“Thank you for contacting Universe Selectors Incorporated. In which Universe would you like to be deposited in this endless moment?”
Horace blinked. “Um… what?”
“We currently have access to just over seven hundred thirty-seven nonillion possible universes, but more are becoming every available in each nanosecond, so, if yours has not yet been discovered, if you can wait a millennia or two, we’re sure we’ll get access to it. You’ll have to forgive us. We’re such a new company. We’re looking forward to our nine billionth birthday in the next relative century or so, and we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a shockingly short time.”
Horace stared into the emptiness of the cosmos, trying to remember when he had last dropped acid, and why it would present itself like this.
“That was, on your embarrassingly primitive calendar, July 7, 1986 on a planet called… one moment… here we are… Earth? Earth, Earth, Earth. I know we have that somewhere… Oh! Here it is. A remarkably unremarkable planet. I suspect you will want something a bit nicer. Risa is a lovely place. Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet is getting quite a few requests in the last few hundred centuries. Oh, and it looks like there’s a lovely little spot called Alder- Oh no… never mind. It just got blown up again in all of the only 23 billion nine hundred thirty-four million three hundred thousand one hundred three universes in which it exists. That’s a shame. Bloody Death Star!”
“See… here’s the thing,” said Horace. “I was just sitting at my keyboard, smoking a bowl, playing some Michael Franks, and then Speedy Shine started barking his ass off, and then… you know… well… I was here.”
“Oh, no no no. You’ve always been here. You’ll always be here. You just forget from time to time. And you keep getting deluded into thinking time and space exist.”
“Um… what?”
“Precisely the thing. What. ‘What’ is the question. What universe please?”
“You’re offering to put me into an alternative universe?”
“That’s what we do. Is this a difficult concept for you? I was told you were reasonably intelligent. I seem to have been misinformed. That happens, but it’s exceptionally rare.”
“Okay, then… Um… what are some of my options?”
“Well, what would you like to find in your universe?”
“World peace?”
“Whose world? Oh! You mean that stupid little rock tumbling through spacetime?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, there are only five quintillion seventy-four quadrillion thirty one trillion three hundred thirty one billion 9 million one hundred thousand three hundred four such universes, so you’re limiting your choices a bit, but we can work with that. Did you have a planet preference?”
“Earth, I suppose.”
“Seriously? I was told you had some imagination. Our database needs to be updated. Bloody tech support!”
“One planet is plenty for me, thanks.”
“And… we’re down to only 9 billion universes. This is going to be difficult.”
“That seems like quite a few choices. It would be great to narrow them a bit.”
The being Horace could perceive, but not actually see, rolled its eyes. “Obviously, we’re going to narrow it. I can’t just plop your unintelligent, unimaginative ass anywhere. I’ll need a little more information, please.”
“What else did you want to know?”
“What other conditions of life are you looking for?”
“Well, I breathe oxygen and nitrogen, so –”
“No no no no no! I know all that. Are you looking for more than World Peace? That’s extraordinarily general. The more specific you can be, the better we can place you.”
“Oh. I see. Well, no poverty would be great. No Homelessness or hunger.”
“And now you’ve narrowed it to 8.99 billion. That’s really not very helpful. World Peace is usually accompanied by the lack of Poverty, Hunger, and Homelessness. They’re closely connected. You’re not understanding me at all. I need something very specific. An event that you need to have occur.”
Horace laughed. “Any event I want? Like Valerie Bertinelli makes me dinner?”
“Excellent! That occurred in only… this can’t be… I need to check my data. Something is obviously malfunctioning. And that can’t be because nothing ever malfunctions. That means… Oh! I see. Yes. That explains it.” The Being looked at Horace and smiled. “Well, this is exceptionally easy. World Peace, everyone has a home, enough food to eat, and we’ll even throw in Free Health Care and Education, and… Valerie Bertinelli makes dinner for you. That’s Universe 338-419 Alpha. If you’ll just step this way…”
“I don’t know how to follow you since I can’t actually see you.”
“You are so limited. You need imagination. Let me show you how it works. Do you know what a coffee cup is?”
“Of course.”
“You can imagine what it looks like?”
“Obviously.”
“Good. If you pick it up and set it back down, can you hear that sound in your imagination?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, excellent. Can you smell the coffee inside it?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“You’ve smelled coffee, have you not?”
“Far too many times.”
“Smell it now… Think a little harder. Smell is harder than sight or sound.”
Horace closed his eyes and concentrated on the last time his best friend had dragged him to Starbucks. The scent returned to him. There was a smell of nuts. There was a definite sense of the caramel candies he used to get at Halloween. There was also a smell of cardboard that had outlived its usefulness.
“Yes,” said the being. “You’ve got it now. Hold that smell. Now… taste. You’ve tasted coffee?”
“A few times.”
“Bring back that sensory experience.”
Horace recalled the flavor. It was overpoweringly dark. It was hot on his tongue. It burned his throat when he swallowed. The aftertaste stuck with him. It was unwelcome. His eyes shut a little tighter.
“Now… feel the coffee mug.”
It was smooth. It had weight, but it wasn’t heavy. It made a great paperweight. He felt the handle with his thumb. It was strong. It was solid. It was security.
And now he had the coffee mug. He knew he was holding it. He opened his eyes.
And Horace was sitting at his black desk, incense burning to his right, Speedy Shine sleeping on the couch he hadn’t chewed for a few hours, and the keyboard beneath his fingers. There were two coffee mugs on his desk. One held pens and had “Shine” written on it. The other held a highlighter and what he always thought was some sort of dental instrument that the place’s previous occupant left behind. There was a picture of an owl on one side. The words “Witty Owl Writers” were on the other. He smiled at what he considered to be his Pulitzer Prize. He’d won it in a writing contest, the only one he’d ever entered.
He picked up the little psychedelic bong to the left of the desk lamp and looked into the bowl. “What the hell was in that weed?”
The cell phone to his immediate left dinged, signifying the arrival of a text from someone he didn’t know. He picked up the phone, unlocked it, and saw a text from a 323 number. He frowned and opened the stranger’s text.
Hi. This is Valerie Bertinelli. I ran across your podcast. I think it’s adorable the way you talk about me making you dinner so often. I got your number from your Facebook page, and… well… would you allow me the pleasure of making you dinner this weekend? xo Val
Horace stared. He read the text again. He looked to his bong and back to his phone. He had no idea what to do. Obviously, he had to answer the message. It was almost certainly not from Valerie Bertinelli. But, what if it was? He had talked about a universe in which… but… no. Horace reminded himself he was a rational man. This couldn’t be… could it?
Another text appeared below the first.
Yes. It’s real, Horace. Lol. Hang on.
Horace frowned. “What the fu—”
He stared for a moment longer, and then he hit reply. He studied the phone’s tiny keyboard. Surely he would think of what to type. He was a writer. That’s what he did. He wrote.
He waited. No words came to him. He thought of asking who this really was, but that didn’t seem right. He thought of saying he was thrilled to hear from the woman on whom he’d had a childish crush for more than 40 years. That didn’t seem right either. Anything he considered simply seemed wrong.
The text box suddenly showed a video was downloading. He waited a moment and then saw the picture on the video. It was Valerie Bertinelli. He stared incredulously at it. Deep fake? He played the video.
Hi, Horace. Now you can see me and hear me, so you can get over your incredulity. That’s not a word I use a lot, but I’m a writer now, too, you know. I’m allowed.
Anyway, a friend of mine heard from a friend of hers about your little show, and she played it, and she thought it was cute, so she sent it to me, and she said I could really make you happy if I offered to make you dinner, and I thought, you know, it wouldn’t hurt me in the least. So, we vetted you to make sure you weren’t some weird stalker guy, and it turns out you were a teacher for 29 years, and I really admire that. You live in poverty most of the time, so I figured you would really enjoy a good meal. I can send someone to pick you up cuz I hear you don’t have a car, and they’ll drive you to the airport, fly you here to LA, and someone will pick you up there and drive you out here, and we’ll have dinner. Does that sound all right?
“Does that sound all right?” asked the formless being.
“What?” asked Horace, blinking in confusion at the darkness of deep space.
“Will that Universe work for you?”
“I was only there for five minutes. I have no idea.”
“Well, there are a couple of billion possibilities to explore. At five minutes a piece, we’ll finish in just under two hundred thousand years.”
“That seems like quite a while. Can we speed it up any? I’d actually like to live in one of them.”
“Horace, you can’t live. Anywhere. Ever. Don’t you understand that?”
I recognize that much of what I’m about to write (or, if you’re listening to the podcast, say) is due to seeing the world through the lens of clinical depression. I see the sadder parts of the world with greater clarity, and I become uncharacteristically cynical. Normally, I eschew cynicism. I think it does nothing to move us closer to solving problems. It usually gives us a reason to throw up our hands in despair and accept the unacceptable. Nevertheless, today, probably because the chemicals in my brain are malfunctioning, I am feeling cynical.
My feed is filled with opinions about what two multi-millionaires did on television last night. Because they are celebrities, everyone feels the need to discuss their behavior.
And I’m frustrated by that.
Week after week, I discuss ideas that might help us to change the world. I discuss the evils of hunger, poverty, insufficient health care, and homelessness. I talk about the existential threats to freedom. I discuss the value of Love and the Joy of having Enough.
Since I’m not a celebrity, and I never will be, and I don’t have celebrities on my show, (although a good friend pointed out that I did have Sara Niemietz on my show once, and that’s true, and I was ecstatic to have a chance to talk to one of my heroes for more than an hour!) I am fortunate if I can get even a single like or comment on my ideas. I have begun posting them in writing, for those who don’t want to listen. And all of this is largely ignored.
Next week, (which, by the time you read this or hear it, will be last week… Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny used to have a good time on Saturday morning discussing this issue) I’m going to talk about the possibility of alternative universes. Science tells me that if we could create human-made wormholes, we might be able to travel to such places. Instead of putting our money and our greatest minds into the work that needs to be done to make this possible, we are inventing new and more efficient and effective ways of killing one another, and we are concerned about who embarrassed himself or someone else. We live for click bait and blood. We live for hatred.
So, today, I am depressed. I want to live in a world where ideas are not only more important than celebrities, but they are also more interesting.
Please, I beg you, don’t tell me in the comments which celebrity was right, or why they are more important or more interesting than trying to create a better world. I already have seen that in abundance.
Perhaps there’s nothing to say. Perhaps this is just the world in which we are all required to live.
So today I am depressed.
There are real problems in the world today. Children are dying in Ukraine. Children here in The United States are going to bed hungry. Income Inequality continues to rise. Someone you love is sad today.
And there are real Joys in the world today. Children are being born at this very moment, their lives just beginning. Children here in the United States are meeting their puppies for the first time, finding a love they never knew existed. People are getting jobs that pay them more than they need to make ends meet, feeling successful and fulfilled. Someone you love has a reason to celebrate today because they have earned something valuable to them.
These are the places I would prefer to focus attention.
On March 27, 2022, on National Television at the Academy Awards, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face. (I realize the people who will hear or read this during its first run will know that, but I hope to create Art that will last through the ages, and, frankly, it’s so entirely unimportant that I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the time this is published in April, it has already begun to fade from the public consciousness. Ten years from now the moment will probably have faded into the mist of trivia. It really ought to.) What was the result of this behavior?
Social Media was filled with opinions.
“Chris Rock was insensitive to tell a joke about a woman suffering from alopecia losing her hair.”
“Will Smith committed assault on National Television.”
And from those two camps sprang pages and pages of subgroups of more opinions. Sensitivity was a big topic. Standing up for your spouse was another. Violence on television was a third. The list went on and on.
It was discussed as though it was a topic of great importance. I’m sorry. It’s not. It’s two millionaires behaving badly. If this happened in the house next door, it would receive no attention. Spousal abuse and domestic violence are important problems that are rarely addressed, and they receive scant media coverage. Since these are celebrities, we are enthralled and anxious to tell everyone what we think.
What is the cause of this? I suspect I may be a part of the problem because I participated, actively, in public education for 29 years. Somehow, despite my best efforts, I have helped to produce a society that values celebrity over ideas.
In 1967, Andy Warhol told us, “In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” And that fame is vital to us. What’s trending is where you must focus your attention because everyone else is doing that. You can’t afford to be left out. In 2022, many of us hope to “go viral.” This has nothing to do with the quality of your content. It’s about what amuses people for a few seconds.
We have developed a media that garners ratings by creating divisions. Compromise in Congress is tantamount to taboo. This will be covered by the media, and the voters will decide you’re not sufficiently devoted to your own team. You will lose in a primary. I heard somewhere that in Congress reelection is at 92%, even though only 28% of us are happy with the job they’re doing. The attitude is “He sucks, but he’s on my team.” We have to be Republicans or Democrats. We have to be liberals or conservatives. The slightest move to the right or left can be political suicide. Journalism sold out for the ratings.
In the infancy of mass communications, the Columbus and Magellan of broadcast journalism, William Paley and David Sarnoff, went down to Washington to cut a deal with Congress. Congress would allow the fledgling networks free use of taxpayer-owned airwaves in exchange for one public service. That public service would be one hour of airtime set aside every night for informational broadcasting, or what we now call the evening news. Congress, unable to anticipate the enormous capacity television would have to deliver consumers to advertisers, failed to include in its deal the one requirement that would have changed our national discourse immeasurably for the better. Congress forgot to add that under no circumstances could there be paid advertising during informational broadcasting. They forgot to say that taxpayers will give youthe airwaves for free and for 23 hours a day you should make a profit, but for one hour a night you work for us. And now those network newscasts, anchored through history by honest-to-God newsmen with names like Murrow and Reasoner and Huntley and Brinkley and Buckley and Cronkite and Rather and Russert – Now they have to compete with the likes of me. A cable anchor who’s in the exact same business as the producers of Jersey Shore.
— Will McAvoy, The Newsroom, “The 112th Congress,” 2012, by Aaron Sorkin
How do you feel about the fact that children are sleeping on the street tonight? What do you think we should do about that? I’m interested in your opinions about that.
How do you feel about the fact that a person whose sexuality is different or whose gender is subject to change is likely to be assaulted for having the audacity to vary from the norm? I’m interested in your opinions about that.
How do you feel about families all over America being forced into bankruptcy because someone got cancer or any of the hundreds of other illnesses that can bring lives to a sudden and painful end? I’m interested in your opinions about that.
The fact that someone is annoyed with me now for even suggesting that the Slap in The Face wasn’t important is a serious contributor to my depression. Again, I recognize that much of this is chemical. That, however, does nothing to minimize or mitigate my feelings.
For me, The Real Slap in the Face is the one to those of us who want to change the world. I’m not close to being alone in this. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are smarter, stronger, and more charismatic than I am who are trying to end poverty, get everyone enough money to live, end the bureaucratic labyrinths one must navigate to get any assistance, renew and revitalize public education, and save us from the nightmare of out-of-control health care costs. They are doing plenty of things to try to make a difference. I’m ridiculously small. Others are going to be more successful. But that doesn’t mean my cheek doesn’t sting right now.
I want you to know that since you are listening to this podcast, or you’re reading this on Word Press, you are actively helping to defeat my depression. You’re saying that my ideas are worth considering. You’re telling me that I’m not singing an aria in an empty cave. And because so few people do what you’re doing at this moment, you’re more valuable than you believe. I thank you deeply, sincerely, and humbly.
There are those who would suggest I relax and get some Prozac or some other medication that would straighten out my brain chemistry. It’s kind of you to think of me. Thank you. And that’s not the solution I think will help me. As opposed to muting my response to the inequities of the world, I would prefer that we change the world into one where liberty and justice for all is more than a mindless chant.
I know I can’t hope to do that, but maybe you can. I have a friend who is getting involved in politics. She was instrumental in helping The Yang Gang get started. Perhaps she can help. You may have friends who will benefit from listening to or reading this. Perhaps you could pass it on. Maybe one of your friends knows someone in Washington or in your state’s capitol who might be able to change a bad law or write a better one. If nothing else, maybe we can get one more person to the ballot box to vote for someone who can change something. I don’t know. What I know is I just can’t give up yet.
Even my worst depression won’t allow me to buckle under to cynicism for long. I can still hope.
