I am fortunate to live in Olympia, Washington in the upper lefthand corner of the (dis)United States. This morning I did one of my fave runs. To Priest Point Park, a loop of the heavily wooded east-side trail, and back, 7.5 miles for those keeping score at home. Now I’m sitting at my desk looking alternatively at my computer monitor and Budd Inlet, the southernmost part of the Puget Sound, a series of saltwater inlets that are, in essence, a bucolic part of the Pacific Ocean.
But did I really run to Priest Point Park and am I really sitting above Budd Inlet? Indigenous groups are succeeding in renaming places based upon their history. Now, Budd Inlet is more appropriately called the Salish Sea and the Olympia City Council is in the process of renaming Priest Point Park, Squaxin Park, after the Squaxin island tribe, who lived here first.
I am down with the updating, but I wonder about a potentially subtle, unconscious even, unintended consequence. What if we think land acknowledgement in the form of updated place names is sufficient and stop short of more substantive changes that would both honor Indigenous people’s history and improve their life prospects?
Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or, it can and should be both/and, but we seem prone to superficial, fleeting acts that are often “virtue signaling“. We change our blog header to Ukraine’s flag, we put “Black Lives Matter” stickers on our cars, and otherwise advertise our politics in myriad ways, but we don’t always persevere. With others. Over time. To create meaningful change.
What is the state of the Black Lives Matter movement? How much attention will the media and public be paying to authoritarianism in Eastern Europe a year or five from now?
Admittedly, that’s a cynical perspective, but I prefer skeptical. I’m skeptical that substituting the Salish Sea for Budd Inlet and Squaxin Park for Priest Point Park will do anything to protect salmon, extend educational opportunities for Indigenous young people, educate people about our Indigenous roots, or improve Indigenous people’s lives in the Pacific Northwest more generally.
In fact, I wonder if it may, in an unfortunate paradoxical way confound those things. I hope not.
“So much hatred,” said Marcus Ransom.
“. . . Mr. Ransom’s mother insisted that he never judge people by the color of their skin. And the judge in the Arbery case insisted that the jurors hear the evidence with clear heads and open minds.
Mr. Ransom, 35, said he tried to hew to those principles every day he was in the jury box, even as he heard evidence that the defendants considered Black people to be animals or savages, and even as he was forced to watch a video that showed Mr. Arbery bleeding on the pavement and gasping for breath as the three white defendants declined to offer him comfort or aid.
It was not easy. Mr. Ransom cried when the video footage was played in court. He cried when federal prosecutors showed another video one of the defendants had shared with a friend that cruelly mocked a young Black boy as he danced.
He cried after handing over the verdict, which the clerk read aloud: Guilty, on all counts.”
One to two hundred years from now, historians will point to the end of the Twentieth Century and the first half of the Twenty First as the time that the United States ceded its global leadership to China and a menagerie of other nations. Basically, the timeline of my life.
Why? Because we’re losing economic momentum and China and other countries are gaining it. It’s only a matter of time before the “X” and “Y” axes cross.
And with our loss of economic momentum, people and institutions are under ever greater pressure. Economic anxiety compels more and more people to prioritize their self interests to the detriment of the common good.
For the first time in a long time, parents worry that their children will not live as comfortably and securely as them. Add to that the recent damage done to our political institutions which were integral to our Twentieth Century rise. Peaceful transitions of power can’t be assumed any longer. Legislators cannot compromise to invest in green energy and physical and social infrastructure.
Consequently, our roads are rutted and many, many international airports lap our own aging ones. At the Winter Olympics, China showed off it’s new bullet trains that go 217 mph, not quite up to Japanese speeds, but give them time.
Don’t interpret this as idealizing China, because there’s a lot more to quality of life than economic growth. There’s a sense of safety, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to protest, equal opportunities, a healthy natural environment, physical and mental well-being, and support for the most vulnerable. China fails on many of those fronts. Increasingly, the U.S. does too.
Apart from our failing infrastructure, we imprison a larger percentage of our population than anyone. Our response to Covid has been “worst in the world” especially when adjusted for our economic status. Many use alcohol and drugs to escape and more and more of our children suffer from anxiety disorders and depression.
For the historically astute, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Greatness has always been fluid. Tides rise and tides fall. Our aristocracy, the top ten percent who are thriving economically, don’t realize a lower tide lowers all boats. That it is in their enlightened self interest to reduce the income and wealth gap. To reduce the vulnerability of the least fortunate among us.
Our problem is we don’t think in terms of generations or hundreds of years. The aristocracy thinks they’ll be fine and they work tirelessly to make sure the same is true of their children. Talk of environmental degradation and climate change, is mostly just that, talk.
I’m not immune from that self-centered myopia. I think to myself, if I can just keep running in Priest Point Park, keep cycling on Mount Rainier, keep swimming in Ward Lake, keep eating healthy food, keep drinking craft beers with good friends, all is good. Which does nothing to slow the country’s decline.
But then again, history suggests the decline is inevitable.
The take-away for my international friends? If you have the United States on any sort of pedestal, update your thinking. If we ever were a light upon a hill, we are not now.
Breathe. Press pause. Breathe some more. Then read it not just to figure out your own course of action, but even more importantly, to better understand why other people’s decisions are many times different than yours.
Imminently sensible.
My fave paragraph:
“But if you’re otherwise healthy and have received your vaccine and booster shots, your risk of getting seriously ill with Covid is extraordinarily small. It’s about in line with other risks people take every day, such as driving in a car.”
Another insight:
“. . . follow the norms and the rules of the business you’re entering. If the sign at the door says “Mask Required,” you don’t want to make retail workers have to enforce policies over which they have no control. Their jobs are hard enough, and everyone can wear a mask with little to no sacrifice.”
Alright, my work is done here, no more mask hostilities.
Watch “The Tindler Swindler” on Netflix and you’ll never online date again.
Watch the last episode of Euphoria on HBO Max (Season 2, Episode 5), and if you haven’t started, you’ll never do drugs.
In college, in “The Sociology of Education” more specifically, I found “The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School” a fascinating read. As a result, this article caught my eye, “What is Harvard Business School’s Secret Sauce“?
The author asks whether or not sound judgement under pressure can be taught. The Harvard Business School definitely thinks so. How?
“Students study about 500 cases during their two years at the school. . .”
Case studies are one of my all-time fave teaching methods, but I have to believe students reach a point of diminishing returns well before Case #500. I suspect fewer, more in-depth cases would yield better results.
Has the HBS or anyone else studied their graduates’ judgement relative to other non-HBS grads? How would one create a baseline of HBS grads pre-HBS judgement under pressure from which to compare? More generally, how would one conduct such studies?
Messy at best.
Name an emerging field of therapy.
“Her goal is not to be released from her fears about the warming planet, or paralyzed by them, but something in between: She compares it to someone with a fear of flying, who learns to manage their fear well enough to fly.
‘On a very personal level,’ she said, ‘the small victory is not thinking about this all the time.’”
The best thing you’ll read today. “I Am Not Proof of the American Dream”. As a general policy, if Tara Westover writes something, you should read it.
Upon receiving a $4,000 Pell Grant, Westover writes:
“In those desperate years a few thousand dollars was enough to alter the whole course of my life. It contained a universe. It allowed me to experience for the first time what I now know to be the most powerful advantage of money, which is the ability to think of things besides money. That’s what money does. It frees your mind for living.”
How on earth does the Right, with their knee-jerk complaints of Big Government waste and social program dependency make sense of the Tara Westovers of the world?
Pressing Pause 