Helping Hands

My life of crime began when I was twelve. I was roaming around my suburban neighborhood with a BB gun when a police car passed by and then stopped, paused, and started backing up. I ditched my air gun in the weeds and did my best impression of a nonchalant walk. No sale. Dad had to come to the police station to retrieve my Daisy Red Ryder, and me. He’d delivered the baby of one of the policemen, so I dodged a BB, so to speak.

That was the first time he saved my bacon, but certainly not the last. I feared his interminable lectures, but nothing else. It was like being under the protection of the mob: there was a cost in terms of personal dignity, but no one outside the family could hurt me.

We weren’t rich. We were solidly middle class. Maybe upper middle class. Middle class had levels in those days. We had enough that Dad often delivered babies for country hams. He told those proud families who were down on their luck that he liked country ham better than money anyway.

I didn’t think our family was special. I thought anyone could be like us if he worked hard enough. I was a punk, but I worked hard. I had a newspaper route when I was eleven. My friend up the street had two. He was upwardly mobile.

Today, upward mobility has gone the way of my friend’s ducktail haircut. The middle class is, as President Obama puts it, being hollowed out. According to an Associated Press report last month, four out of five Americans live in danger of falling into poverty or joblessness. Four out of five! That’s not just bad for people who, no matter how hard they try, have little prospect of getting ahead, it’s bad for our nation’s long-term prosperity. The middle class buys the most stuff, and consumption is two-thirds of our economy.

My father died in 1974. I miss him, but by the time I lost him he’d picked me up and dusted me off often enough that I’d learned to stand on my own two feet. Looking back at that time, the early seventies, and the decades since, it seems to me that something besides my father died then too: the notion that the government could help us the way a parent does. The Great Society had been shelved. We’d come home from Vietnam with a national case of PTSD. Nixon’s secret tapes destroyed whatever remaining trust we had in government.

For a boy and for a nation, growing up is tough. When I think of all the twists and turns that led to the me I am now, all the one-on-one support I had, I realize how easily I could have failed. I see now that that my father’s steady belief in me, even at times when I did not believe in myself, was likely the most important gift of my birth.

But what about the millions among us who don’t have that support? Maybe they’re from broken homes, or from families in which both parents have to work all the time just to scrape by. Maybe they’re on the streets when they are eleven, but not to deliver newspapers. It’s unlikely that their father or mother delivered the child of the patrolman who busts them for doing what adolescents have been doing forever: testing the limits.

I had ups and downs, but I was shooting a BB gun, not a Glock; I was high on adrenaline, not crack; I had a paper route, not a drug route. If you’re in the wrong environment, not only is it easy to slip off track, it’s a long way down when you do.

We can’t bring back the post WW II manufacturing boom that created the middle class of my youth. We’re moving toward becoming principally a service economy. Instead of Detroit’s assembly lines and Pittsburgh’s steel mills, workers are needed now in the information economy, in health care, in technology, in distribution, in services for the aging population.

Government can’t be our parent, but it can help us in many of the same ways a good parent does. It can extend a hand to aid rather than punish. It can give kids a better start in life with good preschool and elementary and high school education. It can, as Attorney General Holder recommends, stop filling our prisons with minor offenders. It can retrain workers and give them the public transportation systems they need to get to their new jobs. It can give second chances.

We risk becoming a nation of two classes: those who are born into families that can support them, and those who are not. We don’t get to choose to whom we are born, but if we did is there any question which class you would want to be in? If you are one of the lucky ones, is the privilege and opportunity that comes with your accident of birth just your good luck, or does it carry with it some obligation to seek a way to help those who weren’t so lucky?

Many engage in private charity. They deserve our admiration and respect. But they are too few. Only through collective action, administered by local, state and federal governments--by our democratically elected representatives--can we extend our hands to the millions in need. We need to quit bitching about government and try to make it better. We need to quit talking about drowning it a bathtub and focus on making it a more responsive and efficient servant for our needs. Like a biological parent, government can be loutish, vain and wasteful, but for many, it’s the only dad they have.