I need to begin this evening with a gargantuan disclaimer. I’m not a scientist of any sort. I’m not an astronomer, in particular. I’m certainly not a mathematician. I have no expertise of any kind in what I’m discussing tonight. (If I’m wrong about something, please feel free to correct me at (480) 331 – 9822.) I watched some YouTube videos. And, that’s almost the point. What I’m describing tonight is as simple to learn as it is staggering to contemplate. Is time travel actually possible, especially into the past? Is ours the only universe? If there are other universes, can we go to a different one we might like better? (I’ll be out looking for the one in which Valerie Bertinelli makes dinner for me.)
Tonight I’m going to bring you an old, not very intelligent, man’s exploration into ideas that move beyond our world, and yet are a part of the very fabric of our existence. I’m going to avoid pseudoscience. I’m going to eschew the supernatural. I’m going to limit myself to science that can be easily accessed in popular culture. It’s more than enough to make me wonder, as the person for whom I made this episode asked, “Why are we fighting in the sandbox instead of harnessing the sky?” (I wish I had written that line. I suspect there’s a universe in which I did. I might consider trading the Valerie Bertinelli Dinner Universe for that one.)
In 59 years, I have experience of only this single universe, at least as far as I know. I have traveled only forward in time. I have existed only on this insignificant rock tumbling through this tiny bit of space.
Much of what follows will approach The Impossible. Whenever I think of The Impossible, though, I am reminded of all the Impossible Things that have turned out to be true.
It was obvious, at one point in history, to anyone who bothered to look around, that the Earth was flat. You never see the horizon bend the way you would expect if you were a small bug on a large rubber ball. It’s almost invariably a straight line, which is what you would expect if you were a small bug on a very large table. It was Impossible for the Earth to be round. Then, a couple millennia ago, there comes along a guy named Eratosthenes. He uses “sticks, eyes, feet, and brains” not only to prove that the Earth is round, but to calculate the diameter of the Earth, and he was fairly close to correct. Carl Sagan explains this brilliantly in the first of the videos I am adding to the show notes. I urge you to watch it.
We were told repeatedly that it was Impossible to fly. Gravity, Newton told us, forbid human flight. As Blood, Sweat and Tears observed, “What goes up must come down…” Simon Newcomb told us, in 1903, “… aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope.”
Gravity is the force of attraction between any two objects that have mass. The heavier the mass, the greater the attraction. Earth is the largest mass in the neighborhood. We’re all attracted to it. There is child’s explanation of this to be found in the show notes, here:
Science certainly forbid space travel. And then Science learned more, and it corrected itself. We found escape velocity. Science corrects itself frequently. It will do it again. Many of us have experienced flight over Earth. A few of us have experienced space flight. A dozen of us have been to the Moon. It’s now commonly accepted that this is not impossible.
Space and time seem to be independent of one another. That’s the way I experience them, at least. The space between my fingers and the keyboard has nothing to do with time, except to the extent that I can measure the number of seconds it takes to move my fingers from one key to the next. And yet, it turns out that space and time are not separate. They are connected in what is called Spacetime. Spacetime is bendable. It isn’t fixed. It’s more like a waterbed than a wooden table. The heavier something is, the more it warps space, just the way a bowling ball will warp your mattress. You and I exist in more than 3 dimensions. We exist in length, width, height, and time. The first three are generally enough to locate someone on Earth. The fourth is required to find something in space because everything is in motion. There’s a link to another children’s site in the show notes that will explain that for you.
A black hole occurs when spacetime becomes so warped by a heavy object that it creates a singularity, or a place in the universe where the laws of physics that you and I take for granted simply break down and space and time are no longer related. Einstein said they would be unlikely to exist. And then, on September 14, 2015, LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detected them and verified their existence for the first time. And it was an extraordinary bit of good luck because two black holes, 1.4 billion light years away, were racing around each other, and the light ended its 1.4 billion year journey to Earth just two days after we activated LIGO. What if we’d waited another week to flip that switch? Today, we even have a photograph of a black hole in Galaxy M87. All of this and much more can be found in the simple video in the show notes in which Brian Greene explains black holes.
We believe black holes may cause something called Wormholes. We’ve haven’t been able to verify their existence… yet.
These are holes in the fabric of spacetime that allow us to travel to extremely distant places in very little time. The 186,000 miles per second speed limit is irrelevant to getting somewhere if you go through a wormhole. There are several types of wormholes.
Einstein Rosen Bridges are a type of wormhole that can’t be crossed. A black hole, where anything can enter but nothing can escape, to a white hole, where everything can escape but nothing can enter would take infinite time to cross because of the singularity at its core. A white hole is a place where time runs backward. It’s something like a Big Bang. The stuff coming out of a white hole won’t be the stuff that went into the black hole.
Traversable Worm Holes might have been created at the very beginning of The Big Bang. They could be connected by Cosmic Strings. The nearest Traversable Worm Hole, however, that we would be likely to find appears to be about 26,000 light years away. This means it will take more than an hour to get there, and, as it turns out, humans don’t have that kind of patience. I can barely get people through a 30-minute podcast.
Manmade Wormholes would need to connect two different parts of spacetime. We would have one somewhere near Earth, and the other would be wherever we put it. I’m not sure how we could move it where we wanted it, but it appears to be possible. It would also need to be kept open because gravity would try to close it. This could be done with something called Exotic Matter. This is a set of theoretical particles that have a negative mass. Gravity pulls things toward it. Exotic Particles are like me. They push things away. Manmade Wormholes also must have no event horizons because then we would become spaghetti if we tried to cross them. (The fact that “spaghettification” is a real word is excellent evidence for the existence of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.) They must be big enough that we can traverse them safely. You can travel back in time with a wormhole, but only from the future back to the time when the wormhole was created.
I am dropping a video explaining wormholes in the show notes:
But what if we wanted to travel back in time? I would love, for example, to go back in time to Flagstaff in 1986 to correct a massive mistake I made at my own toga party. (If you want to hear that story, you’ll have to talk Chris into asking me about it for a Fred’s Back Porch Interview.) Since I hadn’t built a wormhole yet, I could never get back there. It’s possible there’s even a way around that. It’s called a Tipler Cylinder.
This is a cylinder that spins at a few billion rotations per minute. (For reference about how fast that is, if you’re old enough, you might remember that records sounded funny at 78 RPM.) You also need material that has a mass of about ten of our suns, or a just a couple of neutron stars. The cylinder also needs to be of infinite length. These are problems that our understanding of physics tells us we can’t possibly overcome. The physical laws of our universe prevent that. In short… It’s IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Today.
Let’s remember, though, that in singularities, the physical laws of our universe break down rather promptly. And, our understanding of these laws has its own set of problems. While Einstein and Newton did a magnificent job of explaining the very large things that create gravity, all of that seems to break down when we get to the scale of the very small. This is called Quantum Mechanics. The laws of gravity stop working when things are smaller than an atom. As microchips grow ever more miniscule, we are moving toward what is called Quantum Computers which will be much more powerful and efficient than the one on which I’m writing this. They are likely to lead to the AC, or the Automatic Computer, about which Asimov writes at the end of this podcast.
Wormholes might not lead us only to far distant places, they could, potentially, also take us to alternative universes. There is no telling what the laws of physics might be in other universes. This is called The Multiverse Hypothesis. We once believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. It turns out it wasn’t. Then we believed the Sun was the center of the universe. Oops. It’s not. Then we believed our galaxy, The Milky Way, was the center. Nope. Our understanding expanded, just as “our universe, itself, keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz…” (That’s from “The Galaxy Song” in “The Meaning of Life,” by Monty Python, 1983) In the same way, we may conclude that our universe is not only not the only universe, but that it may not be the center of the Multiverse, either.
If we could go back in time, or it we could visit other universes in which all possible outcomes occur, what we could accomplish as a species is, essentially, limitless. This show spends an enormous amount of time trying to find ways to end poverty, homelessness, and hunger. I keep trying to work out health care so that no one dies for a lack of little green pieces of paper and linen or a lack of digits on a computer somewhere. If there are other universes, I feel sure there’s one in which we’ve conquered those problems, Valerie Bertinelli wants to cook me dinner, and I wrote the line, “Why are we fighting in the sandbox instead of harnessing the sky?”
Did you ever hear the theory of the universe? Where every time you make a choice, A brand new planet gets created?
Did you ever hear that theory? Does it carry any sense? That a choice can split the world in two, Or is it all just too immense for you?
That they all exist in parallel, Each one separate from the other, And every subsequent decision, Makes a new world then another, And they all stretch out towards infinity, Getting further and further away.
— Sting, from the song “It’s Not The Same Moon” from the album “The Last Ship”, 2013
There is also a universe in which everything you wish had happened, or might happen, does happen.
What would it take for us to accomplish this? We need our best and brightest minds working on the science that will help us to understand this universe well enough for us to begin to answer many of our questions. We would need to spend the money to build the technology that is this universe’s way of understanding itself.
Instead of spending trillions of dollars and many of our greatest minds on finding new ways to kill one another, what if we spent those resources on expanding who we are and who we could be? We don’t need to defend ourselves from one another in every possible universe. I, for one, would like to live in one where everyone leads with love.
I’ll bring this to an end with one of the most interesting ideas I’ve heard so far about the endlessness of humanity. It’s called The Omega Point. “The real essence of life is the software, not the hardware,” as Frank Tipler tells us. It’s the idea that at the end of time, the entire universe will become one gigantic computing machine. The Omega Point is the ultimate limit. It is beyond space and time. It is, essentially, God. You and I will be resurrected in Time by super beings when all of us have become powerful computer emulations.
Isaac Asimov dealt with this in my favorite of his short stories, “The Last Question.” The last question to be answered, trillions of years in the future, is whether entropy, or the loss of all energy, can be reversed. This is the conclusion of that story:
Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer [technician] ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness. All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light –
Carl Sagan warned us about Mutually Assured Destruction 40 years ago. If we do survive a nuclear war, the condition of our planet will be such that any life afterward will be miserable. We humans have spent trillions of dollars in an effort to learn to kill each other more effectively, quickly, efficiently, cheaply, and remotely. We have a massive war industry. And War is the polite term for mass murder.
Already in Ukraine, as of March 17, 2022, more than 100 children have been killed as a result of Putin’s attacks. Children. They have done nothing to deserve death. They are children. This is sickening. This is immoral. This is wrong in every possible way. It is unforgivable. There is no defense for this state of affairs.
Yes, there is! They are the enemy. The enemy needs to be killed. That’s the way the world works.
Perhaps it is. But it shouldn’t be.
There are certain undeniable truths that we need to understand. One is that there is no Them; we are all Us. Everyone who dies in a war is someone’s son or daughter. They are people just like you and me. They may have different ideas. They may have different beliefs. They may have very different lives. But they are human beings who are here for an incredibly brief time, and we have shortened it by killing them. We can make up reasons to decide it doesn’t matter when someone dies, but it still does. We don’t feel the deaths of strangers as deeply as those close to us. We shouldn’t. If I felt every death as deeply as I did the demise of my Dad or my Dog, I would spend all my time curled up crying in a fetal position. That doesn’t mean the deaths don’t matter. Of course they do. And nearly everyone who dies has someone who feels the death as painfully as I felt the loss of Melanie.
The second fact about which there can be no debate, is that we are all living on the same planet at the same time.
More than 40 years ago, when I was an adolescent running around in as much of a hormone haze as I now am surrounded by the Fog of Idealism, I was as madly in love as a boy could be with a girl whose intellect and compassion I admired nearly as much as her physical form. When you’re 16, it’s difficult to see much beyond appearance. Or, at least it was for me. Perhaps today’s adolescents are more enlightened than I was.
Among the reasons I fell in love with her was her Idealism was seductively attractive to me. She was a member of a religion of which I had never heard, called Baha’i. I had, even then, no supernatural beliefs, but I loved the idea of unity that was at the core of her religious beliefs. She had on her car a bumper sticker that has the unique status of actually affecting me. It said, “One Planet, One People… Please?” I have never forgotten the words. Now, I believe, she’s off living with her husband on a farm somewhere, and we say hello to each other occasionally on Facebook, but we don’t really have a serious friendship anymore. Her influence over my thinking, however, has only grown in the intervening decades.
She was the water and sunlight that made the seed planted a decade earlier grow and flourish. What planted the seed? It was Star Trek, of course. In Star Trek, we are all one people sharing one planet, and we’re not only working together as humans, but we are also working with species from other worlds. We spend our time trying to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. It is cooperation and exploration at its best.
I believe if we could all embrace the idea that we are all deserving of life, that all of us matter, that there is more we share than there is that separates us, we might find wars would stop.
There is much debate right now about what the United States, and/or NATO should do about the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. I wish that I were wise enough to tell them what to do, but I honestly don’t know. I have no knowledge of military tactics. I have no expertise in winning a war. Should we use our military to stop Russia? I don’t know. If we do, will this lead us to World War III? Will it lead to a nuclear holocaust that could destroy most of the species, and leave behind a cold and barren horror story in which to live? I have no idea.
What I do know is that people are being murdered on a massive scale. I know that to be true of every war ever fought by anyone on this planet at any time in history. I know that it will be true of every war we fight in the future. We count the value of war by determining the number of lives saved against the number of lives extinguished. If the United States hadn’t bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how many lives would have been lost in the continuation of the war? Had Japan or Germany won the war, how much more horrible would the world be than it is now? I don’t know. I can’t know. I’m not Q. I have no power to view alternative time lines. I can guess. I can speculate. So can you. So can people much smarter than we are. No one, however, can know.
What can we know? We can verify that nearly 200,000 people were killed by the atomic bomb. How many people is that? To put it in a personal perspective, I have nearly 2,000 friends on Facebook. There may be 20 or 30 I’ve actually met. So… everyone I know would be 1% of the loss caused by the atomic bomb. Assume I’ve met at least 2,000 people in person over my 59 years in wandering this planet. That brings me to 4,000 people. Fifty times that many died because we used atomic bombs. That’s more than enough to leave me utterly alone in my life, fifty times over. That would knock me out of human contact for this and, if we get reincarnated, the next 49 lives. I’m guessing your numbers are different from mine, but not substantially so. Everyone you have ever known, and everyone you ever will know is almost certainly dwarfed by 200,000 people. And today’s weapons are infinitely more powerful. The damage we can do to each other is unimaginable.
Why, God, why do we insist on mass murder? Why must we be consumed by homicidal hatred instead of united by love?
Arizona’s Governor, Doug Ducey, had this on his Facebook page:
In Arizona, we will secure our border. With advanced equipment & drone technology, we can bolster surveillance and stop the criminals in their tracks. Discussed some of these tactics with Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and defense-tech company Anduril Industries.
I posted a comment that I thought was fairly obvious:
When someone commits a crime that hurts someone, by all means, arrest them. No one is hurt by someone crossing the border. They are human beings. They deserve the best life they can have. If they come here, they can, and often do, help us to build a better world.
Don’t waste resources, please, on keeping decent people out of our country.
This set off a firestorm of hatred directed toward me. I suppose I ought not to have been surprised. They dragged out the same old arguments: They have, they told me, nothing against immigrants, but they should come in legally. That’s a legal argument, not a moral one. If I were living 200 years ago, I could have owned another human being. It was legal, but, guess what? It was immoral. I don’t think any rational person would argue to the contrary in the 21st Century. The Law has little to do with Morality. The process of becoming a citizen takes years, it’s expensive, and, like anything else that involves our government, can be delayed or even shut down due to nothing more than paperwork errors that are no fault of the person applying for citizenship. All the while, they are trying to pay rent and put food on the table, just like the rest of us are. And they live under the constant threat that they will be removed from their homes and shipped like so much cargo to another country as though we were returning a defective DVD to Amazon. Legalism is an excuse for doing what we know to be wrong. Laws can be changed; this one ought to be.
I heard about drug cartels and human trafficking. Yes, those are conditions that exist. They are evil. And they have nothing to do with the vast majority of people coming to America in search of a better life. Statistically, immigrants are less likely to be criminals than those of us who were To The Manor, Born. If they engage in human trafficking or commit other crimes, we arrest them for those crimes, not for stepping over a line. There is a Tom Cruise movie in which people are arrested for crimes they’re likely to commit in the future. It’s an obscene idea. It suggests that we can’t change our minds. It’s Orwell’s Thought Police on Steroids. Could we please wait until someone does something to hurt us before we deny them the liberty about which my students chanted, hands over their hearts, every morning for 29 years? Is that really an unreasonable request?
