Family Ties

What happens when siblings remember their parents differently? Dad was abusive. No, he was charismatic.

The truth is, he was both. What’s different is not so much our memories, as our willingness to accept the effect he had on us.

Many of us worshiped our fathers. All the more so if they were out of the house a lot and when they were home swung between playing with us and lecturing us, sometimes with a red face and a wagging finger.

B.F. Skinner first demonstrated that inconsistent rewards produce the strongest reinforcement of behavior. If you’re never quite sure whether you will win a parent’s approval, you try all the harder for it.

That explains a lot about how young children and adolescents relate to mercurial parents. As we age, we become able to see a parent’s erratic behavior for what it is, and stop seeing it as a reflection on our own worth. We learn that parents who periodically rage at children are the ones with the problem, not the children.

But what happens if you are a child of such a parent and he dies before you have come to that mature understanding of his behavior? Your emotional response to it is frozen in the time of your adolescence. 

When your siblings say, “You know, Dad was a little crazy,” you might offer that being a little crazy is the flip side of brilliance. The adult in you cannot hide from the fact of his inappropriate behavior, but the child in you still sees it as part of his bright sun, the one you longed to be in the warmth of.

The trouble comes when a sibling tells you that he hurt him. Emotionally and physically. Or your mother tells you he hurt her, emotionally and physically.

What do you do with that information?

Impugn the source, likely as not. He was weak. She was unstable. Secretly you might even tell yourself they deserved it. They weren’t as strong as you. He didn’t love them as much as he did you. It’s wrong for them to attack his memory. He can’t fight back, so you do it for him.

Families are a separate thing from the people who make them up. They don’t exist except in relation to one another. The good memories may be there, but the bad ones always come up. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

When these dynamics are at play, it may be too hard to keep going back over the past. Nothing is solved. Old wounds are ripped open and bleed as freshly as when first inflicted.

We’ve been taught that nothing is more important than family. Maybe that’s so. But it may also be true that sometimes family is not as important as the individuals in it.

How Much Am I Worth?

I recently wrote about medical treatments I would be receiving. I said I was grateful to live near a first-class medical center and to have medicare to pay for it all. I lamented that so many others do not.

I finished those treatments and got the bill. Or, actually, I did not get a bill. Instead, I got statements from medicare and my medigap insurer about how much was charged by the hospital and doctors and how much they were paid. My share of the payments was zero.

So, that’s great, right? Well, I suppose. For me.

As I write this, the nation has once again reached its debt ceiling. Now Congress will fight over raising it. Fiscal conservatives will demand spending cuts, targeting programs like medicare. I don’t agree with their tactics—and certainly not their rhetoric and factual distortions—but we need more rational discussion about how we raise money (taxes) and how we spend it.

My treatments were billed by the hospital and doctors at over $500,000. Under medicare, the providers got paid about five percent of what they charged. (My private medigap insurance paid another one percent.) They accepted that. As I said, I owe nothing.

Great program, right? A ninety-five percent discount. Let’s do that for everyone. By that reckoning Medicare For All would be dirt cheap.

Of course, it wouldn’t be. Our national system of healthcare providers may be charging too much, but they could not take a ninety-five percent haircut and stay in business. In a health system that covered everyone, reimbursements would have to be greater, which would raise the cost to government, which would have to raise taxes to pay for the added cost, or cut services.

You can’t get anything repaired today for less than market rates, not well anyway, and not for long. Plumbing, electricity, roofs, kidneys, lungs, hearts. When it comes time for a new water heater, we have to make choices. If our budget is tight, something less important might have to wait.

The same is true of healthcare. We see that reality in every country that has free healthcare for its citizens. As The Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want...”

As our population ages, we are spending more and more of our healthcare dollars on old folks like me. The question is obvious: are we worth it?

Even in a country as prosperous as ours, we don’t have boundless resources. We have to make choices about where to invest. In a child of five with many years ahead of her, or in a man of seventy five, who is coming to the end of the line?

Every human life is worth something. None is worthless. But is each one worth the same investment from the public treasury?

When put in those terms, the question answers itself.

Goodbye to All That

This was the year:

Putin showed his true colors…and Ukrainians theirs.

So, so many died, not just of covid but of drug overdoses, gunshots, long undiagnosed maladies, storms…and yet we carry on.

Crypto lived up to its name, crypt being a burial site.

The stock market reminded us that trees don’t grow to the sky.

Elon Musk reminded us that he really is a jerk, and that being smart is no excuse for stupid behavior.

China pivoted from zero covid to a full-blown health emergency, because “it’s the economy, stupid.”

