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The Corrosion of Public Discourse

I’ve always valued people’s ability to have a healthy exchange of ideas and find common ground on social media. But that’s increasingly difficult to find these days. People increasingly:

  • Share memes without checking to see if they are based on truth or misinformation
  • Talk past each other rather than to each other
  • Slice, dice and distort data points to fit their viewpoint
  • Talk down to other people and confuse this as an act of virtue

Mood Music:

People on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum do these things, and this week I’ve begun deleting a lot of them from my friends list. I don’t have time to roll around in the dirt. They’ve grown too toxic — a corrosive agent eating away at the public discourse.

A lot of what I feel these days is captured in Andrew Doyle’s article “The mark of an educated mind” in Standpoint magazine.

The article isn’t perfect. Doyle diminishes the power of his message in spots with a holier-than-thou tone. As my wife, Erin, put it, the “mansplainy, academics-of-the-past-were-better tone is so off-putting, especially for those with little experience with the ivory tower attitude.”

But there’s a lot in there worth unpacking. Here are some of his points, followed by mine:

To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. 

Look at most Facebook debates, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who admit when they are wrong. They are always right, period.

Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.

When one thinks they are always right, they can’t grow as a human being. In my own battle with the demons, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. Insisting on spreading misinformation and not fact-checking oneself contributes to the disease.

The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to support one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. … Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognize their behavior for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous.

This point is especially true in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Convinced that stay-at-home orders and mask mandates are the lash of the dictator? There are always data sets floating around the internet that you can deconstruct and rebuild to prove your point. I see people do this all the time with state-by-state COVID case numbers. Typically, they point out low death rates to prove that government is lying to us, while ignoring the horror stories coming from multitudes of people who have had the virus and continue to suffer lingering and permanent damage — not to mention nurses and doctors from hospitals in hard-hit areas that have been overrun.

On the other side of the spectrum are those who find data points to shame people for not wanting to wear masks or watch the economy crumble amid lockdowns. Instead of responding with a dialogue about what we should or shouldn’t be doing, about where the masks help and when they don’t, about how we can avoid lockdowns with other measures, it’s another all-or-nothing response. If you don’t want to shut everything down again or if you don’t see the logic in wearing a mask if you’re outside and no one else is around, someone on the left is there to vilify you. You’re selfish and don’t care whether people die.

If we’re ever going to heal our discourse, the treatment begins with two conclusions from Doyle:

  • More humility could stem the tide of narcissism and the decline of empathy that has taken root in recent years. In other words, be willing to see when you’re wrong and admit it.
  • Schools need to do a lot more to train students in the art of critical thinking. Arguing and calling people names is not critical thinking.

In the words of Edward R. Murrow: “Good night, and good luck.”

Yellow square with the text "How to be an elitist prick (a diagram" next to a yellow and aqua triangle. The word "You" is at the top of the triangle. Beneath that is "All the people who do things differently (crossed out), than you do things (crossed out), and wrong."
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New OCD Diaries Playlist on Spotify

Some readers have asked why I put mood music in my posts and how I go about choosing the daily selection.

I use them because in my mind, music and writing go hand in hand. I used to require absolute silence in the room to do my writing. Now I can’t write without some noise.

Some days, the music will fit the theme of what I’m writing about that day. Other times I use music that has nothing to do with the subject matter. I put it on there simply because I’m digging the song that morning.

I also like to use this forum to promote local musicians I admire.

I do consider the music to be a soundtrack for the blog. I also like to use the blog as a music player while I work. I’ll open the blog and just play all the mood music selections of the past weeks.

The music is mostly the metal I grew up with and love to this day, but not always. I also mix in non-metal acts like The Decemberists, The Avett Brothers, The Beatles and U2.

Life is full of ups and downs, and this blog is all about how I confront it. Why not have a soundtrack to go with it?

For those who just want to hear the music, I’ve created a playlist on Spotify. There are currently 54 songs — 4 hours’ worth — though I plan to keep adding to it. I’ll also start creating specialized playlists for different moods and topics.

You can find and subscribe to it here. (Free account required.)

