Phthursday Musings: The Party Starts Now!

To borrow from Handsome Dick Manitoba: The party starts now!

The pace at which government is liable to move over the next 100 days will be unlike anything since FDR took office. With so many agencies hollowed out, with so many legislative actions needed, with the pandemic still raging, we’re going to see layered action which we may never see again.

Much of this work / news will be quite boring. Yep, another qualified undersecretary. Yep, another regulation that reverses course.

To me, a critical question is, how engaged will we all be? What it means to be engaged now is different than it was before. Are we too exhausted from the chaos, and still at a loss to figure out how to plug in when everything is remote?

It’s not just partisan politics. Engagement, at this point, is about something broader, about staking how we truly expect America to function. Not just how we expect government per se to function - but also how we expect our communities to function.

I offer no grand suggestion. But I think people who have felt helpless for a while as the country has taken hit after hit need to rediscover their agency now. There is too much work to be done to expect the government to do it all.

This past weekend my boy and I went and found a big hill. He’d never been sledding before. There wasn’t a whole lot of snow, but there was enough.

When I was his age, we had a big sled hanging up in the garage. For the life of me, though, I can’t remember ever using it.

Thinking about the sled in the garage leads me to thinking about being in the garage, being behind it where the big stump was, crushing cans with a cinder block to take to the recycler… a whole lot of disjoint pieces from roughly age 3 to age 8.

I wonder at times about what disjoint memories he will retain. Will he remember sledding for the first time? Will he remember some esoteric activity that happened to take place in the garage? Is there, or should there be, an intentionality, a point made of making certain kinds of memories stick?

Over the course of reading recently I’ve been thinking more about intentionality and experientialism. We’re all eager for this damn pandemic to end. When it does, I want to prioritize giving him experiences. Not huge, grand ones, say, but rather a larger number of smaller experiences: local theater, high school sports, parades, whatever. I think back a year to quiet weekends and while down time is often good, experientialism like I’m talking about doesn’t need to be super immersive. It can be as simple as getting out there with a sled. Or toboggan. Or whatever exactly that thing is we have.

The local newspaper is the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark. It comes out weekly. I happen to think they do a pretty good job.

Every week, there’s an Opinion page and an Obituaries page. The Obituaries page, to me, is super old school. It’s how I remember the daily newspaper.

Here’s the thing. A typical obituary heading goes like this:

John Q. Smith, 77

Bank Manager

In most cases, the person’s job is what gets put into the subheading. Sometimes it’s something else. But usually it’s the job.

Most obituaries of course are for people 20, 30, 40 years older than me. John Q. Smith may very well have worked at the First National Bank for 35 years and made it all the way up to a managerial role for the last 15 years. That might well be how he would want to be remembered. But I’m quite sure that most people I know wouldn’t want their job listed there.

It’s a small thing, but I think this is indicative of a significant cultural break, one of those generation gap things. I actually think most people today work harder, that their jobs are a more intense part of their daily lives; but they’re not as definitional to them as people.

Maybe, if you reverse that construct, you can see one of the fault lines of the modern condition. Maybe if our work was more definitional to who we were, that our jobs would not be so crazy. It would mean we had more of a stake of ownership in the work, and that the workplace would have a more vested interest in maintaining the health of the relationship.

Employers should give that some thought. Instead of silly social media campaigns, they should consider this idea: What would it take for an employee to feel so strongly about his or her work that they would want that included in an obituary?

And why don’t politicians talk about this stuff? This feels like a winning topic regardless of what party you identify with.

I mean, I know why they don’t. This is a winning topic, unless “winning” means pulling down tens of thousands in corporate campaign contributions. But I would at least think a new crop of progressives would be more in tune with all this.

I have no interest whatsoever in what James Comey thinks about anything at all and wish people (ahem, media) would stop treating him like someone with something interesting to say.

Oh, Bernie.

A little bit shorter today (and also put out later in the day!)

New META-REVIEWS coming up this weekend, hopefully. Prepare yourselves.

Oh, and, if you actually watched the video from Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom… why?