Posted on

I’m Not Leaving America

A lot of folks are thinking about leaving America for better places. This season, many Americans are dissatisfied with our response to the pandemic, the state of our society and culture. America in general.

I’m staying. Here’s why.

America is special to me, but not because we don’t make mistakes. We have made many mistakes, poor decisions, and we never quite agree on anything. Yet we are the wealthiest nation on earth because we also continuously correct ourselves and discover solutions to our problems.

We are no longer a new nation. America has been a constitutional democracy for centuries. We hear that American democracy is under attack today, but democracy is always under attack from all sides: right, left, and center.

Always. If you think not, you haven’t paid attention. Take heart, you’re not alone. Even historians have a bit of rose tint in their glasses. In this country, standard histories tend to gloss over attacks on democracy. If you disbelieve, go to the newspaper archives and see for yourself what folks were thinking about Hitler in the late 1930s. The 3rd Reich had its American backers. And it’s not only American democracy under attack. One way of reading Thucydides, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is as an analysis of attacks on Athenian democracy.

The losing side in every American election, from high school class president to U.S. president, claims the election was defective. Republicans thought so in 2020, Democrats in 2016, and on down the line. No one likes to lose, so we come up with reasons, any reason we can latch onto: voter fraud, door-belling the wrong neighborhood, the electoral college, gerrymandering, hanging chads, lying politicians, external conditions like the weather, pandemics, or foreign wars. Some excuses have some truth, others not.

More than anything else, they’re excuses.

When I was a software developer, I always tried to build self-correcting systems that made seriously bad choices and errors so obvious, so blatant, they were immediately corrected.

American democracy is a self-correcting system. That’s the secret to our success. Over and over, things go sideways, millions of eyes focus on the issue, and we work it out in the fervid and contradictory jumble of thought and effort that is our society. Americans disagree with each other, but our freedom to investigate and think for ourselves coupled with our election process always favors effective solutions.

Solutions in a free society are not cheap or easy. Among a free people, you are free to say that things are bad, say something nasty, say what people want to hear. No matter how false or outrageous your statements, you’ll get attention and some people will believe you. There’s money to be made. Unscrupulous folks take advantage of this and always have, but in America, people decide for themselves and solutions that work eventually appear. The attention-getting phantasms fade away, but until they fade, they are often viciously destructive.

This is not the first tough time for the U.S. A civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the forgotten economic crises of the 19th century were all tough. The 1918 flu pandemic was a killer. Many of us once believed owning other humans was morally right. These tough times were addressed with new ideas and solutions that rose to the top from the chaos of a free people.

America’s 2021 is not easy. Nearly 800,000 dead in less than 2 years— more than the population of Seattle or Denver, more than the U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cherishing our freedom, many more of us have died than in autocratic states with more draconian mandates.

The pandemic has generated difficult economic issues, which, like covid-19, no one has seen before or anticipated.

Who thought a disease that kills mostly the old and sick would lead to a truck driver shortage? Labor shortages may have been predictable, but who predicted the Great Resignation?

We haven’t found the American solution to the pandemic yet. Mandatory lock-downs, masks, and vaccinations have worked in China. Their pandemic death rate is minuscule and their economy is nearly fully recovered. But the solution is not to double down on methods that clearly have not worked here. Instead, we have to find the American solution.

Now, the world faces the Omicron variant. No one knows if it will fizzle away or rage like the Delta variant, but all the experts say that variants will continue to appear and every variant has the potential to evade the vaccines and kill more.

More medicines, faster easier testing, ideas no one has noticed yet, all may be part of our solution.

We will find the American solution. It will not be autocracy or abandoning our freedom. If any entity can tackle this challenge, it’s the United States of America.

Posted on

Chicago Conversations

This morning, I spoke with four alumni from the University of Chicago, the institution where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees close to fifty years ago. The experience was instructive and pleasant.

Fifty alumni signed on to a Zoom meeting. The meeting leaders then randomly paired the participants into two-person breakout rooms to talk privately for ten minutes. When the time was up, the moderators returned us to the full meeting, then paired us up randomly again. Rinse and repeat four times.