U.S. tech decided it’s time to come home, because it’s a long way from China when you need your chips in a hurry.

Joe Biden settled us down and got a few important things done, so that Republicans would continue to have something to complain about.

AI showed promise on so many fronts…and lord knows we can use any added intelligence we can get, artificial or otherwise.

It’s been a rough patch, but we always do better when pulling together to deal with adversity. Let’s hope we’re smart enough to remember that in the coming year.

Thirty Days of Biking

I’m getting some medical treatments at Stanford. I have to go in every day during the week for seven weeks. As of today, I’m halfway through. For me, that mid-point benchmark is like the winter solstice: psychologically, my days will get brighter from here on.

I’m in no danger of dying. Indeed, the point of the treatments is to assure that, at least with respect to the current bête noire. One never knows when another might pop out of the shadows of my inner workings, but I don’t worry about that, I just deal with the ones I can see.

It’s true, I have to admit, that I’m not as young as I think I am, as I feel. But both my grandfathers lived to be almost a hundred, so I think I have some miles left, with, as Bruce Springsteen says, “a little touch-up and a little paint.”

Meg and I live in Carmel now, too far for a daily commute to Palo Alto, so some very kind and generous friends loaned us their guest house for the two months. We brought our bikes, and I bike every day to and from the hospital. I wear a garish orange jacket that cars can easily see, and that I feel the need to explain to the wonderful hospital staff is not a fashion choice.

There’s something about biking that makes my soul take flight. The effortless freedom of gliding along in the sunshine and fresh air. It’s my decompressor, both going and coming. I’m so grateful for it.

Which, since it’s almost Thanksgiving, brings me to the many other things for which I am profoundly grateful. For Meg, most of all, my lover and my guide through good times and bad. For my children, who are as attentive and loving as any parent could hope, in good times and bad. For our friends, like the ones in whose house I am writing this.

Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful for the chance to keep living with vigor and purpose. Both Stanford hospital and I have deep wells of support buoying us. A first-class medical center has first-class doctors and equipment. I’m getting the best of that. I have Medicare. Based on past experience, I don’t think this amazing treatment is going to cost me anything.

I feel a little guilty about that. So many people in our country don’t have that advantage. Medicare is only for old folks. Medicaid, which is for poor folks, isn’t available to everyone. And in the middle, private insurance can be hit and miss. If a first-rate medical center isn’t in you health insurance network, you’re going to have to accept second best…or third, or worse.

The way we handle health care in our country is inequitable and dumb. Many states have refused to expand Medicaid to cover more of their poorer citizens, even though the federal government pays over ninety percent of the cost. It’s hard to conclude they are acting out of any motive other than ill will toward the people who are on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder. And it’s stupid, from a purely fiscal standpoint, because we have shown over and over that prevention is much cheaper than treatment after health problems become chronic or acute.

So, not only do I get first-class medical care for free, just because I’m old, but I get to ride my bike to it in my ugly orange jacket, and feel the sun on my face, and the freedom of gliding effortlessly along the road of life that has been smoothed out for me by the lawmakers of decades ago who gave us Medicare. Forward thinking men and women who, sadly, did not fully succeed in passing along to their successors their common sense and compassion.

We can do better. We need to keep trying.

Mob Psychology

Crowd psychology refers to altering one’s views to go along with those of others. We may do this to win friends, fit in, or not look stupid. 

There is another term for this phenomenon: mob psychology. This conjures up angry townspeople outside the jail tossing a rope over a nearby oak limb as they demand retribution. If there’s a sheriff in the way who tries to reason with them, he might fare no better.

Or angry and frightened villagers storming Dracula’s castle with torches, crosses and holly stakes.

These are more than just crowds. They are mobs. There are fewer old west lynchings now, and vampires are confined to movies, so if you’re looking for a good old fashioned mob frenzy today, you have to go to a Trump rally.

There you will be able to cheer loudly with all the others around you at a fairgrounds in Robstown, Texas, when your hero suggests that journalists withholding the names of leakers should be sent to jail where they will be other prisoner’s brides; raped, in case that wasn’t clear.

Why do they cheer? Well, it’s simple really: they’re a mob whipped up by a master manipulator. Like Hitler. Like Mussolini. 

I don’t like Trump, but he’s just one man. Without his rabid crowds, he would be no more a threat to us than the odd eccentric on a soapbox in a public park telling everyone that the world is coming to an end.

Why do we listen to Trump when we don’t listen to the nuts on soapboxes?

That’s the million dollar question.

