I wonder if they were like that in school. Are these the kids who were on the student council? Class president? The new selectman admitted that he was. But his working career was not in law or government. He was middle management in a manufacturing corporation. He's more of a working guy than a boardroom guy. But he did have that interest in how things work. Me, I never did. I'm much more likely to bushwhack up a stream to find out where it came from than to dig into rules and regulations and shake a lot of hands and talk to a lot of people to find out how all that works. So I really appreciate the people who like that stuff and do it well. Do their decisions always please me? Hardly. But I'm glad that they're willing and able to engage in the personal and public interaction necessary to govern at all.

Positions of responsibility are also positions of power, so they attract applicants whose motives are not helpful. Money and power are usually conjoined. Because it's always more comfortable to be rich than poor, especially in a failing society, corrupt leaders whose focus is money will do little to keep a government from degenerating, as long as their own wealth, and that of their benefactors, remains secure. We're in the advanced stages of this at the national level. Because any set of characteristics can be used for good or ill, the same energy and social ability that makes a good government entity works just as well to facilitate the connections and operations of a bad one. The major difference would probably be the dark side's willingness to double cross anyone they have to, if it brings them more money or power.

Treachery is the dark side's strength and weakness. The ruthless ability to destroy things without remorse gives evil a short term edge that can last a long time. Evil forces good to play the game on evil's terms when the violence and destruction get so far advanced that they can only be met with countervailing destructive force. But you don't want to stop a strip mine by dropping bombs on it. You can't protect the environment while you are blowing it up. A minefield and razor wire would protect a wetland, but they're hardly the best methods for it. A lot of things can't be settled by a contest of force.

At the local level, in tiny rural towns like the one I live in, things are seldom that dramatic. But because we are working from a smaller bag of money, issues like a six-figure bridge and road contract, or standards for environmental protection have much more visible personal consequences. If anyone ever figures out how to get outright rich off of government corruption in this town, we will all be simultaneously outraged and impressed. But we're not immune to cronyism. Human nature resides in the individual human. People play favorites. It may not be right, but it's common. That's why we have to make a point to critique -- not just bash and disparage -- decisions our representatives claim to be making on our behalf. It can be hard, especially when some blockhead proposes  -- or the elected body of blockheads enacts -- what we see as a stupid decision.

It's enough to make you give up on government entirely. But some form of government would reassert itself because the personalities that created it in the first place would still exist. The only way to get rid of government would be for a relentless corps of introverted assassins to hunt down those chirpy extroverts and kill them off until the genes were eliminated forever. First of all, that's impossible. Secondly, we would no doubt discover what we missed about them. Third, would a species entirely of introverts even be able to sustain itself? No one would ever ask for a date, let alone take it any further.

We're stuck with government until artificial intelligence takes over and turns us into a herd of domesticated animals kept in line by robot guards. So we have that to look forward to as we muddle along, trying to find good people to run things while most of us do our best to avoid being one of them.

Troubleshooting Scrooge

As the holidays approach and some regions already have winter thrust upon us, the misunderstood character of Ebenezer Scrooge will take to the seasonal stage.

Scrooge’s offense was not that he thought that the holidays are bullshit, it’s that he was a chintzy employer and an exploitive landlord and lender. Amazing how he is embraced as a great guy when he softens and starts sharing some of his customers’ own money with them in the form of Christmas largesse.

Largely viewed as a misanthropic cheapass, Scrooge was living a low budget lifestyle because he couldn’t see the point of living more extravagantly. This is completely legitimate. So is your festive brightness and cheer, if you choose. Just bear in mind that large indoor gatherings with lots of hugging and shared food are the reason that the season ushers in the plagues of colds, flu, and contagious vomiting illnesses.

Dashing through the snow
To a toilet or a shrub —
Hope I’m not too slow.
I ate some tainted grub.
Was it the hors d’oeuvres
or maybe bad eggnog —
Aunt Alice didn’t look too good;
I thought it was the grog.

Jingle bells, this was swell
Parties are great fun —
but I’m green around the gills
and so it’s time to run...

It’s all in your outlook, of course. I have enjoyed many holiday events and jolly festive times. I’ve also been a casualty. If this is when you can get the gang together, and that's what you're up for, do it. But the short days also favor solitude. Mentally if not actually, I try to find a high and lonely place in which to squint toward the distant sun barely giving us a nod as it flies low across the southern sky. It doesn't even need altitude if it has a good sweep of horizon and sky. A nice beach or coastal marsh will do quite well.

Safety depends on consent

A piece on NPR this morning about Squirrel Hill and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting mentioned that it was a "safe" neighborhood.

The devotees of armed force like to remind the rest of us that no place is safe. And they are right. Unless you are in some super-fortified safe room -- in which you are a prisoner of fear -- you may encounter an evil person any time, anywhere. But the odds are better in some places than in others.

I lived in a safe neighborhood in West Annapolis in the 1980s. Just a few doors up the street, someone was murdered in their home. As I recall, that was a spousal murder. It was still a murder. A couple of years later, on a slightly sketchier residential street in Edgewater, the guy next door wigged out on PCP and fired off a few rounds at something imaginary before sprinting up the street stripping his clothes off. Years before that, in Coral Gables, Florida, I found a .32 slug from our crazy neighbor flattened against the wall of our house. She was a drinker, who kept the pistol at the head of her bed. Good thing the houses in that neighborhood had thick masonry walls. We never heard a shot. She could have done it any time, even before we moved in. Just another day.

Mass shootings and ideologically motivated murder have increased in this country since the mid 20th Century, adding to the ongoing death toll that merely stems from the ugly side of human nature. Our own citizens subscribe to enough homicidal ideologies to supply us with atrocities that require no invaders or sneaky terrorists from abroad. We rate the safety of a neighborhood on its record of crime and violence. But ideological violence leaps over the local customs between neighbors, the consensual agreement to live and let live.

Safety depends on consent. The residents of a place agree that they will work with and around each other without resorting to forceful confrontation. They will respect each other's boundaries. In the best cases, they will enjoy the experience and expanded point of view brought to them by a diverse population. But even lacking a diverse population of residents, people can cultivate a peaceful attitude if enough of them choose to do so.

All this is for nothing, the armed and dangerous crowd tells us. The only path to peace is through the threat of mutually assured destruction or by eradicating everyone who holds an opposing viewpoint. Anything less is cowardly.