Playlist. The OCD Diaries: Mood Music . A selection of songs used as mood music in various posts in The OCD Diaries: https://theocddiaries.com/. Created by Bill Brenner. 54 songs, 4 hours, 3 minutes
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Measuring Anxiety and Depression Through Color and Stages

As I work to keep my mind and body in check during the pandemic, two older tools have proven useful: the Anxiety Rainbow and the Five Stages of Depression. The idea is that by measuring what you’re going through, you can take steps to manage those feelings and stay in the game.*

This isn’t a scientific breakdown, of course. It’s simply how I’ve learned to process what I feel.

Mood Music:

The Five Colors of the Anxiety Rainbow

To get a better handle on anxiety, I try to label the different kinds of anxiousness based on the first five colors of Newton’s primary color system:

  • Red. This is the worst of the worst, the type of anxiety that makes you feel like you’re at death’s door. I used to suffer from this one all the time: a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, my heart pounding so violently that I thought it would break bones, my feet tingling and a constant feeling of having to throw up. Fear is the trigger for this one, the kind of fear that made me not want to go places, take risks or live life in general.
    Remedies: For me, Prozac has been a very effective weapon against red anxiety, as has my faith and, more recently, meditation.
  • Orange. Fear plays a big role in this anxiety as well, but unlike red, orange is usually rooted in something stressful that is really happening in your life. You could be fighting a serious medical issue and worrying about losing the fight. You could be having financial trouble that results in routine stress but the anxiety magnifies it to monstrous proportions.
    Remedies: Medication has helped here, too, as has reconstituting my exercise regimen.
  • Yellow. This anxiety is usually triggered by a lot of sustained stress at work or home. Maybe your marriage has hit a rough patch or your job is riding on the success or failure of a huge project. To get through it, your body pumps more adrenaline than you need, and you get the overwhelmed feeling that keeps you from seeing the order of work items and their level of completion. The news business is a perfect place to experience this because you face daily deadlines and a tongue lashing from your bosses if a competitor gets a big story instead of you. I don’t experience that today, but when I worked for newspapers, yellow anxiety was always with me.
    Remedies: Therapy, medicine, a heart-to-heart talk with the boss and, if necessary, a job or even a career change have all helped me. I made the career change in 2004. The medicine and therapy followed.
  • Green. This anxiety appears when the less-frequent stresses spark up. I recall one day six years ago when I was already ramped up after spending an evening at the hospital holding vigil while my father faced emergency surgery that ultimately didn’t happen. The plumber was coming to install a new dishwasher and to pound my mind into submission, I went on a chore spree. Then my cell phone died for good, and I had to spend the afternoon replacing it. The latter two events are problems we’re lucky to have, since the alternative is being too broke to afford these things. But it sent the day on a trajectory I hadn’t anticipated.
    Remedies: The only cure for this one is to reach the end of the day and go to bed.
  • Blue. This is a small, sustained level of anxiety so slight that you usually don’t see it for what it is. It’s generally a byproduct of depression. In my case, blue anxiety shows itself in the winter, when a lack of daylight sends me into blue moods.
    Remedies: Activity helps me the most with blue anxiety. Writing helps a lot, as does work.

5 Stages of Depression: Like Grief, But Different

There are plenty of articles out there about the so-called five stages of grief. Based on my experiences in that department, I find the writings mostly accurate and valuable.

I also found that these stages convert nicely to describe the course of my depressions.

  1. Denial and isolation. Things start to go wrong, but you’re not immediately aware of them. Your short-term memory starts to slip, you become disorganized, and you protest when those who love and know you best suggest you may be heading for an episode. You respond by clamming up and ignoring friends when they ask you to have coffee. You spend a lot more time on the couch.
  2. Anger. After too many days in denial, you start to realize you’re slipping into depression. This makes you angry, and you start taking it out on those around you. Your self-worth begins to sink, and you start to feel like you can’t do anything right. This leads to more anger, self-loathing, and self-pity.
  3. Bargaining. During grief, this is the stage where a person repeatedly goes over the what-ifs: what if the loved one had gotten medical attention sooner, what if you’d recognized the problem for what is was, and so on. With depression, the bargaining works a bit differently: You play the blame game with the world around you. You’re depressed because of work. You’re depressed because of a disagreeable family member. If the depression is really bad, you blame anyone and anything but the disease within your own brain.
  4. Melancholy. With grief, the fourth stage is depression. Within depression itself, the fourth stage is melancholy, at least in my experience. A deep sadness and hopelessness take hold in your gut after too many successive days of feeling like shit. It becomes hard to do most basic daily tasks.
  5. Acceptance. After a while, you realize you have a few choices. The most extreme choice is suicide. I’ve never seriously considered it, but I know people who have and, sadly, gone through with it. Another choice is to start doing things to emerge from the depression. For me, that involves talking to people and writing to get the feelings off my chest. The other step is to re-embrace coping tools. It’s not like flipping a switch; it’s more like rebooting a computer. It takes time to start using your coping tools effectively again and more time for them to make a difference. But acceptance is a start.