Stacked Up

When my children were young, I was a philosopher, a moralist, a humanist. Now I’m a laundry-room consultant. Listen, if that’s what they want from me, I’m there. I’ve given advice to them for so long that now that they are all grown and on their own I’m seriously having withdrawal symptoms. I go up to random children on the sidewalk and tell them not to get too close to the curb, causing their mothers to take their tots’ hands and hurry away. If I see teens in a coffee shop with homework spread out before them that is being ignored, it’s all I can do not to point to their books and suggest they get back to work.

My son Grant called today to say that the laundry room in his new house is too small to even open the door after installing the washer and dryer. He and the developer are about to come to blows. Stack them, I suggested. Great idea, he said. After he hung up, I imagined him going online to search for stacking brackets and I felt a surge of the same warm satisfaction I used to have when I watched him play on the beach with sand toys I had given him.

That’s all we want, isn’t it? To be helpful. Well, also to be acknowledged as being helpful. And wise. Wise is very good. I was wise when they were young. I took it for granted, so it was a shock when I suddenly became a cretin. That lasted a few years, but wisdom is on the horizon again. It appears I will not return to the status of philosopher king, but that’s okay. I’ll take what I can get. Just knowing some little thing that helps is good enough.

I’m off to look for washer-dryer stacking brackets now, just in case Grant has trouble finding one.

Terrorists

I was sitting at an outside table, eating a sandwich, watching the pigeons and children, when a cute little girl with a tangle of brown curls caught my eye--and ear. She was not happy. She threw herself against her brother’s legs and wailed until he gave her his bag of chips. She sulked behind a post when her sister denied her something. She slapped her hands against the wood and cried and looked up to see what effect her performance was having, and when it seemed the answer was none, she carried on with greater lament. I was smiling as I watched her and eventually she began playing peekaboo with me before charging after a pigeon who needed a good chase.

Watching her, I naturally thought of terrorists.

We know that young children have undeveloped neurology. With too much stress, their brain circuits overload. Meltdown; clean up in aisle three. Mostly, their tantrums aren’t their fault. They can’t help themselves. Which is why it makes us so mad when we see some oafish parent giving their child a case of nursemaid’s elbow as he drags him away, the parent as red-faced and out of control as the kid. Sure parents’ have stresses, including the ones sobbing at their feet, but they’re supposed to be able to control themselves. They’re supposed to be patient. They’re supposed to gently show their children the way to get along in the world.

Terrorists are not children, of course. Some, like Osama bin Laden, are calculating and cold-blooded. When he planned the attacks on the World Trade Center, bin Laden wasn’t having a tantrum, he was acting out his narcissistic impulses without the burdens of conscience that restrain most of us. Men like him (and women, too, I suppose, although there seem to be fewer women in the terror game) are sociopaths. Most of the rest of us aren’t. But we do get very angry sometimes, especially when our lives are rotten. We get frustrated and start looking for someone to blame. We have a tantrums. Sometimes we get together and have mob tantrums.

When we’re lashing out that way, in angry concert, I think we’re more like three-year-olds than sociopaths. And we will respond to the same things toddlers do: patience, encouragement and--yes, it’s true--the adult equivalent of lollipops and ice-cream. Like a toddler, and unlike a sociopath, we can be distracted long enough to recover our emotional equilibrium.

The biggest difference between angry children and angry mobs is that most toddlers, the ones you see in the grocery store having a fit over skittles, anyway, get to go home to decent lives. Most angry young men bent on violence--whether gang or jihad--do not. A lollipop isn’t going to calm them down.

So what should we do? The most obvious thing is try to improve their lives. Do what we can to ameliorate the dreadful conditions that fuel their anger. Poverty is the biggest driver of hatred, followed closely by repressive government. Those are two tough nuts to crack on a global scale, but we should keep trying. Compared to the Middle Ages, we’re making progress.