For decades now, the promoters of an armed society have been telling us that anyone must be prepared for a gunfight. As the rhetoric creates an ever more paranoid and volatile population, their prophecy fulfills itself. I see armed men all the time, just going about their lives: shopping, gassing up the truck, serving on town boards, with at least one gun visible. With permitless concealed carry, they could have a couple more tucked in various crevices on their person. A couple of weeks ago it was a scrawny young dude with a 12-pack of beer under one arm, and a handgun bigger than his skinny thigh almost pulling his jeans down as he climbed into his truck.

The Second Amendment cancels out the First, if the threat of armed response is what makes people shut up and ignore each other's behavior. Flip the bird at someone who drives like a sociopath and you may find out just how much of a sociopath he is. It was always true. Anyone might have a gun, regardless of the laws. But the more we enable and encourage the idea that deadly force is normal, the more of it we will see. Deadly force may be a last resort, but feel free to hop right to it with only the briefest glance at other options on your way by. Homicidal ideology plus an arsenal of firearms leads you right to Squirrel Hill, or a grocery store in Kentucky. It breaches the agreement of safety wherever it arrives.

Every time I've considered carrying a gun I've decided that it would probably make a situation worse rather than better. Because we do not yet live in an actual war zone, by the time you know that deadly force is justified you have probably already lost that battle. Our stereotypical movie cowboys of the mythical old west weren't fighting off muggers. They were calling each other out in duels. Or the sodbusters were engaged in guerrilla warfare with the ranchers. Or the gang of outlaws would sweep down on the town, where the brave sheriff and his deputies would pick them off. In every case, the participants knew that they were in a defined conflict. It was right there in the fictional script.

The racists and antisemites in this country who want to eliminate people they deem undesirable are eager to define the conflict and declare war. They have no use for conventions of safety. Perhaps they would feel differently if they were immersed in a lengthy conflict that destroyed a lot of property and killed a lot of their friends, but you'll never convince them of that by imagination alone. They imagine glorious victory and rivers of blood from their enemies. The same optimism has ushered in every war since the first pre-human picked up a stick and showed his tribe-mates how great it was to bust heads.

That first war led to the proliferation of sticks. A secret weapon is only a secret until you use it. Then everybody wants one. And no one imagines themselves on the receiving end of it. That reality sets in later, when the glorious conflict turns into a quagmire. And people start to yearn for peace, rest, and safety.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.

About male privilege...

The President of the United States today said that it is a "scary time for young men in America."

Men have been shaken by the wave of hostility coming at them from women all over the United States. And by men I mean mostly white men, but in gender issues the relationships become more complicated. Let's focus on the white dudes for right now, since they are the most egregious offenders.

You don't have to want to be a domineering asshole to find yourself the beneficiary of generations of domineering assholes. In fact, as a member of a privileged class it is basically impossible to separate yourself from your advantages.

Witness the rage of privileged white males in government who face a challenge to their anointed candidate for the Supreme Court. Witness the quivering indignation of the man himself. They know that they face the biggest challenge ever presented to their ability to rule with impunity over women and minorities. This is life or death for their way of life. Maybe the patriarchy won't fall immediately if Brett Kavanaugh doesn't get a seat on the Supreme Court, but the battle has solidified opposition to it. Losing it will weaken them further. Winning it, on the other hand, will fortify their defenses for an indefinite period. One can only hope that in either case the movement to end their hegemony will lead to a better world, not just another hegemony.

All I can say to white men -- as a white man -- is that this would have hurt a lot less if y'all had accepted it well back in the last century. Maybe your fear even then was fully justified, and the paybacks would have been hell. We'll never know now, will we? And the paybacks really will be hell now. They will continue to ramp up steeply as long as you drag your feet.

I will admit that I never gave it much thought when I was growing up. I worried about how I would earn a living. I wondered if I would be able to get a job that would keep me in the lifestyle to which my parents were accustomed, because I knew nothing else. As far as I knew, we weren't rolling in dough. My father did okay, but he and my mother had both been children during the Great Depression. They grew up with competing urges of compulsive thrift battling against the desire to live large. Everyone in America looked up to the wealthy. At that time, that automatically meant white people.

Add religion to this and you can write off a lot as God's responsibility. "God has a plan." "God will care for them." May God help them, because I won't do more than toss an occasional charitable donation at the problem."

No one that I knew of ever said anything about massive lifestyle changes to balance out the prosperity.

See how any discussion of white male privilege veers into economics? Daddy gives the allowance, see? Daddy gives Mommy the housekeeping money, and she'd better not blow it. The lucky wife gets a bigger allowance. Maybe she exerts her power by henpecking her man into bringing home more money and letting her get away with whatever she wants.

You heard almost nothing about the accomplishments of women.

Mostly white men did the hiring and firing, and engaged in the dirty business of politics and government. Rooms full of cigar smoke and self congratulatory flatulence were no place for a lady. The women who broke into those citadels had to be able to deal with that, and were changed by it to become something similar to their opponents. We are only now finally seeing women present their point of view without justifying it to masculine values. They may have gotten the vote in 1920, but they were still subject to the coercion of the male establishment.

Be afraid, white men. You're very close to finding out what it's really like to be a disadvantaged minority. I'm afraid, because I look like you. As much as I wanted things to be different, I was already in the minority of the privileged majority. I alone could not have stopped this. I had enough to do, weeding out the programming I had absorbed, as I learned to recognize each piece of it. Because you cherished dominance so much, and feared equality, you will soon be distinctly unequal for a while. The first effect will be the loss of credibility of a white male speaker or writer. It will be automatic suspicion and dismissal of ideas put forward by a white man. It will be a higher bar of proof, and greater scrutiny of sources and reasoning. The shoe will be on the other foot. You'll have to face prejudice just because, at long last, enough people are tired of your shit.

You want to know why there's black pride, gay pride, feminism? Y'all made that. Then you try to answer it with white pride, and white identity, and hetero male dominance. You made the whole situation happen.

We cannot know whether some other subgroup in human evolution would have appointed itself the Asshole Emperors of the World if white people hadn't done it. We live in this world, and in this world the gang that's on top right now got there by being the best at not playing nicely with others. You accepted life as a competition. When you were at the top of the game you could have changed how the prizes were distributed. Instead you just tried to be the biggest winners in the history of the world. Winning streaks end, boys. They always do.

The sex itself

I won't pretend that I banished my desire for sexual contact with women. I can no more do that than a gay person can become un-gay, or a trans person decide to ignore the inner being and conform to the outer plumbing. I am as attracted as I ever was.