Social scientists and politicians theorize that he is speaking to the grievances of his followers, making them feel included and hopeful when they have fallen on tough times, or at least giving them someone to look down on and hate.

In other words, he is inciting them to hatred, often to violence.

He’s not going to help them. Those of us not in his thrall know that. He’s just using them for his own pleasure and aggrandizement. And they love him for it, for giving them purpose—hatred.

What is there to do about it? Many of us have thought his crowds would wake up and see what a fraud he is, what a false prophet. So far, they have not.

They are the problem—their weakness and susceptibility to being misled and abused—but getting rid of him is the only practical way we can deal with them. Without him, his mobs will still be discouraged and angry, even hateful, but there will be no one to gather them together in the torchlight and direct them to storm the castle (or the Capitol).

The unfortunate truth is that we are a danger to ourselves. For reasons I’m not sure we fully understand, there is a little bit of the mob in all of us. Lying dormant, waiting for the stimulus that awakens some atavistic urge that no doubt helped us survive in grittier times but which now stands in the way of the cooperation we are going to need from now on to thrive on our increasingly hot and dry planet.

The Queen in a Soundproof Cage

Here’s a heretical question: why is it considered a good thing that we had no idea what Queen Elizabeth thought about anything? Well, that’s not precisely true. We know she loved horses and corgis. We know she was frustrated with her family now and then. We also know she thought it her duty, for the sake of the survival of the constitutional monarchy, not to express her opinions.

She did a good job, both at keeping mum and at not blowing up the monarchy. With the ratty ermine she inherited, stained by her kingdom’s brutal colonialism and worn thin by the feckless behavior of so many in her family, past and present, it was a remarkable achievement. Her people loved her. Like them, I too was sad to see her go. She had pluck. She did the job she set for herself about as well as anyone could. 

Tina Brown wrote about her recently, saying the Queen loved her job and proved once again, along with Elizabeth I and Victoria, that women are very good at it. So, what was her job, exactly? Brown called her the CEO of the institution of the monarchy. That’s a fair description, I think. She was the boss of the inner workings of royal public service and of castles, lands, titles and pageantry, the glittering trappings of the time when kings and queens actually ruled. Some think the English monarchy continues to survive because it is good for the economy. Disneyland needs a CEO, so no surprise the monarchy-as-tourist-attraction needs one too.

Fine, if that’s all we’re hoping for. But it seems to me that an opportunity is lost when a head of state, even a strictly ceremonial one, plants their head, crown and all, in the sand. There are politicians aplenty, so we don’t need more of those. Indeed, deference in politics is necessary for the monarchy to coexist side-by-side with a democratic government. But Elizabeth II was a queen. Her opinions could have mattered, could have been a positive influence, a steady guide through turbulent times. I know times were different then, but we knew the opinions of the other two great women monarchs Brown mentioned, Elizabeth I and Victoria. We even knew Bob Iger’s opinions when he ran Disney.

Elizabeth’s son Charles is king now. It will be interesting to see how he walks the line laid down by his mother. Since 1968 he has been a strong advocate for action on climate change. Will he now pretend that is no longer something he can talk about?

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the English monarchy is that to survive it had to adapt to changing times. So, too, we humans can't go on merrily plundering our planet, metaphorically chopping off the heads of those who displease us. Charles has our attention now, and he has the credibility of one who is the head of a once mighty institution that adapted to survive an existential threat. Whatever the evident merits of his mother's political abstinence, it is time now for Charles to lead by a new example, one that continues to embrace humility and perseverance, but which also nudges us to face the reality of the threat to our home.

If I Had a Gun I Might Shoot You

If I had a gun, I might shoot you. 

Don’t worry, I don’t. I turned in my 20 gauge skeet gun to be destroyed ten years ago. I thought too many guns were a societal problem. I wanted to do my part by getting rid of mine.

Since then, with the flood of guns, practically encouraged by the Supreme Court, I’ve once or twice thought I might be the last unarmed person around. My self-preservation instinct runs pretty hot, so I’ve wondered if I’m being naive. Maybe I should be carrying.

I haven’t been in a fight ever. I got punched once when I was a mouthy teen, by the son of a waitress I was bitching about. (Never saw it coming; deserved it.) Every time fight or flight has been activated by my base brain, I have chosen some form of flight. Mainly because I don’t want to fight. Also, plenty of guys are bigger and stronger than I. It would be beyond stupid to take a swing at them.

But what if I could, in the blind rage that sometimes comes over us, reach into my waistband and pull out a gun? A gun is a great leveler. How big the dude is doesn’t matter.