What we should not do is respond in anger. We should not be the creepy abusive parent we all despise. It’s tough, I know. They say they want to kill us. They’re firing real bullets. It’s hard not to want to whack them in self defense. But their threats, while more dangerous, are not so psychologically different that those of the youngster screaming that she hates you. With children, we look past those moments. We give them another chance--and another, and another; as many as it takes. It seems to me that would be a good way to respond to angry mobs lashing out at the Great Satan.

In our daily lives, with our families, we’ve shown we can respond with compassion and restraint. We’ve shown that we have bountiful stores of patience, wisdom and kindness when we understand what is needed from us. Given the way the world is filling up, and the position of the United States and other rich countries in it, the poor and disposed of other lands (and our own) are no longer strangers. For better or worse, they are our children. And they will grow up to be the way we teach them to be.

Full Stop

Night slipped over the runways as we waited at Dulles airport in DC to see whether our flight to San Francisco would be cancelled. We had boarded, only to be taken off when the Asiana jet crashed on landing at SFO. Our group of eight, formed solely by physical proximity in the gate lounge, had been brought together, it seemed, to consider unexpected tragedy, to understand it, to adjust to it.

There was the guy who worked at the San Francisco airport. He had colleagues on the phone who were out on the runways looking at the accident to see how bad it was. Two people had been killed, he told us, but he thought that was not the end of it. The tail was gone and the front half of the fuselage was charred. The airport was closed. It looked bad, he said, and we all understood that he meant both for the Asiana passengers and for our prospects of going to San Francisco that night. He wore a dark purple shirt and tie. Who knows what I would have imagined him to be if I had only seen him in passing. He turned out to be sensitive and compassionate, and to know a lot about airports and airplanes.

It’s hard to hold onto tragedy. We didn’t have many facts. It was a plane crash, and we were all trying to get back on another airplane. Perhaps some part of us, of me at least, didn’t really want to know too much. While we waited we did what people waiting together, people who are locked together by troubling circumstances, do: we asked about one another. As if studying x-rays of our mortality, everyone wanted to know everything about the others; everyone wanted to the others to know about her.

There was the couple from DC who were going on a group expedition to Yosemite that was leaving from a hotel in SF at eight the next morning. They had trip insurance, so they had decided that if the flight didn’t go tonight, they would just stay home. He had sold a chain of service firms he inherited. I don’t think he wanted to sell, but someone made an offer he couldn’t refuse. I especially liked them because they laughed at my corny jokes.

There was the man from Helsinki who was on his way to speak at a big conference in SF on solar energy. He was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts and outrageously yellow sneakers he had just bought in Milan. He had a little goatee and looked more like a hipster than a scientist, but he knew a lot about solar. We talked about the Chinese push in solar. He thought that other countries were going to be able to back the Chinese off their aggressive dumping of solar panels. He was funny and irreverent. He made me want to go to his conference to hear him speak.

There was the charmingly modest couple from Indonesia. He was a lawyer and she a book publisher. They were on the way home and still had a long way to go. We talked about the kinds of books she likes. I told him my grandfather had been with the Ford Foundation in Bangkok in the sixties and had traveled to Djakarta often. He knew the Ford Foundation well, the man said, and the way he said it, with warm approval, made me feel we were connected by the efforts of so many men like my grandfather over so many years to help others.

We followed each other from announcement to announcement, from ticket agent to ticket agent, like college freshmen at orientation. After four hours, our flight was cancelled. The couple on their way to Yosemite collected their bags to go home. We all said we were sorry they had to miss their big adventure. For the rest of us, the scramble began in earnest. We had been allied in our waiting, but now it was every man for himself.

There was a long line of ticket agents. The one Meg and I got told us the soonest we could get out was in three days. The solar guy scored a flight at six the next morning. I thought of the Yosemite couple—they might have been able to catch up with their group if they had gotten that flight. Meg and I were looking for hotel rooms, thinking of making the best of a forced visit to museums and monuments, when Nick, our (practical) son who was with us, suggested we might get out sooner if we split up. He had just been on a tour of DC with his glee club, so he had seen all the history he needed to see for a while.

