What If

Fiction writers are "what-iffers." What if the hero falls into a pit of despair. What if he falls in love? What if he falls and breaks a leg? You get to a point in a story where you're a little stuck about what should happen next and the what-iffing begins. When a story is boring, it’s usually because there hasn't been enough what-iffing.

So also a life. When you get to a point where you don't know what you should do next, that's the time for some what-iffing. What if I go somewhere where no one knows me and stay anonymous for a while? What if I ask his name? What if I sell everything, grab a backpack and hit the road. Like stories, your life isn’t going to be interesting, if you don't ask "What if?”

When we’re very young, we have powerful imaginations. I remember a recurring dream in which I could fly. For a long time, I thought maybe I really could. Flying becomes winning at some sport or getting into the college you want, then maybe a particular job. I’m not saying those aren’t good, practical things to hope for, but they aren’t flying. “You get what you settle for,” as Louise said.

Meg (one of my dreams that did come true) particularly likes a bit of writing advice Tim O’Brien gave her: “Have people behave in extraordinary ways to illuminate ordinary emotions.” When you come down to it, most of what we want is pretty ordinary. How bold we are in pursuing it is what makes the difference.

There are reasons to be reticent about taking some daring leap in life—money, time, other commitments—but often as not, if our lives are boring, our biggest failure may be one of imagination.

Letting Go

I was eating a burrito at a restaurant patio table on beautiful day when I decided to let go. Of my money. Some of it. A dollar. There was a modest older man at a nearby table who was politely asking passersby if they could spare a little change so he could get something to eat. I was writing, sort of, mostly letting my mind float free, and his quiet and respectful request floated in and out of my thoughts and eventually took hold of them. I went back into the restaurant, broke the twenty in my wallet and took him a dollar. I said it didn't look like he was having much luck. He said he was mighty hungry. He wasn’t thin or scruffy. His clothes were worn but he wore them carefully. His mustache was neatly trimmed. He didn’t look like a drunk. In that moment, I didn’t care whether he was. I didn’t care what he did with the dollar, I just wanted to give it to him.

I've seen a lot of homeless people over the years. I wrote here about one who became a family friend, a chess-playing street musician in Santa Barbara named Mason B. Mason. Mason was in and out of jail, but he played chess with my sons Chris and Nick and we all liked him and were sad when he died of cancer unexpectedly. There was a woman in our local park in Palo Alto who I saw so often I always spoke to her. She never replied, but that was okay. She died a few weeks ago of hypothermia. Her middle-aged daughter had been trying for years to get her off the street. She'd been a good mother when she was younger, her daughter said.

Most of the homeless people I see are anonymous. Sometimes I give them a little something, but I don't carry small bills, so I rarely reach into my pocket for someone I pass on a sidewalk.

I see them, though. I see them watch me as I say, "Sorry man," or as I just look the other way, pretending not to notice them. I feel ashamed when I do that. They'll just buy booze with it, I might think, to make myself feel better. Or I remind myself that Meg and I give money to Second Harvest, which feeds the homeless, and to homeless shelters like The Opportunity Center, which offers housing and life and job counseling. They're on the street because they want to be. You hear that so often you begin to believe it. Or you want to believe it. If it's their choice, it's not your fault.

I suppose some of my rationalizations are rooted in truth, but I don't like myself for thinking about people that way. I want to let go of that habit, that reflex. I want to let go of the cliches and stereotypes. I want to let go of my need to shape my worldview to accommodate my desire not to have small change jangling in my pocket. What do I know about those people? One of them might be another Mason B. Mason, a friend to my sons. One of them might have been a good mother to her daughter when she was young, a daughter who cannot understand what happened to her mother, why she sits all day on her bench saying hardly a word.

Homelessness is a dreadful state of existence. It is also a terrifying mirror held up to us, reflecting our inability to help one another sometimes, even our indifference to their suffering. When I gave a dollar to that man on the restaurant patio, I resolved from then on to carry a pocketful of dollars to give to others like him. Without judgement. Without fear. I don't know what they’ll do with the money. When you make a gift it’s no longer yours to control. A dollar isn't going to change anyone's life, but perhaps the daily giving will change mine. All I know for sure is that I can no longer look away.

When he was ready to leave, the man I'd given the dollar folded his newspaper, slipped on his jacket and stood and smoothed his clothes. He came over to me and said thanks again. He walked away a few steps and turned back to me, glanced up at the sky, where clouds were gathering, and said, "Stay dry."

