Echoes

When I was in law school, I was a bore at cocktail parties. I had few opinions on the great issues of the day. Why not? I was certainly opinionated—I couldn’t otherwise have survived in my father’s house—but law school was teaching me to learn all the facts before making up my mind. Easy enough in the legal cases we studied, almost impossible on subjects like economic policy and foreign affairs. So, no opinions.

That phase didn’t last. I have plenty of opinions now, but my legal training still makes me yearn for facts. When I was younger, Walter Cronkite told me what I needed to know, or at least all there was to know outside the C.I.A., and I believed him and formed my opinions based on his facts and my judgments about what would be good for society.

But Uncle Walter is long gone—I can still see him taking off his black-framed glasses and wiping away a tear as he told us President Kennedy was dead—and reliable facts are getting harder to identify in the torrent of digital news. It’s a paradox of our time: more information, less truth.

In self-defense against the barrage from unreliable sources, we tend, naturally, to rely on those we have come to trust over the years. Some trust sources that tell them what they want to hear. Some trust sources that have a track record of getting the facts right. Lately, the sources I have always relied upon, like The New York Times, have come under attack from those who are only interested in news that confirms their pre-existing beliefs.

So they have their sources, many and varied, and I read The New York Times and The Washington Post, both known for journalistic integrity and for getting the facts right. Do I feel superior? No, but I do feel informed.

Today, a friend and political sparing partner responded to a spoof I sent him about Paul Ryan’s concern for the poor with a suggestion that I make a resolution for 2018 to “spend more time outside the echo chamber.”

He no doubt meant it good-naturedly, but it irritated me because it's another example of the false-equivalency virus that's going around. I may be living in an echo chamber, but it's echoing the truth, or at least as close to the truth as I can feret out in this complicated and contradictory world.

I’m interested in economics, for instance, especially as it informs our choices on fiscal and monetary policy. I’ve read big-government advocates like Stiglitz and Krugman, but I’ve also read libertarian conservatives like Hayek and Friedman. It turns out, if you read the works of any of these brilliant thinkers fully, you can find plenty in each to agree with. It’s all a matter of balance. And the sad truth is, still, in economics we aren’t always sure what produces what result.

But we are pretty sure of a few things. Trickle-down has been largely discredited. And lower taxes aren’t likely to meaningfully increase GDP, not with taxes at current rates. This isn’t some wild-assed guess or article of liberal faith; it has been tried a few times and it hasn’t worked.

So when Paul Ryan, defending the current tax proposal, says lower taxes will boost the economy, what am I to think? This is what: he wants to lower taxes for his own reasons—to shrink government, for instance—and is trotting out old dogma that he almost certainly knows to be incorrect to try to convince us it’s a good idea. 

Plenty of people lie and get away with it. O.J. comes to mind. But that doesn’t mean I have to fall for it. And it doesn’t mean that just because I don’t, just because I go back to the studies that have disproved these theories in the past, that I am living in an echo chamber of mis-information. 

In fact, what I am doing is educating myself to be able to sort fact from fiction in the post-Uncle-Walter age. It takes more work than turning on The CBS Evening News every night, but it’s the only interesting and helpful way to consider problems and possible solutions.

"I'm Just So Lonely"

I keep hearing my mother say that: “I’m just so lonely.”

She only said it to me once, many years ago, but I hear it over and over in my mind. It’s a mark of how oblivious I was to her emotional needs at the time that I don’t even remember what year it was. Was I living in L.A.? Baltimore?

I suppose I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. She came out to visit once in a while. I went to see her now and then. That’s just the way it is with parents and kids living in different cities.

My father died when he and she were fifty. She lived alone after that, for 34 years.

Late in her life we were in the same cities again for a dozen years. I saw her often. I hope she wasn’t lonely in those years, but to tell the truth, maybe she was.

Loneliness is a funny thing. It’s a kind of desperate longing. You can be in a crowd and be lonely. You can have casual friends and be lonely. Close family is usually a pretty good antidote for loneliness, but that cure can sometimes be worse than the disease. Old thoughtless habits, old grievances. Sometimes you may want a stressful family member, or even a well-meaning one who is pushing you to do things you don’t want to do, to be things you are not, or are no longer, to just go away so you can be lonely again.

Loneliness has to do with living alone, of course. It also has to do with having too much time on your hands. Too much time to look back, to reflect, to regret.

There is no cure, I think. There are moments of respite—of remission, one might say—but once it has crept into your life, loneliness seems to persist despite everyone's best efforts to chase it away.

It’s a form of getting ready for death, I suppose. A gradual release of one’s hold on the world, and of it on you.

Mom died in a nursing home in another city, two thousand miles away. I’ve been thinking about her lately because it was about this time of year eight years ago that I flew with her to my brother’s hometown and had her furniture sent to the nice private room we had arranged for her there. She needed 24-hour care, and all she could have afforded in my town was something like a cubicle with a sheet between her and her roommate, in a place that said for her not to bring any of her lovely clothes, only a few sets of sweatpants and comfortable tops they recommended I buy at Target. 

I missed her and felt guilty about not being with her. I visited as often as I could those last few months of her life, but it wasn’t that often. When I saw her she always asked me to wheel her around to a cage of parakeets in a hallway. She loved their happy chatter and companionship.

A hospice nurse called me not long after my last visit to say Mom had died. Not from anything in particular, the nurse said. Failure to thrive, she called it.