With COVID-19, I’m at acceptance now and I’m grateful for it.

* While I’ve written about these tools before, they’re often used together so I’ve aggregated them into one post.

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To the Anxious This Election Day

Many of you fear what will happen in the days, weeks and months following this election. You’ve already been in a long depression, fed by dread about civil unrest and a million political and policy implications.

There are Biden and Trump voters among you — sick inside over what might happen if the winner is the guy you opposed.

You feel unhinged about all the yelling back and forth on Facebook and Twitter — a lot of people on there say some crazy shit — and what you see in the media. It seems like every newspaper and TV news show is yelling at you with opinions over facts. Some of you get that reaction from CNN, MSN and the New York Times; others from Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.

Whichever political side you’re on, you fear violence in your cities and neighborhoods.

As you nurture these worries, the continuing depressive effect of the pandemic hangs over you like a blanket that rapidly alternates between being soaked and on fire.

I feel it, too — the anxiety, the depression, the anger, the uncertainly.

But I still feel hope. The overreaching part of that hope is the possibility that the worst won’t happen and November 3 will pass us by the way Y2K did at midnight in 2000.

The realistic side of that hope is the knowledge that we’ve fallen into the abyss many times and many of us managed to crawl out of it each time. We’ve seen darkness but the daylight has always followed.

I can’t predict what the coming period will bring. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it push me into a corner.

And I will continue to show up.

I trust many of you are of the same mindset. I’ll keep praying for those who aren’t so sure and believe they won’t be able to hang on.

Be well and be safe.

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Van Halen: Hacker Guitarist
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

I’ve always been a big Van Halen fan. The music is, among other things, a remedy when my depression is running hot, especially during the winter darkness. The songs capture all the feelings of summer, giving my brain the necessary jolt to keep going through the cold.





Reflecting on that in the days since Edward Van Halen’s death, I’m reminded of something else I loved about the legendary guitarist: He reminds me of people I admire in the hacker community. Part of the hacker’s craft involves breaking technology to find and fix security weaknesses in software and hardware. They inspire me endlessly — one of the things I love so much about working in the security industry. 





Just as they break things and develop innovative fixes on the fly, Eddie Van Halen was famous for destroying a lot of guitars and amps in his quest to turn the tones in his head into reality.













There is perhaps no better example than his Frankenstrat. He crafted the instrument using parts from Gibson and Fender guitars because he wanted to combine the sound of a classic Gibson guitar with the physical attributes and tremolo bar functionality of a Fender Stratocaster. 





Image of Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstrat on display.
Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstrat





He ripped a humbucker pickup from his Gibson, potted it in paraffin wax to reduce microphonic feedback and bolted it onto the guitar in the bridge position, at a slight angle to compensate for the different string spacing between the Fender bridge and Gibson pickup. 





He removed both tone controls, wired the pickups in a simple circuit and placed a knob marked “Tone” on the volume-control pot. He then covered over the controls with a pick guard made from a vinyl record he cut up. 





He screwed a quarter into the body to stabilize the Floyd Rose tremolo system he used in place of the original Fender tremolo.





Closeup of the quarter screwed into the Frankenstrat.





One of my favorite stories is about how he hacksawed one of the horns off his Gibson SG so he could hit the high notes of the song “Dirty Movies” with his slide:





Eddie Van Halen's Gibson SG guitar with the right horn hacked off.













For a deeper dive into many of Van Halen’s guitar innovations, I highly recommend this Popular Mechanics article from a few years back, in which he describes a lot of what he was doing at the time. It includes a breakdown of some of his patents.





There’s been plenty of debate over the years about Van Halen: Did Eddie really invent some of the things he claimed to invent? Which was better, Roth-era or Hagar-era Van Halen? (I loved both.) I have lots of friends who love the band, and many who hate it.





I also suspect some of my security friends will beat me over the head for comparing what Eddie did to what they do. Fair enough. But I can’t help but see the parallels. 