Downton Days

I admit it: I love Lady Mary. And Mrs. Patmore. And Daisy. And Bates. Let’s see, that’s three to one in favor of downstairs. I don’t think I have a soft spot for servants, but the characters who appeal to me seem to be the ones with problems ranked lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I worry more about the struggle to make a living than the quandary over which gown to wear to the ball.

As entertaining as it is, watching Downton Abbey is beginning to annoy me; or perhaps I should say discourage me. Why are we so fascinated with the aristocracy? Why do we care about them at all? Sure, they’re people; they have problems like we all do. Sort of. It’s too bad for Lady Edith that she went from ugly duckling to pregnant pariah without ever passing through the swan stage. But she’s not going to have to work two jobs or queue up for food stamps to get by as a single mother. She’ll board the wee bairn on the estate and go back to afternoon tea served by Carson and that conniving Thomas we all love to hate.

There have always been classes. Some societies—notably Britain and India—formalized them. They didn’t just tolerate them, they maintained that one person’s dominion over another was a natural right. It is less popular these days to codify superiority, but as part of the human condition class is sticky. Even when nations have violently thrown off the shackles of caste—as in Bolshevik Russia and Red China—the ensuing totalitarianism ushered in not an egalitarian utopia but rather a concentration of power and privilege on a lofty peak overlooking a thickening fog of paucity and suffering. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about a capitalist “democracy” like ours is that at least there is no dictator.

It seems odd to me, if perhaps historically inevitable, that a country like the United States, which was founded by hearty individualists breaking free of their feudal fates, has come to look more like nineteenth-century England’s realm of landed gentry than a wide-open new world of prairie schooners and gold rushes. We’ve run out of easily accessible opportunity—land and natural resources—and we are stratifying. Our economic institutions (and, through them, our political structures) are becoming the domain of a plutocracy that is consolidating power and building deregulated walls and untaxed moats to defend it.

I’m not foolish enough to wish for Marxism. I’ve read what Stalin did in Russia. I saw the newspaper accounts of Mao’s purge of China’s intellectuals in his cultural revolution. But still it pains me to see Bates putting on Lord Grantham’s cufflinks. It doesn’t seem right that one group should be subordinate to another. I know how it happens; I understand the driving economic and cultural forces behind it, the apparent inevitability of our tendency to rank ourselves (and our universities) one against the other, but it doesn’t seem right.

Utopia germinates in revolution but always seems to end up being bastardized by political or economic bullies. I suppose I think that, among large pluralistic cultures, the United States still offers the best hope for us to live together in comparative equality. There’s no getting around the privilege of money, but I hope we can avoid the snobbish entitlement that baronies and duchies carried with them in the run-up to Downton Abbey, when a lady of the manor falling for a chauffeur was an epic scandal.

There is an insulation that goes with economic privilege that dehumanizes those of lower classes. They become takers and parasites. Mitt Romney’s forty seven percent. Unworthy even to participate in governance, at least by the reckoning of the rich venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who recently proposed that only the rich should vote. When we look upon one another that way, utopia seems a long way off.

There have always been rich snobs, and will ever be. What I fear now, as we return politically and economically to something like the Gilded Age, is that we are losing sight of the notion that a rich snob is not a good thing to be.

The Habit of Achievement

Two of my grandchildren (I know, it's shocking to me too) are competitive swimmers. They swam this past weekend in the Georgia State Championships and did well. I was talking to my son Grant, their dad, and saying how great it was, and he said it was nothing compared to the news that same day from one of my other sons about his grad school plans. Grant was just being generous, and modest, but it struck me that what he said wasn’t true. What his little swimmers were doing in that noisy pool, among the excitement and commotion of parents and peers, was as important as anything they would ever do. They were laying a cornerstone in the foundation of character: the habit of achievement.

The next day I was talking to my oldest son, whose children are budding musicians, one a pianist the other a violinist. He said his daughter’s violin teacher has a patient way of emphasizing a step-by-step approach. It made me think of something a recent Olympic gold medalists (Mikella Shiffrin, as I recall) said about her approach to slalom racing: she focuses on the process, each movement, step and turn. The cumulative result takes care of itself.

I read a piece in The New York Times recently that, in the old debate over nature vs. nurture, came down on the side of nature. Recent studies suggest genes are destiny. Which leaves me with mixed feelings: oh, good, I couldn't have screwed them up too badly by denying them video games and dispensing occasional ranting lectures; vs., what was the point of all that diligent parenting, anyway?