This says nothing about whether I should be allowed it, or my odds of ever again getting an offer.

Regardless of my success ratio, I wanted to give as good as I got. Considering my darkest failures, that assertion seems laughable. Considering my best performances it inspires mirth as well. Both of those were in my thoughts as I guided my behavior starting in my 30s toward the most polished sexually neutral demeanor that I can bring myself to present, at all times and in all places. I started realizing years before the current wave of awareness that women needed relief from men's conscious and unconscious efforts to coerce or persuade. And I'm a dick. I can look back on years of unfounded arrogance.

Self denial takes conscious attention. If you happen to be young enough for your sexual behavior to matter, remember that the choice is always whether to indulge, not whether to want in the first place. If anyone were to ask, I would say that a man's regret will be stronger for times that he indulged than times that he didn't. It's not about being noble, or being canny enough to avoid some kind of entrapment. It's about the intrusive, invasive nature of men's apparatus, and the irrevocability of penetration. You can pull it out, but you can't un-enter.

Even in fantasy, it has become impossible to imagine a permissible scenario, nor does memory provide any comfort in the absence of any corroborating witnesses. As Meg Ryan taught us, don't believe what you want to believe just because you want to believe it. In addition, you might never know what motivated a woman to be with you in the first place. And if you're smart, you won't ask. You might not be flattered. Not only that, the past is untouchably gone. Your chances of flying to Pluto are way better than your chances of ever repeating something you can remember in vivid detail.

If you're a well brought up young man, or if -- without external intervention -- you've never had an improper thought, consider yourself very lucky. I had to cut my way through thickets of predatory impulses, often with companions who brought fertilizer instead of pruning shears. Most of the impulses were not overtly predatory, but objectifying women at all is fundamentally predatory, even if you believe that you love them and don't think that you could ever hurt one. Desire itself is the emotion of a consumer. Hunting urges bred down are what make border collies great herding dogs.

Sex can be fun. It can also be horrendous in a huge variety of ways. Sexual behavior connects to the most primal parts of our being while at the same time appealing to acquired tastes that are wholly intellectual. The primal urge intrudes like a pop-up ad in the middle of something unrelated. It arrives like an unsolicited dick pic.

No man can ever understand the full extent of  a woman's experience of sex. I don't care what you shove how far into what opening, it isn't going to be the same. And I guarantee that you cannot realistically imagine it. Hanging over a woman all the time is the prospect of impregnation. Even if both parties in a consensual encounter have taken redundant steps to prevent fertilization, the anatomy itself was designed for it and the most basic prompting seeks it. Recreational genital stimulation works around this in a number of ways. Even there, consent is not the whole story. What you might consider the beginning of a beautiful phase of long term exploration she might consider an experiment best discarded and forgotten. Even if she was really good at it.

Alternative methods raise another whole flock of questions. Is there a simple answer under all of the layers of possible motives? When you finally peel back all of the persuasive pressures, is the answer to whether she really gets off on that thing you really like a simple and perpetual, "no?" The answer probably changes with age, at the very least. It also fluctuates from moment to moment in the flow of feelings emanating from that spot in the lower abdomen that seems to connect directly to the brain and create the crucial link to success or failure of a pleasurable impulse.

Age changes everything. Returning to the primal prototype, sexuality is a preoccupation of young adults. Unrestrained by other conventions, the interest begins early in the teen years and continues to a finish line that varies by individual. Some people are ready to walk or run from it within a few years. When life expectancy was under 50, your average person probably died still horny. Because inside of every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened, people who may be well beyond attractive youth, perhaps even physically incapable of participating, may still be plagued by the memory of what used to be possible, that they would love to try again.

Age and a sense of personal mediocrity probably do a lot to bolster my ability to be deferential. I'm good at what I'm good at, but that's a pretty narrow band. I struggle at a lot of other things, and that makes up the bulk of my life. Be assured that I don't see myself as handing down wisdom from a mountain top. I'm just sharing what I've learned from trudging along one particular road of life. Maybe it will prove helpful to someone.

What to do for women

It was very confusing, coming of age in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. There were many women who hadn’t figured out yet that they would prefer to be left alone, and men — even white men — could have the mistaken impression that their kind had actually achieved something of value over the centuries, and that someone could actually like them. Sure, we needed to be less pushy and more open minded. The true depths of male — particularly white male — depravity were concealed behind the facade built brick by brick by the patriarchy to secure dominance in perpetuity. It is hard to come to terms with the harsh truth that one’s entire world view was built on lies, but there it is.

As an average heteronormative schmuck, I found women desirable and acted like various kinds of idiot to try to get to spend some time with them. I am limited by my own lack of social skills in this, but you can find all kinds of support for the idea that you may be socially awkward, but deep down you're actually really cool and people will want to be with you.

That's a comforting lie. The key to its survival is that it is comforting. It seems empowering and encouraging of diversity. But hooking up is a competitive activity. There's a lot of weeding. If your motivation includes what we call the pleasures of the flesh, you need to qualify. Hell, if all you want is conversation and a break from the endless loneliness of shy dorks, and you happen to like the company and insights of women, you still need to avoid wearing out your welcome.

Obviously, based on the avalanche of stories of women who have been attacked and forced into sexual contact, a lot of men don't worry about qualifying. They just grab. In so doing, they give all of male horniness a bad name.

Maybe male horniness is only worthy of a bad name. It's as common as dirt, and less healthy to get on you. Actual dirt contains beneficial microbes.

I was once young enough that a woman might give me a second glance, and even an audition. I was no prize, but I was deceptively attractively packaged. It fooled both them and me. I apologize retroactively for believing my own shit. We were all being raised to believe that we had promising futures, and that life was to be enjoyed. My blunders haunt me to this day.

What I finally realized was that the best thing men can do for women is purposely, consciously, and in large numbers, get out of their way. 

What have you read on social media since Thursday? Women saying that they wished they could walk around without constant fear of some aggressive creep assaulting them with anything from words and gestures to actual physical force. Women in vast numbers calling for an end to paternalistic, misogynistic oppression. Women drawing comics about how great the world would be if all men vanished.

Paternalistic misogynists will continue to make what they consider to be their case. They can cite a lot of history, and call upon female allies who have, for generations, worked within that system in their own ways, and present it as the norm. Women are not unanimous in their support of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers. They're not uniformly supportive of survivors of sexual assault. This is jarring and incomprehensible, but it's part of the bewildering variety of human experience."Good girls" won't have any problems. Feisty ones will suggest that a woman simply needs to be armed and ready to fight off any male who tries to go too far. It's a pretty sad view of human nature, that the best we can ever do is learn all the ways in which to defeat the inevitable attack.