In a rotten year like 2020, where Van Halen’s death is just one more cherry on top of a shit sundae, getting lost in the music and tinkering that defined the man has been a welcome source of mental shore leave these last days.





We need constant reminders that there’s still joy in the world, and this gets the job done for me.





Thanks, Eddie.





An older Eddie Van Halen at a workbench working on a guitar. His Frankenstrat sits on the bench in the foreground.






	


	





		

		
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We’re Better Than Our Online Personas
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

Amid despair over our broken civil discourse, I’ve found reason and perspective in recent American history. 





Mood Music:













Buried beneath all the news about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the resulting political chaos was an article about her friendship with then-fellow Justice Antonin Scalia before his death in 2016.





Scalia’s son, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, described the friendship this way:





They were both New Yorkers, close in age, and liked a lot of the same things: the law, teaching, travel, music and a meal with family and friends. They had a bond, I think, in that they both grew up as outsiders – to different degrees – to the elites who had ruled the country: she as a Jew and woman, he as a Catholic and Italian American.





They shared a passion for opera and even once appeared together as extras in the Washington National Opera’s opening night production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. 





This, even as they passionately and consistently opposed each other over law. Scalia once quipped: “What’s not to like, except her views on the law.”





Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg seated next to each other during an interview. Both are smiling at an unseen person.





American history is full of such friendships. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion from dark-blue Massachusetts, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a devout Mormon from the red state of Utah, were close friends. President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill were fierce political adversaries who still bonded over their Irish heritage and a love of jokes.





These friendships reflect what many of us experience on a personal level. We have friends and relatives who have political beliefs opposite ours. We argue a lot, often heatedly and in public places like Facebook and Twitter. 





But when it comes to the health, safety and happiness of our families and fellow friends, politics takes a back seat.





We laugh at the same jokes and Facebook memes. We delight in the same movies and music many times. And we come to the rescue when someone in our orbit is in trouble. Who they’re voting for doesn’t matter in those moments.





As ugly as this political season has been — compounded by months of pandemic and civil unrest — we haven’t lost the ability to rise above politics and be good to one another. I see abundant examples daily of personal bonds being stronger than the things that divide us.





It’s just easy to lose sight of that when we spend too much time on social media. I’m guilty of that.





We’ll need those bonds to survive the next few months, which promise to be as hard as recent months — maybe even more so. The coming election will almost certainly be rich with chaos. The pandemic will continue to dog us. The economy will take a long time to recover. 





Our empathy for each other might be our greatest weapon against the darkness.





One of my friends from the information security community, Don A. Bailey, captured the things that matter most in a recent Facebook post: 





No matter which side you’re on, half the country is going to have a very bad 2020 in November. Now, more than ever, is time for empathy, patience, and communication with friends whom think differently than you. Your candidate won’t save the country, only we can, one deescalation at a time.





Thanks for that perspective, Don.





Call me a hopeless optimist. Call me naive. But I truly believe our better angels will overcome the ugliness of 2020. 





There are more than enough Ginsburg–Scalia friendships in America to carry us through to better days.

	


	





		

		
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Mental Shore Leave: A Remedy for Uncertain Times
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

Low energy. A lack of creativity that partly explains why I haven’t written in over a month.  A deepening sense of dread. I’ve spent weeks trying to put a name or definition to the feelings and fatigue.  





I know the cause, and I know that I’m no special case. A lot of people are experiencing the same things, and the whys are many: We’ve had to hold our mental functionality together amid an unending pandemic, a breakdown of public discourse, civil unrest and now a looming presidential election where an unclear result and constitutional crisis are all but certain.





I’ve finally found the proper label, courtesy of Dr. Aisha Ahmad. More importantly, she has put forth a remedy to help us move forward.





Mood Music:













Dr. Ahmad, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote a recent Twitter thread about the six-month wall she has experienced when working for prolonged periods in disaster zones and how, when you hit that wall, it seems like the darkness is permanent, that things will never get better.





The desire to “make it stop” and “get away” is “intense” and our impulse is to try and ram through the period of uncertainty, trying to be as creative, disciplined and hopeful as we may be the rest of the time. She has learned to stop doing that, to give in to the lack of creativity and drive and take a “mental shore leave.”





