Monthly Archives: October 2021

Twelve Hours of Mask Wearing

This evening I had the opportunity to travel from my usual place of business in Binghamton, NY to the sunny port city of San Diego on the far side of the country and this continent. It was my first time flying on a full transcontinental route; coming from the Midwest I’ve benefitted from living almost halfway between Atlantic and Pacific until now. The experience was largely uneventful, though I’m humbled by the fact that this continent across most of which I’ve now driven (as far to the east as Boston, as far to the west as the Great Salt Lake) could be crossed in the same amount of time it would normally take me to drive west from Kansas City to that place in western Kansas where I’ve found myself within sight of the tallest clouds rising off the Rockies just west of Denver. I spent the flight reading a compelling story, checking my preferred flight tracking app, and listening to Planetary Radio. 

But the greatest physical reminder of this flight and this entire day will be the pain in my ears and the sides of my head from wearing this KN95 face mask for so long. I dearly hope we climb out of this hole of a pandemic we’ve dug ourselves into, and that my fleeting escapes from mask wearing as I took a drink of water would be signs of a future when we won’t have to wear these masks to travel. And yet, I worry that our relatives and neighbors who cry wolf about these masks so forcefully that events meant to be dull, like school board meetings, become events rife with danger, that these our fellow Americans are the ones whose actions will only keep these mask mandates in place longer. After all, we’d be further out of this continuing crisis if we were as a country more fully vaccinated. Being triple-vaccinated against COVID-19 myself, I know I’m probably safe, but the best way to ensure that is the case both for myself and for all the people around me on this plane from the oldest passenger to the youngest infant are safe as well.

I worry that in the fear-mongering of the last decades we’ve lost a sense of communal spirit. We’ve become suspicious of our neighbors who once we could trust. Any statement deserves to be questioned, so I ask you now: what went wrong? When did we choose to fear others before learning to appreciate them? And why don’t we lower our pride for even a minute and let ourselves lower our guard?

We have a lot of problems facing us today. Step one clearly will mean that we’ll have to at least start by looking each other in the eye and at the very least saying hello. It’s a start.

I don’t think I’m in New York anymore.

Shucks!

Shucks!

If there was a word that could fully express a sense of regular melancholy at yet another well laid plan turning out poorly, it is my favorite expression of this sort of sighing shrug of the shoulders: shucks! It’s a word that seems well suited to resignation and repeated failure, one that speaks to the lovable loser in all of us.

I often use “shucks” to mean many of these things. It’s a way of expressing a sense of humility in the face of great odds. It is the sort of Charlie Brown inside of me, the guy who’s just living his life despite all the failures and problems that come his way. Shucks then is a word that seems friendly and warm, a relief when I’d want to cry out in frustration.

All that said, while researching this favorite of exclamations, I learned its etymology comes from a portmanteau of two of English’s more ordinary and yet colorful words. It’s a combination of two of this language’s oldest terms, the noun shit and the verb fuck. It turns out then, that my favorite melancholic exclamation originally had both a fecal and a sexual connotation. Shucks!

Connectivity

“We were both thinking about food”

I often find myself trying to balance staying connected with my family and friends all around the globe and staying connected with the people I’m with in a given moment. Beyond even face-to-face conversations, even when I’m alone I find myself sometimes struggling to focus on one thing at a time and not let my mind drift towards looking up this or that thing, or to any of my social media accounts, while a routine moment in a TV show or more importantly in my work passes by.

Still, there are times when I make a strong effort at being present in the moment in which I’m living. I realized last night that I still hadn’t posted a photo of one of the sheep staring through a fence at me at the Ross Park Zoo here in Binghamton that I had taken on Sunday afternoon, with a humorous caption about the pair of us both thinking about food at once bringing chuckles to the fore for a few who would read it. While I wanted to put that picture out there on my Instagram story, in that particular moment I was far more focused on enjoying hanging out with one of my best friends who I don’t get to see all that often.

I think the question of connectivity comes down to a question of purpose: why are we in the situation where we’re in public among family and friends yet still hooked to every ping and notification that emanates from our phones? I’ve balanced that out by usually keeping my phone on silent, and severely limiting which notifications come through to buzz my wrist on my smartwatch. If the person who those notifications are meant to attract is me, then they don’t need to be heard by anyone else around me.

Further, when I’m in a situation where I really do need to focus on what’s going on in the room, say in a class or a concert or at a religious service, then I’ll turn on the “Do not disturb” feature on my watch and let any notifications that come through queue up on my phone where I can look through them after that event is finished. I’ll often do the same thing if I’m out for a meal with family or friends; in that moment they deserve my attention, not the device in my pocket.

I do think these devices serve an important purpose for all of us today. Contrary to the opinions of some eye-rollers who are my senior, I do remember a time before much of this connectivity. I remember how hard it was when I was little to call my Mom on the phone when she was traveling for work overseas. I still do write letters, on occasion, and enjoy sending postcards to a handful of people when the idea makes itself known to me. But I certainly wouldn’t go back to a life before smartphones and smartwatches.

I think as with most of these new technologies, we’re still in a sort of Wild West phase, when there are less set guidelines or rules to how all this technology impacts our lives and how we in turn use that same technology. As the devices improve, as they become more advanced, more precise in their capabilities, I think we too will refine their usage. We’re not quite to the point of replacing a smartphone or smartwatch with the communication badges found in the Star Trek shows set in the 24th century, which are almost like speaker phones in that they can be heard by people around the wearer, but those people seem to have learned to ignore conversations to which they aren’t privy when the need arises. For now, when I’m taking a phone call in public I will use my headphones, in this case a set of Air Pods, which I’m proud to say contrary to common practice I’ve yet to misplace.