Immigrants are fleeing Ukraine as I write this. Fortunately, there are other countries that will let them in, just as we used to do at Ellis Island. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries all that was required was a health check. If you were unable to pass it, you were held in isolation until you were no longer a health risk to the rest of society. You weren’t constantly living with the threat of deportation. You could join the Pursuit of Happiness, at least to some small degree.
There were the arguments concerning the use of our resources by people who were not Us. More than one terribly clever person suggested I take them in and support them, somehow equating the roughly 1,000 square feet of my condo with the 105.8 trillion square feet that make up the United States. That argument is too absurd to engage. In case you haven’t heard me say it 105.8 trillion times yet, there is no Them; we are all Us.
This is what we need to understand more than anything else. If we can feel for each other just the slightest bit of empathy, if we can learn to lead with love, we can change the world.
I’m going to end this episode with the piece that made a friend suggest I start a blog (I didn’t even know what a blog was at the time. I was just posting my writing on Facebook hoping someone would respond. It was the fact that my Rhiannon (see The Haunting of Horace for details) reacted that prompted me to keep writing.) that led to this show. I think it’s relevant now.
Empathy and Art
My earliest memory of feeling empathy is Christmas 1969. I was 7 years old, sitting under a tree with an obscene number of gifts I had just opened, and feeling truly ecstatic, when I noticed my Mother had no Christmas presents. Not one. I burst into tears of guilt. My father took me to a drug store, and we found Mom a candle, and it was my first present to her. Neither Dad nor I had any ability to wrap a candle, so we gave it to Mom to wrap. And when she opened it an hour or so later, she loved that candle as she loved her children. She got candles from me for decades after that, and for nearly every occasion. It took several additional hours for me to recognize that Dad hadn’t gotten any presents, either, and Mom took me to the drug store to buy Dad a pipe. I gave him most of the pipes he used to smoke. These Traditions were the product of Empathy.
I have, and I would guess most of you have, wept for Tom Robinson. I have cheered for Sherlock Holmes. I have spoken with Hamlet repeatedly about the value and meaning (or lack thereof) of life. I have felt joy for Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars. I learned Friendship from Sam and Frodo, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. I learned courage from Santiago and his marlin, and morality from Atticus Finch. I have faced George’s agonizing moral dilemma concerning his best friend, Lenny, when George tells him to think about the rabbits. These are all other examples of Empathy.
I believe Empathy is essential to being Human. Too much Empathy is dangerous, of course. You can’t possibly grieve for every tragedy in the world. No one has that vast an emotional landscape. But, the inability to feel for others is, in my mind, the root of evil. You don’t kill people not because it’s against the law, but because you can feel for someone besides yourself. You won’t commit most acts of violence or cruelty for the same reasons. You can imagine how you would feel if it happened to you. You can’t do something you believe to be evil because you can experience the emotions of Others.
I believe an exposure to The Arts is essential for increasing a person’s Empathy. It’s in books, movies, music, paintings, poetry, dance, and other forms of Art that we find our own feelings. And it’s where we learn to feel the joys and pains that our fellow travelers on this little ball in space are likely to feel, themselves. It’s in catharsis that we learn the most about ourselves and each other.
When we can understand each other, we can dispense with the idea of Us vs. Them. We can move forward together, as a species, and this is a product of Empathy. I care about you because I recognize some of myself in you. I hope you can see some of yourself in me, too.
There are some other doggos in my neighborhood. I have to make the barksers at them when they walk by because this is my yard, and I have to defend it from anyone who thinks they can have any of it. I already peed to let them know, but they still walk by with their hoomans. The Smelly Old Man doesn’t like the barksers. He picks me up and takes me in the house if I make too many. He doesn’t understand how important they are. What if another dog tried to invade? Most of the dogs are lots and lots bigger than I am, but that doesn’t matter. They can’t have my yard. It’s where I make my poopers. It’s where I play with all my toysers. It’s where I sit in the Smelly Old Man’s lap, and I give him cuddles under his robe so I keep him warm. It’s my home. I don’t know if hoomans understand about home.
The Smelly Old Man had some waters in his eyes yesterday when he was looking at some hoomans sitting on concrete floors and holding on to each other. The hoomans looked scared and sad, but there were littler hoomans that were playing with their puppies. The puppies seemed like they were helping. There were pretty yellow flowers. I would give them lots of cuddles and loves if I were wherever they are. I could give them kisseses, and then they would feel better, I think. Smelly Old Man always feels better when I do those things for him.
Some of the hoomans have bigger dogs, too, but they’re made of metal I think, and they are scarier. The big metal dogs run things over, and they make lots of noisers, and then bad things happen. They ruin more things than I do when I’m chewing up the Smelly Old Man’s furniture. The Smelly Old Man needs to yell at them, like he does at me, to make them stop wrecking everything. Sometimes when he yells at me, I stop for a little while. But then he goes back to the big desk, and I get some more of the stuffings out of the couch. I kind of forget, I guess. Maybe that’s what hoomans do, too. They probably know how to be Good Boy, too, and then they forget. Maybe they need to stop ruining other people’s homes. Smelly Old Man doesn’t like it when I chew up his couch. Probably other hoomans don’t like it when the big metal dogs ruin their whole houses. That’s probably why they had waters in their eyes.
Ukrainian Children
In Local News
Smelly Old Man was happy yesterday. He keepeded saying something about being on 10. Then he played this song over and over. He said people listeneded to this show ten thousand times. He was very proud, so I gave him some kisseses to tell him I was proud of him. And then the waters came out of his eyes again. Hoomans are weird. Smelly Old Man gets waters in his eyes when he is happy and when he is sad. I wonder if my hooman is broken. I should see if it came with a warranty.
I think his name is Fred. He calls himself my Fred, and I heard someone else call him Fred the other day when two hoomans brought some big wooden things where he puts his books. Fred’s not a very good name. I will stick with Smelly Old Man.
He’s slow. When we come in the house, from the time he opens the glass door until he gets in the living room, I can get through the library and do 6 laps around the couch. I still get Zoomies a lot, but I don’t think he likes when I pull all the stuffings out of the couch. I just need him to chase me is all, but I don’t know if he can. It takes him about 11 hours to stand up. Poor Smelly Old Man.
I think he loves me, though. He gives me lots of pets, and he lets me jump on his lap when he sits in the backyard. I try to give him kisseses on his face, but he makes noisers like it hurts him, so I have to try not to do that so much. Maybe he just doesn’t like my feetsers on his chest. I make my poopers and pee pees in the backyard now, and then sometimes I eat the poops. Smelly Old Man keeps trying to get them away from me, but if I’m not supposed to eat them, he shouldn’t leave them on the ground.
Editorial
This dogporter believes more of us doggos need to help more of those poor hoomans who don’t know how to love right. Love is about cuddles and kisseses and pets. It’s about treatsers and foods and sharing dinnerses. It’s about being by each other no matter what. I have to remind Smelly Old Man about that part sometimes because he leaves me in the backyard by myself when other hoomans come over. Those hoomans need loves, too, so he needs to let me in so I can jump on them and give them lots of kisseses, so they learn how to love, too. That’s happened three times since we’ve been together. I hope he learns to do better. I’m trying to teach him. He’s slow and kind of stupid, though. I still love him. That’s what I do. I eat, I pee, I poop, I chew up furniture, I play with my toysers, and I love peoples. Is there anything else I’m supposed to be doing? Is there anything else hoomans should be doing?
I love all of you other doggos out there…. And the hoomans, too.
And, that’s the way it is. Good night and good treatsers.
Government is the source of more problems than I can count. If you want to do something, you almost certainly need a license of some sort. If you live here, they’re going to take your money in the form of taxes. If you want to have a voice anyone in government hears, you need to have a lot more money than either you or I have. Things are set up to benefit the wealthy and oppress the poor. Government is a bureaucracy constructed to ensure nothing ever really gets done without jumping through more hoops than all the animals Barnum and Bailey ever trained. A single mistake sets a person back for months.
California, for example, said they were covering my Medicare until December, even though I moved to Arizona in October. Arizona, therefore, while they were perfectly willing to pick up my Medicare, denied the request in November because California hadn’t sent the form that said they were no longer covering it. This is why Social Security took $510 from my Disability this month to recoup their losses from December, January, and February. Arizona sent the proper form to Social Security. It takes 90 days to process that, so I’ll get $170 a month less on which to live until June or July. I’m not alone in this. I feel sure it happens to millions of others, and all of us search frantically for the means to survive while the bureaucrats process paperwork. I’m never moving again. The only way to get me out of this place is in a body bag.
Any efforts to pass laws that help us take years, and they can be stopped by a single voice, usually one paid for by those who have the money to deny the rest of us the chance to join the pursuit of happiness that is supposed to be one of our inalienable rights. Government is the problem, isn’t it?
Americans, after all, rugged individualists. We hear so often about those who made it all by themselves. They didn’t need government to become successful. They are self-made successes. We should all aspire to such greatness. They did it all alone, didn’t they?
Did they? From where did they get the education they needed if not from our schools? How did they get where they needed to go if not on the roads we built? From where did they get the currency they needed to exchange for the goods and services they used to become successful if not from the government that printed it? Who kept them safe if not our police departments? They almost certainly benefitted at some time from our fire departments, our paramedics, our hospitals, and our concept of freedom that allowed them to live without the fear of winding up disappearing in the middle of the night for speaking out against our government.
All of us are standing on the shoulders of 200,000 years of human development. I didn’t invent paper, nor the printing press, nor the computer on which I’m writing. I didn’t invent the language that allows us to communicate. I’m using the products of human progress. I’m not doing this alone. There are billions of people who came before me to allow me to write this. The government and The People On The Porch provide me the funds I need to exist. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos didn’t do it alone, either. They couldn’t possibly do it alone. They made use of (or, if you’re of my frame of mind, exploited) the benefits of the advancements of our species.
We humans have done extraordinary things. We have increased our life spans dramatically. My mother is 91, and I expect her to live for quite some time to come. It’s not unheard of for people to live for a century because of our advances in medicine.
We’ve also made health care into a logistical nightmare, but now an insurance company can’t deny you coverage because of a “preexisting condition” – a term they invented to avoid insuring diabetics and others that are likely to cost them more. For all the problems inherent in The Affordable Care Act, that’s one part it got right. They can no longer say, “You’ve outrun your coverage; die in peace.” Government allowed medical insurance to exist. That was a problem. Government kept them from denying coverage. That was a small part of the solution. The government is a tide that goes out but comes back in. It moves in waves, and, like the ocean itself, it does as much damage as it does good.
“We have to say what we feel; that government, no matter what its failures of the past, and in times to come, for that matter, government can be a place where people come together, and where no one gets left behind. No one… gets left behind. An instrument of good.”
— Toby Ziegler in “The West Wing: He Shall, From Time to Time” Season 1, Episode 12, by Aaron Sorkin
Our Founding Document, “The Declaration of Independence,” tells us that all men are created equal. That’s an ideal, not a fact. Michael Jordan is a better basketball player than I am. That’s a fact. He was created one way, and I, another. I am a better writer than a child who will never be able to use language. That’s a fact. I was created one way, and he, another.
“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality…”
— Atticus Finch, “To Kill A Mockingbird: Chapter 20” by Harper Lee
Will you find corruption in our courts? Of course you will. Only hours after Atticus gave that speech to the jury, the court failed to deliver justice for Tom Robinson.
But this is an example of the idea upon which our country was built. It’s the idea that we all matter. It’s the idea that all voices count, even those who spout ridiculous things. Last year, for example, when I was in Surprise to see my mother, my nephew and I were staying at a hotel. We went downstairs for a drink, and there we met a woman who spent 45 minutes explaining to me that there are Lizard People from another dimension, or reality, or planet (she wasn’t sure which) who are living here now. And I want her to be allowed to vote. Because, as Toby Ziegler told us above… no one… no one is left behind. I don’t have to agree with you to want you to have a say in how this life we share is governed. She may be right. I would be willing to bet everything I will ever earn for the rest of what’s left of my life that she’s not, but I could be wrong. I remind myself of that constantly. I think I’m right, but I could always, always, always be wrong. So could you. So could she.
There are times when all the world’s asleep The questions run too deep For such a simple man…
I said, watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical Liberal, oh fanatical, criminal Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re acceptable Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable
— Supertramp, “The Logical Song” from “Breakfast In America, 1979
Instead of giving in to the cynicism that tells us it’s too late, that the American Oligarchs have already taken over, and that there’s nothing more to do but live in a dystopian nightmare, we can encourage one another to believe in an idea. The Cynics, you see, can be wrong, too. We can believe in the idea of liberty and justice for all. Our flag lies limp on its pole now, hanging its head in shame, but a good wind can come up at any moment to make it fly in all its tri-colored, star-spangled glory again. We can begin by protecting voting rights. We can continue by creating a Health Care System that allows us the medical attention we need without bankrupting us. We can reach for the stars by providing a Universal Basic Income that ensures all of us have enough to survive. We can end poverty. We can reduce the nightmare of income inequality. We can do anything we choose to do if we can be United.
The oligarchs want to pit us against each other. “They’re not from America, and they’re stealing your jobs. They’re the source of the problem. She’s a woman, and instead of staying home and raising children, she’s out in the workplace, making you replaceable, and reducing everyone’s income. She’s the source of the problem. They have different sexual orientations than you do, and they’ve destroyed the moral lives that are the heart of this country. They’re the source of the problem. That guy is a Socialist who wants to give away your hard-earned money to someone else for free. He’s the source of the problem. This guy is a fascist who attacked the country on January 6. He’s the source of the problem. This guy likes the football team you hate. You just KNOW he’s the source of the problem.”
Sorry. I don’t buy that. There is no Them; we are all Us. We’re all the source of the problem. I can, and do, disagree with many people. Even more disagree with me. But I won’t turn that disagreement into hatred. Neither should you. Instead, I want to understand those with whom I disagree, and I hope to make them understand me. I want to find a way to solve the problems. I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in solutions. Don’t tell me why we can’t unless that’s your preface to the answer I want to hear: how we can.
In 1940, our armed forces weren’t among the twelve most formidable in the world, but obviously we were going to fight a big war. And Roosevelt said the US would produce 50,000 airplanes in the next four years. Everyone thought it was a joke. And it was, cuz it turned out we produced 100,000 planes. Give the air force an armada that would block the sun…
Over the past half century, we’ve split the atom, we’ve spliced the gene, and we’ve roamed Tranquility Base. We’ve reached for the stars, and never have we been closer to having them in our grasp. New science, new technology is making the difference between life and death, and so we need a national commitment equal to this unparalleled moment of possibility…
— Sam Seaborn from The West Wing, “100,000 Airplanes” Season 3, episode 11, by Aaron Sorkin
A President of The United States was once asked to define America. He answered, “One word – one word: Possibilities.”
There’s little we can’t do if we work together. One person can’t defend the country, but millions of soldiers with 100,000 airplanes can. One person can’t cure cancer or diabetes, but thousands of scientists working together and separately can, and I believe, someday, they will. One person can’t reshape our economy to relieve the afflicted. But a government that truly represents the diversity of America can. One person can’t explore strange new worlds, or seek out new life and new civilizations, but together we all can boldly go where no one has gone before.
Let’s recognize, at last, that we have more in common with our bitterest enemy than I have with the dog I love with all my heart. We may have irreconcilably different ideologies, beliefs, agendas, goals, and desires. But all of us have a heart. All of us bleed. All of us pee, and poop, and sleep and wake up. All of us require the sun to keep us alive. All of us rose from the same bit of goo 4.5 billion years ago. Your DNA is nearly identical to mine. You’re sharing a ride with me on this rock tumbling through space. You live, you love, you laugh, you cry. So do I. You’re here for less than two centuries. So am I.
We need to work with the government we have to make it the government it could be. We need it to become that place where we all come together to discuss our problems and find not the Democratic Answer or the Republican Answer, but the Right Answer.
As Russia marches, seemingly inexorably, toward World War III, and the nuclear war that would exterminate all life on Earth, we need now, more than ever, to stop fighting amongst ourselves over differences that are superficial and start finding a way out of the terror that lies ahead. There’s little point in planning for a Utopian future if we’re not going to be around for another year.