I got back in line and was talking to a nice agent who was tapping away on her reservations computer--as fast as she found a space, someone else took it--when Meg called me from where she was sitting with our bags and said that another United flight scheduled to leave at the same time as ours was still showing online as not cancelled. What about that? I asked the woman who was helping me. I don’t think so, she said, but then she checked and, I’ll be damned, it was still going and there was space. It’s at the other end of the airport, she said. You’d better hurry.

I about had a heart attack running to check us in, then a big slowdown---like slow motion in an action movie---while the gate printer broke and the gate agents checked us in by hand-writing seat assignments on old boarding passes. None of our new friends were with us. I felt like a traitor, getting out on the last flight through sheer dumb luck. I found out later that DC representatives from the NTSB may have been on the plane, on their way to investigate the crash, which, if true, was no doubt why it took off when others didn’t.

The next morning I woke up thinking about our airport comrades. We had been close for those few hours, almost intimate. It made me wish I could find out how they were doing that morning. It made me wish we had time—or could somehow make time--to better know the people we sit next to in coffee shops or ride beside on subways or pass on the sidewalk. The world—at least my world—would be the better for it.

Good luck, friends. Come back to Yosemite. Bring us solar energy. Give us new books. Keep us safe as we travel.

this is the way prejudice ends (not with a bang but a whisper)

When our son Chris was born, Meg and I went into full nanny-search mode. We were both still practicing law. We needed help. We wanted nothing less than Mary Poppins. We lived in LA, so I don’t have to tell you that what we got was a succession of nannies who acted the part but reverted to narcissism as soon as the director left the set. Among others, there was the proper English nanny who took Chris to her apartment for trysts with her boyfriend and let him cry in his crib while she soaked in our jacuzzi tub. I learned all this from Sonia Aguilar.

Sonia and Chris (with his shoes)

Sonia was our housekeeper. She came in a few days a week and cleaned up and occasionally made dinner for us and left it in the oven. She is from El Salvador, and when we met, she didn’t speak English well (or thought she didn’t), which, coupled with her natural modesty, caused us to be slow to realize that she didn’t always have time to finish her cleaning because she was taking care of Chris while the nanny was doing god knows what. Eventually we figured it out and I asked my secretary, who spoke Spanish, to ask Sonia to be our nanny. Never mind the language barrier, she clearly loved our son. I learned to say “¿Dónde están tus zapatos,” which seemed to be the question she asked Chris the most.

The parents of my daughter-in-law Yvonne were born in Korea. She and Cord met at Penn and have two beautiful children, all the more beautiful because of their diverse parentage. There is something in my children that attracts them to Asians. Even when we lived in Nashville, Chris’s best friend was of Korean ancestry. After we got to Palo Alto, most of his friends, and a big chunk of Nick’s, were Asian: Indian, Chinese, Korean. This must explain why I like Jackie Chan movies.

Our next-door neighbor here was a man named Art Fong. Art was the number six engineer at Hewlett Packard. He and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard all worked in one room then. When one of them had an engineering question, they called it out to the others. Art told me that in 1945, when he built his house, our street was the “Chinese neighborhood”--meaning Chinese could live there, as opposed to “Old Palo Alto,” where they were not welcome. Art used to come to parties at our house and hold forth on his engineering feats for Nick and his robotics pal Jon Xia. He kept them transfixed. The exclusion he had to deal with as a young man must have seemed to them as if it were from another era, not something that would have to be faced by a man whose patents at one time accounted for twenty-seven percent of HP’s revenue.

We had known some friends in Santa Barbara for five or six years before someone told me they were gay. Even though I have seen them with their partners now, they still don’t talk about it. They come from a time when that was the best approach. Nick has many gay friends from high school and college. No big deal. Meg and I see our writer friends who are gay all the time. The novelty is so long past that now, when I see the anger on the faces in the news of those who believe that homosexuality is a moral abomination, I wonder if I’m not looking back in time.