A woman named Nancy Theeman wrote that she taught at Holton Arms when Christine Blasey Ford was a student. One thing she mentioned was the value of single sex education to create empowered women. Because the students were all women, they held all leadership positions by default. They competed among themselves on their own merits to achieve these positions, unfiltered by any judgment stemming from mere anatomy. But at the same time, at an all boys' school, young men are in an undiluted environment of male assumptions. And the empowered women coming out of the all-female incubator emerge into a world that is not ordered that way at all. If no one is teaching all the men how to be anything but entitled chauvinists, the system never changes.

Men need to listen. Don't jump in the minute you think you get it. Shut up and listen. Then shut up and listen some more. We have centuries of shutting up and listening to catch up on. Don't expect to knock it out in a couple of days. You can't pull an all-nighter for this. And if all goes well, the world that you knew will never exist again.

A lot of men simply aren't going to listen. It's easy for me to say shut up and listen, because I was not indoctrinated in the notion that it was my right and duty to lead the world. And by observing my father's frustrations as a skilled and loyal officer of a government increasingly controlled by the military-industrial complex, I was not drawn at all to the established power structure, even if that was where the money was. Like him, I believed that the ideals of our nation were sound, but that the execution of them fell far short of the promise of the words.

Naively, I believed that everyone would eventually agree. And I figured that far better minds than mine were working on it. Far better minds than mine have been working on a lot of stuff. Some of them have been working on this. A lot more of them have been exploiting the existing trends toward wealth consolidation and reinforcing existing hierarchies of race and gender.

The Rat Maze of American Health Care

In January 2017, I passed a kidney stone. I self-diagnosed, and got through the long night of pain with only profanity, lots of water, and a little bit of beer -- taken medicinally for its diuretic qualities -- to get me ready for work the next day.

After several months, I thought it might be a good idea to inform what passes for my primary care physician that I had suffered this misfortune. I used to go to an actual doctor, but he took advantage of his superior financial decisions to leave the practice and go adventuring. He was a bright guy who laughed at my jokes, but he was also really good at keeping the clinical wall between us. The practice has not provided a consistent replacement practitioner since his departure. The nominal MD at the head of it has never seen me as a patient.  The people I have seen have been delightful, but the place seems to be the last stop before imminent retirement for all of them. Or, if it's a young PA or someone like that, it's just a stepping stone on the way to greater things. There's no continuity and little sense of any more than formulaic care for the person rather than the customer.

As an uninsured American -- or even as one with the typical overpriced, under-insuring policy -- I was reluctant to get into the investigation at all, because of the bureaucratic rat maze and unclear pricing of health care services. Because there is no uniform standard for charges and service quality, people travel a long distance to find either providers "in their network" or self-pay prices that they can afford for diagnostic services that their insurance company's accountants have deemed unnecessary to cover.

Does every community disparage its local hospital? Certainly the one around here has garnered its share of scathing reviews from former patients and the surviving family members of patients who didn't make it. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, local gossip describes it as a place to pay too much for too little when you have no other choice.

Because health care is a marketed commodity in this country, health care providers use advertising to communicate, rather than presenting information fully, completely, and readily accessibly. Hospitals are selling themselves. They want you to be happy with the result so that you will patronize them again and tell your friends that it was good, but if you're not happy they'd prefer that you shut up and stay out of sight, same as any other business would. A good business tries to learn from its dissatisfied customers, but dissatisfied customers do not feature as the lead element in any of their advertising.

By a stroke of pure chance, a customer at the bike shop where I work is a nephrologist in the Harvard Medical School system. He had offered many times to help any of us with medical issues. Indeed, as one of the leading researchers studying polycystic kidney disease, he had been very helpful and comforting to my wife and members of her family after they discovered that several of them had that genetic disease. So, when I had a kidney issue, I eventually turned to him. Because he had no commercial motive, and his credentials as a scientist are impeccable, I trusted his judgment.

Unfortunately, his ability to conduct examinations and treatment is limited by his contractual obligations to the hospital in Boston where he works. He can provide his time and knowledge, but no lab work or medical imaging. I have had to scrounge those up for myself, with as much guidance from him as he can provide.

The process of navigating the health care labyrinth is awkward enough without adding any confusion. I already felt unwelcome because of my inconvenient income level and the fact that I don't sport the brand logo of an insurance company. The health care industry in this country is geared toward extracting as much money as possible from reluctant third-party payers. They seem very accommodating to self-payers. But because the majority of participants in the system operate within the framework of the adversarial game between insurance companies and medical facilities, things are very compartmentalized. The seeker of services has to open every door and look in every room with few allies who don't have their own financial stake in the game.

When I go to the local hospital for a service requested by a Boston doctor, what will the local providers think...if anything? Will it occur to them that this is an outgrowth of the intimidating facade of commercialized medicine? Or will they just be resentful that I seem to consider myself "too good" for them? Conversely, will they automatically pigeonhole me as a charity case, uninsured because I am destitute, or a cheapass who simply refuses to fork over the coin for a real insurance policy?

When I was a kid, it was simple. If I got sick, my parents took me to the doctor. If I needed more than what the office could provide, it was arranged. Granted, my parents had the backing of the United States government through CHAMPUS. And I was a kid. Complexities were hidden from me. But health care on the whole seemed a lot more systematic, geared toward healing rather than cash flow.

As I read the history of CHAMPUS, and its transition to the current Tricare system, between the lines I infer that a growing population of people who don't die of their injuries and ailments puts increasing financial strain on any system of medical care. That would be true no matter who is paying, so it does not in the least justify our current American system based on profiting from fear and ill health. But it does explain how accounting departments looking to shift costs would entertain increasingly complex mechanisms to divert expenses onto someone -- anyone -- else. This burst forth in the 1980s and has mostly gotten worse as our country does anything it can to avoid settling down to create one coordinated system based entirely on patient outcomes rather than its own income.

Discouraged by the prospect that any pursuit of health services could metaphorically lead me down an alley where my pockets would be emptied, I have been very slow to follow up on my situation. Having an illness is bad enough. Feeling like an illness turns you into some corporation's cash crop makes it all the worse. I feel like a beggar, and a blind beggar at that. I dropped the ball last autumn after the first round of lab work ordered by my nephrologist friend because I still felt awkward taking him up on his offer, no matter how often he had repeated it. When he confirmed it this summer in person, I felt like I'd  let him down by taking so long to go further. But I still have to make the contract for services and pay whatever the bill turns out to be when the dice finish rolling and stare up at me.