Series of tweets from @ProfAishaAhmad: "Also, don't be afraid that your happiness & creativity are gone for the rest of this marathon. Not true. I assure you that it will soon break & you will hit a new stride. But today, roll with it. Clear away less challenging projects. Read a novel. Download that meditation app. /7"; "Frankly, even though we cannot physically leave this disaster zone, try to give yourself a mental or figurative "shore leave". Short mental escapes can offer respite and distance from the everyday struggle. Take more mental "leave" until you clear the wall. /8"; "In my experience, this 6 month wall both arrives and dissipates like clockwork. So I don't fight it anymore. I don't beat myself up over it. I just know that it will happen & trust that the dip will pass. In the meantime, I try to support my mental & emotional health. /9"; "Take heart. We have navigated a harrowing global disaster for 6 months, with resourcefulness & courage. We have already found new ways to live, love, and be happy under these rough conditions. A miracle & a marvel. This is hard proof that we have what it takes to keep going. /10"





I’m certainly experiencing this wall. I find it harder to write (this is my first post in a month), and it’s getting harder to get out of bed in the morning. I’m finding it close to impossible to be patient with the unending social media screeds from the left and right political extremes. 





I’ve had massive cravings for escape — watching YouTube clips from Star Trek, Babylon 5 and The West Wing. I’m reading more comic strips than news articles. And I doze off in my leather recliner a lot. 





I thought these were signs of weakness, of caving and buckling under the weight of life in 2020. 





But the more I consider Dr. Ahmad’s words, the more I think those activities might be a sign of strength — that I’m indeed capable of finding new waves of energy, creativity and resolve by simply letting the wall crash over me, resting in the rubble and then getting up and brushing off the dust. 





We can expect many more months of chaos. Dr. Ahmad’s suggestion of taking mental shore leave is a tool to survive it. The key is to take mental shore leave without abdicating one’s responsibilities. We still have to get up for work. We still have to take care of our families. Obligations won’t go away while we pull ourselves together. So how do we maintain some semblance of balance? Here’s my plan.





Keep working, imperfection and all





I’m fortunate to remain employed, doing a job that matters. It’s a job that was already busy before the pandemic. Since then, the work has been more intense and, to be honest, I thrive in those conditions. In recent weeks, I find that I’m not as full of ideas and drive as I usually am. But getting up every morning and keeping all my initiatives on track gives me some mental stability. I may not be at my most creative, filling a whiteboard with thoughts and ideas in multiple colors as I’m known to do. But I can still keep all the balls in the air and keep the machine moving. And so I shall.





Ignore social media — to a point





Few things are more toxic to mental well-being these days than Facebook and Twitter. People are fixed in their world views and quick to tear down those with an opposing opinion. I’ve tried to spend my time on these platforms being a voice of reason, trying to steer people toward common ground. It increasingly seems like a pointless exercise. Yet I use social media for a lot of my work, so I can’t skip it altogether. Instead, I skip over political posts more often. My sharing is increasingly music-related, bits of rock ‘n’ roll history and video clips, and humor. 





Stick with the neighbors





A silver lining of this pandemic is that we’ve gotten more quality time with the neighbors in our townhouse complex. We take joy in the pets running around the yard, our gardens and the beautiful weather we’ve been having. I’m pretty sure there’s a wide range of political views among us, but we don’t talk much about it. The antics of the pets are a lot more interesting and a lot more fun. (Especially when you stuff them full of treats! –Ed.)





Take more naps





As I mentioned earlier, I’m dozing off a lot these days after dinner and sometimes before. For me, there’s no better escape than sleep. It gives me the mental shore leave needed to keep going the rest of the time. 





Remember what has gone right





There’s been so much tragedy in 2020 that it’s easy to forget that things have happened that show that we humans have the capacity to endure. As Dr. Ahmad noted in her Twitter thread, people have adapted, learning to do groceries, go to work and even find ways to be happy during the pandemic. 





The pandemic will be with us for months to come, but there are signs that we can absolutely live our lives and co-exist with COVID-19. As bad as the economic downturn has been, a lot of businesses have found ways to adapt and latch on to unexpected opportunities.





Surely, we can continue to do so amid political chaos that will not abate anytime soon. 





I’m a big fan of this quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  I’ve certainly tried to do so. 





But even Churchill understood that it was OK to stop within bouts of depression — which he called his Black Dog — and let go. 





Photo of small pleasure boats bobbing in a harbor, with a treelined shore in the background, and a blue sky with wisps of white clouds above

	


	





		

		
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I See Villains. Time for a Gut Check
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

I recently caught myself failing miserably at a suggestion a friend made: “Don’t assume villainy where it is merely different goals.”