We’ll get there eventually. For now though, do me a favor and turn that ringer on silent during events, and keep the speaker phone conversations to a minimum in public.

Party over Country

Over the last week I’ve read a number of editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post about the longterm implications of the January 6th attack, written by such a diverse group of political writers as the Jamelle Bouie and Robert Kagan, which argue that as close as we came to a full constitutional crisis, to an actual attempted coup, the events of this January can best be understood as a prelude to what might well happen in four years when the next Presidential election results are certified by Congress.

To say that this is a depressing reading topic is putting it mildly. The implications of Kagan’s essay and Bouie’s frequent editorials about January 6th and Trumpism reflect the very real fear that we may be seeing the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War playing out in front of us today. An October 2nd article by the New York Times Editorial Board makes an even clearer case, bringing in the new evidence brought to light by General Mark Milley about how serious that attack was to the stability of our global security presence, whose calls to his Chinese counterpart have struck a cord on how serious January 6th really was.

At the heart of all of these editorials and essays is one common theme. At this point in our history, 234 years after the Constitutional Convention, our republic has reached a point where many of its citizens, and notably many of its elected officials on all levels, have begun to put their party, and in particular their own political ambition, over their country. There is a clear path forward to ensure another January 6th doesn’t happen again, but the political will doesn’t seem to be there especially among Republican office holders. Robert Kagan, a political thinker with whom I generally disagree, makes a profound point in writing that Republican officials like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, while opposing Trumpism in public, have continued to “balk” at the opportunity to actually do what is needed to preserve both the republic and our democratic form of government in the face of what is fast becoming the next great attempt by the Trumpists to subvert the electoral process.

I too am a party player. I’m a registered member of the New York Democratic Party, and yes while I have voted for a Republican candidate in one instance, I’ve otherwise solidly only voted Democrat. Generally too, I’d say the last Republican President who I would’ve considered supporting was President Eisenhower, though even then my vote would’ve gone for Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956. Looking even further back, the last Republican President I would’ve actively voted for would probably have been Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. All that said, as solidly Democratic as my voting record is, I vote on policy, not on party, and generally at this point in our history the Democrats in their own diversity of opinions tend to reflect my views better than the Republicans. There simply hasn’t been a Republican candidate since that one county commissioner who I voted for when I was 18 that I’ve actually agreed with more than their Democratic challenger.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how strong loyalties tend to be among certain groups, tribes, teams, companies, and parties in this country. It’s interesting to think about how we might be best friends with someone but we can’t talk about certain topics with them because of all the hot air that comes up whenever it’s mentioned. Different sports come to mind here. I can well remember what it was like being the only Cub fan surrounded by Cardinal fans on my floor in Corcoran Hall freshman year of college at Rockhurst. It also happened to be the last time to date that the Cardinals won the World Series. This fierce loyalty has played out in our politics too: people who are politically inclined are usually either Democrats or Republicans; they’ll vote blue or red and hardly ever switch to the other team. And when they do switch sides, is it a sign of being open to new ideas or of someone who can’t be trusted because they can’t be loyal? As long as we think of our political rivals as the enemy, our whole form of government is in danger of collapse. Democracy relies on compromise to survive.

Let’s take another angle on this. We Americans have an unusual devotion to our flag. You can drive from coast to coast and see American flags everywhere, not just outside government facilities, but in front of private businesses, and even outside people’s homes. Every time there’s a sporting event from little league to the majors we always start by standing up, hatless, with our hands on our hearts for the playing, or more often singing, of the national anthem. Whenever a veteran or their family is introduced as an “honor family” or something along those lines at that same event, everyone gives them a standing ovation, as they’ve deserved.

But how honest is a person’s patriotism when if you don’t stand for whatever reason you may have, or you begin to ask questions that are deemed unpatriotic and are harshly rebuked for not being as patriotic as you should be? How honest can a person be when they’re being threatened? I worry here that the obligatory nature of these mandatory public acts of patriotism are diluting what it really means to be patriotic, to love this country and its core ideals. I worry that making the act of being patriotic, of say unquestioningly supporting the military, making this sort of act of devotion something that is required of any good American citizen is dangerous because it eliminates critical thought and the opportunity to ask the necessary questions to make our country a better place and our political system better suited to our electorate. What’s more, I worry this forced, unquestionable patriotism opens the door to a future where it will not only be socially damaging to question the need for patriotism but even life threatening. Further, as we glorify the military as the one thing that can’t be questioned, we open the door for the military to be the only real authority in this country that would be accepted by both parties in the case of a full scale constitutional crisis.

I’m frankly glad that the Joint Chiefs didn’t send the National Guard or the Army into DC sooner on January 6th. Like the Roman Republic before us, our military’s headquarters, the Pentagon, lies across the river from our capital city, far enough away from the center of civilian political power that it can’t threaten it. As far as I’m concerned, the day when we do see tanks and soldiers rolling across the Arlington Memorial Bridge into the District will be our Rubicon. The die will be cast as it was for Caesar and his legions, and there will be no going back to the republic as we knew it.

I think the example of the Roman Republic is a good one to bring my main point home. We certainly aren’t at the point where we’ll have a Caesar coming to the rescue of the republic with the military backing him. But I do think our zealous devotion to political party, in many cases over the best interests of the country, the republic, and the people as a whole, is similar to the military reforms of Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 BCE) which led to the Roman legions becoming far more loyal to their generals than to the Roman Republic itself. This set the stage for the civil wars that would destroy their republic in Caesar’s time a few decades later. I can’t say who our Marius is, but it certainly seems that millions of Americans are now more loyal to individual politicians and the parties they lead than to the republic itself. The last time this happened our forbearers fought a brutal four-year Civil War. I can only hope that our leaders in Washington will have the courage and the honor to do the right thing and preserve both the Union and the representative government it has represented all these generations.