Phthursday Musings: What Can We Do?

I use this forum for a lot of things. Regular readers will know that at or near the top of that list is working out my own thoughts on different things. Those things might be curious, abstract, deep, absurd, you name it. And, usually, even if the topics are serious, I still try to keep the tone fairly light. This week, it’ll get a little lighter as we go along. But, well, I can’t quite start that way. See:

We live in a country where it is unfathomably easy for people to legally get their hands on machines which are primarily designed to facilitate mass killing.

Meanwhile, mothers are struggling terribly to get their hands on formula for their babies. For some people, it is easier to acquire assault weapons than baby formula.

The political system cares more about guns than babies.

Let that sink in:

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM CARES MORE ABOUT GUNS THAN BABIES.

It is a thorough disaster. Yes, this is a result of a lot of the people who populate that system. But the system is not merely a collection of the people who happen to inhabit it at a given point in time. What we have is a structure that discourages people from prioritizing the well-being of living, breathing children. The relative health of a child is a political abstraction. It’s not a statistic. Until, of course, it is.

This disaster of a system is, of course, incredibly resistant to change. That is very much by design. The U.S. Constitution is written in a manner which makes systemic change very difficult to implement.

In recent years, Confederate monuments have come down in cities like New Orleans, Richmond, and Charlottesville. It took many years of effort to bring these statues down. A common argument - even from people who deplored the Confederacy, indeed most importantly from people who deplored the Confederacy - was that bringing down these statues was akin to erasing history. “Well, maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but… they’re there.” So anti-racists - and of course we should all be anti-racists - who want to see monuments to white supremacy removed, have had to not only fight against the outright racists, but have also had to fight this weird pseudo-passive argument that it’s scarier to change things than to just leave them be. And the actual racists were all too happy to leverage this pseudo-passive argument, to hide behind it. It worked for a long time. It still does in a lot of places.

But, a lot of those monuments have come down. The system is a disaster, but change can happen.

The Constitution is itself a monument. Now, I’m not arguing that it’s all bad. It’s a complicated document. But it truly is a monument. Think of how literally difficult it is to amend it. Even when you get beyond its raw text, the political system it propagates proves to be remarkably difficult to change. Every so often there are dramatic breaks, like Brown v. Board of Education. Still, the American system is famously much slower to adapt than most Western democracies - countries which were able to observe and learn from the problems with the U.S. Constitution and improve upon the model that America introduced. They… don’t quite teach that in our schools, do they?

From the advent of the American two-party system until the present day, it is extremely rare to find a time when at least one of the major parties wasn’t substantially devoted to substantially maintaining the status quo, or even retreating back into the status quo ante. And when you have a system where it is so extremely difficult to affect major change - say, a system where legislation can be blocked by just 41 Senators - having at least one major party willing to block change can simply make it incredibly difficult to achieve.

What can we do about all of this? Well, for one, we can talk about it. Which, by and large, we don’t. We can better understand these dynamics, so that when our co-workers or family members or whomever parrot lazy, tired arguments, those arguments can be demolished. No, that won’t always work, because some people thrive on being argumentative, contrarian, or just outright assholes. But that’s not how most people are.

Look around the country right now and there are laws in a lot of states, flagrant violations of the First Amendment, specifically designed to prevent people from talking about these sorts of dynamics. Here too we see ways in which the resistance to change manifests. Even by passing absolute garbage laws, you can temporarily shut down discussion, and even if the courts intervene (which they might not), you’ve effectively scared people, by whipping up anger and making it so that people feel like they’re better off not talking about things they absolutely should be talking about. Don’t let them get away with it. Talk to your children. Talk to your friends and family.

Change does happen. 70% of Americans today approve of gay marriage. Twenty years ago, both major parties were adamantly opposed to considering it. This is just one isolated example, but I think it’s a very good one.

Of course, as I point out, the system cares more about guns than babies. So if you want to see rational change take place in the way America deals with guns, it’s a heavier lift than changing people’s minds about gay marriage. That doesn’t mean we absolutely can’t get there, though.

To get there, I think we have to accept the reality that, in big-p political terms, we’re not really talking about sincere disagreements about policy. Mitch McConnell standing before an NRA meeting holding a rifle in the air doesn’t reflect something where he and I have a “sincere disagreement”. Don’t extend a man like that any such legitimacy.

Unfortunately, our political system heaps tremendous legitimacy on such people.

Here in Illinois, we have a gubernatorial primary coming up in June, with multiple Republican candidates in the race. The two leading candidates are Darren Bailey, a State Senator from Southern Illinois; and Richard Irvin, the Mayor of Aurora. Irvin is a relative moderate by current Republican standards. Bailey is a hardcore Trumpist.

The Democrats have been incessantly running an ad that is ostensibly a hit on Bailey, calling him out for being an NRA member, claiming he’s “too conservative” for Illinois. But the clear purpose of the ad, which all of the politicos in the state immediately recognize, is to convince Republicans to vote for Bailey in the primary.

Now, some people are bent out of shape about the Democrats meddling in the Republican primary. Sure, fine, whatever.

My problem is different. What infuriates me about this is that the Democrats are taking someone who they supposedly believe to be an unacceptable extremist and are normalizing his politics with their choice of language. They don’t call out Bailey for being a crazy lunatic who stands with someone who tried to throw a coup. No, they lamely try to tag him for being “too conservative”, a tiny collection of nonsensical words. Is he truly unacceptable or not? Well, I have an easy answer for that:

If you’re still an NRA member in 2022, you’re not “conservative”, you’re a fascist.

It might very well be the case that Bailey is ultimately an easier candidate to defeat in the general election than Irvin. That does not excuse some of the individual framing decisions made by the Democrats right now. It’s not enough to win some elections. Not when in the process of doing so you’re undermining the potential for the kind of systemic change required to save America’s soul. The bar must be set higher.