Well, it was fun. That's one thing. I know that because I miss them. And when they achieve something cool, I, like presidents and governors, always give myself a lot of credit, even though I know I don't deserve it. I know this because I never even did their homework for them. But now I've come up with something to hang onto, something that, now that I consider it, I wish I had thought more about before: my pack-mule role in helping my children develop.

Achievement is up to the child, but enabling and facilitating a habit of achievement is something a parent can do. It's something we do out of love and perhaps some kind of instinct, like a mama lion teaching her cub to hunt for food. We get up early to take them to swim practice; we hang around soccer fields and chess tournaments; we go to their plays and concerts; we remind them to practice; we tell them not to give up when they get discouraged. We help them get started, and we help them persevere. Sometimes it takes a while for them to find the thing that lights their fire, but we keep taking them back to the metaphorical activity store. We rent pianos and saxophones, we buy balls and rackets of all types, we hire coaches and senseis.

Do you remember the feeling of realizing for the first time that you were good at something? Anything. It doesn't matter. Sports. Spelling bees. Magic tricks. Do you remember how empowering it was? Hey, I can do something, and do it well. It makes you proud. It makes you confident. It makes you willing to try other things. It makes you willing to take risks.

DNA may be the car, but it needs a driver. It's not going to go far with one who is too cautious, too unconfident. And it's likely to crash with one who lurches from point to point without mastering driving skills along the way. That's what achievements are: driving skills. Although, I kind of hate to think of it that way when I remember my moments terror as I taught them actual driving skills and tromped on the brake that did not exist on the passenger side of the car.

Why Learn?

My grandfather was one of the smartest men I ever knew. He was an academic with a photographic memory. He lived to be ninety eight, and I remember thinking when he died that his death was a waste of a lot of knowledge and wisdom. My father was a doctor. He was a restless man and a restless learner. He did the first intrauterine fetal transfusion in the South, to save babies whose blood cells were being attached by their mother’s antibodies. He died at fifty. All his skill in saving babies, all he had learned about a possible cure, went with him.

So it goes. Collectively, we pass along our knowledge, but individually each one of us more or less has to start over. We are born clean slates, waiting to be marked on. For a while, it is others who draw our lines, but it isn't long before we take over the effort ourselves. At that point, our life-long quest for things we want to know begins.

We build skills. We build understanding and reasoning. We go out into the world and use what we have learned to make money, make love, make art, make bridges and mobile apps. In our prime, we are machine learners, applying our CPUs to the task of learning what we need to know to do what we want to do; doing it, learning more, refining our skills, learning still more, becoming accomplished.

At some point we slow down. We make enough money. We tire of a passion and get antsy for change. We move on. We learn again. We do again, or maybe we just keep learning, not altogether certain what to do with the knowledge we are gaining, yet still as thirsty for it as one too long in a wasteland.

I found a new science feed for Flipboard, and you would have thought I discovered electricity. I'm not going to be a scientist—I suppose I have to finally admit that—but wow, is there ever a lot of cool stuff out there. The great thing about being a writer is that I can rationalize that anything I learn might be useful to my writing. I'm no longer limited in time or interest to “useful knowledge,” like the corporate tax and securities laws I had to study back in the day. Anything I want to know now, however arcane, is fair game.

Of course, I made better use of my narrower field of inquiry when I was a lawyer. Everything I learned had a purpose. I was like a giant processing machine: laws and regulations in the hopper, loopholes and evasions in the output tray. It was obvious to me why I was learning then. But why now?

I don't know the answer to that. This isn't one of those essays with an answer. The question is more or less its own answer I suppose. Or is that just the lawyer in me peeking out, offering a clever but meaningless aphorism?

I seem to need to learn in the same way I need to exercise. In both cases, I feel crappy if I don't. In both, the effort is exhilarating and frustrating. Too late to be a Nobel scientist. Too late for the Olympics. But still I love the effort. I even like the frustration. When I can't run as far as I want to, it just makes me want to try harder. When I see a policy issue that I think is getting mangled, it makes me want to write an essay. I'm not racing anyone but myself at this point, but still I put in the miles.

We're a curious lot, we humans. Both figuratively and literally. We're capable of great kindness and cruelty, great art and ugliness, great discovery and, now and then, especially when we don’t like what we hear, stubborn ignorance. It is our curiosity, though, that has gotten us where we are. It propels us. It is our heart. It keeps pumping until we die. And the parts of us we pass along to our children pump in them, fueling the unbroken quest that is our humanity.