My current anxiety level, measured by the anxiety rainbow, is red, fueled by anger over how people carry on amid the pandemic. Everything has become political to my eye, especially in those spaces I inhabit with people wearing their masks below their noses or not at all and the name-calling and other general nastiness on social media. 





It makes me angry, which leads to self-righteousness, which leaves me feeling like a prick. I’m doing a gut check about it, because the last thing the world needs right now is another asshole.





Mood Music:













Seeing villains everywhere is unproductive and stokes hateful feelings. I don’t like being this way. 





But I can’t tell you I’ll stop now that the epiphany has struck. 





Believing as I do that the pandemic is real and knowing people who have been infected with COVID-19 and killed by it, I take all necessary precautions and feel other people should do the same, as a civic duty. When they don’t, I can’t help but see them as selfish pricks willing to put others at risk.





My friend is right. Much of the time, the people around us have conflicting goals but not a desire to do someone ill. People have a lot of concerns rattling around in their brains and why they do certain things can’t always be explained in black and white. We need to do a better job listening to each other. 





Not seeing each other as villains is a good place to start. 





Yet here I sit, unable to do so. I can’t stop feeling the way I feel. This pandemic has made me a far less patient, much angrier individual. I know I’m not the only one.





Am I weak and self-righteous, unable to get past my biases and giving in to blind rage? Is there a hole in the concept of not making someone out to be a villain?





I don’t know.





What I do know is that I need to look deeper inside myself for a better way to manage my emotions and deal with people. 





The work continues.





Drawing of horned teddy bear shooting a yellow light from its right eye, which captures a yellow cartoon-ish humanoid, and a black light from its left eye, which captures a gray cartoon-ish humanoid. By Sharane Wild. Learn more at https://www.facebook.com/sharane.wild.3.
Art by Sharane Wild






	


	





		

		
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Why We’ll Survive This
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

Recently, my posts have trended toward the darker side, with laments over our broken political discourse and inability to coalesce around common goals. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost hope, however. 





Here’s why.





Mood Music:













When shit rains down in our communities, we continue to come together. That’s an old story, with such examples as people combing through rubble and tending to the injured at the WTC in the wake of 9-11 and the rescue missions immediately after Hurricane Katrina.





As Mister Rogers once recalled his mother telling him, “The helpers always come.“





I’ve seen abundant examples during the current pandemic — nurses and doctors I know personally, driving their sanity to the knife’s edge to keep patients alive regardless of their politics, food drives overflowing with donations to help people who have lost their income, success of a thousand Facebook donation drives. 





At a more personal level, despite what you see daily on social media, people remain good, able to see past politics to care for people.





My late father-in-law was an inflexible, often angry Trump supporter. He was socially conservative to the core. But he loved his “liberal” family members as much as the conservative ones. And it didn’t matter what you believed or what color your skin was or what your sexual orientation was: If you were burned out of your home, in legal trouble or broken down on the side of the road, he dropped everything and did what he could to make your burden a little less crushing.





I have a cousin who I constantly spar with on Facebook over politics and what we should or shouldn’t be doing amid COVID-19. When we meet in person, we argue about none of that stuff. Instead, we share in the joy of the little kids running around us and the concern for family down on their luck.





I have a friend from the old neighborhood who is far to the right of me politically. But our shared past and relationships forged there far outweigh the squabbles of the present.





Humans can be terrible to each other. But enough of us are kind to each other to re-enforce my belief that when push comes to shove, we can still come together.





That’s why, as bad as things are right now, I think we’ll get through this. I don’t know how long it will take, but it will happen.





"Spectre of the Past" by Eddie The Yeti. A brown and black image of a human skeleton with skeletal wings. 
“Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti






	


	





		

		
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Observations of a Centrist
	


			

			
							
		

	
	

		

When it comes to politics, I claim neither purity nor perfection. Mine are simply a set of beliefs collected through life experiences and a vigorous read of history. 





One thing I’ve always tried to do is be open, adjusting those beliefs in the face of fresh evidence. Such evidence has come my way more times than I care to admit. To me, the ability to be flexible in this arena is necessary for personal growth, evolution and my usefulness to society.





I spent part of my teens and early 20s as a libertarian before swinging the other way toward left-wing liberalism. 