But, for today…
I woke up at 3:40 AM, but that’s because I passed out a little before 9. Speedy Shine came outside with me, did his business, and jumped immediately into my lap and fell asleep again. I don’t know why I love that feeling so much. Having him sleeping in my lap makes me feel alive, content, and at peace with the world.
I wish, so much, everyone could feel such peace. I think of it as a simple pleasure. For far too many people, it’s an all but unimaginable luxury.
There is plenty about which to worry. The chance of nuclear war grows greater all the time. This will almost certainly lead to the extinction of the human race. I think that’s a good reason to worry.
On the other hand, I don’t believe there’s much I can do about that. I don’t believe Putin is taking my calls this week. If he were, I don’t think he could possibly care less about my pleas not to continue the mass murder our species has politely named War.
The best I can possibly do is to convince, if I am absurdly successful, 50 people to believe in the possibilities that liberty holds. I might be able to get them to oppose voter suppression laws, or to support a Universal Basic Income. I can’t stop the deaths.
If our time on Earth is approaching its end, I want to find all the happiness I can before I’m gone. Worrying accomplishes nothing of value, and it keeps me from feeling the Joy I want while I can still have it.
It’s not that I don’t care what is happening. It’s that I can’t change it.
If I can’t change it, I won’t worry about it. I will hope for change. I will advocate change. I will support those who try to make the changes in which I believe.
And then, I’m going to smoke a bowl, play some music, and enjoy the feeling of a dog lying in my lap, allowing me to believe he loves me, and knowing that I love him.
I hope you find a similar sort of Peace. I love you.
Iowa Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would force all public-school classrooms to have a camera that would livestream classes which parents and guardians could view online. Under the bill, school staff who did not keep cameras active or who obstruct the camera’s view could be fined up to 5 percent of their weekly salary.
“I have a right to know what is happening in my child’s classroom every minute of every day. If teachers have nothing to hide, there is no reason to keep cameras out of the classroom. Let the parents know what teachers are doing to their children. This is no different than police officers wearing body cameras to ensure they’re not doing anything wrong. And, like body cameras, cameras in the classroom will provide evidence to protect teachers when they are unjustly accused. Why on Earth would anyone object to Cameras in The Classroom?”
That’s an excellent question. I asked it this week on my Facebook page after a dear friend made a request for this episode. What I’m about to give you is NOT to be confused with scientific research, or even with a valid poll. It’s nothing more than the responses of a few of my friends, many of whom are, shockingly enough, teachers. I taught Elementary School for 29 years. I made friends with a few teachers in that time.
I won’t be using real names. One of them already has a built-in pseudonym, and the others I will invent.
A friend I’ll call “Jennifer” suggested:
My two cents is that if you mistrust teachers so much, keep your kids home and home school them.
The response to this would probably be that not everyone CAN keep their kids at home to home-school them. Many, if not most, parents are working.
Another friend I’ll call Frances, who has mixed feelings about it, made a case for having cameras in the classroom. She told us:
As an abused child that switched schools several times in order to get away from our abuser, I could see how this could go terribly awry.
On the other hand, my 6th grade teacher used to hit us with yardsticks and paddles when we were “bad”. One time, there was this boy named Bobby that used to go rounds with the teacher. Teacher bullied the student & the student retaliated with a disrespectful & aggressive attitude. Bobby spouted off to the teacher this day & the teacher full on assaulted this 12 yr old boy. It was horrifying. As it turns out, Bobby was being abused at home by his alcoholic father only to come to school to be further abused by his teacher. In that case, maybe a camera would have saved that boy from yet another assault from an adult that was supposed to be taking care of him.
I’m kinda torn on this one.
This is an important point. Most teachers, like most police officers, are good, kind, caring people of decent moral character. In any group, however, there will be bad people, and the teaching profession is no exception. I don’t know anyone who wants a teacher like this in the classroom. Is a camera in the classroom the only way to stop someone like this from abusing our children?
I think we all know that it’s not. At no time in my career was there ever a camera live streaming my class to the world. Near the end of my career, however, cell phones were common. I’m sure they’re even more prevalent now than they were in 2016 when I quit teaching. You can be reasonably certain some student would record that moment. Even if that didn’t happen, it would be discussed around dinner tables when students go home to tell their versions of the story to their horrified parents. It would get to the administration. It would be addressed swiftly and in accordance with the policies of the district. The camera wouldn’t offer immediate assistance.
There is also a legitimate legal issue of student privacy. As Frau Bleucher tells us:
I teach 3rd grade. I can’t even take pictures of my entire class without putting an emoji over 2-3 faces because their parents won’t give permission for their pictures to be taken. So, it would be an issue.
I have 6 students who are currently kindergarten level, so I’m trying to fill in some deep gaps. Therefore, they will receive different types of lessons and learning strategies than my other students. I referred all of them for an SST (Student Study Team) meeting in September so we can see if they qualify to be academically tested. We are currently a year behind in our intervention meetings due to Covid/distance learning. No other parent needs to know this.
I have one who has the mentality of a 3-4 year old. (We are in the process of trying to find a suitable educational placement before she goes to 4th grade). She also goes to speech and occupational therapy. No one needs to know this. I have 3 students who suffer from emotional distress and go to a counselor. No one has the right to know this. One is absolutely brilliant, 5th grade level. But, we believe he is on the spectrum and has had episodes of extreme frustration that he gets mad and begins to tear up my classroom or throw things, or break down in tears because he can’t handle it. He also has a severe stutter, but it’s taking a long time to process for testing. No one needs to see him trying to control his feelings and not succeed on a particular day.
She makes excellent points here. Students’ privacy outweighs the need for parents to watch what happens all day long in a classroom. Such a stream could easily be hacked and used for unthinkable purposes. I’ll say the word pedophile, and I’ll leave it at that.
A significant part of teaching is establishing relationships with students. This is made much more difficult by having every move watched in an almost Orwellian sense.
Another friend I’ll call Austen, who does a weekly news and commentary show on YouTube, saw both sides of it.
I am legitimately torn on this issue. I feel like the way it is going to be implemented and used is nothing more than spying on teachers for the state. I don’t think people can work or study in that environment. On the other hand, I think child abuse at the hands of teachers would probably go… way down and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have an objective view of what’s happening inside of classrooms. Really tough. On the one hand we have this watch state, which is dystopian and disturbing. On the other hand the constant use of cameras everywhere save(s) lives and stops abuse and exposes lies. We would need to create a lot of regulation around them if we did. I cannot fall on one side of this issue or the other, I am genuinely torn.
I would be way more in favor of recordings though than streaming.
This might be a more workable idea. If we insist on putting cameras in the classrooms, the videos are locked down, and they can be opened only with just cause. I wouldn’t want to try to determine what qualifies as just cause, but others can figure that out.
I think she’s right, too, that much of this is because there are those who live in terror that teachers will discuss issues that they don’t want discussed. I suspect you’re familiar with The Scopes Trial. It is explained succinctly by History.com here:
The Scopes Trial, also known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was the 1925 prosecution of science teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school, which a recent bill had made illegal. The trial featured two of the best-known orators of the era, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, as opposing attorneys. The trial was viewed as an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the bill, to publicly advocate for the legitimacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and to enhance the profile of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Even today teaching Evolution can be controversial. It was the cry for inclusion of religious doctrine as science that gave rise to The Flying Spaghetti Monster. In an open letter to the Kansas School Board, Bobby Henderson wrote:
I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.
Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.
Today, many are concerned about Critical Race Theory. They don’t want teachers to discuss anything that might make anyone uncomfortable. Books are being banned for having LGBTQIA characters, for discussing racism, for illustrating the holocaust, or for having ideas that cause a reader to reflect, ponder, or think at all. Cameras in the classroom would have provided powerful evidence against Scopes. I believe this is among the reasons Republican state Rep. Norlin Mommsen, who introduced the Iowa Bill, would like to have every moment of the day recorded. There are bills restricting what teachers can discuss in their classrooms, and the punishments for violations can be extreme. In short, they want their ideas to be taught to the exclusion of all others. History shows us this never works out well.
Your ideas about religion are personal. The government has no business telling you what your relationship to the universe, or to God, or to multiple gods should be. Certainly, the school doesn’t have the right to do that.
History, however, is not a matter of personal opinion. The Declaration of Independence was dated July 4, 1776. To say otherwise would require quite a bit of evidence that would probably require a TARDIS to collect. Slavery was a part of America. European Americans subjugated and slaughtered Native Americans. These are facts. Understanding our history allows us to learn from our mistakes and celebrate our victories. The United States has won extraordinary victories for humanity. We have put human beings on the Moon. We have made an effort at having Freedom unlike any before us. And we have made mistakes. We have done evil. This is all part of the canvas of our history. We need to see all of it in the cold light of day.
And just as we trust doctors with medicine and lawyers with legal matters, because they are professionals who have learned more about it than we know ourselves, we need to trust our teachers and treat them as professionals who know more about education than the rest of us. They are already underpaid and insufficiently respected. They are filling roles for which no school ever prepared them. They have become parents, counselors, social workers, and practitioners of patience on an unimaginable scale. They need to deal with a host of children’s challenges, whether the child is abused, neglected, homeless, or simply sad because their dog died. They take on an enormous responsibility, and they do it for very little money. If we would like to end what people are calling a teacher shortage, perhaps we could let them do their jobs unencumbered by the uninformed opinions of those who have, or want to have, power over them.
No one went into teaching to make money. We did it to make a difference. Don’t beat the passion out of those who are still in the profession. They’re doing the best they can with incredibly limited time and resources. If you don’t want to support them, at least don’t make their jobs harder. Let’s leave the cameras on cell phones. Let’s let teachers do what they can to save the world.
My first idea was to call this episode “Preserving Democracy.” The moment, however, that I refer to our system of government as a democracy, someone will shout, “We’re not a democracy; we’re a republic,” and we’re already wasting time on semantics. I don’t want to argue about which terms we apply to the idea that our government is supposed to be about Liberty. It’s right there in our Pledge of Allegiance: “…with liberty and justice for all.” The only way it works is if we can all vote. We gave up The Divine Right of Kings by 1776. Google’s Dictionary defines it fairly well: “the doctrine that kings derive their authority from God, not from their subjects, from which it follows that rebellion is the worst of political crimes. It was claimed in Britain by the earlier Stuarts and is also associated with the absolutism of Louis XIV of France.”
Constitution of The United States
The idea of America is that we all decide who will represent us, our values, our needs, and our concerns in government. I welcome this concept. I think everyone – and by that, I mean all human beings capable of understanding what it means to vote (more than, say, arbitrarily, 12 years old) should be able to vote. If you live here, whether I agree with you or not, I believe your voice should be heard as clearly as mine. This is true whether you are a convicted felon, an illegal immigrant, a homeless person, or the CEO of General Motors. You have a stake in what happens in this country.
Why do you object to someone voting? Among those of us who have that right, well over 30% of us choose not to use it. Do you believe a prisoner serving his sentence is going to vote for the candidate who wants to legalize robbing a convenience store or something? Is there such a candidate… anywhere? If those who are currently unrepresented, or, at least under-represented, can vote, the country can more accurately reflect the will of its residents. I’m willing to bet that a large portion of us, on both sides of the aisle, would love to end poverty and homelessness.
Universal Voting has met significant opposition from its inception. Women were not allowed to vote for well over a century. Black people weren’t allowed, preliminarily, to vote, and when they were, laws were promptly passed to make it all but impossible. People have died for having the unmitigated temerity of trying to cast a vote.
A few weeks ago I talked to you about The Utopia We Could Create. (It’s Episode 137: The Utopia We Could Create: One Dear Land if you haven’t heard it) I described Ellen Hadley’s vision of a world without poverty and homelessness, with little fear of war, with help for everyone, and with information shared all but effortlessly with anyone who wants it. It’s a beautiful idea. The first step in bringing it to fruition is ensuring that everyone can vote.
While we currently live in an oligarchy, or a government run by the wealthy, we were not designed to work like this. There are many more struggling than thriving. If we let those who are struggling vote, they’re likely to elect representatives who will help to ease their pain. Those who hold power now don’t seem to like this idea very well. They’re doing what they can to make voting as difficult as possible. I’ll give you a few examples.
Politicians often use unfounded claims of voter fraud to try to justify registration restrictions. In 2011, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach championed a law requiring Kansans to show “proof of citizenship” documents in order to register to vote, citing false claims of noncitizen voting. Most people don’t carry the required documents on hand — like a passport, or a birth certificate — and as a result, the law blocked the registrations of more than 30,000 Kansans…
Some states are discouraging voter participation by imposing arbitrary requirements and harsh penalties on voters and poll workers who violate these rules. In Georgia, lawmakers have made it a crime to provide food and water to voters standing in line at the polls — lines that are notoriously long in Georgia, especially for communities of color. In Texas, people have been arrested and given outrageous sentences for what amount at most to innocent mistakes made during the voting process…
A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences, including the loss of your right to vote. Some states ban voting only during incarceration, or while on probation or parole. And other states and jurisdictions, like Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., don’t disenfranchise people with felony convictions at all. The fact that these laws vary so dramatically only adds to the overall confusion that voters face, which is a form of voter suppression in itself.
Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black and Brown people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses. Many of these laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era, when legislators tried to block Black Americans’ newly won right to vote by enforcing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers that were nearly impossible to meet. To this day, the states with the most extreme disenfranchisement laws also have long histories of suppressing the rights of Black people.
These are just three examples. There are many more. Many states are going to great lengths to ensure as few people as possible vote. This is in direct opposition to the ideas upon which our government is founded. If we add to this the gerrymandering that occurs in many places, it becomes clear that those in charge are more interested in maintaining power, and less interested in creating One Dear Land.
The cynic will tell you that your vote doesn’t matter. Both major parties are controlled by the elite, and there’s nothing we can do short of a violent overthrow of the government. The problem with that is, in the unlikely event they were successful, we would then have a government controlled by violent people, and I have no more confidence in their intentions to help us reclaim our liberty than I have in those who currently hold power. The odds of such a revolution working are miniscule. The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world. There’s no military action a militia can launch that could scratch the surface. Additionally, many people will die in any such plan. I’m opposed to killing except in the most extreme cases of need.
Fortunately, other solutions are available. One is The John Lewis Voting Rights Act. “The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the law (the Voting Rights Act) to full strength, in part by once again requiring states with histories of voter discrimination to receive approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before enacting voting changes.”
The idea is that we will have more opportunities for people to vote. More voices will be heard. Is this necessary, though?
The Brennan Center for Justice tells us:
Voter suppression remains on the rise today. In 2021 alone, at least 19 states enacted at least 34 laws that make it harder to vote, while at least 13 restrictive voting bills have been pre-filed for 2022 legislative sessions and no fewer than 152 restrictive voting bills will carry over from last year. Four of the restrictive laws that passed in 2021 are “monster” voter suppression packages that include dozens voting access rollbacks. Two of these monster laws are in states that would be covered by the version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act before the Senate (Texas and Georgia) and a third is in a state (Florida) that would have been covered by the House version of the bill. (The fourth is in Iowa).
In 1965, states and localities suppressed the votes of people of color with poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, we see insidious discrimination in new forms. We see it when a state bans 24-hour voting in response to its widespread use in a heavily nonwhite county. We see it when a state sets limits on drop boxes that make them harder to access after nonwhite voters used them in droves. We see it when a legislator says we should focus on the “quality” of voters over the quantity.
One step toward ensuring full participation in our democracy is passing the latest Voting Rights Act. There are enough votes in Congress to accomplish this, except that the filibuster keeps it from happening. The filibuster, in modern times, is explained here by The Washington Post.
The filibuster is a Senate rule that essentially requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.
The Senate is required to follow certain procedural steps in passing legislation. When a bill is brought to the Senate floor, any senator can bring things to a halt by speaking for as long as they wish, effectively delaying a vote to end debate on a bill. The Senate can vote to end debate with a three-fifths majority, or 60 of 100 senators. So any bill that has the support of at least 60 senators is, in effect, filibuster-proof, and the Senate can quickly move on to the next steps leading up to a final vote.
But most controversial legislation is passed on party-line votes these days, and it’s very rare for parties to have 60 senators. Democrats only have 50 right now.