Hooking Up the Freight Trains

Meg and I have these friends in Santa Barbara who are like Russian nesting dolls: you keep opening them up and finding more surprises inside. Melodie is a successful mystery writer, but in another life she was a dazzling actress. She even starred with my hero (as a cowboy, not a politico) Clint Eastwood. He was a little stiff, she said (no doubt struck speechless by her beauty); she told her husband, Bones, she didn’t think Clint would make it as an actor.

Bones is a drummer for occasional gigs in Santa Barbara, but in those days he was a renowned music producer. At their house his gold records are hung inconspicuously in a hallway, but his Grammy for producing the Fifth Dimension’s “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” is in the living room. He said it isn’t the original Grammy; that one was made of pot metal that fell apart, so they replaced it for him. It’s not that big, about the size of a water pitcher, but it is stunning. I asked him to tell me the story of how the song was made.

He was working with the Fifth Dimension at the time, and they told him they wanted to record “The Age of Aquarius,” from the rock opera “Hair.” He went to see the show, but when he heard “Aquarius” his reaction was that it was only half a song. He didn’t see how it could work. The play went on, and after a while a guy swings out over the audience on a rope (probably naked, like most of the cast was), singing the opening of “Failures of the Flesh,” which ended with the repeating chorus of “Let the Sunshine In.”

That chorus stuck with him, and after the show he got the idea to make it the missing second half of “Aquarius.” How can you fade them together? someone asked. “I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m going to hook them up like freight trains.”

They recorded in several cities, including Las Vegas, where the Fifth Dimension was opening for Frank Sinatra. The studio was near the train tracks, and their session was interrupted by an actual freight train. While they waited for it to pass, singer Billy Davis Jr. started riffing over “Let The Sunshine In.” “Save that,” Bones told him. “We’ll add it in later.” And he did.

The record company, when they heard the song, said, “This is going to be number one.” Bones told them he’d been around long enough to not make that kind of prediction. He said he just did his best on each song and whatever happened happened.

The song was Billboard’s number one for six weeks, won a Grammy for Song of the year and is, by Billboard’s reckoning, the 57th greatest song of all time.

I love this story because of its glimpse into the craft, creativity and serendipity behind artistic success. “Hair” was a transformative musical. The Fifth Dimension was a wonderful group. Bones married them for the ages. “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” defines the era of my wannabe-but-too-conventional-to-take-a-chance bohemian youth.

We had dinner with Melodie and Bones that night. Melodie had offered beef stew or coq au vin. We said the chicken sounded great, but that we’re a tad allergic to tomatoes. The dish was delicious, but Melodie teased us all night about how lame it was without tomatoes. When I wrote her afterwards to thank her for a lovely evening, and to ask if Bones would mind if I posted the photo I had taken of his Grammy, she said he would consent “only if you put a tomato in the horn.”

And so I did. Who am I to argue with creative genius? As much as his talent, I admire Bones’s advice for making art: Do your best every time and whatever happens happens.

Not Ready For That

My son Chris, who is studying to become an economist, recently gave me a book by Joseph Stiglitz called The Price of Inequality. A few years ago he gave me John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Last year it was The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, who was pretty much at the opposite end of the capitalism/socialism spectrum from Stiglitz and Galbraith. My sympathies tend toward Stiglitz and Galbraith, but then again I’ve never lived under the kind of totalitarian political regime that shaped Hayek’s thinking. One thing I’ve learned from my economics tutorial is that the more I know the more I realize how much I still have to learn.

I wonder sometimes what kind of man I would be if I’d lived in an informationless age. The printing press wasn’t invented until 1439. The telegraph didn’t go into service in America until about 1840. The first commercial radio broadcast here was in 1920, television in 1928. In the last hundred years--and really only in the last hundred years--information has begun to flow like water. Our thirsty minds have drunk it up.

In the early years, and for a long while, what was broadcast on national radio and television was, broadly speaking, the truth. The networks prided themselves on communicating the facts. Newspapers have always had a more local flavor, with political biases frequently on display. I suppose you could say that local newspapers, with their pluralistic perspectives, were the true progenitors to the Internet, where today every opinion is available for easy consumption. Indeed, every version of the facts.

For millennia people were ignorant because they could not get information. Now, with information ubiquitous, we are ignorant because we choose to be. I’ll admit it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, but it seems to me that too many of us aren’t trying very hard. It would be understandable if, overwhelmed by conflicting opinions and data, we just threw up our hands and said, “Who knows?” But that’s not how we’re acting. We’re acting like we know. In fact, we’re acting like we’re damned certain.