In the end, looking for cost-contained, competent medical advice and treatment, I'm not sure if I merely made it much more complicated as I try to manage the interface between my doctor friend and the other service providers in the process. And my situation isn't the stereotypical nightmare of phone tag with higher and higher levels of corporate supervisors that a lot of really sick people have to go through. Imagine having a really serious illness and having to go through a process clearly designed to weed you out.

A genuine system of universal care is decades overdue in this country.

AR-15s and stuff like that

I just got a commission to work on some drawings for political advertising. The first assignment was easy: it supported environmental science. The second one is extremely hard, and it may make or break my chances to draw for hire for any other installments in the campaign. This is a bummer, because overall I support the "progressive" policies that this group espouses.

The second target of the ad campaign is gun control, notably the control of so-called assault weapons.

Let me be clear. I don't like the proliferation of guns. I find the point of view that we have to be ready to kill each other at a moment's notice extremely depressing. I deplore the use of semi-automatic, militarily-styled weapons as fetish objects, and particularly their use to slaughter crowds of what we call innocent people. That being said, I hear the arguments of the pro-gun contingent, that murderers use a much greater variety of weapons than the "assault" category, and that militarily styled weapons in responsible hands are just a different style of projectile thrower, better for some uses and worse for others.

AR-15s are kind of like the pit bull of guns. People get cranked up over a breed of dog which might or might not be more prone to take someone's face off or mutilate someone else's family pet, and out come all the pit bull devotees with their stories of loving canine companions who live in homes full of happy children. We have a mass shooting and the voices rise again to ban the weapon. Other voices shout back about mental health care. Supporters of the particular piece of killing hardware make their points again about the total acceptability of the tool itself, and the Constitutional amendment that guarantees every citizen's right to have as many as they can afford.

I also hear the arguments specifically aimed at restricting militarily-styled rifles. Militarily styled weapons feed into a fantasy that does not have animals as its targets. Armies don't fight deer. They don't even fight grizzlies and mountain lions. They don't fight coyotes, peccaries, groundhogs, or raccoons. Armies of humans aim high-capacity, automatic rifles at each other to kill each other. The purpose of a military weapon is to put a round or rounds through the flesh and bone of an adversary who would be just as happy to reciprocate.

How much does form follow function? Much of the sinister looks of a militarily-styled weapon grow from the design requirements to make it do what it does with the least amount of undesirable feedback to the shooter. These include recoil, heat, and muzzle rise. Even a silencer and flash suppressor have actual uses during certain hunting conditions.

All that being said, when I looked at a half-dozen "best deer rifle" lists, nothing with military styling headed any of them. The "best" deer rifles were bolt-action, with a capacity of about three shots. Militarily styled weapons did appear in every list, but as an option for the shooter already so inclined. If you want that style of rifle, reviewers have checked out a few choices. If the militarily-styled rife is your preference, you'll then want to accessorize it to make it work better for you.

This does not answer why the militarily-styled rifle is your choice. People are attracted to some weird stuff, that's for sure. However, lots of people like things that aren't used to kill. It's the killing part that moves the gun hobby from harmless diversion to political firestorm. It's what motivates people to take a position inspired by the perfectly valid desire to go about their daily lives without wondering when they might be caught in a hail of lead.

I'm left with an approaching deadline and a nuanced situation I'm asked to depict in a simple manner. So I'll do the drawing and take the check, but I guarantee that it will not have the desired effect except on readers who were already inclined to agree. As much as I support the Parkland survivors, I see this election turning on other issues. Some people I know who are Republicans who don't particularly care for religious people or hunters will still vote the party on the basis of other issues, or they won't vote at all. And the real participants in the debate will continue to throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other in an endless war that no one wins.

The Woman Haters

When I was about seven years old, living in a little residential neighborhood called Rogers Heights, in Annapolis, my friends and I played in the woods that abutted all of our back yards, on the other side of a rainbow-hued trickle that flowed eventually down to Weems Creek underneath the Rowe Boulevard bridge. This was around 1963.

Our group included at least one girl. She was just another grubby kid looking for frogs, like the rest of us. We gave no thought to gender in our loose group of poison ivy finders. Not much, anyway.

We never saw anyone in the woods that we hadn't brought with us, but the other kids would refer to an ominous group of older boys who called themselves The Woman Haters. We never actually saw any of them that I recall, but we did see a tree fort that the kids in the know said was their headquarters. A flag made out of an old cloth diaper hung limply from it in the windless summer air. Whatever design had been painted on it remained obscured in its folds. Feeling that we might be under surveillance from that eyrie of junior misogynists, we withdrew quietly to the safety of our yards. We had no fences, so the collective yard formed a long strip of field between our houses and the near bank of the stream.

The day that safety was violated by a BB gun sniper who shot me in the arm, everyone agreed that it was the work of The Woman Haters. Apparently they weren't too fond of anyone.

I never encountered anything like that when we moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and then to Thomaston, Maine. And when I returned to Maryland at age 11 to face an unending assault of other preadolescent stresses, we lived in a different neighborhood where enmity was much more pointed and personal.

I wonder now whether The Woman Haters existed, who was in the club, and what became of them as they grew older. But I don't waste any time wondering enough to investigate. We're all too old to matter anymore. If they made careers of misogyny, they've done their damage. If they didn't, their club name was just another stupid boy thing. I don't imagine they inherited it as a secret society, as old as the Knights Templar, and passed their lodge rituals on to new generations. I think they just liked to sit in their tree house and take pot shots at smaller kids. It was the sort of thing that never surprised smaller kids. We were the punching bags and continual irritant of older siblings and their friends.

I was not aware of woman-hating sentiments among my fellow bottle breakers and stone skippers. I never went through a phase where I "hated gurlz." I always rather liked them. Later, in adolescence and beyond, I was cruel to some of them, but never out of malice, only out of selfishness and self consciousness. That makes it no less hurtful, and, therefore, unforgivable, but they weren't the acts of a twisted man with deep-seated hostility. Just another insecure dork trying to fake out both the bullies and the objects of his desire.

Self consciousness is very different from self awareness. Self awareness puts you on solid ground to figure out how to be the person you want to be. Self consciousness never finds solid ground. For some of us, the tension between the two forces never ends.