I think I am. Most of us can’t be around people and not develop empathy for them. Blacks, Hispanics, gays. It’s just a matter of exposure. It’s like getting inoculated against a disease. You have to be exposed to the virus. Maybe you feel a little queasy at first. But when you get over the initial symptoms, you begin to feel fine again. And best of all, after that you don’t get sick again.

Égalité

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

-- Anatole France (1844-1924)

The Supreme Court is struggling with Equal Protection again. One faction wants what is being called “formal”--I might say “literal”--equal protection of the laws, which means what it sounds like: no group can be singled out for better or worse treatment than another: black or white, straight or gay. The other faction urges a “dynamic” view of equality, under which in compelling circumstances a disadvantaged group can be given a leg up, even if that means discriminating against those who are not disadvantaged.

Adam Liptak reported in The New York Times on Sunday that the “formal equality” approach would likely produce good news for those seeking marriage equality and bad news for supporters of race-based affirmative action. As to affirmative action, we will have to wait for at least another year to see if that’s true, because the Court ducked today, sending the case before it back to the lower court to apply the review standard mandated by the high court ten years ago. This was a win--or at least not a loss--for fans of affirmative action.

For now, promoting student-body diversity continues to be a Constitutionally acceptable goal for a university. Important though this may be, it is a distant moral cousin to the lofty objective that gave birth to affirmative action generations ago: helping blacks recover from the privations of slavery and Jim Crow. No one even argues that notion to the Court anymore. As David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor put it, blacks are now viewed by many as “just another interest group.” As a society we seem to be worn out with trying to atone for slavery.

Some believe that if schools want to help those in need they should focus on a more objective indicator of disadvantage: low income. Economic affirmative action, if you will, would indeed lift up many. Some would be black, some would be white. What troubles me is that I fear that many opponents of affirmative action don’t want it on any basis. They view it as just another government handout to people who are undeserving. In the case of college admissions, the kids are undeserving because they don’t have as good an academic record as those whose slots they are taking. If you apply that same logic to government assistance programs, the poor don’t deserve welfare because they are poor.

We are a proud and independent people. We like to stand on our own two feet. We think everyone should. I think it’s just hard for us to realize that not everyone can, that no matter how great their will, no matter how sterling their character, some people just don’t have the opportunity to achieve what others do. We are likely to help a stranger change a tire. We have empathy for his predicament. Abstract empathy is something of an oxymoron. Think of the politicians who have changed their minds on gay rights because a child has come out. Suddenly they understood. Suddenly they felt empathy. Not too many politicians have kids who are destitute, though.

I believe in self-reliance, but I don’t like to see us turn our backs on the poor. I don’t like to see Mitch McConnell oppose tax hikes to fund President Obama’s plan to provide high-quality preschool for poor children. I don’t like to see Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas, work to scrap the state income tax and replace it with a sales tax, which by its nature hits the poor harder than the rich. And I really don’t like to see the governors of twenty five states, mostly Republican, refuse to expand Medicaid in the their states under the Affordable Care Act even though doing so would both save them money and provide health care for their poorest citizens.

Our hardened--or hard-hearted--self-styled fiscal conservatives have lost empathy. Cloistered in marble corridors and offices, they can no longer imagine the desperation and hopelessness of endemic poverty. I suppose it doesn’t help for me to use demeaning labels, any more than Mitt Romney’s “Entitled 47%” helped his cause. In this case, motives don’t matter. Without our help, the poor will remain poor. Their kids will be poor. The cycle will continue, and over the long term we will all bear the burden, moral and economic, of uneducated and unproductive citizens.