This is especially true in politics, which deals with questions that intimately impact us. The taxes, regulations and impositions on personal liberty that so irritate libertarians. Or food stamps and health care for the poor, which are, depending on your perspective, either our humane duty to one another or takings from hardworking citizens to subsidize freeloaders. There are opinions out there to support almost any point of view. Facts too, it seems.

Not all facts are created equal, though. Some come from scientists who’ve made finding the truth their lives’ work. They’re not always right, but they give us the best knowledge they have at the time. Then there are facts that come from those who have an agenda. These famously include studies funded by tobacco companies to show that smoking was neither addictive nor harmful. More recently, there is the dubious climate science funded by coal and oil companies. Or data supporting the bedrock Tea Party doctrine that the worst thing we can do for the poor is enable their laziness by extending unemployment benefits.

You would think that “facts” sponsored by people and organizations with obvious axes to grind would be viewed skeptically. But often we embrace them; we chose them. I suspect that what we are doing is choosing among competing narratives, competing ways of telling ourselves the story of how we are living on the planet and with one another.

Many things can cause us to be predisposed to a particular point of view. How and where we are raised. The tenets of our faith. Despite the fact that scientists view the theory of evolution as incontrovertible, it is not accepted by many who have been raised on the belief that their god created heaven and earth in six days a mere six thousand years ago.

These predispositions are part of us. Over long periods of time we may change our views, but we tend to turn away from knowledge that comes at us too fast, especially if it is disruptive. The severity of climate change, and mankind’s contribution to it, are, as Al Gore famously put it, inconvenient truths. According to Nicholas Kristof, more people believe there is evidence of aliens having visited the earth (77%) than that man is responsible for global warming (44%).

There are whole branches of psychology, anthropology and cognitive and social science devoted to why we resist change. Businesses cling to the commercial environment in which they have historically made money. Individuals hang onto ways of living and thinking that have served them well in the past, that are comfortable and seem safe. This made sense when our habits developed slowly and organically out of our interactions with one another. What worked was kept; what didn’t was left behind.

We are programmed, it seems, to go slowly with change to protect the species from hastily made bad decisions. But now the opposite is happening. We are changing our habitat and social order so fast, and on such a large scale, that the risk of harm is now less from taking imprudent risks than from failing to understand and respond to the consequences of our habitual ways of doing things.

We are not entirely to blame. Not only are we hardwired to be skeptical of change, the growing fog of obfuscation makes what is actually happening harder to detect. It hasn’t been that long since, at least as to existential risks, we knew what was happening. If your village was attacked, the threat was clear and immediate. You fought as well as you could, and if you lost you adapted to survive. Today, with risks like global warming and the increasing gap between rich and poor, we are more like frogs in the proverbial slowly heating pot of water. The changes are accretive, and the consequences seem unreal, or at least far off. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. Enjoy the warm water.

We all know the story of how Microsoft developed the dominant computer operating system and, when we were all using it, employed every trick in the book to keep us from changing to another. When threatened by Netscape’s Internet browser, Microsoft, to raise fears of system incompatibility, programmed random error messages to pop up on any computer with Netscape installed. “FUD,” Joseph Stiglitz calls the strategy: fear, uncertainty and doubt. In so many policy areas today--taxes, food stamps, ethanol subsidies--there are committed legions out there flashing error messages.

When the Catholic Church jailed Copernicus for his heretical view that the earth orbited the sun, rather than the other way around, all that happened was that Copernicus had a bad few years in prison and human knowledge had to wait for the truth. Waiting didn’t matter. What we thought or did wouldn’t change the natural order things. But what we think and do matters now. We are changing the natural order of things by warming the planet and creating billions of economic refugees. And while we dither and rationalize, the water is heating up.

Son, Go Out There And Be A ...

When I was eight, I sold Christmas ribbons and cards door to door. Then I had a newspaper route. A couple of years later I bought an old trailer for my even older car and towed around lawn mowers to cut yards. Finally I graduated to a real job: the graveyard shift at a printing plant setting up stacks of magazine sections for a long line of women who dropped them onto a moving clothesline, one section after another, to make up the magazine.

Wait, don’t stop reading. This isn’t going to be one of those stories about the virtues of hard work. I didn’t care about virtue in those days (except for being pretty interested in losing my own). What I cared about was gas money and the freedom it gave me. I tell the story of my industrious youth solely as a kind of CV for thinking about a question that has been on my mind lately. If I hadn’t gone to college, if I hadn’t left that printing plant, or the department store sales job that came after it, and if I had a son who wanted to follow in my footsteps, who wanted to be like his old man, what kind of work would I tell him to seek?