By the time I reached my 30s and since then, my political leanings have remained mainly in the middle. I vote for Democrats and Republicans, depending on who I think shows the best ability to lead.  





I like a vigorous debate between those on the left and right. When the country faces a crisis like the current pandemic, I prefer that leaders be willing to cast aside parts of their ideology and meet the other side halfway to do what’s necessary.





Most people agree that the current situation is dangerous — a new virus we’ve failed to get accurate measurements on, resulting in people forced to stay home, keep their distance and freeze the economy. 





Most people agree Congress must pass another massive emergency aid package as the economy plunges to depths unseen since The Great Depression.





Most people agree we need far more extensive testing and that without a more accurate count of who is sick and who isn’t, most other data points are useless.





But the public discourse has become overrun by people from both political extremes. 





Many on the far right are shouting that continued social distancing and mask mandates are acts of tyranny, that this is local and national government grabbing power for power’s sake.  





Many on the left argue that those who want social distancing to end are heartless tyrants themselves, willing to sacrifice grandma and countless other lives out of a selfish need to restart the economy.





We continue to argue and vilify each other. This scenario is now playing out against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election. People at one extreme believe universal mail-in voting is the only way to stay safe. People at the other extreme insist mail-in voting is a recipe for massive fraud and will undermine the accuracy of the election.





President Trump, who has skillfully played the emotions of both extremes like a master conductor, claims mail-in voting will rig the election against him, even as his policies undermine the U.S. Postal Service, increasing the likelihood that things will go wrong.





As I sit here in the center, it looks to me like the far left and far right are easily played, becoming outraged at the drop of a dime. If you disagree with the far left, you’re a fascist too dumb to know what’s correct. Trump knows how easily riled they are and presses their buttons effectively. The far-right casts aside reality not because they lack intellect but because they’re convinced they’ve been lied to over and over again. Yet some of the things they’ve been willing to entertain as truth boggles the minds of centrists like me.





Against that backdrop, here’s what I believe:





  • Mail-in voting is no different than absentee voting, which has mostly worked for decades. If it worries you, spend less time crying foul and more time demanding that the postal service receive all necessary resources to make this work.
  • Americans are spoiled when it comes to election results. Except for 2000, we’ve had an outcome on election night for decades. To make mail-in voting accurate, we should be willing to wait weeks and even a month or two for careful counting and recounting. Then, it will be harder to discount the election outcome’s legitimacy, no matter who wins.
  • Though I think mail-in voting can work, I also believe in-person voting can as well. Most of us make regular trips to the grocery store, where we spend a good hour (I do, anyway). Voting can be a quicker process, if everything possible is done to provide enough polling places and move people along. You just follow the same rules as you do with every other outing. Mask up and don’t linger.
  • With a hybrid approach, we can have a fair election.
  • The government has grown rotten and we’ve been lied to repeatedly. If the government tells you something is necessary, it’s not the act of an uncaring person to be skeptical. In fact, it’s a healthy reaction. 
  • But it’s not enough to sit around and bitch about it. People of all political leanings must demand more transparent government. That’s a cause as worthy of the kind of protest we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter (peaceful protest, not the looting and vandalism that rightly sparked outrage). As the late John Lewis used to say, some things are worth causing “good trouble” for.
  • The Founding Fathers built this nation to avoid extreme outcomes. Checks and balances demands compromise. 
  • It’s fine, even appropriate, to look on government officials with skepticism. Both parties have done things to make the American experience a terrible one in this regard. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — a Democrat — is often lauded as an example of good leadership in the pandemic but some of his early decisions were disastrous, particularly his order to put COVID-19 patients in nursing homes, which infected and killed people who might still be with us today. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a Republican — refused early on to institute safety measures. Florida is now a hotbed of sickness and death.
  • Some claim the pandemic itself is a conspiracy and a scam. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when there are millions of sick and dead people out there it’s real. I know several people who got sick and at least one who died.





The only way America will endure is if many more people meet in the middle and cast aside tribalism for the greater good. That means doing or not doing things that would seem appropriate in normal times. 





These are not normal times.





"American Rag Doll" by Sharane Wild
“American Rag Doll” by Sharane Wild





Editor’s note: Prints of “American Ragdoll” are for sale, with all proceeds being donated to the Elizabeth Stone House in support of survivors of domestic violence in the Boston area. If you’d like your own print, email sharanewild@gmail.com.