I say “blind rage,” because that’s an easy way to think of escalation to violence. There must be something wrong with someone who gets in a blind rage, right? Well, maybe there is if we’re talking truly black-out rage, but there are plenty of states of anger on the way to that that are plenty dangerous.

Our amygdala goes into overdrive when we are threatened. It floods the zone with a bias for action over reflection. That’s how we survive. The choice of what action to take in that situation is based on an instant assessment of risk. Fleeing is almost always less risky, but men (I, at least) have a strong impulse to stand our ground. I don’t know where that comes from. It doesn’t strike me as particularly evolutionarily adaptive, but it it there nevertheless. States like Florida have even made it a legal right. 

I’m not likely to stand my ground if I know I’m going to get pounded to a pulp. But, if I had a gun…

I think you get my point.

We’re going the wrong way to arm ourselves. We are falling victim to our biology. It’s like not carrying condoms. We’re going to have sex, so we should be prepared. We’re going to get mad, sometimes very mad. The way to be prepared for that eventuality, though, is not to carry a gun. It’s just the opposite.

The Death of Me

Remember that old expression, “You’re going to be the death of me”?

You may not. You may have been better behaved as a child than I was. As I recall, it was usually spoken to me by an older relative. I never took it too seriously. In fact, I thought it was vaguely flattering, an implicit acknowledgement that I was too active, and by extension, too clever, for them to keep up. By merely trying they might collapse in exhaustion. Now that I think about it, that might have been my strategy. Not an actual collapse by my wardens, but at least a resigned relaxation of surveillance.

Well, now that strategy is being turned against me. I’m the sluggish old fogey. My tormentors aren’t my children or nephews, they are zealots pursuing their mad objectives as hyperactively as I pursued minor delinquencies.

They’re going to trash my neighborhood, but not with eggs, water balloons and toilet paper. They’re armed cultural vigilantes. It’s as if my boyhood friends and I weren’t satisfied with occasional freedom to do our private mischief but wanted to terrorize our parents and grandparents into never coming out of the house.

Need and abortion? Better not Google that. Someone is watching. Want to go to the corner grocery? Better keep an eye out along the way to make sure no one is carrying, which of course is going to be tough if their piece is tucked into their waistband and concealed by their shirt.

Want to call the cops for protection? Sorry, too late. The Supreme Court says it’s all perfectly fine. Like your favorite outrageous uncle might say “boys will be boys” when someone gets all wet from your assault with a hose. Except this time what is being shot is bullets and what we are getting wet with is blood.

It’s enough to make you just want to give up and stay inside. Of course, if we do that, we’ll never be safe to go out again. It will have been the death of us.

Roeing Against the Current

The roadsides of my youth were festooned with blazing demands to “Impeach Earl Warren,” the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court throughout most of the fifties and sixties. That’s the last time I remember the Court being so out of step with the citizenry in general, especially the Southerners who were my neighbors at the time. The Warren Court’s impeachable offenses were desegregating schools, assuring criminal defendants the right to counsel, reading criminal suspects their rights, and demanding that states’ electoral district lines count every person’s vote equally.

The Warren Court was an activist court, expanding individual rights and protections. The Jim Crow South wasn’t quite ready for that. I thought they’d gotten used to it, but I was wrong.

Embracing a new “Lost Cause,” they steadily chipped away at the progressivism they abhorred and finally packed the Court with a majority that resurrected the misogynist, racist zombies who had lain in their sepulchers these many decades, waiting for this moment like the undead in a bad movie.

The misogyny of the decision to overturn Roe is obvious. The racism a little less so, until you focus on the fact that it is primarily poor minorities who are most grievously affected. Richer people, mostly white, can simply travel to a state where, for now, abortions remain legal.

The same is true of the Court’s expansion of gun rights to permit guns to be carried outside the home. Everyone is a potential victim of gun violence, white or black, but the cities that have struggled hardest to reduce gun violence, like Chicago, New York and Washington, DC, are the ones where gun deaths are devastating minorities. Richer people move to the suburbs, behind a gate if necessary.

The social and political upheaval of the fifties and sixties, culminating in the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Viet Nam war, led to violence and bloodshed. Martin Luther King urged non-violence, but Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were more impatient. “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

As in Iran in the seventies and Afghanistan today, theocrats have taken over the United States Supreme Court. Christian morals drive their decisions. Our laws grew out of some of those same moral principles, but laws and religious dictates are not the same thing. Until, suddenly, they are. Until Sharia law in the Middle East. Until something like ultra-orthodox Christianity in America.