Hustlers

For many years I was a general contractor. Technically I was a corporate finance lawyer, but really I had more in common with the guy who does your home remodel than I did with Thurgood Marshall or David Boies. I met with businessmen who wanted to construct pleasure domes of commerce and convinced them that our law firm should be their builder, or, if that’s too grand a description of our role, at least their electrical contractor. I sent in a crew of young lawyers to do the work, and if the client got what they wanted--the legal equivalent of a seaside estate--in their moment of euphoria and gratitude I convinced them that our exorbitant fee was worth it.

There are hustlers everywhere. Everyone is suspicious of lawyers, but what about doctors? Not long ago most colonoscopies and other minor procedures were performed in doctors’ offices. Now many such procedures are performed in surgery centers at twice the cost to the patient. Surgery centers charge facilities fees that reap huge profits for their investors, which are often the doctors themselves. These doctors are hustling, leveraging their medical expertise and position as medical gatekeepers.

Hustlers are the heartbeat of capitalism. There would be no economic competition without them. Are they worth it? Is capitalism worth it? I think we’ve answered that last question with a resounding “yes” (see Berlin Wall, fall), so we’re stuck with, or depending on your perspective, blessed by, hustlers.

The guys selling snake oil from the back of a horse-drawn wagon were pulling the wool over our eyes. We’re smarter now. Mostly we know snake oil for what it is now. Still we get bamboozled. Bernie Madoff ran a huge con for decade. Greed still gets in the way of skepticism.

The key to keeping hustlers honest, and to keeping the hustler’s premium to a reasonable commission for organizing work, is what it has always been: information. The more we know about what is being done and who can do it, the better our choices will be. Unlike government regulation, information enhances competition rather than stifling it. Information lets other hustlers see where there are diseconomies in the marketplace that can be taken take advantage of. The result is usually good for the consumer: better products or services at lower prices.

Amazon is democratizing commerce. Legalforce wants to do the same for much common legal work. Wevorce for divorce. Angie’s List and Yelp are arming consumers with expert reviews of service providers of all kinds. Hustlers are now making a business out reengineering the delivery of heretofore exotic services, like trademark filings and divorces, and of educating consumers about which plumber or electrician to choose.

Then there are Google and Facebook. Can you think of two companies that have had a greater impact on our ability to get and propagate information? With Google you can find out anything. With Facebook you can tell the world about it. You can start revolutions. And yet those amazing services are free. Really, if you step back and think about it, it’s mind-boggling. Something so valuable--unlimited information and communication--for free.

In exchange for the gifts of the Internet, we are giving up some privacy. There may come a time when the cost of that will be considered too high. For now, though, from my point of view we seem to have entered a kind of capitalist paradise in which the hustlers may save us from the hustlers.

General Dad (Ret.)

It starts innocently, virtuously. “Don’t go near the street, sweetie.” Then, later, from where you watch beneath a big magnolia tree, “Don’t put your weight on the small branches. They won’t hold you.” I suppose from the way that one grinned down at me when I said that--Sorry, old boy, I don’t think you can reach me up here--I should have known my days of being in charge were numbered.

Still, I tried to keep up. I was protector-in-chief. It was a full time job. I wasn’t comfortable outsourcing it, especially to my charges. As they got older and more aggressively resisted my sage counsel, I became more insistent. One of Grant’s friends called me “The General.” I took it as a compliment.

At some point, I may have lost sight of the strategic objective and focused too obsessively on tactical victories. You can’t keep children safe, after all, if they don’t do what you tell them to (or do what you tell them not to). Obedience becomes the key. Generals must be obeyed. Everyone knows that.

Now they are all off at foreign postings: jobs, marriages, a last year in college. I don’t get to tell them what to do. When I try, they stop calling. The funny thing is—and this surprises me about myself—I’ve stopped (almost) wanting to. Maybe this is because I am so proud of the wisdom they have gained, of the smart choices I see them making. There is some of that, certainly. But something more is at play here, something I don’t quite understand.