In the modern Senate, an objecting senator doesn’t actually have to stand there and filibuster endlessly — you might remember Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) reading “Green Eggs and Ham,” or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) quoting Jay-Z and Wiz Khalifa, in the midst of hours-long speeches that brought the Senate to a standstill.
Those were examples of what was required of senators decades ago. Now, a senator can simply indicate her intent to filibuster a bill and cause it to be sidelined. That means in the current Senate, all it takes is one Republican to object to a Democratic-sponsored bill, and that bill is stopped in its tracks.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/09/what-is-filibuster/
Ending the filibuster would allow Congress to protect our voting rights. It’s not a panacea, but it’s a good step toward allowing us to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. There are dangers for both sides of the aisle. Democrats will be able to pass voting rights legislation now, but Republicans are likely to regain the majority in the 2022 elections, and changing the filibuster will give them greater power to pass legislation Democrats won’t like.
The majority of voters chose these representatives. The majority of these representatives want to protect voting rights. I’m a part of that majority, which is extraordinarily rare for a man known for holding minority opinions on nearly every issue.
If the people are accurately and faithfully represented, the people can decide how to make our country, first, and our world, inevitably, the kind of place it ought to be. We can work together to abolish poverty, to terminate homelessness, and to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. We need to preserve our liberty if we’re going to accomplish anything else.
Violence is unnecessary and counterproductive. We can use our voices to make a difference. I can’t make that difference alone. Neither can you. Neither can she. But, if every person moves one rock, a billion of us can move a mountain. I’m moving the tiny little rock that I can. I hope you can move a heavier stone.
Imagine all the people Sharing all the world You
You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one
It is probably unwise to do this episode because it’s likely to cost me some of the Patreon support that has helped me to get to the life I have always wanted. Sometimes when someone thinks I’m doing all right, they stop supporting me because they feel like I don’t need it anymore. To be clear, I’m nothing approaching wealthy. I’m never going to be. I do, however, if I am very careful, have enough to live every month. This is, in large part, because of the help my Patreon supporters, and several other good friends of mine, have given me. I have, for example, one friend who is the mother of one of my classmates from my days in high school who sends me lovely cards with $40 in them from time to time. She thinks of it as nothing, but it makes it possible for me to get through just a little longer, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
My Valentine
Another friend got his taxes back, and, for absolutely no reason, sent me $75. Those unexpected gifts help me to get the little extras. I just got another blanket that has no stuffing because of my friend’s tax return gift. Speedy Shine can’t ruin it. My room isn’t covered in feathers anymore. My life is better, and I get to enjoy luxuries I wouldn’t otherwise even consider.
Without my Patreon support, I would never make ends meet every month. Without having the good fortune of renting a place for half price, I would never make ends meet every month. If I still had a car, I would never make ends meet every month. I’ve learned to adjust my life to my meager means. I can’t afford to buy every book I want (but one of The People on The Porch – Frau Bleucher — just bought me Valerie Bertinelli’s latest book, for which I could not be more grateful), and I still can’t afford my bookcases or to get my plumbing fixed, but I don’t spend every day worrying about getting evicted, or losing my electricity, or paying for my internet, because all of those things are covered in my wildly reduced rent.
(Update: My best friend has become a Notorious Furniture Flipper. She buys furniture cheaply at something called Offer Up with the intention of selling it at a profit. She’s gotten the furniture several times now, but she’s never sold any. Either she or her boyfriend decide they love it and want to keep it. Using these newfound skills, she is shopping for 4 big bookcases for me for a total of $50 or less. I’m hopeful she will be successful. It would be a huge step toward making my life complete.)
This didn’t come easily. I’m the recipient of more kindness and generosity than I could possibly deserve. I never forget that for even a moment. But, I also worked hard to get where I am. I worked at grocery stores when I was a kid. I worked at Day Care Centers when I was a little older. I went to NAU for a little more than 4 years (we don’t talk about my first semester, thank you), I became a teacher, and I did that for 29 years. I taught Defensive Driving on weekends during the final five years of my Elementary School teaching career because my salary wasn’t keeping up with inflation. Rent kept going up, but my checks didn’t. When I quit teaching, I took most of a year off, and I lived the life I had always wanted. I had to go back to work, and I sold Direct TV for quite a while and taught all the Defensive Driving classes I could get. I drove for Postmates. And when my Diabetes finally destroyed what was left of my health, I spent nearly 3 years trying to get my Disability.
Disability pays my half price rent and my phone bill. Everything else is funded by Patreon. The license I just got for the software I use to do this show was paid for by The People on The Porch. When I have to renew the license for the music I use, that will also come from the money I get from Patreon. It took me more than 2 years, doing at least one episode a week, to get to this point. I’m proud of my success.
I no longer live The Life of The Desperate. I did. I lived it for a long time, and, I have to tell you, it sucks. If it weren’t for you (and, let’s face it, if you’re listening to this show, you’re almost certainly one of The People on The Porch. I don’t think very many others listen.) I could never have made it this far. You made my better life possible. And I couldn’t be more grateful. Please please please don’t stop. I am beating my depression for the first time in years, and it’s because my circumstances are no longer anxiety producing. You did that for me.
When you think (as I often do) that doing the little things doesn’t matter, I want you to know what you are really doing. You are helping me to have this life, and without you, it would be impossible. Every single dollar goes into creating the life I think everyone ought to be able to have. This show is mostly about trying to create a world where everyone has the kind of life you have granted me.
What is that life like?
Waking Up
This morning, without an alarm, I woke up a little after 6 AM. The first thing I felt was my dog, Speedy Shine, cuddling next to my leg. I smiled. I took my first conscious breath. I took a moment to appreciate the beauty of that experience. We shared loves and cuddles until he woke up, did his morning shake, and then gave me kisses. I felt good before I was even out of bed. We laid there a little longer. He needed a few more minutes of cuddling before we both went to take care of our morning business. While I did mine, he came in and put his paws on my lap to remind me he loves me. After he did his, he came over to my backyard chair to tell me he was a Good Boy. We went in for Treatsers, but he didn’t really care about them. He just wanted to show me how good he was.
I went back out for a morning cigarette and to see what happened in the world while I was asleep. People had responded to my pictures of Speedy Shine and the new covers that wouldn’t spread feathers all over my room. They had nice things to say. Speedy Shine laid on the blankets by the back door so he could watch me. It was too cold for him out there, but he wanted to be sure I was still around. I wish I could find the words to explain how good that makes me feel.
I texted my best friend to tell her I hope she slept well, that I hope things are going well with her boyfriend, that I hope work goes well, and that I continue to love her most. That always sets her up with a nice start to a day that is going to be much more difficult than mine. I know. I did what she’s doing today every day for 29 years. Teachers can use all the emotional resources they can get. I make sure that I tell her I love her whenever we’re done talking or texting for a bit. I recognize I could easily be dead before we communicate next. I want to be sure the last thing she hears from me is that I love her. I do the same thing with my Mother. I do the same thing with Speedy Shine. I do it sometimes with you.
I played a game of Clue on my phone. We used to play that when I was a kid, and my brother and sister frequently beat me at it. I hadn’t figured out the logical way to proceed yet. For those of you who have never played the game (infants!), it’s a murder mystery. Someone has been killed. There are 6 suspects, 6 possible murder weapons, and 9 rooms where the murder might have taken place. We all have six cards that are some combination of suspects, weapons, and/or rooms. Three are in in the envelope in the middle of the board. These are the solution. The objective is to figure out the murderer, the weapon, and the room. You do that by travelling from room to room and “suggesting” who might have done it, the weapon that was used, and the room in which the crime was committed. It’s really a children’s version of The Scientific Method. What do I mean?
It helps if you have at least one suspect, one weapon, and one room in your hand. When you arrive at a room you don’t have, you suggest a suspect and a weapon in your hand. (The rules require you to use the room you’re in as the scene of the crime.) You know those two elements. You’re testing for the third. If no one has it, you have found the room where the crime occurred. If they do, you can eliminate it from the 9 possibilities. If you arrive at a room you have in your hand, you choose either a suspect or a weapon you don’t have to test whether others do. They are required to show you a card if they have it. If they have two or three of the cards, they need to show you only one.
The Scientific Method teaches us to control all the variables except the one for which we are testing. We know this method works. Evidence for that can be found in the fact you’re listening to this podcast. The computer on which I’m typing, the one on which I’ll record later, and the computer, or phone or whatever other device you’re using to play this are all direct results of the application of The Scientific Method.
When I first started playing this game on my phone back during my California Adventure, I always chose the option to play against the AI. I was afraid of seeming stupid in front of other humans I would never actually see or hear. The game doesn’t even have a chat feature. It’s not like they can TELL me how stupid I am. I play as Front Porch Fred. They won’t even know my name. But they might think I’m stupid. Yes, these were things about which I worried. After I had won 100 games against the AI, I felt confident enough to try it in front of other humans. And I was shocked by the results.
I’ve explained how to play the game correctly. It’s not difficult. Few of my opponents ever play it according to The Scientific Method. They suggest three elements they don’t have in their hand. Sometimes I will have two of them, and the third player shows them a card. Now I know what the third player showed. There’s only one possibility. That’s free information. It’s like playing Texas Hold Em and intentionally exposing one of your hole cards. My assumption is that people hope to get lucky. “I’m going to take a wild guess and see if I get it right.” It’s frustrating for me when they do this on the first turn, and, before I’ve even gotten the chance to roll the dice, they’ve solved the crime. That happens a little more than 1% of the time. Statistically, it should occur much less often. I assume someone has taken the time to hack the game. I can’t imagine why they would do that. Everyone, however, should get to spend their time as they see fit, so long as they’re not hurting anyone else. The damage they do to me is negligible. I’m annoyed for, perhaps, 15 seconds. I think I’ll survive.
It takes me between 10 and 15 minutes to play a game of Clue. I win 89% of the time. Now and then, I encounter another player who also knows how to play correctly, and then it’s a true race to see who can find the right room first. We tend to find the killer and the weapon almost simultaneously.
When I want a shorter game, I play Othello. This is another game we played as kids. You flip tokens from black to white and back. You’re either black or white; your opponent is the opposite color. Whoever has the most tokens at the end of the game wins. It’s another great little logic puzzle that allows me to think without taxing my brain sufficiently to make me frustrated. I won’t play that online at all. Even at the Very Easy level, I still sometimes lose to the AI. A smart player can crush me, and I don’t enjoy that as much as one would think. Again, I feel embarrassed. I’m less interested in competition than I am in spending a few leisurely moments thinking a little.
Othello
Shorter still is Solitaire. If the game takes more than 3 minutes to win, I think of it as a failure. I’m sure you’ve played that before. It’s a card game we all learn as children. I used to cheat as a child, and the phone won’t let me do that. Sometimes the deck is unwinnable. I can always play another one.
I read when I want now. Normally, it’s during the daylight hours because I like to read outside with a cigarette. I used to read in bed, but now I like to listen to my show when I’m going to sleep. First, I can use the numbers. Second, I prefer talking to myself about whatever is on the show to letting my brain run wild all night to remind me of every mistake I’ve ever made and let me know what a horrible person I am. My podcast voice generally drowns out the voice of my Prosecutor. (You’ll find him in Episode 97: “The Prosecution Never Rests.”) Finally, my voice saying, “Fred’s Front Porch Podcast is made possible by…” has become a signal for Speedy Shine. Before I even turn the bedside light out, he’s diving under the covers to secure the best cuddle spot before I go to sleep. How lovely is that?
After my morning routines, I like to come and sit at my computer and write. I play my Spotify playlist (no, I don’t feel like arguing about Neil Young and Joe Rogan right now; I’m in a good mood.). I look over my shoulder from time to time to make sure Speedy Shine isn’t destroying anything that might hurt him. Other than that, I am essentially talking to myself through my fingers on the keyboard. I’m rethinking my ideas. I’m clarifying them. I’m understanding my life a little better. It’s a wonderful experience.
When I start to get hungry, I go make a microwave breakfast. I’m ecstatic that I finally got enough in Food Stamps that I can afford to eat now. I don’t ever worry about going hungry anymore. This is a fantastic luxury. I love that feeling.
Breakfast is always in bed. As far as that goes, so is lunch and dinner. I don’t have, nor do I really want, a kitchen table. I have my TV in my bedroom, and I like to watch some Dick Wolf show while I eat. I enjoy most of the Law & Order shows, the One Chicago shows, and I just started FBI. They aren’t more challenging than I can handle. They are new to me. The characters become my friends over time. No, it’s not Aaron Sorkin, but I can recite nearly every word of every episode of television he’s ever written. A person needs something else. Some of the new Star Trek shows are pretty good. I love Picard. Prodigy is surprisingly good. Obviously, I’ve already seen all of The Original Series and The Next Generation more times than I can count. So… Dick Wolf is part of the meal ritual.
Speedy Shine has learned “lay down.” When I finish more than 90% of my meal, he knows he will get a little if he is a good boy. He is always a good boy. I share the last of the meal with him, and, in a little while, we’re either going to pull up the covers and start up the podcast, or we’re going to get up and go read outside. I love a nice morning nap.
I get to choose now what to do with every minute of my life. I have a few alarms on my phone. I had to change the Mom call from 7:37 PM to 6:25 because she’s getting tired earlier. She’s 91. No one gets to complain about what time she goes to bed. I have an alarm set for 1:45 every Wednesday so I get to Weekly Wacky Wednesday by 2, my time. I have an alarm for 4 PM to remind me to take my Lantus. When I have a doctor’s appointment, I have an alarm for that. Everything else, though… those minutes are up to me. I get at least 1 nap a day. Sometimes, if I’m caught up on the show, I manage 2.
I have the time I need to write my show at a leisurely pace. I try to have the script finished by Friday so I can record, score, and Horace on Saturday. I bounce the episode, find about 60 seconds to use for “Next Week On Fred’s Front Porch Podcast,” and then I’m ready to go. Sunday, I assemble all the pieces for this week’s episode, knowing I already have next week’s episode done, and I can relax.
I spend far too much time worrying about whether anyone likes my show. I obsess about numbers, but I keep trying to stop that. I’m checking my numbers less frequently. At first, it was just ego. Now that I’m deriving a little income from this, I find I really don’t want to lose the life I’ve worked so long to get. You are the reason I can live my way. I want us all to work together so everyone can choose how to spend their minutes without worrying about whether they will be able to pay rent and eat. Everyone deserves what it took me nearly 60 years to get. Is it possible? Why, yes. Yes, it is. I know that because I’m doing it. I want you to have a life at least as good as mine. You deserve it every bit as much as I do. And I couldn’t be more grateful for the life you’ve given me. I love you very very much.
“What? Did you think this was YOUR chair or something?” — Sir Speedy Shine
“No longer do we see slum conditions in any part of our country. Landlords vie with each other to offer the finest affordable housing to prospective tenants, knowing that, thanks to their basic incomes, they will be able to pay the rent regularly. Arrangements can be made for the landlord to be paid directly by the government, with the tenant receiving the rest of his basic income for his other living expenses. No one need live in run-down housing, and, as a result, slums have disappeared, to be replaced by decent, pleasant neighborhoods.
“No longer do we see the sad spectacle of elderly persons being stripped of a major portion of their life’s savings because of a catastrophic illness. They need not live in fear of impoverishment by health care expenses after they have worked long and diligently to put aside their nest-egg in order to have some comforts in their old age and leave inheritance to their children.
“No longer do we worry greatly about the possibility of war with other countries. We have come to think of ourselves as one world, working together under a common government, enjoying equal privileges, and striving toward shared goals.
“Finally, my friends, as you enter the voting booth, I ask you to think of the wonderful young people who have been growing up during these years. The counseling and care provided them has helped them to make the most of their educations, talents, and abilities and to develop into wholesome, healthy young citizens and future contributing members of the world community.
“I am confident that you, being mindful of these important advances in our society, will elect me to a second term as your President.”
— Ellen Hadley, “One Dear Land” page 247, 248
The link to the book is in the show notes.
Whether you believe what you just heard is possible, I hope you agree that it’s what we would all want for our world. The end of poverty is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Decent neighborhoods, kindly landlords, and children growing up in a nurturing environment are goals I think we all share.