It’s hard to overthrow the Taliban. It may be just as hard to wrench public policy from the Puritanical death grip of today’s Supreme Court.

But we must try. We must take to the streets. We must vote in every election, state, local and federal. We have been out-hustled and out-flanked by the radical religious right. The decisions by their Supreme Court picks are a call to action. We must heed it.

Unless of course, you’re rich and white and male and like where the Court is leading us, or are too self-satisfied and insulated to care. 

Our Struggle

On this Memorial Day, I remember and honor the men and women who sacrificed to sustain the American Dream. Thank you.

I would like to say to those who gave so much that their sacrifices were not in vain, that we have built upon the foundations of liberal democracy they shored up brick by bloody brick, but I am ashamed to say I cannot. We have failed them.

Today in America we protect unborn life but not those living, breathing and dreaming among us. The guns our fathers and grandfathers put away when they returned from war are now being taken up to turn not on our enemies but on each other. When Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, we declared war and defeated them. Now, as we attack one another, we sit by idly as if nothing can be done. Worse, as if taking action to halt the slaughter would make us un-American.

We are at war with ourselves, and we are losing.

When I was a young man, the future was clear to me. We were making progress on many fronts: technological, economic, legal and moral. Prosperity abounded. Ignorance was sent slinking back to its dark caves. The troglodytes living in the shadows didn’t trouble me; they were a minority, and maybe they would eventually die out altogether.

It turns out, though, that like Germany after the WW I Treaty of Versailles, they were licking their wounds, nursing their grudges and regrouping for an all-out panzer attack. Their heavy treads are grinding along the streets of our towns and cities, where we have become too complacent to recognize their danger, or so bitter and radicalized that we welcome them with flags and cheers as the Austrians welcomed Hitler at the start of WW II.

I don’t glorify the past. Intellectually, I realize that in may ways we have never had it better. We have indoor plumbing, antibiotics, vaccines and social security. Emotionally, though, it feels like we are sick with a disease for which we may not have a cure. Feeding on the same hatreds and prejudices that I had hoped we had put behind us, it is resurgent; and not having recently fought it in the stinking trenches and forests of Flanders and Ardennes, we seem to have lost our immunity to it.

Recently, when I asked someone I respect which nations he admires, he offered that America today is the least bad. That’s not the kind of dream I had for us. And at the rate we’re going, I’m not even sure that pale distinction will be a lasting one.

So, to come full circle, to those of you who came before and gave so much that we might live in freedom and prosperity, I apologize for our careless stewardship of your legacy. There will almost certainly be another great crisis that stirs our nation to unified purpose, a time when we will again as one take up your war-torn banner. I only hope that we will have not waited so long to be stirred out of our selfish indolence that we lose this next great struggle. We’ve never lived in totalitarianism. I don’t think we’ll like it.

Something's Happening Here

I’ve just read that the latest large language model AI (GPT-3, not to be confused with the adorable but less understandable R2-D2) can write novels better than I. Well, I suppose that’s a relief. I can quit banging my head against that wall. I mean, GPT-3 can crank out a good one, in any style, in seconds. Who can compete with that?

AI has always been my unrequited love. So it’s appropriate that having stolen my heart she would also steal my avocation. She’s not going to get away with it so easily, though. I’m going to stalk her.

GPT-3 came from OpenAI, which came from a dinner meeting in 2015 at the Rosewood hotel in Palo Alto, where I used to live, attended by four AI pioneers, including Elon Musk, who moved on to electric cars, spaceships and tweets. The rest of them hung in there and gave us our new storyteller.

Palo Alto was always a fairy tale for me. There was a pot of gold there, and leprechauns, but I never saw them. Once I met the founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator on the sidewalk where we bonded over our mutual contempt for gas-powered leaf blowers. And my neighbors and friends were atomic scientists, tech inventors and venture capitalists. I knew them and enjoyed them but I was always just a kid with my nose pressed up to the candy store window. My own fault, I guess, for not asking where the sweet magic was made.

But now, suddenly, achingly, I want to know.

My son Nick was programming machine learning in high school, ten years ago. When he went off to the University of Michigan, we met John Laird there, the head of a prestigious AI lab. AI seemed romantic and fanciful then, futuristic. 

If GPT-3 is any indication, we’re getting there; and it’s damned exciting. 

What does it mean? I’m not sure. To quote Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

But I am sure that pretty soon nothing will ever be the same. This is our century’s Industrial Revolution. I want to be part of that. It feels like taking a prairie schooner across the plains; or maybe it’s going to be like the Donner Party. It’s a new era, though, and those don’t come along that often. It would be a shame to just keep going through the same old motions and miss the world changing as I tie my shoes and brush my teeth. 