My uncle used to tell the story about coming home drunk one night and, as he slipped in the front door, being greeted by his father’s fist. He said the next thing he knew he was looking up from floor at his father’s bathrobe fluttering down the hall. Later, when I was bumping along in my early twenties, I used to try to get advice from that same man, my grandfather. I could hardly pry it out of him. He was one of the smartest men I knew. He would have had great advice. He gave me twenty bucks for no reason now and then. I guess he figured that was what he had that I might actually find useful.

Maybe my grandfather felt guilty about decking his son. Maybe he was just tired of young men not listening to him. Maybe that’s what’s happened to me. I do feel guilty about all the too-harsh things I ever did to my children. It does get frustrating when they do something I think will be bad for them. But I don’t push them much anymore. It’s a nice change, one that is good for me and—although it's hard to believe that anyone could be better off without my advice—them.

My children are my friends now. I don’t tell my friends what to do. I listen to them. If they ask what I think, I tell them, but cautiously, guardedly. It’s almost like I’ve become afraid to influence them. They have to live with their choices, so they have to make them. What might be good for me, might not be best for them.

I wonder what that boyhood friend of Grant’s would think of me now. I imagine he would shake his head at my new-found reticence and pat me on the head they way one does an old dog with no teeth. He and Grant might sit out on the porch talking about old times while I nap in the sun, whimpering and kicking my legs as I dream of children I have chased.

The Outsider

There is a village beside a river. The people came on the river and settled near where it emptied into the sea, where its delta made the soil rich. They were hearty, independent people who had families and farmed the fertile land. They shared a way of looking at life and their place in it. They worshiped the same god. They stayed to themselves, mostly, but if they saw someone on the road who needed help, they stopped and helped him. Their farms prospered and grew too large for the families to farm alone. Word spread that there was work in the fields and people came from other places and built shacks on the outskirts of town and hired on to plow and plant and bring in the harvest.

No one could remember a drought like the one that came. The river dried up to a trickle. The crops died. Families hunkered down and did the best they could. They planted small vegetable gardens and hunted game. Some moved away, but most had never known anywhere but the village. They stayed and prayed. The hired hands who lived on the edge of town had no work. The landowners would see the workers’ children outside their shanties, dirty and malnourished, and they felt bad for them. They wanted to help, and some did, but most weren’t sure they had enough for their own families. They avoided the shantytown and tried not to think about the suffering of the people they felt powerless to help.

One day a man from far away came to the village. He offered to help the poor families in the shanties. He could give them enough to keep them from dying. He offered little to the other villagers because they were not the ones with the greatest need, and he had no more to give. They would be okay, he said. The rains would return one day. He asked the people who were not starving to set up places where the poor could be helped. He said he would pay for almost all the cost of the places. He said the people who had been helping the poor for free would not have to do that anymore, so there would be that benefit to those of the village who were better off.

The leaders of the village did not like the man. They did not trust him. They thought he was there to influence the way they did things. They thought he would try to replace them as leaders. They told him they did not want his help. They told the people they should not trust him. They said he would undermine their way of life. They said he would take their money and give it to people who were too lazy to work.

“He’s not like us,” they said. “He does not worship our god. He wants us to be dependent on him. And when we are, he will take away our freedoms. It is better to let those in the shantytown die than to become his vassals. We did not ask them to come here. They can go back to where they came from. They are not our responsibility. Their deaths will not be on our heads. We must not give up our way of life for them.”

It rained a few days ago, but the river is still very low. The people are afraid it may never be the same again. They have come to blame the outsider for what is happening to them. They have told him he is not welcome in the village, and the children in the shantytown are dying.

Self Defense

Every time the happiness or safety of one of my children was threatened, I felt a rush of adrenaline that drove me to protect them. I kept an eye on the suspicious-looking guy at the toddler playground. “Excuse me, mister, what are you doing here?”

Identifying threats is critical to survival. The quicker the better. In the wild, a split second can make the difference between living and dying. Our need to assess threats and react to them is deep in our base brains. It’s as much an instinct as the urge for food and sex. We act without thinking.

