The View From the Other Side of the Street

I walk a lot. I tend to take the same mindless route, because mindlessness is part of the attraction, letting my thoughts wander who-know-where. Usually they find their way to something I'm writing. Sometimes to DT. Too much DT lately, honestly. Not healthy. Bigly.

But I digress, in a wandering kind of way. What I want to say is that once in a while I walk on the other side of the street. When I do, it’s almost like taking a different route. I don’t do it if I don’t want to engage with my environment, to be taken out of mindlessness, because inevitably what happens is I begin to notice things I’ve haven't before.

The charming second-floor patio on a house on the side where I usually walk, set back too far to see from up close. The broad sweep of an oak tree that I usually am aware of primarily because it buckles the sidewalk where I walk too tightly under it to appreciate its sprawling beauty.

It makes me wonder what else I’m missing for being too close to what I’m used to seeing.

I don’t want to belabor the now clichéd point about being in a political bubble. I am. I took Fox News out of my curated news feed. Too aggravating. 

But that’s a different kind of missing. One I’m aware of. One I do on purpose. Every once in a while I visit the other side of the political spectrum, whether by reading or by having my favorite brilliant conservative friend over for dinner and light combat. I know what’s on the other side of that street. I don’t need to be reminded every day.

But this other missing, the one I am not aware of (because, as another cliché goes, we don’t know what we don’t know), is more interesting. What if I could walk not just on the other side of the street, but on the other side of the state, which, in the case of California, would be walking down the central valley. This is our breadbasket, the nation’s breadbasket. During the drought, the farmers were worried about water. They still are, but now they are also worried about who will pick their crops, since most of the field workers are undocumented immigrants.

Or what if I could walk through Kansas? Not drive through those golden wheat fields, as I have many times, but walk, stopping at homes and churches. What are they thinking there? Why are they so worried about their kids learning evolution and attending gay marriages? 

Honestly, these days I think I understand the concerns the Brits who wanted Brexit and the French who are disillusioned with Hollande better than I understand the growing fever of isolationism in America. The Middle-Eastern immigrant surge is huge and up-close and personal in Europe. Not here, though. I don’t think there are any Mexican jihadists, unless you count as terrorists the ones who participate in a-day-without-immigrants boycotts.

Why are Texans and North Carolinians so worried about voter fraud? Are they really? The people, that is, as opposed to the politicians who don’t get votes from the poor.

Do the coal miners in Kentucky really think their jobs are coming back? What if the jobs don't return? What do the people who used to do that work need to survive? How can we help them? Not sell them a fantasy, but actually help them. What do they say? Would they like us to help them pack up and move? No point in sticking around and starving, but moving money is tough to come by. And where would they like to go? Do they have family anywhere? Is there some place they’ve always thought they might like to try, some place where there are jobs. Not mining jobs, but decent ones.

What we have now is an intellectual dual between warring political classes. Bernie Sanders has his solutions. Never mind that few of them have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress, not just this hopelessly screwed up one but any since the New Deal and (almost) The Great Society.

Paul Ryan has his plans. He read them in a book. He’s a policy guy, he likes to tell us. But his economic plans are like Barry Goldwater’s suggestion that we use low-yield nuclear weapons to clear out the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

You can’t see the human cost from the air.

And you can’t keep walking down the same side of the street and expect the view to change. Or expect to learn anything new. 

The Petri Dish of my Life

I'm sitting on my back porch as I write this. A soft breeze carries the sweet smell of jasmine. The only sound is the chirping of a bird who is excited about something, probably spring. The rest of the world might not even exist.

Not the desolation in Syria, nor the starvation in Yemen. Not the migrants huddled against border fences. Not the refugees clinging to the remains of a boat in the Mediterranean. Not the jobless husband and wife in Appalachia wondering how they will feed their children. Not the cancer patient wondering how she will survive if she can no longer get heath insurance.

There are two worlds: Mine. The rest. 

My world is safe and privileged. Much of the rest is not. I am not rich, but I am well enough off. I was born into a family that was not rich, but it was also well enough off. I went to good schools. My kids went to good schools. My family is like an organism in a petri dish rich in nutrients.

If I had been born in Syria as it is today, what would I have been like? Or paid a coyote to smuggle me across a border? Or climbed into a boat to strike out for safety? Some from those harsh conditions do well; we all know those stories, those triumphs against staggering odds. Most do not.

Success is an accident of birth. I see that now. I didn’t want to believe it. Who does? If you prosper, it implies that you are not as talented as you thought; if you do not, it suggests you never had, or will have, a chance.

So we cling to the myth of individual self-reliance. Mainly, I also see now, it is merely an excuse to look away from the hardships of others. To turn our backs on them.

Most of us would not step over a man bleeding in the street and walk on. Most of us would not ignore a crying child sitting alone on a street corner. We have hearts. We have empathy. But when the suffering is not right before us, we have worked out with our consciences a rationalization that permits us to ignore it. 

The poor should use the money that they spend on cell phones for health care instead. They shouldn’t be buying potato chips with food stamps. If they really wanted to work they could find  jobs; they’re just lazy. These are the kinds of things we, even the best of us, sometimes tell ourselves.

That’s not the way it is, though. That’s not the truth. And deep down, we know it.

I’m drinking tea with cookies and cutting roses for the dinner table because of where and to whom I was born. I have no moral superiority. I have no claim to greater virtue. I was just lucky.

Does that confer upon me, and all those in government and industry who like me were born into nutrient-rich environments, an obligation to help those who were less fortunate? For instance, by making sure that at least in our rich country no one is denied decent health care? 

The question, when asked honestly, answers itself.