This is a wake up call, for me, at least.

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Credit to the excellent article on GPT-3 by Steven Johnson in The New York Times on April 15, 2022.

Write Something

I need to write something. It always makes me feel better.

I wonder why that is. I’m under no illusion that it’s going to change the world, or even anyone’s mind. So why bother?

It’s like walking or running. I do it to stay healthy. It exercises my emotional muscles and keeps them strong and flexible.

My writing career started briefly, a punnish way to say I was a lawyer. I hated briefs, actually. Too much research, too many citations, so I moved over into transactional law, where I could write to be persuasive, relying largely on creativity and logic. 

Later, picking up on the fictions of my lawyer days, I started writing novels. Don’t rush out looking for them, they’re still finding their way. One of them will make it over the finish line one day.

In the meantime, it would be easy to get discouraged and throw in the towel. I’ve decided that the reason I haven’t must be that although I write hoping for readers, it is the process itself, not the prospect of engaging others, that brings me back for more.

Sometimes I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it. There is a crisp clarity about the written word, as well as a permanence, that commands that it be produced carefully, thoughtfully. (Let’s leave social media out of this, shall we? Nothing wrong with it, but not the kind of writing I’m talking about.)

To put it differently, a character portrayal is a merciless critic. Even as the thoughts are formed and go onto the page, their virtues and flaws jump out at me. Conversation, on the other hand, is shape shifting and ephemeral. In its inherent give and take, it is self correcting. And what was said is gone as soon as the hearer walks away, unless like a seed eaten by a bird it is pooped out over a patch of welcoming soil and takes root and grows, and even then it will never be more than a random tree in a forrest, which I suppose is better than being a random manuscript in a desk drawer, but not much.

So, back I go, hurling myself into the breach. I haven’t decided what the story will be this time. Or maybe I have. I always seem to write some version of a father-son story featuring a tortured relationship that leads to tortured relationships. There are plenty of those to go around these days.

My Daughter and Me

I don’t know what happened to my daughter and me. I think it’s my fault, but I don’t feel that, if you know what I mean. Maybe it’s just too hard to imagine that I have completely alienated her.

I want to fix it, but I have been spectacularly bad at that for decades. Not her early years, perhaps, or so I want to believe. Those seemed pleasant, idyllic, even; ballet, Indian Princesses, Laura Ashley. I worked too much, and the tension between her mother and me didn’t bring out my best side, but I loved my children, and I thought I was a good dad.

I wasn’t that great, obviously, as I missed something terrible happening to my daughter. Many years into her adulthood, she told me that when she was nine she started having anxiety attacks. An elementary school teacher told her class that when they heard an airplane overhead there was a not insignificant chance it was a Russian bomber coming to drop the big one. This was a good while after the Cuban missile crisis (when such a scenario was indeed possible), long after the duck-and-cover drills of my own youth, so I don’t know where this guy was coming from. It was California in the seventies; he was a little off the grid, I think.

But he made a big impression on my daughter. She didn’t tell me she was suffering. I don't think she told anyone. But I should have seen it.

She has struggled with anxiety ever since. She is so smart and talented, though, that for years she could, as far as others were concerned, power through it; or at least coexist with it. She was a drama star in high school, college and graduate school in New York. She even acted off Broadway for a few years before she came back to L.A. to try film.

That’s when the wheels came off. They had been wobbly, but she could keep herself on the road. As a struggling actress in L.A., she crashed through the guardrails. Multiple guardrails.

I need to say here that I divorced her mother when she was fifteen. I wanted to tell her before she went off to ballet camp in Boston that summer, but her mother told me not to spoil the camp for her. She came home from that trip with a t-shirt for me that said “World’s Greatest Dad.” That claim to fame obviously didn’t last too long.

My divorce from her mother was the beginning of something like my divorce from my daughter. I wanted to spend time with her, but she felt her mother needed her more. 

So the years went by with occasional visits and phone calls, but not much more. 

Then her anxiety began taking a more serious emotional and physical toll. I wanted to help, but my suggestions (especially for treatment) weren’t well received, particularly by her mother, with whom she was living. To her mom, my role was to send money and shut up. I did that for a while, but when my daughter kept getting worse, I thought a change of course was warranted. Her mother didn’t, and neither did she. So that was that.

There ensued, as anyone could have predicted, bitterness and disillusionment as a result of my failure to play my designated role. These led eventually to estrangement. Which apparently is where we are now.