When we feel threatened and can’t identify the source of the threat, we become agitated. We feel defenseless, vulnerable. The resulting anxiety, which sometimes seems intolerable, can be ameliorated only by identifying the threat so we can plan our defense. No serious threat exists for long without our finding, or imagining, the source of it.

After the Boston bombing some rushed to the judgment that the bombers were Chechen Muslim terrorists. Even a few U.S. Senators, ostensible defenders of our Constitution, recommended that the surviving bomber, a nineteen-year-old U.S. citizen, be held as an enemy combatant and tried by the military rather than the courts.

The breathless panic of those Senators was not that surprising. We need to know this about ourselves. We need to know that we are afraid. We need to know that being afraid makes us lash out to try to protect ourselves. We need to know that sometimes, because of other instincts that are also deep within us, we lash out at the wrong people.

When we lived in tribes, the tribe next door was frequently a threat. So we learned to fear the other, the foreigner. Xenophobia sounds like an irrational psychological state, but it is deep in our psyches. We are programmed to fear foreigners. We need to know that about ourselves too.

I’m not saying we should be naïve. I don’t recommend we whistle while walking down dark alleys late at night. I’m not suggesting there are not plenty of people in the world who would hurt us if they could. What I am suggesting is that we aren’t helping ourselves by generalizing from isolated examples of legitimate threats. Not all black men in hoodies mean you harm. Nor all women in hijabs.

The world is chaotic. Many of us are confused. Some of us are unbalanced. A Christian zealot who murders an abortion doctor may say, may even believe, he is acting out of religious conviction, but is he? Or is he just crazy? I ask the same question about the Taliban. How sane are you if you are willing to strap on a suicide vest? We can blame zealotry on religion or nationalism, but perhaps the blame lies within us.

Perhaps it lies within our need to blame others for our misfortune. I’m not sure of evolutionary roots of that particular trait--it may be simply another form of identifying threat--but it has produced many a martyr willing to die for the sins visited upon his people by the godless abortionist or the imperialist aggressor. The storm grows as blame begets blame.

Perhaps, instead of responding defensively, we should try to understand why others want to harm us, why they blame us for their troubles. “They hate our freedoms,” a Fox talking head said after the Boston bombings. “They hate our way of life.”

Somehow I doubt that. They may be jealous, but if they hate us it is probably because of something they think we are doing to them, or about to do to them, as opposed to the way we are living among ourselves. Nations have been exporting their cultures for millennia. The most common method of export has been conquest. No wonder we are suspicious of each other’s motives and pieties.

Religion plays into this suspicion, of course. Heretics and infidels are to be despised. How else can the clerics retain control over their flocks? I would be fine with doing away with all religion, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. There is no doubt yet another evolutionary imperative behind its longevity. If we can’t get rid of it, perhaps we should try harder to understand it, or at least just to agree to disagree, peacefully, and see how we all end up in the end.

One reason it is hard to ignore some religions, to just let them alone to be however they want to be, is because they are abusive, especially to women. Westerners are justifiably sanctimonious about how enlightened they are on this front compared to the teachings of, say, Sharia law. No one with a developed intellect and conscience thinks women should be treated differently than men, but they always have been. Parts of the world are just farther along the cultural evolutionary curve than others.

Does that give us a right to feel superior, to condemn the heathens? In a way, yes. But in another way, most of us cannot claim to have been the authors of our better mores. It is not just scientists like Newton but whole societies that stand on the shoulders of those who came before. Are we, by virtue of time and place of birth, innately more virtuous that those born in societies that have not so advanced? Are they to be ridiculed? Subdued? Conquered? They are nothing more than a look back at ourselves. The answer to how we should treat them lies in how we, in their shoes, would want to be treated ourselves.

A hand reached out in understanding might be bitten. It might be blown off. But it might be taken. And another hand taken. There’s a nice version of the song “None of Us Are Free” that has an improvised line that puts it well: “The only chain a man can stand is the chain of hand on hand.”