Those who oppose these goals tend to use fear to dissuade us from pursuing them. The attitude is frequently that “I got mine; you get yours. If we start handing out money to lazy people, they end up getting the money YOU earned! We can’t allow that.” And this is a root cause of much human misery. As long as there are those who lack the basics of survival, there will be desperate people trying to obtain them. If we share no other goals, I think it’s fair to say that, with a few suicidal exceptions, we all want to live.
“While it’s desirable that competition should be a factor in determining the luxuries that a group enjoys, we shouldn’t let it affect its members’ access to the necessities of life. Competition must never cause any community of people to be deprived of its basic needs. If that were to happen, not only would this be an evil in itself, but it would lead to bitterness and resentment on the part of the deprived group toward those who are more affluent.” (“One Dear Land,” pages 254 and 255.)
There are lots of reasons cynics can find to persuade us this world isn’t possible. They help us to achieve nothing, however. Believing that something is possible is the first step toward making it happen. We would need some fundamental changes in our society, and, indeed, in the world for this Utopia to become a reality. There are those who will try to keep us from making these changes because they profit from the world being as it is. They can’t keep doing that forever, though. There is only so long that you can oppress a large population before they rebel. I never want to see it come to violent struggle. I don’t believe it has to, if we can convince everyone that it’s in everyone’s best interests to create a kinder, more productive, and, frankly, more beautiful world.
How do we do it?
First, let’s rid ourselves of poverty. If you’ve ever listened to this show before, you know what Universal Basic Income is. It comes up over and over. If, however, this is your first episode, I’ll take just a moment to explain. UBI is providing everyone with enough money to meet their basic needs. We ensure everyone has enough to pay rent and, at the very minimum, have enough money to eat properly, dress, and do the other things we need to do to keep living. This isn’t a handout if you are willing to accept the idea that, as I’ve said hundreds of times, There is no Them; we are all Us. This means the government is us, too. At the moment, it doesn’t really seem to be.
It seems to be an oligarchy, and there are those who have a vested interest in keeping it that way. It’s government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. It’s wonderful for those who have money. It sort of sucks for the rest of us. There was a guy whose name you might have heard before, Abe Lincoln, who told us that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The people. Not the few. I would love for us to return to that. We can take a step in that direction by working to keep free and fair elections in which everyone (that would be The People) can vote, and many more of us actually exercise that right.
The first step, then, toward achieving the world we want is reforming the government. I am not a political scientist. I’m not an economist. I’m not a sociologist. I leave that reform to those who are smarter than I am. I will simply point toward the destination: a truly representative government.
Having elected leaders who represent our interests, we now have the chance to put a UBI into place. Don’t buy into the fear that someone is going to take your money and give it to someone else. That’s what we do with money. We earn some, and then we give it to someone else in exchange for something we want, whether it’s goods or services, or simply the satisfaction of helping. The money we collect through taxes goes back to those whose money it was in the first place. In “One Dear Land,” Ellen Hadley suggests it might be done through a sales tax. Those who have more, and spend more, also pay more. There are any number of ways to pay for everyone’s well-being. I leave it to my economist friends to find them. We’re all working together to try to improve the world. That’s their contribution. It’s vital.
Ms. Hadley suggested, in 1990 when the book was first written, that we might have a computer system that would allow us more information about each other. This is, of course, before the internet did just that. The privacy concerns still exist, but the truth is that anyone can find out nearly anything they want about you now anyway. It’s hardly a state secret that the NSA has all our texts and phone calls. There’s little point in fighting against it. It’s best to embrace it. We can now find out about which businesses are best on Yelp, as well as dozens, or perhaps, hundreds of other places. If you want to know anything about me, the information is easily accessible on my Facebook page if you’re a friend of mine. It’s less easily accessible if you’re not, but I feel certain anyone who really tries can find out more about me than I remember about myself.
In One Dear Land, someone is murdered because of all the information floating freely out there. The murderer is dishonest, and the free flow of information hurt his business. He wants revenge. I have an entire episode about why revenge is a very bad idea. (It’s episode 132: “A Dish Best Served Cold” if you would like to listen.)
The book pioneers a religion called Infinitism. As an atheist, I reject the supernatural portions of the idea, but I like the values that spring from it. Where they have reincarnation, I would have The Veil of Ignorance. Infinitism posits that we are all going to live another life in the world we helped to create while we were alive in this one. It suggests we create a better world now so we will have a better life next time around, whether we are born rich or poor.
The Veil of Ignorance says, “Imagine before you’re born you don’t know anything about who you’ll be, your abilities, or your position. Now design a tax system.” (That was Will Bailey, in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing explaining John Rawls.) The idea is that, no matter who you are, or where you’re born, or what challenges you will face, you want the world to be as good for you as possible. Whether you’re rich or poor, you want the best life you can have. I believe in that idea. I believe in having a reasonable amount of empathy. I believe in compassion. Don’t you?
So… why have a UBI?
First, it creates better employees. The people working for you now are people who really want the job, and not people trying to make enough money to make ends meet one more month. They are likely to be more enthusiastic, more dedicated to the work, and more interested in improving. They find the job fulfilling. That’s how I, for example, felt about most of the first 20 years of my teaching career. It’s how I feel about my podcast now.
Second, UBI decreases crime. Gone are the otherwise good people who have been forced by desperation for food or a home to commit crimes to get the cash they need. Their basic needs are met. Of course, there are still evil people in the world. I don’t know that we will ever be able to stop that. I do know, though, that children who grow up in more stable households, with parents who have the time they need to give to their children, are statistically less likely to become criminals. There are no guarantees. The best we can do is increase the odds. I have an entire episode on this idea, too. It’s Episode 91: How Do We Avoid Another Columbine, Parkland, Newtown, or Boulder?
Third, employers can now pay lower wages for good jobs because people don’t need the money simply to survive. One of The People On The Porch, who is a relative of mine (although I have no idea of what the term for our relationship to one another would be), told me once that she wanted to be a teacher. I am certain she would have been an excellent educator. Why didn’t she ever do it? She couldn’t afford it. Teachers don’t make enough to cover all her bills. Her line of work is vastly more profitable. The world lost someone who might have made a significant difference in the lives of many children because she couldn’t afford to follow that passion. This is not to say that she hasn’t made a difference in her profession. She absolutely has. I just feel bad for the kids who never got to have her as a teacher. Good teachers are harder and harder to find. With a UBI, they wouldn’t be.
Another change we could make is, of course, Universal Healthcare. Just as our schools are funded by our taxes, so our Medical Care could, and should, be. No one should be crippled by medical debt. I covered this in one of my earliest episodes. It’s Episode 7: “Who Are The People Who Should Die for a Lack of Little Green Pieces of Paper?”
We could also pay for counselors for everyone, and in every area of life, so that mental heath assistance is always available. The same is true for help with budgeting, or drug abuse, or citizenship, or anything else of which we can think. We need to know help is freely available to all of us.
We could treat Drug Addiction as a medical issue instead of a crime. We should have help easily and freely available to everyone who wants it. Obviously, if drug use causes someone to commit a crime, the criminal needs to be properly tried in a court of law. If, however, we can help a drug addict before they commit a crime, aren’t we all better off?
What we have now is something between 59 and 68 million people getting some form of welfare, trapped in a system from which escape is all but impossible, and saddled with the contempt that comes with assistance.
The vast majority of people who are on welfare would rather not be. They’re happy to work and to contribute to our society. Many, if not most, of the people receiving government assistance are working. My former roommate, for example, has a degree and is being crushed by the student loans that come with it. She got that degree based on the myth that this is how one gets a higher paying job. She worked overnight shifts at Circle K because we needed the extra 50 cents an hour that she got for those high-risk times. The degree didn’t get her a higher paying job, but it did put her sufficiently into debt that she gets food stamps. She works 40 hours a week. She’s anything but lazy.
She’s more fortunate than many of the people we see when we go to DES to stand in line for hour after hour waiting for someone to ask her degrading questions about her life so they can decide if she deserves to eat for the next 6 months. Most of the others have their children with them. Why? They can’t afford daycare. How well are they going to do at whatever jobs they can get, since they don’t have degrees, when they don’t know if their children are safe?
Some of them are in their 60s. They’re too old to do many jobs, but not old enough to get Social Security.
Are there lazy people on Welfare? I’m sure there are. There are lazy people everywhere.
But, for most people, it’s not that they’re lazy. It’s that they got hit with medical bills that put them on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s that they had children when they hadn’t planned to, often because they were raped. It’s that they work 2 minimum wage jobs, hoping to earn enough to go to school hoping that someday they can actually earn money. There are as many reasons for poverty as there are victims of it.
What would $2000 a month do for those people? It would pay their rent and utilities so the money they do earn can go to frivolous things like car payments so they can go to work and pay for their cars so they can go to work.
Where would we get the money? We would get it by taxing those who, through innovative technology, for good or for ill, are eliminating jobs human beings once did. No one will need to do a Go Fund Me for technology companies when they pay these extra taxes. And you know what else? No one will need to do a Go Fund Me for the rest of us, who live paycheck to paycheck, to pay our rent and keep the heat on, anymore, either.
Is UBI a radical idea? Yes. And it’s only through radical ideas that change had ever been made.
The Founding Fathers had the then radical idea that people ought not to be taxed without representation among those levying the taxes. And things changed.
Abolitionists had the then radical idea that it’s not okay for one human being to own another. And things changed.
Susan B. Anthony had the then radical idea that women should have a few of the same rights as men. And things changed.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had the then radical idea that people should be judged by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin. And things changed.
There are many more changes this country needs to make if it is to fulfill its promise of liberty and justice for all. One Dear Land is proposing several such changes.
The most important part of any free society is the right to vote. It is our ability to make our voices heard at the ballot box that grants us what power we have. Nearly all of us feel as though we have too little power as it is. To do anything to deny any citizen the right to vote, or to make it more difficult to vote is, in my view, patently immoral.
Let’s get the talking points out of the way off the top:
We must protect ourselves from fraud.
Nonsense. Voter fraud is all but non-existent. If you’re truly concerned with that, let’s see what we can do about changing to something called block chain voting. Even a brief Google search, however, brings up many suggestions that this, too, may be insecure. Evidently this form of internet voting can still be hacked, despite the many claims I have heard to the contrary. Do you know more about blockchain voting than I do? That wouldn’t be difficult. Please call the show and tell me what you know, and whether this is really a secure and feasible idea to make elections both secure and easily accessible for as many people as possible. (480) 331 – 9822.
I have no objection to making voting secure, but I also have no reason to believe it isn’t already. The idea of making elections more secure is a solution in search of a problem.
· The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
Really? Why is that? Let’s go through the most common list. First, there are convicted criminals. There’s debate about whether they should have their right to vote restored to them once they have served their sentence. I understand that there are people who need to be locked up to keep the rest of us safe. I don’t deny the need for a prison system of some sort. But… why can’t they vote? What is it you’re afraid they’re going to do? The worst I can imagine is they will vote for people who are most likely to repeal the laws they were convicted of breaking. I have no objection to someone voting to repeal the laws against marijuana. I’ll go further and suggest that Oregon has it right. They have decriminalized possession of all drugs. Why do we need to lock someone up for possessing drugs? If they get wasted and commit a crime in which someone is hurt, by all means, arrest them. But owning something that isn’t dangerous to others is no reason for one to lose the liberty, both physical and political, that is the birthright of all people. I don’t think they’re going to find many candidates running on the idea of legalizing murder, rape, or car theft. So… let them vote. If it were up to me, they would be voting from their prison cells. They are still human beings. They deserve the right to have their voices heard.
The Founding Fathers didn’t intend, I realize, most people to vote. Slaves weren’t allowed to vote. Women weren’t allowed to vote. We’ve eliminated (at least superficially) slavery, and I prefer we don’t eliminate women. It’s fairly commonly accepted that women and Black people should be allowed to vote. I don’t think there’s anyone sitting on our Porch tonight who would seriously try to argue those folks should be disenfranchised.
Next, there is the idea that Illegal Aliens shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Please don’t, in my presence, ever refer to these people as “Illegals.” It is not illegal to be a person. When this occurs, we will be living in a dystopian nightmare. They may be in America illegally, but that doesn’t make them Illegal. It may, I suppose, make them criminals, but I am truly sickened by the idea that there are people who will go to prison or be thrown out of the country because they lack the paperwork to be here legally. Paperwork exists to ensure nothing ever gets accomplished. Or… such has been my experience. I’m sure many of you are big fans of paperwork. To me, it’s a symbol of mistrust. It’s true, it seems, only if it’s committed to paper.
Our government moves at a glacial pace. Earning citizenship can be not only prohibitively expensive, but it can also take years. All the while, people are trying to live: Mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, infants. All just trying to live their lives while they wait and wait for paperwork to be completed. There is nothing magical about the paperwork that makes them better people than before it was processed. It simply says they were patient, they persevered, they persisted, and they paid. If you live in this country, you should have a say in how it’s governed. Other countries don’t do this? Okay. Let’s be better than other countries.
The last election was stolen; this must never happen again, so we need more prohibitive voting laws.
I don’t think you really believe that. The evidence that the 2020 election was accurate is overwhelming. The myth that the election was stolen is commonly referred to as “The Big Lie.” It’s been thrown out of court more than 60 times. Ballots were counted and recounted. On The Front Porch we discuss ideas that lead somewhere. We’ve spent far too much time with that nonsense already. No. The Election was not stolen. If you have evidence to the contrary, please turn it over to the proper authorities.
I think we have addressed the most common talking points now, so let’s move on to why they’re just wrong to try to make voting more difficult. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a member of The Green Party, The Communist Party, or the Frat Party, you get to vote. Your voice counts exactly as much as mine. Regardless of how much I may disagree with you, I want you not only to have the opportunity to vote, but I would like you to make use of it. Democracy works best when… oh wait… I heard that.
We don’t live in a Democracy, Fred; we live in a Constitutional Republic.
Oh, aren’t you clever? You’re so much smarter than I am. You must have read a history book once. I shall bow to your superior knowledge. I am cowed by the overwhelming power and magnitude of your argument. We don’t live in a Democracy. You’re right. I’m wrong.
There’s a difference between the two. Let’s see what a three-second Google search reveals on this important bit of political knowledge.
“In a pure democracy, laws are made directly by the voting majority leaving the rights of the minority largely unprotected. In a republic, laws are made by representatives chosen by the people and must comply with a constitution that specifically protects the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.”
So, you know, voting doesn’t really mean anything. It’s not a democracy. Except… oh wait, again! Yes. Yes, as it turns out, voting does matter. “laws are made by representatives chosen by the people.” How do we choose these representatives? Do we do it by drawing lots? Perhaps by tossing darts? No? No, you’re right. We do this thing called… what’s it called? Oh, yes… voting.
Making it more difficult to vote is making being an American, being a free human being, more difficult. Why would we want to do that? Aren’t we The Land of The Free and The Home of The Brave? I know I’ve heard that somewhere before.
Let’s be brave enough to allow the people to choose their representatives. When appropriate, let’s allow the people to vote directly on their laws. Let’s make being an American the easiest thing to do. Whether we agree about anything politically, I feel certain we can agree that voting is our most basic right. It’s not to be reserved for straight, white male landowners. It turns out the person farming the land for the landlord matters, too.
See, this is the thing. All people are human. I like some of them. I don’t like others. This is true for all of us. But, I also recognize that all of us, even people I don’t like, deserve the best possible life. To get that sort of life, we need to be able to choose representatives that exemplify our interests. This would include the interests of those who have no money. That group is becoming larger all the time. The pandemic caused a massive rise in poverty. Their voices need to be included in the discussion. The voices of the rich have plenty of representation. Let’s make it as easy as possible for those who don’t have cars to drive to their polling places to vote. Let’s make it as efficient as we can for people who live on roads with no names and no power to make their voices heard. They’re Americans, too. Let’s make sure that The Newsroom’s Dorothy Cooper can vote. Oh… you don’t know her? I’ll drop a link to the video in the show notes, but this is what Will McAvoy tells us in an episode of the fictional show, “The Newsroom.”
Dorothy Cooper is a 96 year old resident of Chattanooga, Tennessee and has been voting for the last 75 years. This year, she has been told she can’t. A new law in Tennessee requires residents to show a government issued photo ID in order to vote. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a driver’s license, because Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a car. Dorothy Cooper doesn’t have a passport; a vacation abroad was never in her future.