Hogan's Heroes and the Confederacy

Baby Boomers will remember watching Hogan's Heroes on television. It was a comedy about Allied prisoners in a German camp. A comedy. At the same time you could watch the films Stalag 17 or The Great Escape for  more dramatic presentations of the situation, but once a week, for six seasons, our clever heroes outwitted the bumbling Nazis and helped to win the war against fascism.

By the time that show was winding down, Richard Pryor was cranking up. I first heard a Richard Pryor album in the dorm room of a southern white guy who thought it was totally great. Richard seized ownership of the n-word and freely mocked uptight white people. We really were putting all that segregation shit behind us, weren't we?

The answer then was no, but it was well concealed from the white majority, and even from some rising blacks. Now it seems obvious, but back then the vestiges of racism could seem like exactly that: vestiges. We made fun of the South, we made fun of Nazis, starting to feel at ease about mildly confronting the injustices that underpin all of white people dynamics.

Whites don't have an exclusive title to injustice. We just used it very effectively to become a dominant force in the world as we evolved. Injustice is a tool in the arsenal of evil along the continuum that runs from the most sadistic darkness all the way to unachievably pure goodness and light.

Funny how evil is always so much more accessible.

A generation made influential by its sheer numbers got to see these attractive but deceptive portrayals at an impressionable age. I met few openly and aggressively racist people along my path. Only decades later did I figure out how sheltered my life was. Bad stuff might happen in isolated parts of this country and in other parts of the world, but overall we were on a path to potential world peace and good times. It was an easy mistake to make.

It becomes increasingly obvious now that humanity's dark side can't be laughed off. Humor seems to make sense as a countermeasure, but evil notoriously lacks a sense of humor. That's why control freaks hate to be laughed at. If everyone laughed, it could stop totalitarian shenanigans like a punch in the face with an inflated pig bladder. Maybe fascists make everyone stand up at their rallies so that no one can put whoopee cushions on every chair.

Humorless leaders can always find humorless followers to carry out their unfunny wishes. They are joined by people with sadistic senses of humor, who see slapstick entertainment in bloody dismemberment. Laughter may be the best medicine, but power is the strongest intoxicant. An underling in a dominant group enjoys the power of their collective cruelty.

Righteousness sounds good. By the dictionary definition, it describes being "morally right or justifiable." Morality is whatever we say it is, but thousands of years of collected writings have yielded a few common principles that seem to emphasize respect for each other.

Self righteousness is invariably wrong and a gateway to evil. If you sincerely believe that you are living exactly the way everyone should live, you are mistaken, and you shouldn't let it go to your head. It's an easy trap, especially for young adults. From the late teens through the twenties, humans are looking for meaning. We're told that we're adults at that point, fully responsible for our actions and deserving of our rights and privileges. We feel physically strong. This happens to coincide with a period of emotional uncertainty as we leave our homes and childhood behind. Things that feel right and good seem very right and good.

Research that indicates that our brains are hard wired will make your head spin. You can soothe your insomnia and melt the battery in your laptop watching lecture after lecture to help you understand your behavior and other people's. Of course you are drawing your own conclusions through your hardwired circuitry. Maybe you're hardwired to be open minded. Maybe you're hardwired to put up walls and fences topped with razor wire. This makes it an evolutionary question. There are winners and losers in evolution, but evolution does not recognize concepts of good and evil. There is no right or wrong. There is only existence and nonexistence.

Country makes us family

On social media this Fourth of July I see a lot of people posting that they don't feel like celebrating. I understand. But I also see people from all points of the political debris field who are celebrating anyway.

A country is an artificial creation based on some unifying principles. This is true in just about any nation you can name. The decision to draw borders and establish laws turns everyone within those boundaries into a blended family.

Even families purely related by blood don't get along. Look at the stereotype of the tense holiday gathering. Did you know that the biggest drunk-driving night of the year in the United States is the night before Thanksgiving? Apparently, either to steel themselves for the first contact or to escape from the pressure before the big day, lots of people go out to bars and tie one on. Family will do that to you.

The United States, with its immigrant founders and tradition of either inviting or importing people, is like the world's biggest messy divorce and remarriage. Our founders talked a great game in their philosophical ramblings and our constitution, while still shackled to the ignorance of their time. They may have risen above the average, but there was a lot that our species simply didn't know yet. A lot of it seems like it should have been obvious: don't buy and sell people, don't dismiss an entire gender, quit double crossing the natives. I'll grant you that the foot-dragging on those was and is unconscionable. But it's not remarkable. Some people's thinking evolves faster than other people's. That evolution has to reach a tipping point that seems like it should be close at hand, but, time after time, we fail to reach it. I still believe that we are closing in on it.

I haven't felt like waving a flag and getting all sentimental about the Fourth of July for many years. I feel that the government misuses the armed forces a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, wasting the lives and sanity of people who have signed up to serve in that life and death capacity. I deplore the way that massive wealth has made a power play, hiding behind a false image of hard work and worthy ambition, while undermining the citizen government that would make a prosperous republic possible for all. I'm depressed by the persistence of ugly, narrow visions for this country.

Like most families, we argue nastily, pushing each other's buttons in frustration, mostly making things worse. Maybe we pull it together for a short time, but those times get shorter and shorter, and occur at longer and longer intervals. The issues are important. Some of them threaten everyone's survival. Others threaten only the survival of one branch or another of the family. Every argument we've ever had -- still unresolved -- seems to be coming to a head now.

Over this grumbling mass of humanity waves the flag that was first hoisted in its early form in the 18th Century. Snatched from hand to hand are the pieces of paper that are supposed to guide us through the lives and deaths of generations of leaders and citizens. Every generation fights over the inheritance. Win or lose, every generation dies and leaves it to another. Even if this particular family breaks up, the territory itself will be occupied by one of the other families that lives on this globe, for as long as our species manages to stay alive.

Anyone who lives here has a right to wave the flag. I prefer that it symbolize responsible freedom, and the acceptance of diversity, that creates a nation worthy of the grand words used to describe it at its birth, rather than nationalism and a country in which freedom is something we not only hide from the world behind fortress walls, but steal from each other by force within those walls. But that's just how we feel at this end of the table. At the other end, someone's going to stick a fork in your hand if they don't want you reaching for the potatoes. And they do it under the same flag.

Family. They'll drive you crazy.

First they came for the...

History repeats itself because it is a product of a species that is generally slow-witted, irritable, and hates change.