Of course I’d say, “Don’t be like me, go to college, raise yourself up,” but what if he didn’t want to? Or what if, for one reason or another, he couldn’t? He’d want to make gas money, then he’d want to make enough to have a family, maybe buy a little house, put something aside so his kids might go to college. In today’s economy, how could he do that?

Time was when you could follow your dad to the factory floor and make out okay. No more. Those jobs aren’t completely gone, but they are much less plentiful and many require advanced training. It’s not like when the country was growing like a strapping young man and all you had to do was show up and work hard.

Everyone says we’re becoming a service economy. Is that because we’re richer and can afford to purchase more services? Some of us are, but not most. Is it because we’re getting older and need more help with day to day life? Certainly the boomer bulge is aging. But here’s the question I have: if we’re seeking employment in the service sector, as opposed to making things to sell around the world, aren’t we sort of chasing our tails? I’ll come to your restaurant if you come to mine.

Technology is increasing productivity faster than ever. Unfortunately for those who want to work, the way it does that is by eliminating jobs. That frees up a lot of workers to go into services, but I’m not clear about where the money to consume those services will come from. It feels a bit like a ponzi scheme.

I suppose what I’d tell my son who didn’t or couldn’t go to college (and, increasingly, the one who was a liberal arts major) is that he should develop a skill that’s in demand. Be a nurse. Be a healthcare IT worker. Do something that not just anyone can do. Differentiate yourself. Education is one way to do that, but a skilled trade is another. If he said he just planned to knock around and see what turned up, do this and that, I’d have to tell him that wouldn’t be good enough anymore. There will be too much competition for unskilled jobs. You can’t make it in Christmas ribbons and paper routes anymore.

On Being Part of Something That Does Not Depend on Me

I’m starting to be able to see the world without me. No one thinks he will live forever, but the idea--no, not the idea, the feeling--of the world going on without me is new to me. For all my life the past has been laid out behind me. I could look back and see the road I had traveled and I could read about and imagine all the roads others traveled to lead to that moment. I could imagine the future, in a sci-fi kind of way--space ships and landings on Mars--but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t feel it. That didn’t surprise me. Why should I be able to see the future? No one can.

But that’s not true. I can see it now. It is, broadly speaking, more of the same. There will be changes, but unless we extinct ourselves (always a possibility), they will be incremental. There will be advances in science and probably even in democracy, but humanity is like water: it always fills in the low places. The day-to-day human struggles of a century ago look, overall, remarkably like those of today. In another hundred years, they will look the same.

I don’t remember ever considering what I was doing. I don’t mean ordinary things, like what to eat, whom to ask out, where to go to school. Broadly, though, from the beginning of my memory, I have put one foot in front of the other on a path that seemed to be one I should walk, the one laid down for me by the gods who ordain such things. There was no one else on my path (which is how I got a false sense of uniqueness). I didn’t even think about whether others had their own paths. I might have thought they were just wandering around. I was, at a minimum, pretty egocentric.

When I looked ahead, it was mainly to be careful of my footing or wary of the dangers that might lurk behind a nearby bush. It wasn’t that I didn’t have goals. As Rummy liked to say, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. And what I didn’t know was that I was never looking very far into the future, the real future, not some fantasy concoction. One thing seemed to lead inexorably to another: school to work to marriage to children. When you live that way, before you know it you’ve lived a lot of your life without wondering why.

Now one thing has not led to another. The path is no longer laid out before me. I’m looking up for the first time, as if from a trance, and wondering where I’m going.

Let me just say, it was a lot easier doing it the other way. I’m not sure I know how to make my own path. The problem is that I don’t know where I want to go. My life now isn’t about success or money or children. So what is it about? What am I about? When you look up from where your next footstep will fall, you can get dizzy. It’s disorienting. On a boat you watch the horizon to keep from getting seasick. For me, just now anyway, looking up at the horizon of life has the opposite effect. It makes me feel queasy. It makes me want to look back down. It’s almost enough to make me want to go back to practicing law. Now that was a time when I hardly ever looked up.

The horizon of life. What is that anyway? I can see all of humanity as if we were a great herd. I can see the dust boiling up from the savannas we have crossed and the lands ahead where we will go together. I can see myself in the herd, part of it the way a single blood cell is part of the flow in an artery, and I know that although I am part of it, it does not depend on me.

I’m trapped in a college dorm room discussion with myself about the meaning of life. We all woke up in the morning after those and nothing was any different, not even us. I don’t want to be cynical, though. That’s too easy. I want to figure out my place in things, even if it’s just to occupy my space in the great march. I’m sorry I didn’t think more about it before, but it’s probably just as well. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have gotten much done.