Tennessee isn’t alone. At this moment, 33 states have proposed or already adopted the same voter ID laws that have disqualified Dorothy Cooper from the one fundamental thing that we all do as Americans. It’s estimated that 11% or roughly 20 million people don’t have government issued voter IDs and will be disenfranchised this November. Why? To crack down on the terrible problem of voter fraud. Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who is about to enter the presidential primary race, is serious about cracking down on the problem:
>Video of Perry: “Making sure that there is not fraud, making sure that someone is not manipulating that process makes all the sense in the world to me.”<
Me too. Because voter fraud is such a huge problem that during a five year period in the Bush Administration, when 196 million votes were cast, the number of cases of voter fraud reached…86. Not 86,000. 86. Here’s what that number looks like as a percentage of votes cast. .00004%. Four one hundred thousandths of a percent. This would be called a solution without a problem, but it’s not. It’s just a solution to a different problem.
Dorothy Cooper should be able to vote. No matter who she votes for, her voice is one that should be counted. She is no less of a person because she has no driver’s license. Jon Kavanaugh, a lawmaker right here in Arizona, said:
“There’s a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
He pointed to Democrats’ emphasis on registering voters and pursuing those who have not returned ballots — tactics that Republicans have successfully implemented in other swing states — and said doing so means that “you can greatly influence the outcome of the election if one side pays people to actively and aggressively go out and retrieve those ballots.”
“Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues,” Kavanagh said. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
There is no such thing as “quality” in voting, Mr. Kavanaugh. If someone is uninformed, let’s do better at getting them the facts. Even Huck Finn’s Pap should have the right to vote. (Trigger warning: the following sequence, quoted from Mark Twain, makes use of a word I will never use, myself, and that I do not wish to hear anyone else use. I decline, however, to edit America’s first great writer.)
Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily news summaries are sufficient to cover most of my news needs, showed us how much voting matters.
March 10, 2021 (Wednesday)
Today was a big day for the United States of America.
The House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, accepting the changes to the measure that the Senate had added. This bill marks a sea change in our government. Rather than focusing on dismantling the federal government and turning individuals loose to act as they wish, Congress has returned to the principles of the nation before 1981, using the federal government to support ordinary Americans. With its expansion of the child tax credit, the bill is projected to reach about 27 million children and to cut child poverty in half.
The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign Friday,(UPDATE: Biden signed it on Thursday) is a landmark piece of legislation, reversing the trend of American government since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Rather than funneling money upward in the belief that those at the top will invest in the economy and thus create jobs for poorer Americans, the Democrats are returning to the idea that using the government to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans will rebuild the economy from the bottom up. This was the argument for the very first expansion of the American government—during Abraham Lincoln’s administration—and it was the belief on which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal.
Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color.
Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.” “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”
Republican lawmakers all voted against the bill despite the fact that 76% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, like the measure. Still, the disjunction between the bill’s popularity and their opposition to it put them in a difficult spot. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) tweeted positively about the bill this evening, leaving the impression he had voted for it. Twitter users wanted no part of the deception, immediately calling him out for touting a bill he had opposed (although he had been a Republican co-sponsor of the amendment about which he was boasting).
This is why we need to have the greatest possible number of people voting. When we have more voters, we can pass legislation that actually helps people. Those who are opposed to helping the poor are going to need to defend their votes in upcoming elections. Voting is how we hold our representatives accountable.
Our representatives decide who will be able to vote. They decide who will be able to stave off, for one more month, the plunge into a poverty from which there is often no escape. They decide who will be the judges that interpret our laws, and who will be the people who enforce them. Their decisions directly affect your life. You need to have a voice in choosing who will make those decisions.
Even if you entirely oppose all of my political views, I think we agree that we must protect our ability to vote. It’s all the power we have. Vote against all of the programs I endorse if that’s your wish. But let’s allow this to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Isn’t that the least we should have if we’re to be called a Free People?
If it were up to me, we would scrap the Electoral College, which has more than once robbed the candidate with the most votes of the Presidency. If I had been a Trump voter in Arizona in 2020, I would have felt disenfranchised because my vote didn’t matter. More Arizonans voted for Biden than Trump, so slightly over half of the votes in Arizona counted, while the rest were irrelevant. Who is better off for this? I would prefer that every vote counted equally. My one vote in Arizona is worth as much as someone else’s one vote in California, although they have five times as many electoral votes as we do.
I have read that part of the reason we continue to have the Electoral College is because of the legacy of slavery. A national popular vote would have kept slave owners from getting votes on behalf of their slaves. This was unacceptable at the time. Slavery is, however, at least ostensibly, gone. Perhaps the Electoral College could follow it. As it stands, I am more certain that either a Republican or a Democrat will be elected President in 2024 than I am that Valerie Bertinelli will not be inviting me to dinner before then.
I did an entirely unscientific and informal survey on my Facebook page. It offers me nothing beyond what the few friends who commented thought, but those were the only people with whom I was concerned anyway. Most of them thought that most people need to be able to vote. There were a few who brought up age as being a requirement, and a few who wanted it limited to citizens and withheld from those currently incarcerated, but there was some debate about why those in prison cells shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Some believed violent criminals shouldn’t be allowed to vote, as it would be a fitting punishment. I’m not sure if I agree with that. It will require more thought.
A good point was made that, at 16, many of us are working already. If we’re working, we’re paying taxes. If we’re paying taxes, we should be represented. There was something in American history about “taxation without representation.” If memory serves, we fought an entire war about that idea. It seems reasonable to let someone vote at 16. The consensus was that 12 is too early. That’s a topic about which I would love to hear more. You might leave me your thoughts at (480) 331 – 9822. I promise I won’t answer the phone. Just leave me a voicemail, and I’ll play it and respond on the air.
There was a suggestion that “People who incite or engage in insurrection against the United States government and its citizens” shouldn’t be allowed to vote. I think that’s an interesting idea. It’s as though they have already decided voting is not how a government should be run, so I think that may be a valid point.
No one found any value in voter suppression laws. They are being proposed all over the country. My state, Arizona, has proposed nearly 2 dozen bills to make it more difficult to vote. We can speculate about why. I have a Facebook friend who constantly contends the Republicans can win only by cheating. I would like for Republicans, Democrats, and any other political party to win by convincing the greatest number of people their ideas are the best ones for running our nation. And I would like voting to be an easy right to assert. Vote by mail. Vote by dropping off a ballot in a conveniently located collection box. Put voting booths everywhere. Set them up inside Walmarts. Let’s find voters where they are, and let’s listen to what they want.
In this way, we can save our country. In this way, we can allow more people to… Shine.
While I still have you, I wanted to mention something entirely irrelevant to this episode, but that gave me a bit of joy this week. These are just a couple of moments collected from my Physical Front Porch.
The mother who lives two doors down from me just told me she listened to an episode of my Podcast. That made me unreasonably happy.
Her 11-month-old son has a fever. He’s perfectly happy, she tells me, but she took him to the doctor to be safe. I told her I hope he gets better soon.
My next-door neighbor believes I’m famous. I find that amusing. I don’t believe it will ever be true.
This is my life now. I think there’s something lovely about it. It’s quiet. It’s simple. It’s mine. I hope yours is the same. Let’s vote to make sure that happens for everyone.
I left a voicemail a few hours ago, but I didn’t have time to explain myself properly. I’m going to do that now.
First, I’m asking that you help the Senate to pass legislation that will keep the President from sending unidentified federal agents into cities in unmarked vans to kidnap protesters from the street. This behavior is the beginning of fascism. The officers refuse to identify themselves. They have no badges. They can’t be identified. The protesters are not told for what they are being arrested. They are not being read their Miranda rights.
We must act to keep the President from violating our civil liberties. This isn’t a matter of inconvenience. This is about the right peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances. BLM is protesting about the unreasonable police brutality we have all witnessed repeatedly. They are advocating for change. This isn’t simply their right. It’s their moral duty.
Please support Bill S. 220.
While you’re at it, I need to ask you to help your constituents, in general, and then this constituent, specifically.
First, between 30 and 40 million Americans are now unemployed. This is not our fault. The pandemic has made many of our jobs impossible to do. We are not lazy. We are not wealthy. We need your help.
With the provisions of the CARES Act expiring soon, many of us will be facing eviction because we can’t pay rent. Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am not threatened with eviction, myself, but only because my landlord is my best friend’s boyfriend. I’m safe from homelessness, but I haven’t been able to pay them all my roommates and I owe them for months. I’m living off of their charity.
We are also about to be unable to buy even the most basic groceries. When the Unemployment some of us (but, by no means all of us, particularly in Arizona) are getting runs out in the coming days, we will be unable to survive. Whether we ought to or not, we live in a world in which money is essential to survival. We have set up a system in which one is forced to work by the threat of homelessness and starvation. While a permanent Universal Basic Income that frees us from these chains would be ideal, I would be satisfied with granting the American people… ALL of the American people… an income until the end of the pandemic. Then we can go back to work and earn money again.
It’s unreasonable to assert that we should all have been better prepared. 40% of us can’t afford a $400 emergency. Here is a link to support my claim.
There’s no way we had 3 months of savings. I’m among those who don’t even make it paycheck to paycheck. I’ve eaten more than my share of ramen.
Please support legislation that will bring real relief to Americans, and concern yourself less with the corporations who have the money to buy their will. I promise American Airlines won’t need a GoFundMe to pay rent next month. I’ve had to do 4 in the last 3 years. I will never do another. It’s too humiliating.
And, now, for a personal request.
My name is Fred Eder. I taught elementary school for 29 years, the last 12 of which were here in Arizona. I quit my job in 2016 because I couldn’t do it anymore. My health was shot. What I loved about teaching was gone. My efforts needed to concern tracking data that proved absolutely nothing of value about my students or their abilities, filling in information and uploading “artifacts” (don’t ask what they are… no one knows) on a website to prove that I could teach, and creating bulletin boards of nonsense about our Plan, Do, Study, Act curriculum. I couldn’t have 4th Graders perform Hamlet anymore. In fact, I couldn’t even have them read any real literature anymore.
I wasn’t allowed to show them that reading is the most exciting and rewarding experience a human being could have anymore. Instead, they learned Reading is something you do to pass a mind numbing test on a computer that may or may not work on any given day.
No more Sherlock Holmes mysteries to grab their attention, stretch their vocabulary, and engage all of their critical thinking skills to figure out what happened to Helen Stoner’s sister, Julia, who died alone in her own bedroom, with no evidence of violence or poison. No more watching the gears begin to turn in their heads when we learn that Helen is now being forced by her stepfather to move into the same room in which her sister died. The stares of wonder when they read that Julia heard strange low whistles for a few nights before she died were confirmation that I was getting through. The terror they felt in watching Julia stumble from her room, dying, gasping about “… the band… The Speckled Band…” showed me they were experiencing catharsis. The fact that many of them went home to download and read the rest of the story before we could finish it in class because they were desperate to find out why Helen is now hearing the same low whistles in the middle of the night in the very bed in which her sister died, told me they were becoming readers. I felt great.
I’m sorry those days are passed. I will always miss them.
I pulled what was left of my retirement, lived on it for a while, and then got a job selling DirecTV for a few months before I returned to teaching Defensive Driving. I wasn’t getting wealthy, but as long as I had roommates and food stamps, I could survive.
Then came the pandemic. I haven’t worked since March 15. My company can no longer do classes safely. They hoped to open again in August, meaning I might have a paycheck as early as September 15. With the pandemic spiking in Arizona, that’s incredibly unlikely.
I applied for Unemployment once some time ago. The website and the letter I got told me I didn’t make enough to qualify. I let it go. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t earn any more money. I begged my friends for charity.
Then, for reasons passing understanding, I received a check for roughly $2500 from the state for unemployment. I was ecstatic. I received only one check. The ecstasy soon turned to intense frustration I began sharing to my Facebook page.
I reapplied. And this is where it gets interesting. I wrote this on July 16 as a Facebook post:
Aside from the fact that my brain is shutting down at a frightening rate, I am a reasonably intelligent man. I have a Bachelor’s Degree, and people let me teach Elementary School for 29 years. I’m at least as intelligent as the average person.
And yet…
The Unemployment Office and the hoops through which I am required to jump are beyond my ability to comprehend.
I filed a claim several months ago. They told me I didn’t make enough money to qualify. Several weeks later, for reasons passing understanding, they sent me a big check. Yay!
Then they didn’t send anything else.
So…
I got on the computer with both of my roommates to file another claim. I had them help me make sure I did it right. It took quite a while, but the site said I could have Unemployment. Yay! They sent me a letter telling me I’m going to get Unemployment. They sent me a card they would fill with some money. How awesome.
I’ve had the card for a week. Every morning, I call to see if there is any money on it. There’s not.
Today we tried calling Unemployment to ask what’s happening. Yes, I know that was a waste of time. I’m more likely to talk to Valerie Bertinelli than to a human being at the Unemployment Office.
They did have numbers to Press to give you information about your claim, though, so instead of throwing my phone across the back porch, I pressed the numbers.
The computer says there is no claim.
We got back on the site today and did it all again.
Here’s my point:
If I can’t figure it out, and my college educated roommates, one of whom is young enough to understand computers properly, can’t figure it out, how do they expect those with less intelligence than ours to be able to get help?
If we’re going to defund the police, perhaps we could direct some of the budget to hiring sufficient staff to make the system work properly.
But, this wasn’t all. It was far from it.
This is a second Facebook post from last Sunday:
Adventures in Arizona Unemployment
Sunday is the day you have to return to the Unemployment site to beg to get back some of the money you have been paying in for 4 decades.
This week it decided I needed to have a new PIN. They have a tab for that. Click.
Now it says you have to use the site you’re actually using and start over. Click back.
You’re not allowed to click back. You have to start over. Close Chrome. Start again.
Click File Weekly Claim. Enter SSN. Done. Enter PIN. Done. Need to reset PIN.
Click reset PIN.
You can’t reset PIN online. You must call. Obviously they aren’t open on Sundays.
I call that number 3 times a day. I can’t even get into the queue to begin waiting countless hours. Due to the Pandemic, we have no space left in the queue. Please try another time.
If this were just for customer service because my phone or computer isn’t working, I would blow it off. This isn’t that. This is the only money I can get.
How many thousands of others are going through this? I make almost 300 a month from my podcast now. I’m incredibly proud of that.
I’m working on getting a voice over company to hire me for a project. It won’t be much, but if I land the gig, it’s a little more.
None of the people desperately trying to make the website work caused the Pandemic. None of them collapsed the economy. By definition, none of them just decided to quit working. And yet…
None of us can pay rent. None of us can buy groceries.
Well, I suppose I could go down to the Unemployment Office. Oh, no, sorry. That’s closed.
You can’t do it online because the software doesn’t work.
You can’t call because there aren’t enough people to answer all the calls.
You can’t go to the office because they want you to do it online.
I would be homeless right now if my landlord wasn’t my best friend’s boyfriend.
I would be starving if not for the little bit I get in food stamps.
I would be roasting if not for my roommates who help keep the electricity on.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I just have basically 0 financial value.
How is this okay?
I’m told by several people I should have a donate button on my page. First, I don’t know how to do that. Second, what have I done that means I should become a beggar? How does that make me look in the eyes of those I love? And most people are worse off than I am.
Something needs to change. Immediately.
I had quite a few responses from that post. People offered advice. Among the ideas my friends suggested was writing to my elected representatives. That’s why you’re getting this letter.
A few days later, that post was followed by a third one:
The Further Adventures of Arizona Unemployment
I had to reset my PIN. This can be done, the website says, only on the phone. I called.
The first time I was only on hold half an hour. A human being actually spoke to me. She took my SSN and said I could establish a new PIN. I asked her to wait while I ran inside to try it.
She asked me to do a survey. I said I would after I managed to make my PIN work. I also asked if I was ever getting any Unemployment. She said they are just very behind, but I would.
I arrived at my computer. I typed in the azui.com address. She sent me to the survey. I gave it a 3 out of 5. The call disconnected.
I went to the Establish PIN tab.
I entered the information.
What I entered didn’t match their information. I can’t do my PIN on the internet. I have to call.
I used language I won’t use on the internet. (Or in an email to a Senator)
I came back outside to call. I pressed all the right buttons. I waited for 35 minutes. A recorded voice told me they were full and to call back tomorrow.