The oft-quoted words of Martin Niemöller about the sequential suppression of groups deemed undesirable by the Nazis stir no anxiety in the Nazis themselves. Granted, in a paranoid, authoritarian regime there will be internal strains from time to time. You want to watch your back and try to be sensitive to shifts in power, but that's upper echelon stuff. Down in the middle and lower ranks, you'll be fine if you just don't think for yourself. 

Here in America, the happy followers of rising authoritarianism still talk about freedom, but they've actually given up on the idea of personal advancement. They know that the game has been rigged against them. Now they're just begging for sustenance in return for obedience, and protection in return for nationalism.

What changes as history is added? The population of humans steadily rises. Technology becomes more sophisticated. These should not be brushed off. They're critical variables. Denser populations mean we are forced into contact with each other. Technological advancements mean that people in power can exert control far more easily than control can be wrested from them. You can neither run nor hide. Back in the 1930s, you could still do both.

Because technology can't be rolled back without a pretty widespread catastrophe, our only check on its power is our own will to control it. It can't be made idiot proof. You can't set it and forget it.

I can see why hardworking people are ready to let go of democracy. I learned a few months ago that you have to contact your legislators all the time, even if you are confident that they will vote your way on an upcoming issue, because they need to be able to show supporting numbers when they're arguing for their point of view. So a voter really needs to follow every issue and ring in for or against, just to be sure that representative government is as accurately representative as possible. All this is on top of your virtuous toil in service to the economy. Day off? No such thing. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. The issues never rest. Nor should you.

The realization that the work never ends feeds the desire for Utopian solutions. If everyone believed the same thing, we could all relax, because the natural flow of decision making would support the greater good. Now listen to my beliefs...

Reality is always messier than even our most chaotic imagination. Everything could be destroyed in the competition between Utopian visions. But if it doesn't feel Utopian to you, then it isn't really The One. When, oh lord, will we ever truly be able to set it and forget it?

If freedom isn't free, but nothing else is free either, what's worth the trouble at all? Freedom requires such constant maintenance that it becomes a kind of enslavement all its own. Someone sneaky or overbearing will always try to bend things for personal gain or factional advancement. It's mentally and emotionally exhausting. The simple pressure of tyranny feels like a relief. Then you know who's stepping on you, and you can focus on building up your tolerance to it. As a citizen, you no longer have the constant pressure to make the right decision. You're free to devote yourself to simple survival and pointless griping. You're absolved of guilt.

Fundraising opportunity

Thinking of suicide?

You’ll probably use a gun.

Whether your problems are medical, financial, mental, emotional, or you’re just tired of living, you can seek the quick and effective release of a bullet without government interference, thanks to the US Constitution and the tireless efforts of the National Rifle Association to secure the rights of gun owners and users. It’s your life, and your right. So why not show your gratitude with a bequest to the NRA? For far less than the cost of an inadequate retirement account, you can buy a nice handgun AND have plenty left over to show us some love and help future gun owners to secure their liberty. Remember us in your will. Mention us in your note, and we’ll send your family a lovely walnut box for your ashes. Donations above $10,000 qualify for a solid pine coffin, if you choose not to be cremated. See our website for details.

Could have been produced by the
National Rifle Association of America 11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030
But it wasn’t really.

That darn intellectual elite

Although I no longer think that I'm very bright, I grew up in a family that used big words. I probably read above my grade level, although I lacked the experience and maturity really to understand all of the sentences and paragraphs made of words that I could read and technically define. When I would ask my parents, "what does [word] mean?" they would answer, "Look it up in the dictionary." Or sometimes they would say, "Go wash your mouth out with soap." I was curious about all words.

Kids on the playground would ask, in unkind tones, "did you swallow a dictionary?" No, but it was my bathroom reading.

The working class used to be proud of its own intellectuals, many of whom leaned left. Indeed, the left was traditionally based on workers' rights, and improving living standards for the people who push the wheels of the economy around. Corruption in the leadership of unions and of technically socialist states was neatly spun by the real elitists to condemn the whole movement. The greed of individuals is the root of all evil. Maybe someone does deserve a slightly bigger piece of the cake that the whole community cooperated to make, but if the division seems wildly disproportionate, look for underlying causes before you simply decide either that the system must be right or that it is entirely wrong. You don't crush your car because a dirty air filter is making it run inefficiently.

The internet has made it possible to pump both straight information and egregious propaganda directly into the brains of isolated individuals who are looking for answers. We still have plenty of broadcast media as well, and some print, but lots and lots of people get their information from someone who sees something and tells someone else, or from items of variable reliability posted and reposted on what we have come to call social media. Old media used to fear getting caught making a mistake or presenting an outright fraud. Accuracy and impartiality mattered. An outlet might have a known editorial position, reflected in clearly labeled editorials, but the news was the news. If facts and events seemed to have a liberal bias, it was the fault of reality. For a brief, beautiful time, most people really did seem to be happier imagining that we should all be nicer to each other.

I think that the trend toward more consistently biased communication stems from the instinctive desperation our species is feeling because we have not yet done much about problems that we should have started addressing 45 or 50 years ago. We're speeding toward the wall that we could have avoided with a gentle tug at the wheel in the 1970s, and now we have to make a sharp swerve that could still send us careening into it in a twisted pile of wreckage. Even the deniers know this. Maybe some of them think that they have perfected some sort of ejector seat that will catapult them clear of the smash, and others believe that some divine intervention will yank them out before it happens. It doesn't matter. Our collective refusal to look very far ahead kept us speeding forward while looking only for the next gas station, restaurant, or place of entertainment.

We have a choice between learning as a species to accommodate each other's differences as much as possible or battling to the death to create a homogeneous monoculture. Part of accommodating differences is a tacit agreement to make those differences amenable to accommodation. If your critical difference is that you insist that no one be different, you're part of the monoculture war. Thanks for nothing.

Competition is unavoidable. Say, for instance, that you follow a certain religion and you cater only to followers of that religion. Say that religion enjoys fairly high popularity for a time, giving you and your fellow believers economic leverage, because you have catered to each other and excluded unbelievers. Other players in the global economy will have to do something to ensure their own survival. Do they buy into the dominant religion, creating the monoculture through economic submission? Do they band together in opposition, in an alliance that may be strained by its own internal differences? Despite the best of intentions, individual differences add up to trends. Trends add up to evolutionary factors that shape the entire future of a species.

The Origin of the Therapist God

(Reposted from 2006)

Imagine primitive humanity. Every day brought new levels of self awareness, more questions. Emotions needed names. Mood swings could be noted and charted. Feelings started to stimulate thoughts that affected the feelings.