I know I’ve screwed up, but I’m not sure exactly how. I’m certain my ex wife could tell me, but she has refused to speak to me since our divorce. Literally. Thirty five years now. So there’s been no concerned-parent collaboration about how to help our daughter. None. Zero.

I hope she, both of them, know what they’re doing. I don’t like being shut out. I miss my daughter. But more than anything I want her to find a way to get better.

***

(Afterword: After I wrote this, I looked back at this blog and found I had written almost the same piece five months ago. This proves two things: I’m quite disturbed by this estrangement, and I don’t have a very good memory.)

One of Us Must be Wrong

 Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.

        —Dire Straits, “Industrial Disease”

We’re a little too sure of ourselves these days. Some call it polarization. I call it laziness. It’s easy to have opinions, harder to be informed.

“I’ve done my own research,” is a common rebuttal when confronted with an uncomfortable truth. There is little point insisting that reading around on the internet until you find opinions or “facts” you agree with is not research. They know that. They don’t care. It’s not so much that they believe the absurdities they’ve dug up, it’s just that they don’t want to think about it. They know what they believe, and that’s that.

According to a new poll by CNN, half of voters think that elections now don’t reflect the will of the people. And they think a future election will be overturned for that reason.

So we’re not talking about the isolated views of a drunk uncle at a family gathering. This is half of us.

We’ve been here before: the sixties, both of them, in two centuries. It wasn’t pretty either time (the first far worse, of course), but we recovered. We’ll recover from this paroxysm too. Survival is a basic driver of all species. I thought we’d evolved beyond survival of the fittest to something more communal, but maybe not. Maybe only the most brutal will come through this crisis. Maybe the weakest will have to die, at least politically. We’ll see.

The root of the problem we’re having once again (or still) isn’t ideology, it’s a lack of empathy and humility. Empathy helps us see things from the points of view of others. Humility helps us accept that we don’t know what we don’t know…and that we may be wrong about what we think we do know.

In a life or death struggle, empathy and humility probably aren’t going to defeat your enemy. Maybe that’s why they don’t seem to be as deeply programmed into our behavior as fight or flight. They are the idle pastimes of philosophers, pointy-headed pedants in ivory towers, not the stuff of doers who make things happen.

That may be true. The problem is that without empathy and humility, the doers are making the wrong things happen.

Civil War Medicine

We're all sick of it. Being locked in our houses, locked out of the lives of those we love. I just want to walk out the door and keep going. Except for the getting sick and dying part.

If I can’t just up and run, at least I want to think about what we’re doing to make it better so that one day we can get back to normal. I want to read thoughtful pieces by sensible people thinking out loud about how best to work our way through this. I don’t want to fight about it. We’re not the enemy, COVID is.

Except that’s not true, is it? We are the enemy. For both understandable and baffling reasons we can’t all agree on what to do. Vaccinate? Mask up? Send the kids to school? Go back to work at the office?

The science isn’t all that hard. Yes, get vaccinated. Yes, wear masks in many situations. Be careful and plod along until this thing runs out of hosts. Support each other in the process so that as many of us as possible, people and businesses, survive.

So, where does a program of giving unemployment benefits to those who are fired from their jobs because they refuse to get vaccinated, recently adopted by five or six southern states, fit into that plan? Doesn’t that just give people an incentive to do exactly the wrong thing for the common good?

Yes, of course it does.

So, why?

Well, I think you know the answer to that.

A virus worse than COVID has infected us. Its symptoms are a kind of rabies like madness. Those suffering from it are determined to do what they damn well please, no matter the cost to others. 

We’d never have won WW II with that attitude. We’d never have pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression with that selfishness.

And we won’t beat COVID that way. The misery will be prolonged in the name of personal freedom. 

To Make America Great Again, we must purge it. That seems to be the thinking, if you can call it that. The country has a sepsis of liberalism that is poisoning our freedoms.

What doctors often have to do to treat sepsis is cut off limbs. Where should we start? Hands or feet?

A Helping Hand

How do you help someone you feel you should help, you want to help, but whom you fear has a problem only they can solve? What are the limits of emotional support? Of financial support? When are you helping and when are you enabling poor choices?

Joe Manchin doesn’t want us to become an entitlement society. Maybe that’s a sincere conservative belief of his, or maybe it’s an excuse to look away from people in need. 

When I know someone who is obviously in trouble with addiction, am I just making excuses for doing nothing when I say they are the only one who can help themselves? “They have to hit bottom” we say. The bottom of what? Their graves?