Lucky Us

I met a tech pioneer on the sidewalk in Palo Alto today. We commiserated over our distaste for a gas leaf blower that was wailing nearby. He gave me his email address to stay in touch. Maybe we’ll see each other again. Maybe he’ll become a friend, like my friend who makes atomic clocks or the one who writes code for new startups or the one who after a career in tech is getting a masters degree in philosophy from Stanford. I have to admit that there are times when I feel a little underpowered for the neighborhood, an intellectual impostor hoping not to be found out. But living here is like being a kid in a candy store of ideas.

It wasn’t long after we moved to Palo Alto that my son Nicholas met a boy in middle school whose father, an engineer, got together a group of kids to compete in a robotics competition sponsored by the Tech Museum in San Jose. That was the match that lit Nick’s fire: he’s now finishing college as CS/EE major and programming for a startup. Because the Palo Alto school district lets kids go as fast as they want in math, even to Stanford to take advanced classes, my son Chris developed a love of math that led to his career in economics, which relies heavily on math.

Nick and Chris might have found their passions anywhere, and I might have smart, stimulating friends anywhere, but it sure is easy here. As easy as a pick-up ball game was in my youth. Palo Alto is like a nuclear reactor with plenty of fuel rods. High energy particles are constantly racing around and colliding with one another, forming and reforming, creating energy.

There are other places like Palo Alto. Places rich in the fuel that feeds a particular endeavor: New York for musical theatre and (for as long as it lasts) publishing; Santa Fe for artists; Austin for musicians; Cambridge for intellectual omnivores. There are many other such places. Incubators, I would call them.

Often when I feel I have something others don’t, I wonder why. I used to think it was because I was so brilliant (in the days when one of the things I did not have that others did was humility), but now I realize I was just lucky to have been in the right places at the right times. I took advantage of opportunities, but they were low-hanging fruit. I didn’t have to be brilliant to pick them, only mildly hungry.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the vastly different circumstances in which we, rich and poor, find ourselves. I think about how we, as a people, bound together by a political system, can help those in need; and inevitably, as part of that, I think about the causes of deprivation. As the wealth gap widens, I have also been thinking a lot about how the rich get rich. What is their secret? Can we share it with others?

I’m not the first to note this, but it is increasingly apparent to me that those of us who do well are by and large just lucky: lucky where we are born and to whom. Birth luck is hard to share. I don’t know what that means for my desire broadly to improve living standards and opportunity, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Think about the advantages you’ve had. How important have they been to your success? Have many others had them?

2. Does having been born with advantages make you anything more than lucky? Does it give you any responsibility to those who not only may not have had low-hanging fruit to pick but who might have grown up in a barren orchard?

3. If you feel any twinge of such responsibility, what can you do about it? There’s always private charity, of course, and that is a good thing. But it is not sufficient. It does not reach all in need.

4. So what is the alternative? Nation by nation, the answer has been the government. In successful socialist countries (largely small, homogeneous Scandinavian states), most people enjoy an acceptable standard of living. Socialism is tough to scale up (in tech speak), though; and cultural diversity can weaken the commitment to one another that is a necessary predicate.

5. The great fiscal debate in the United States today boils down, it seems to me, to one thing: do we care about helping one another, or do we only care about producing the best environment for business. Business drives the economy, but it does not care for those cut out of the herd or left behind. It is up to us to support politicians and programs that have compassion for those who by birth or circumstance have been unlucky. We thrive on free markets, but they are not free.

Our luck neither ennobles nor anoints us, it burdens us. We are Sisyphus. The rock is heavy, it falls back time and again, but we must keep pushing.

Golden States

When I moved to California in 1971, it was the Golden State. Having been raised in the Bible Belt, I knew the streets of heaven were paved in gold, and California was heaven to me. It’s a beautiful place, but it was the openness and possibility it offered that appealed to me most--okay, that and the fantastic weather. I arrived with three small children in tow, and I had no doubt they would get a first-rate public education. In the decade before, Clark Kerr, the first head of the California higher education system, had put the finishing touches on a visionary education infrastructure of major research universities, state universities and community colleges that promised a nearly free college education for all who wanted it.

I suppose Ronald Reagan's firing of Clark Kerr for being too liberal (eg, too soft on the Berkeley Free Speech protesters), on evidence trumped up by J. Edgar Hoover, should have been a warning to me that even gold can tarnish. But I was young and optimistic. I hadn’t yet learned that progress could be slowed, or even stopped. I hadn’t learned that sometimes it’s one step forward and two back.