We were geographically dispersed. I’m in the northwest corner of the country next to the Salish Sea and close to the Canadian border. I first spoke with a fellow in New York whose partner is a nurse at one of the Columbia hospitals; then a Chicago architectural history graduate student locked in her parent’s apartment in a northern Chicago suburb; next a recent business and econ graduate only 160 miles south of me in the Washington State capital, Olympia; and finally, a sociology graduate student on a fellowship at Oxford in Britain.

Our experiences were widely disparate. The young woman in the Chicago suburb had not been outside in two weeks. I made her jealous by telling her about the goose sitting on her clutch of eggs on the island in the middle of the pond that Albert The Imperious Border Collie walks me around each morning and evening. The guy in New York discussed toilet paper shortages and supply-chain interruptions with me.

In breakout with the sociology grad at Oxford, we discussed the implications of the pandemic for broadband connections for the disadvantaged. I am optimistic— the network infrastructure has already been significantly strengthened in the past two months of increased network traffic. Comcast has offered two months of free broadband here. These signs generate optimism in me that we will soon see a TVA-like initiative for broadband connections. She was less enthusiastic, perhaps from her more global perspective.

For the architectural history student, I acted professorial and turned to my shelf to pull out a copy of the bible of software design patterns, which was inspired by the building architect, Christopher Alexander, who happens to be from the era she is studying. She, in turn, gave me a reference to blob architecture, which is an architectural term derived from the software term, Binary Large Object, the subject of Big Data analysis. A cross-disciplinary moment.

The business and econ major in Olympia and I discussed lobbying the Washington State legislature in Olympia for continued support for public libraries.

The pandemic bringing a diverse group closer together.

Posted on

Optimistic Pessimism

Today, I expect the worst from the covid-19 pandemic and look for the best. Nearly a million and a half confirmed cases and ninety thousand dead, fourteen thousand dead in the United States, twenty dead in our own rural county. And more to come.

For whatever reason, our wealthy and sophisticated country is not responding well. We don’t seem to be able to organize ourselves. Shortages and gaps in medical supplies are appearing in the country that invented supply-chain management. Testing is faltering at the source of testing technology.

As a world leader, we are stumbling. What else can be said? The number of cases in the U. S. is more than double that of the country with the second highest count.

The only way we have to stop the deaths is to shut the country down, and we struggle to do it. Americans cherish their freedom and do not take kindly to interference. Some insist on their right to assembly when not assembling is to avoid the death for themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, their countrymen. In the country that is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people cannot save themselves.

What do I see that is good in this? Yes, healthcare staff, nurses, and doctors are valiantly giving their lives to save the victims of the virus, but sacrifice is not bright hope. Volunteers distribute food to the distressed and help in many ways, and philanthropists donate billions, but this is only more sacrifice. The necessity of sacrifice drives me to despair, not hope.

Then what good do I see? Change. Change for the better paid for with staggering suffering and cost. Hundreds of thousands of good people forced to die alone with a tube jammed down their throat. Myriads of others who will survive with lame spirits and weakened bodies.

You may lament the shattering of the economy, but I see an economy that was already broken with unseen cracks. We were living in a condition that we now know humans cannot survive. The death toll from the virus testifies to this. If we lived differently, flew around in airplanes less, did not live in cities stacked in layers, looked out for our neighbors instead of competed with them, used computer networks, the mark of the new century, to protect ourselves from pestilence and bring us together instead letting them divide us, the emergence of the virus would have been a minor event. A temporary statistical variation that only epidemiologists and public health specialists would notice.

But the pandemic isn’t minor. It is a catastrophe because we have been doing it all wrong.

Now we know.

Will we have a better world when this is over? I think so. World War II was a horrible event, more destructive than the pandemic. After the war, many people were dead like today, but cities were also flattened, industrial facilities devastated, and resources destroyed.

Yet, the world that emerged from the war was more prosperous, more pleasant, more humane than ever existed before on the planet.

After the pandemic, we will have the dead to bury and grieve, but our resources and infrastructure will be intact, and we will have learned much about the weaknesses in our old ways. We will know new ways to work, to live, to cooperate.

Already, the network has been strengthened in just two months to support the new loads and will continue to get stronger. We’ve learned to get together electronically in ways that the virus can’t disrupt. And we will learn more. New ways to work and distribute goods. Our communities will be stronger and more resistant to stress.

Rebuilding will be rapid because we will have so much to rebuild with, and like the aftermath of the war, the world will improve in ways we do not yet comprehend.