I spent a long time heavily engaged in politics. I believe that the realm of work I was engaged in has ultimately proven to be important. (I’m less certain about the work I myself was engaged in, but that’s a topic for another time.)

My engagement in politics has slackened for several reasons, the leading one probably being that I’m a dad with a lot of direct responsibilities on that front which I didn’t have in my 20s and early 30s. But there’s also this: I just don’t feel like there’s much of a place for me these days. I really struggle with understanding where and how I would engage. And, well, I don’t see organizations which seem very interested in the kind of experience and viewpoints I have to offer.

Several years ago, I was elected to a Local School Council in Chicago, on which I served for four years. After moving, I got involved in the PTO, and also got very involved in coaching, more so than I expected to. I’ve kind of transitioned away from the political and the political-adjacent into a space which is a lot more directly focused on kids.

I feel like in small ways I’m positively contributing to the lives of these kids, and not just by helping to facilitate their playing games. I very much believe that through sports, kids can self-actualize. A child who is super super impatient might be able to learn something about patience by batting, by going up to the plate and methodically placing his lead foot, lining up his back foot, raising his back arm, and slowing everything down in an anticipation of a pitch. A child who is super tentative might find some kind of a break through on the soccer field by running up to a ball and learning to boot it in full stride instead of stopping and worrying about it.

I don’t remember a lot of specific things I learned in third or fourth grade, but I specifically remember the day when I was 10 that the game of baseball slowed down for me. I was too young to understand it then, but… I think other things slowed down for me too. Not always, not permanently. But I had a breakthrough. And it’s stuck with me for 35 years.

It may just be a way that I’m trying to justify how my “free time” has evolved, but I find remarkable value in coaching, for me and for the kids. And, I think, there is something about it all, about kids self-actualizing and helping to facilitate it, which feels more like being the change I want to see than what I could do politically today.

Emphasizing good sportsmanship, emphasizing self-actualization, being part of a framework where kids are safe and cared for… this feels like the exact opposite of most of what I’ve experienced in politics.

It’s not remotely enough for me to suggest that we can change the world just by being good to one another. But we’re certainly not going to affect real change if we’re not good to one another.

Our kids are going to ask questions, and we shouldn’t lie to them. Yes, there are monsters. But there are many, many more good people. And our kids should be among those good people. They should treat people well. They should help people. And we have to devote our time and energy into modeling that good behavior. Most of us don’t do enough of this, and I think it is essential to limiting the number of monsters and the power those monsters have.

As it so happens I’ve been reading Michael Schur’s How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. It’s a non-heavy-handed romp through moral philosophy. There are a couple of major themes pervading the book, but there are two closely related ones which I think are especially relevant here.

The first is that the quest to be morally perfect is destined to fail, but we must of course maintain the quest. He quotes Samuel Beckett: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better. Somehow I’d missed encountering this quote before, but I think it’s wonderful. The key to it is to understand that failure is okay.

Related to this is what Schur calls Moral Exhaustion. Trying to be morally perfect is exhausting - not just tiring, but exhausting, in that constantly trying to be super moral truly takes something out of ourselves… making it harder for us to stay on the quest to moral perfection, and also making it harder just to get through our days.

Should we be doing more? Well, yeah, probably. But we have to be cognizant of our essential humanity. We are complicated, multi-faceted creatures. We are timid. We are ambitious. We are easily angered. We are easily spooked. We are not perfect.

There is a space we should be striving to find, a space where we acknowledge our Moral Exhaustion, but don’t use it as an excuse to stop trying, but also don’t beat ourselves up because we can’t handle endlessly trying with every waking moment.

It’s all very much in line with themes I’ve explored before. I will continue to insist that, ultimately, most bad things are done by good people. Most people are good people. Everyone will at some point do a bad thing. Maybe not an ultra-mega-hyper-super-bad thing. But we’ll litter, we’ll leave a lousy tip, we’ll raise our voice, we’ll do something bad. And that doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It means… We should try again. Probably fail again. But fail better.

We should accept, and also reject, the essential ambiguity of the human condition. We should apply this to how we parent, how we treat co-workers, how we approach politics. We should raise good kids and to that end we should be good people but we should also acknowledge that we’re not perfect and that it’s okay to not be perfect but it’s not okay to say that it’s okay to be bad and if it sometimes feels like an impossible needle to thread well it probably is but we should keep at it because threading the needle is really a shitty metaphor for what this all really is, which is the craziness of humanity. As a certain red-headed man once said, that’s what makes us humans being.

We should be angry at times. Our political system cares more about guns than babies! We should be furious about this! But… fury can only take you so far. Compassion can take you a lot farther. Hate fuels hate. Love can overcome it. Love and only love.

I don’t remotely expect everyone’s path to be the same. Most people, in trying to make sense of how to live on a planet which often horrifies us, aren’t going to drop random references to Sammy Hagar, or rely on rock ‘n’ roll as some kind of moral compass. And that’s okay.

It may seem incongruous to be angry and politically forceful, and then to slip into seeming absurdity. But, sometimes the absurd can actually provide some of that moral compass. I mean, I quoted Samuel freaking Beckett here as a moral guide.

What I know I can commit to is being a good person, being a good dad / husband / son, being a good friend / boss / employee, working with kids, being helpful to people, and, I think this is important, including myself in the list of people to be good to. I can commit to continuing to speak out about what’s wrong. I can’t commit to always agreeing with people I respect, or always saying things that people around me are going to want to hear.

There’s nothing in the above paragraph - gendered roles aside - that we can’t all commit to.

We can all try again, fail again, fail better.

All of us, wherever we may be: We can all try again, fail again, fail better.