We did take a few steps back here in California, and sideways. Proposition 13 in 1978 starved our schools financially; Proposition 187 in 1994 laid bare a fearful cruelty toward illegal immigrants. For decades we had legislative gridlock too tough for even the Terminator to break through. Only two or three years ago many were saying our state government was politically broken and fiscally bankrupt.

But we’re back, baby. We nudged up taxes and cut spending, and now we have a budget surplus. We’re permitting undocumented children to pay in-state-resident college tuition and giving them and their parents drivers licenses and protections against abusive deportation threats by employers. After years of neglect, we’re pumping our new budget surpluses back into our schools. Under the Affordable Care Act we’ve expanded Medicaid and established one of the nation’s best health insurance exchanges (no small feat, as the federal government has demonstrated).

Our fiscal comeback, and what strikes me as our renewed commitment to progressivism, has got me wondering how we do it, and why we do it. The healthcare debate has been on my mind lately because of what I think it says about who we are. I can’t for the life of me, for instance, understand why twenty-five states have refused to expand Medicaid, even though they have to pay only a tiny fraction of the cost. They’re denying better health care to their poorest citizens for what seems to be no reason. Or a reason that could only be described as spiteful and cruel. Oh, I know what they say, that down the road they will have to pay more, but when you take into account the high cost of providing emergency-room care to the uninsured, most economists say they are just wrong. The states that expand Medicaid coverage should actually save money; and their citizens will get better health care. Why wouldn’t every state do that?

We’re a country of libertarians. All of us. It’s deep in our DNA, passed on from the Mayflower to the prairie schooners. We’re restless questers. When we don’t like the way things are going, we move on. That’s the urge that settled our country. But it’s a selfish urge. Just ask the Native Americans we shoved aside to get what we wanted. When we go questing, we do it for ourselves. We’re seeking something better for ourselves and our families. We aren’t really thinking of others.

Eventually, though, we run out of new places to explore. On the East Coast, where those who crossed the Atlantic settled, and the West Coast, journey’s end for those who traversed the continent, we’re piled up on one another. Even the most steadfast libertarian learns soon enough that living close together requires learning to get along. It’s no longer enough to look after yourself and your family, you have to look after your neighbor too. Because you know you need him to be looking after you.

This is the reason, I think, that our big coastal cities are our laboratories of progressivism. These are the places where we see what it means to live together. Where we can’t run away from one another. Where daily we witness the cost to others, and to ourselves, of neglect.

I don’t know how to explain the persistence of a social Darwinist conservative philosophy in the face of its manifest failure to provide for the commonweal. Pope Francis wrote recently: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

I understand the fear of the welfare state. I understand the fear of big government. A big part of me is as libertarian as anyone. But I don’t understand turning our backs on one another. I don’t understand the myth of self-reliance. I don’t understand the fear that keeping a child from starving, or giving her early education and health care, will create a culture of dependency that will suck the life force out of our republic. It is a hope we all have that we can be anything we set our minds to and work hard for, but most of us know it is a hope that is in the same category as world peace or universally likable relatives. Eventually we learn to settle for what we can get. And for too many, what they can get is too little?

Why should we help them? I suppose that is the central question. Human decency (morality) is one reason. And for many, it is reason enough. Self-interest is the other. Even if you don’t give a damn what happens to others, you’re wise to take their needs into account purely as a matter of your own self-interest. The French Revolution and the Arab Spring remind us of that. Our own country was settled by colonists fleeing persecution and forged into a nation in a revolt against oppressive control by the English aristocracy.

I’d like to think that morality compels most of us, but I don’t believe it. I think the vast majority of us act out of self-interest. The difficulty in recognizing our self-interest in helping others is that, like global warming, it can be hard to see that the current threat is great enough to warrant any meaningful sacrifice.

The mandate of self-interest is easier to appreciate in large cities, where we are jammed together. In the sparser towns and communities across the country, it is less apparent, and therefore more deniable. Like climate change deniers, poverty deniers may not themselves suffer for their lack of vision, for their tenacious grip on the status quo, but their progeny will. Theirs and ours.

What does that mean for those of us who welcome the renaissance of the Golden State? Perhaps the greatest service we can do for those in need here in California and across the land is to make our progressive experiment work. To keep open our hearts and minds while at the same time maintaining a firm enough grip on our wallets to be certain that what we spend is for investment in the future--in health, safety, education--and not wasted. The country is watching, or will be. What we do here will matter.