I’m writing to all of my elected representatives today. I hope to receive at least a form letter in return.
Meanwhile… I live off of almost $300 a month between Anchor and Patreon. My podcast is paying me, but not providing enough even to pay rent.
And I’m one of the lucky ones.
Arizona Unemployment doesn’t work.
Then, and this is really the infuriating part, one of my friends made this comment:
It looks like You’re on the wrong site . You need to be on the new one https://pua.azdes.gov/vosnet/Default.aspx Once you get your login figured out, use this link… not the old des one
Seriously? I was on the site I was supposed to use. It was the site to which I was sent by Arizona’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Portal who sent me the email saying I was qualified. There are two different websites, and only one of them actually works? How is anyone supposed to get the money we need to survive the pandemic?
I’m asking now for your help. My Social Security Number is ### – ## – ####. I would like for you, please, to see if you can expedite my Unemployment Claim. I am living in abject poverty. I believe you can help. I’m asking for you to do that.
A friend, who shall remain nameless, works for Amazon. She was sent by Amazon to the doctor. The doctor quarantined her. She sent the appropriate paperwork to Amazon.
First, of course they would pay her, they said in her phone calls, for the period of her quarantine.
Then, of course they weren’t going to pay her, they said in the next three phone calls, for hours she never worked.
In the next 7 phone calls, her concerns were “elevated.” She was assigned several different “case managers.” They were all going to call her within 24 hours. None of them did.
Finally, my friend contacted her latest case manager’s supervisor. The supervisor couldn’t imagine why she wasn’t being paid, and she said her case manager would call her right away.
Finally, my nameless friend, whose income keeps our house from poverty, got a call from the mysterious case manager. She said she would see to it she got paid immediately. Which meant tomorrow… or, if it didn’t get processed, she would be paid within 3 days.
That was a week ago. Today we learned the case manager hasn’t “released” the money. We’re borrowing money all over hell right now so we can eat.
I had originally published this publicly on my Facebook page, but the nameless person in this story asked me to remove it; she fears for her job if it stays.
This is a long way around a simple point: Amazon sucks.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 Graphic. (U.S. Air Force Graphic by Rosario “Charo” Gutierrez)
The world is a dark and scary place for many of us right now. A virus is spreading exponentially among us. We are seeing news of deaths daily. The number is always rising. We are afraid of dying from this. We are afraid of infecting someone else. We are afraid of infecting our loved ones. We are afraid to sacrifice our hard-won civil rights. We are unable to trust our leadership. We are a deeply divided country. And there is no doubt; we are in trouble. All of us.
I have cause for despair. My income is gone until, at least, June 15, assuming I can work in May. I will certainly be facing difficult times. I have cause to fear.
What I don’t have, as it turns out, is time to fear. For all the ugliness and horror in the air around me, I see more love than I have in a long time. I see people helping each other. Artists are giving away their services because, honestly, they are, for me, essential. People are continuing to go to work and stock the shelves, check out your groceries, and let you be pissed at them because they’re out of toilet paper, which is certainly the fault of the woman who is literally risking her life and the lives of her loved ones to make sure you can get whatever it is they still have for sale. I see neighbors reaching out to help one another. I see people loving each other and coming together by staying apart.
There is much to debate about what we should have done, and when we should have done it, and from where the virus came, and whose fault, if anyone’s, this is. We can argue over over reacting. We can debate whether the economy is worth the lives of the 1 or 2, or, depending on whose estimates you’re hearing, 5% of the population that dies so that others can live and the money keeps moving. They were going to die anyway. They might as well do it now and reduce the surplus population. We have to save The Economy.
I take issue with that. I’m happy to have a minority point of view. Others who have a different one can teach me. I’m always willing to learn. With that disclaimer, I’m diving in, but very briefly. Why is this form of The Economy so valuable? Is it really the only kind we can have?
I want to start with what I believe is the function of any economy. It turns out humans do best when we work together. This began with forming tribes to help with hunting. It continues from there. We build villages. This is my village. It’s not yours. My town. My county. My state. My country.
The function of the economy is to allow us to trade our talents and work together to create the best world we can. We have chosen to use an item we have simply all agreed has value. A bottle of water has more actual value than a hundred dollar bill, absent this social agreement for which most of us never signed up, and to which we certainly didn’t give our consent freely. Without the fact that everyone is willing to trade many bottles of water for this printed object, it’s just a printed object. I can’t eat it. I can’t drink it. I can’t make my crops grow better with it. I could, in an emergency, use it to replace the toilet paper that is actually worth more than the hundred dollars. TP provides a necessary function. We all have to wipe our asses. Yes, even in social isolation.
The Economy, as it stands now, is fulfilling its purpose exceptionally well for some Americans, and, in fact, for some citizens of the world, but it is failing entirely for others. The number it fails is much higher than the number it serves. Listen to any Bernie Sanders clip of more than 3 minutes. He’ll certainly give you the numbers. And they will probably be accurate.
Why do we work? Some of us do it because we are fulfilling a lifelong dream. We are pursuing careers that test our skills, cause us to grow, and make us feel valued, respected, and properly compensated. We have enough to live, and we are making a difference by doing what we do. I believe those in this category would go on doing precisely what we’re doing without these printed items. We would continue because it makes us happy. So long as we can live a decent life doing what we do, we will go on doing it.
Some of us work because if we don’t, we have nowhere to live. We’re not fulfilling a lifelong dream. We’re selling DirecTV to unsuspecting old women on the phone. We’re dealing with drug addicts who park in front of the Circle K we’re working alone at 2 in the morning, and we’re wondering if they will wake up and take the needles out of their arms before the police arrive. A video camera records us when we go out for a cigarette. If this group could live a decent life without doing this, many of us would quit doing it. We would spend their lives creating podcasts, or writing, or singing, or painting, or playing video games (my former partner make money doing this, so you can’t say it’s not a profession anymore!), or researching something, or… whatever it is that we would really like to do if you would leave us alone and let us do it. And… there would be some people who would continue doing those jobs because we enjoy them. The work is necessary… well… I wouldn’t cry if DirecTV never sold another cable package, but, I suppose there are those who need it and value it, so… we’ll let it go. We certainly need someone to work in Circle K and at the grocery store and Amazon and all sorts of other places that pay very little for what we have now learned is “essential” work.
Some of us work because we are only as valuable as the money we make, and money should be gained only by hard work. Hard work, for us, is a value in and of itself. It’s a sign of being a good person. We’re contributing to society. We’re taking care of ourselves. We’re not asking anyone else for help. We earn our place in this economy. We’re proud of what we’ve earned. We have a right to be.
But, what would it be like without these printed objects? We would still have exactly the same resources we do now. We could go on living in our perfect economy in precisely the same way.
No… We can’t. No one will workanymore.
There’s an interesting point. You mean, in our perfect economy we work only because we’re afraid of not doing it? Just as there were some slaves who were treated better than others, based on their perceived performance and value to the slaver, there are some of us who are treated as more valuable than others. And you remember how slavery was… you know… wrong? Yeah, well, it still is.
When you make us work only by threatening us with doom if we don’t, we are slaves. We have no physical chains. We are not whipped, at least not legally. We don’t face the physical horrors that slaves did. But, we are functioning under threat just as surely as if we had masters. If you are not a holder of many of these printed items, you are not allowed a place to sleep, food to eat, medical care, or a cellphone. Not even a flip phone. Sometimes you can be afforded a night or two in a homeless shelter, if you are willing to follow their orders, or a jail cell if you’re not. I don’t think anyone would argue that a jail cell represents freedom. This is a form of slavery. It is only slightly less brutal. And it is determined by printed objects whose only value is our agreement to their value.
I’m not going to design a whole new world for you. But, I would like you to think a little while about how the world would exist if we decided that money no longer had value. Would we be able to exist? Would we be able to function?
I think we would, but this is the time to examine what value we place on our economy. I hope we’ll use this time to consider changing our world.
For the first time, we are realizing that poverty is bad. More and more people are tumbling into it, and now that there are enough of us, Congress has decided to act. Are we doing it correctly? Ask me a year from now. I don’t know yet.
This time is economically frightening, but it’s personally gratifying.
I’m seeing kindness pouring out around me. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll notice our logo has changed. I got a painting from an artist friend of mine, Michelle Sylvester, who is as isolated as the rest of us. She’s a teacher. She has time on her hands now, and this was her way of helping. It was good for her. It’s good for me.
I have a couple of friends working on recording a song I desperately need for what I hoped would be tonight’s episode. My friends are doing it to help out.
Another friend, whose father is a bit of a philanthropist, brought over some groceries and left them outside my door. I had some cases of regular Pepsi Amazon had mistakenly sent us a couple of months ago, and I set those outside the door so she could donate them to someone who could use them. (I’m diabetic, one of my roommates has a heart condition that prohibits caffeine, and the other one just won’t drink Pepsi, so… we’re thrilled someone else can get some use out of it.) She included some cash with the burritos, and it will do so much for helping us through just a little while longer.
Another friend sent us some dinners from Home Fresh. We can’t afford those even when we have our regular incomes.
I have a friend who checks on me every day. (We’re supposed to check up on old people you know.)
I see people saying kind things on Facebook. I see people understanding we’re all in this together.
I hope when this is over we’re all still here. I hope all of our loved ones will still be with us. And I hope we learn enough to keep this from happening anymore.
If nothing else, perhaps we will finally, finally learn there is no Them. We are all Us.
If I were sufficiently mentally ill to run for President of the United States, I believe my campaign slogan would be, “Humanity First.” How odd that I found a candidate who stole my idea. His name is Andrew Yang. He keeps that a bit on the back burner, and he generally uses “Moving Forward,” which is undoubtedly more inclusive of various ideologies. Humanity First is an Idealist’s ideology. It includes, to me at least, my core belief that there is no Them. We are all Us.
Moving Forward is political. Humanity First is philosophical. To win an election one must be concerned with the political spectrum first, I suppose, although I find that the least desirable part of the idea of running for office. The measured words based on poll results and popular opinion are the enemies of honesty.
Donald Trump billed himself as an outsider. He was not among those who measured his words. He said what he believed. I should, therefore, admire him. I oppose him, however, with all the power my words grant me. Why?
What he believes is as changeable as an infant’s diapers, with which it has any number of elements in common. I rarely know what he means. He simply abuses the language I’ve spent a lifetime learning and loving. He makes it into a weapon of mass destruction of the ability to think coherently. He exhibits no interest in Humanity. He chooses words of separation, and he mocks the empathy I believe to be at the core of being human. Even if I supported his policies, I would loathe his rhetoric.
I will, of course, support any multi-cellular animal that runs against the President in 2020. The first priority is that we change the President before we become a dictatorship. If he gets a second term, I have little reason to believe he will leave at the end of it. He will become what America was designed to defeat.
Having said all that, I have strong preferences. My favorite candidate is the most idealistic, and, quite possibly, the most politically savvy. Yang wants to enact many of my dreams, particularly in that he wants to fix the ills of the world from the bottom up instead of the trickling down bullshit we’ve been sold fruitlessly since Reagan.
He also has the ability to unite Conservatives, Progressives, and even this Idealist. A good example of that can be found in the increasingly quickly blooming “Moving Forward Podcast,” hosted by Rio Verndonir and Corey Cottrell.
Rio is is one of the few Conservatives I know who is capable of changing a Progressive’s mind. While I still disagree at the core with the idea that all people should be self sufficient, he’s made several very powerful cases on the podcast that have made me reconsider my positions on certain issues. He and I could have a great debate.
He never leaves himself open for the easy attacks, though. No use of the Whataboutism that has become the hallmark of the hijacked word Conservative. No ad hominem. No misapplication of quotes. All my easiest avenues of attack are unavailable with him. I’ve never had a more difficult time writing an article as I’ve had for the past couple of weeks trying to come up with my Idealist’s response to his Conservatism.
Corey does an excellent job of supporting the Progressive point of view, and while he’s clearly the first officer to Rio’s captain, he doesn’t lay down.
And here’s the part that is most unbelievable: They can disagree ideologically all day and all night, but they agree on the solutions Yang proposes. Yang appeals to the Conservative in Rio by being a business man. Unlike Sanders, Yang doesn’t loathe the wealthy. He respects them, but believes they need to pay their share, and he’s getting them to do that with the dreaded VAT tax that my more Progressive friends fear.
He appeals to the Progressive in Corey by concerning himself with the Have Nots. Give people $1000 a month, and suddenly there is freedom they had never imagined before. Two or three homeless people could find a place to live together just on that. That place gives them a chance to shower, which increases their odds of getting a job. It gives those who can’t work an address from which to apply for the benefits they need to survive. It gives them a little something to eat. No, they can’t live entirely on that money, or at least not in the way most of us want to, but they can exist. They can fight to survive. They have a chance they won’t get from tax cuts that have no meaning for them.
Giving the money to the Middle Class gives them an opportunity to explore some of the areas of life that were previously unavailable to them. Why take a lousy job when you have the opportunity now, with your guaranteed income, to find one that you enjoy, perhaps even one that pays you to do what you love?
In my Idealist’s world, we would live in a post-scarcity society. We would welcome automation, and we would allow the machines to do the work we no longer need to do. I can be stoned and go to the store for the much needed Eskimo Pies because I will have a self driving car. I have the money I need to survive, because we have come to a place where we can feed and house the world. We are all working on improving ourselves and mankind instead of working 60 hours a week in a futile effort to pay rent, eat, and hope you might have enough left over to go to a movie once in a while. We have time to enjoy being alive. We can read a book, we can watch a movie, we can enjoy a sunset, (or a sunrise… Corey has started broadcasting those daily on YouTube, and it’s more beautiful than you might think) and we can sit up at night thinking all we want because the alarm clock isn’t in charge. We’re done building Walls and calling people “Illegals” instead of human beings, because we all have enough, and we have no need to invent scapegoats for our lack of resources.
I live in reality, however, and I recognize that this isn’t going to happen for a very long time. The longest journey begins with the first step. Universal Basic Income is the beginning of our trip down The Yellow Brick Road. Oz may turn out in the end to be the charlatan behind the curtain, but even he knows what matters is courage, and the ability to think, and to feel, and to love.
The Progressives can enjoy the idea of guaranteed health care for all.
The Conservatives can enjoy the injection of money directly into the economy when people begin to buy more because they have more. Each transaction creates a new job. The job creates more wealth. The wealth creates another job.
There is a feeling that Idealists loathe the wealthy. We don’t. Nor are we jealous of them. I, for one, am happy for them. They’ve managed to figure out a way to prosper in our society. This is good.
What I object to is the idea that only those who have already achieved wealth have any right to it. The idea that wealth is the result of hard work is demonstrably untrue. If hard work created wealth, the waitress working 60 hours a week, 51 weeks a year, would make more money than the lawmaker who works less than a third as much. It’s that some have skills for which our society pays well, and others have skills that are valued at far less. I recognize that’s part of how capitalism works, but that doesn’t mean that anyone should be without the resources to survive. I am a skilled teacher and writer. I can’t make a lay up shot to save my soul. Michael Jordan will have much more than I will, but I don’t believe my contributions to the world are any less valuable than his. Do you?
This is the sort of discussion you’ll find on The Moving Forward Podcast. There are no claims to absolute truth. There is no hidden agenda. It’s a discussion of… believe it or not… ideas! I invariably come away from an episode rethinking my own ideas. Some of them are reinforced. Others are challenged. New ones appear on my horizon.
Eleanor Roosevelt is reputed to have told us, as I’m sure you’ve heard several thousand times (though I challenge you to find a video or show me the book in which she wrote it), “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” You’ll find a little of each in this podcast, but the events and people are always discussed in the context of ideas.
If we have a chance of saving the world, it will come from discussion of ideas that might accomplish that lofty goal. We will never accomplish anything by attacking each other. Epithets are not to be mistaken for arguments. The moment someone comes out with “Libtard” or “RepuliKKKan” the discussion is polluted beyond salvation. It’s no longer a search for solutions. It’s a symptom of the cocksure ignorance that will block any solution that doesn’t fit with our team.
“You can’t change the world,” my Grandpa Schuelke told me when I was a boy, “but you can change your corner of it.”
In this corner, I present to you the ideas of Rio and Corey: The Moving Forward Podcast.
Fred's Thoughts 