Two very close members of my family struggled with alcohol and drugs. I rushed to the rescue of both of them, taking them to rehab, helping them find better doctors. Maybe I helped them in the moment, but both continued to struggle for years longer. Other people did what they could. A friend sponsored one in AA. A spouse said they were leaving if things didn’t change.

We want to fix things for people who need help. We want to give them money and tell them to spend it wisely and get back on the right track. When they don’t, we’re disappointed. Often we give up. We gave them a chance to get better, we say to ourselves. It’s out of our hands if they didn’t want to take it.

What makes people change? The conventional wisdom, a term coined a half century ago by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is that people don’t change until they have to. Until the need for change hits them in the face. 

Galbraith was right. Our foot-dragging on dealing with climate change is a good example. In the business world, where change often comes fast, company after company has doggedly clung to its comfortable old ways until the last one out of the plant turned out the lights forever.

What was the tipping point for my family members who needed to change or die? They did get pretty low, so maybe they proved Galbraith’s point. But along the way, help from friends and family kept hope alive until they were able to save themselves. Many aren’t so lucky. They have no support systems to sustain hope. They die of alcoholism. They die of drug overdoses. They die of poverty.

Poverty? That isn’t the same as addiction, you say. No one is addicted to being poor. But is it that different? Addiction traps you. Poverty traps you in a different way, but just as mercilessly. People need help to get out of traps. Someone to loosen the steel jaws so they can limp away and recover.

One of my family members told me that even when they were sinking lower and lower, words of encouragement stayed with them. They helped them get through the darkest times. They helped them make it to the point when they could help themselves. 

That’s what Joe Manchin is not giving enough credit to. It’s tough for people to change, tough to break out of debilitating behaviors or circumstances. It’s not a lack of character holding them back, as he believes, it’s just everything. The booze. The drugs. The poverty. 

Overcoming addiction and poverty—sometimes just surviving—is hard work. We need all the help we can give one another.

What if Everyone Crowded Into a Redneck Bar?

I grew up in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and early 60s. Black men stepped off the sidewalk to let white men pass. Everybody’s maid was a black woman. Sometimes they wore little white caps like servants to British aristocrats. The racial order was well established and taken for granted. The sexual order too: women stayed home and took care of their men and children.

The attitude of well-off whites toward blacks and women wasn’t hatred. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone knew their place and stayed in it. But in the country bars where the air was thick with the lust and free-floating rage of young men with too many hormones and too much beer in their bellies, things could get nasty pretty quickly. You didn’t want to be a black man in one of those bars. You didn’t want to be private-school white boy either. “What are you looking at,” was a common greeting.

I wasn’t allowed in the men’s grill at the country club, but from the times I was in there with my father, I thought it wasn’t a place I wanted to be either. Those men weren’t likely to punch you or cut you, but they were as quick with a demeaning joke about blacks and women, and Jews, as those redneck barflies.

That’s just the way it was in the Deep South in 1959, the year I started high school.

The other big part of life in the South in those days was religion. Everyone went to church, to see and be seen. The sermons were high-minded Christian dogma about the golden rule. Everyone prayed the psalms and sang the hymns. I can’t speak for myself, because I was an atheist even then, so it was all a bit like participative performance art to me, but my impression was that those around me were impressed with their piety and charity toward their fellow man.

When racism and sexism leaked out of the redneck bars and country club men’s grills, it washed up on the rocks of that sanctimonious piety. Someone would have too many martinis and get a little too colorful at a suburban party and the host would ask a friend to drive him home, bless his heart. Polite company wasn’t the place for that kind of thing.

So to get a thorough indoctrination in racial hatred and sexism, you had to go to those country bars or country club men’s grills. They were self limiting. Like a localized tumor that couldn’t easily metastasize.

But now we have social media, and we’re all plugged into it all the time. We’re drunk on it. And it’s making us mad. Perversely, that’s a big part of it’s appeal. Making us mad is a moneymaker for its sponsors.

Here’s what Roger McNamee, an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, says:

The problem is that the underlying business model of Facebook, where you bring three billion people onto one network with no boundaries and no safety net, then combine that with a business model that's based on essentially promoting emotionally intense content in order to promote engagement, and then add into that the ability to target people with extreme precision. And the result is that an enormous number of ideas that have lived for years at the fringes of society — things like white supremacy and anti-vax — have suddenly been thrust into the mainstream and done huge damage. *

I had friends who went into those country bars of my high-school years and basically never came out. Now it seems like we’re all doing it. 

Somehow we need to find a way to sober up.

______________

* Interview with Julia Chatterley, CNN Business, October 26, 2021