Depression in animals seems to be a passing thing, for the most part. But humans, able to extrapolate so many possible outcomes from a single point in time, keep coming around to depressing concepts. It has shaped our course from the beginning of self awareness.

A self-aware creature knows its beginning and its end from almost any point in its existence. Not many know the full specific details, but endpoints are in view.

Very early, people must have learned that if they shared something that hurt them with someone who cared about them, the caring friend or family member often suffered mental anguish at least equal to that of the original sufferer. So someone who cares about his loved ones would try to avoid telling them about unpleasant things unless they needed to know.

Depressed subjects would soon learn that people who did not care about them didn't want to hear their blubbering.

"Get out of here, you're bringing me down," may have been one of the first phrases of organized language after "Look out!" and "Oh, gross, was that you?"

The depressed person might find a quiet place and begin to talk to no one. Before too long, he might discover that this helped a little.

While all this simple interpersonal stuff was going on, larger issues like creation, natural disasters and unequal distribution of wealth had given rise to gods. Since gods could be benevolent as well as wrathful, someone trying to keep his problems from becoming other people's problems could quickly decide his soliloquies were prayers to the God or gods. Feeling relieved after a session, the sufferer might return to the group and tell them in general, avoiding the depressing details of his own plight, how "prayer" had helped him. Like a new diet or popular psychology book, it would quickly become the rage. People would even gather in groups to do it, just as some of them had probably discovered that misery loves company and had gathered to weep over their woes already.

Telling a deity made it easier to say and to hear. The congregation could nod sympathetically and still walk out after the service feeling no more obligation to help than was convenient.

Make the world safe for safety

Eons ago, when everyone lived at more or less the same level, conflict based on control of resources and territory was a more or less animal thing, augmented gradually with various hand tools that might give one side a temporary advantage until their opponents figured out something equal or superior with which to retaliate. But, no matter who won, the big enemies were still famine and disease.

As technology advanced, unevenly, it made all aspects of life easier in places that possessed it, so that those cultures expanded more readily, dominating less technologically advanced cultures regardless of the ethics and morals of a given invasion. Technologically dominant powers probably inhibited the advancement of cultures they dominated. The evolutionary compulsion to advance tribal interest evolved into national interest, and imperialism. It was still the same basic urge that had inspired some hominid in a snit to pick up a rock or a jawbone and bust an adversary's head.

All the way up to World War I, disease still killed more warriors than actual battle did. Then improving medicine and killing hardware shifted the balance in war so that combatants could finally claim the higher score.

Setting aside mass slaughter for a moment, early hominids and primitive humans faced risk constantly. Risk takers served as test pilots for the species, advancing the frontiers of capability or providing grim lessons in what not to do. Our respect for risk takers probably predates language. But so does our eye-rolling amusement at generations of Darwin Award finalists, from long before Charlie D walked the Earth.

We can't control or predict earthquakes. We can observe hurricanes and predict their approximate course a few days in advance. We can home in on outbreaks of disease and try to contain their spread or develop vaccines. With eyes in the sky, we can give a few minutes' warning of tornados. We can advise people how to drive safely, and to avoid lifestyle habits linked to disease. But we can't predict exactly when someone will snap and start shooting, or when a nation will lose its grip on global citizenship and start a war inside or outside its own borders. You can say roughly, observing trends and monitoring communications, that a nation presents a risk. On an interpersonal level, you can sometimes tell -- or at least guess -- that someone is volatile.

This unpredictability in human behavior, combined with the long heritage of risk, gives our species a paradoxical yearning for safety and an unwillingness to commit to being safe. Most of us like to be able to move around without constant vigilance. For most of my life, this country seemed like a place like that. Of course I wasn't black, or an unaccompanied woman, and I never ventured into a bad neighborhood. Stuff happened, but it didn't seem as common as it does today.

Personal violence and institutional violence are the micro and the macro of humanity's danger to humanity. Our disdain for the natural world may manage to take us out before we dissolve into global combat. Or we might dodge the bullets both metaphorical and actual, and get our shit together. But the biggest threat to our safety is our belief that safety is impossible. We can't be sure that enough people -- maybe even all people -- could ever be willing to live and let live. We are not yet "all in this together."

With the technology at our command, there is no good excuse for human suffering. We have fear and anger in the world because we accept it.

All that is required for good to prevail is for bad people to do nothing. Focus on a common good that stems from energy and willingness to work, decoupled from grasping material ambition. Hold your temper. Disconnect your jealousy. Evolution beyond the weaponization of technology will require a level of conscious thought. It may prove impossible. Utopianists in a hurry will try to slap together a rule book full of begged questions that they understand intuitively, but vulnerable to interpretation.

To begin the process at all will require a general consensus that we will quit hurting each other. That one step has tripped us up for thousands of years. Rather than reach the point at which appreciative existence becomes our mission, we endure the constant clash between dark and light, the good people and the bad people doing things in opposition. If that's what we're stuck with, there's really no point in going on.

Beyond belief

In the 1970s, the world seemed tantalizingly close to perfectable. Sure, we were still in the thick of the Cold War, but that was our biggest threat. We were learning about the environment and seemed to have popular support for doing something about it. That included acknowledging the role played by population pressure. So all we had to do was avoid nuclear annihilation and we’d be all set for a happy planet full of people who had decided to appreciate each other’s cultural differences rather than give way to paranoia.

Paranoia was not going to take that lying down. It must have convened a think tank with its allies, ignorance and greed, to plan a campaign to reestablish dominance over human affairs.

Conspiracy theory is the enemy of social progress. We used to believe that evolution favored greater intelligence and better planning, so that a diverse and prosperous humanity was inevitable. Magical thinking tainted our hopeful view. Human history has been nothing but cycles of violence interrupted by intervals of fatigue. The Second World War was horrific enough to scare us away from having another big one for many decades. The development of nuclear weapons helped with this. But now we’ve reached the point where nation states are toying with the idea of low-yield nukes that make the use of them a mere tactical decision, rather than the onset of the end of our species in a rain of hell fire. Quit worrying! We’re only going to obliterate a few small cities! We survived the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki with no significant ill effects! We can do this.

Paranoids on the right and the left post each other’s internet memes without reading them thoroughly. As long as the catchy phraseology says that everything is bent and that “they” are coming for your (insert item here) it’s The Truth That They Don’t Want You to Know. Meanwhile, the chief greedheads plan their military campaigns for world domination through strategic application of mushroom clouds.