A Shortage of Outrage

I would not have thought it was possible but I’m finding that I am running an outrage deficit. There are so many utterly appalling situations in our country right now that I can’t process it all. As angry as I am I can’t track everything at once. As I look at any given situation and try to determine how to respond I know I am losing track of several others that are just as, if not more, pressing.

I think a big part of my problem is that I don’t know what to do about any of the most critical issues.
I know that nothing I say will matter. Best case 40-50 people might see this blog. Most of them are already the choir.
I am exhausted from battling a non-stop series of archetypally first world problems in my own life. It makes the prospect of trying to face the big issues crushing.
No amount of money that I can bring to bear will move the needle. (Admittedly I have not emptied my financial resources to prove this.)
But the biggest problem is that I just don’t know where to start. I don’t know what has to be the highest priority.

How do you pick between children being separated from their parents and held in cages and the US standing aside to allow ethnic cleansing of our allies? Both are horrifying. Both need immediate action. People are dying faster in one, the other has been allowed to persist longer and is closer to home. In both cases there is a point at which if it is not addressed it will be too late. In both cases it is already too late for far too many people.

This does not even begin to get in to things like police being called for a wellness check by a concerned neighbor and responding by shooting the resident they are supposed to be checking on, in her own home, through the window. This is just the most recent in a seemingly endless saga of violence by police and toward police in an increasingly antagonistic and polarized relationship between the police and the public.

At the heart of much of this we have a nominal Chief Executive who seems to swing between being utterly immoral, greed driven, and self-serving on the one hand and totally unhinged on the other. The avenues available to deal with this lunatic are too slow to help those who are endangered by his orders and are dependent on rules of law that seem to be increasingly meaningless. As Trump becomes more and more blatant about his belief that he is above the law I have to wonder if there are any federal law enforcement agencies that aren’t compromised. The FBI, DEA, ICE, CBP, and USMS all report to DOJ or DHS, both of which are firmly under the White House thumb. So even if the House of Representative were to start issuing contempt of Congress citations who is going to enforce them? As far as I can tell the House of Representatives has one Sergeant at Arms who has one deputy. While they can place an individual in custody if they are on the premises it seems unlikely that they are going to go out of the building to find and arrest individuals held in contempt (e.g. for non-compliance with a subpoena).

There is unquestionably sufficient evidence for the House to pass articles of Impeachment, but to what end? Trump has already stated that he considers the impeachment investigation unconstitutional and invalid. There is no reason to believe that he would acknowledge the validity of a Senate trial even if it happened.
I see no reason to believe that McConnell would not block the reading, debate and vote on any articles of impeachment just like he has blocked so many things.
For that matter, if we reach the 2020 election, if the votes are counted and reported accurately, and if it turns out that Trump has lost is there any reason to believe that he will accept that result and leave office?

I have not even touched on the fact that we are rapidly running out of time to try to slow and reverse the damage we have done to the one and only habitable planet we have access to. Which could ultimately (and sooner than we used to think) render how we treat each other moot.

Does it seem like this post is chaotic and all over the map? Welcome to what I am trying to process. This is the whole point. In a situation like this how do you pick a starting point and make any headway?

The United States of America was founded on high ideals. Historically we have fallen short of those ideals, time and again, but at least it seemed like we were trying to do better and be better. Now we have a very vocal part of the population arguing that we need to abandon those ideals and become, in essence, an isolationist theocracy.
The Great American Experiment is hanging in the balance. We have failed to stop a cheap huckster from assuming the highest office in our country. We have failed to stop the sale of our democracy to the highest bidder. We have given power to self serving demagogues who are patently unfit to hold it.
Fixing this situation will not be easy if it is even possible.

I don’t know how to start. I don’t know how to move the needle. I’m not sure I believe that slow and steady wins this time. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has any idea what to do first.

Privilege from the inside. Part 6 of a multi-part series.

Part 6

In which Darrin starts to reexamine everything he thought he believed regarding social justice, racial and gender equality and the whole concept of privilege.

I feel like I should pause here to note that this is where things start getting more interpretive. What follows is how various pieces of information started to coalesce in my thoughts on my way to reaching some of the views I now hold. I know there are people who may disagree with my interpretations of both American history and my own family history. I’m not going to caveat every point at which I make a logical leap or reach a conclusion by saying this is just how this registered with me at the time. Just bear in mind that I’m relating an evolution in personal thought, not sociological research.

At the end of part 5 I had just gotten to the point where I had a glimmer of understanding that things I had taken for granted my entire life were not the norm for some or even most people. As I started to realize the impact that educational opportunities and advantages were having I got to thinking about my family history and where those opportunities started. I had the advantage of having college educated parents, but where did that start? The short answer is that on both sides of my family I am at least the third generation to go to college.

My belief at the time, and it doesn’t take much investigation to confirm this, is that children of college educated parents are more likely to go to college themselves and more likely to be successful there. See Footnote. So education is a self perpetuating cycle. If you come from a family that goes to college you are more likely to go to college and your kids are more likely to go to college. But is that racial privilege or socio-economic privilege? Well, I think it’s both really. You only have to go back a couple of generations to get to a time when higher educational opportunities for people of color were extraordinarily limited. My college educated grandparents were contemporaries with people who were former slaves or the children of former slaves and were still struggling to be recognized as human beings. The educational advantages of being white in the US in the early 20th century are undeniable. So the cycle of education starts at a time when college opportunities for people of color were almost non-existent. I guess you could say that it is socio-economic privilege that has it origins in racial privilege.

One of the other evolutions in my thinking came from taking my mandatory US History classes. I have always thought of myself as being fairly well versed in history, but it turns out that there were aspects of economic history that I had neglected. I had always thought that the vast majority of the economic impact of slavery was mainly in the plantation economy of the south. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of 18th and 19th century US economics I came to understand that the slave trade and slave labor fueled US industry and the economy even in areas that did not have large scale slave ownership. While this doesn't change my long standing statement that I have never owned slaves and as far as I know none of my ancestors ever owned slaves, it did change my belief that no one in my family had benefited from slavery and more specifically my belief that I had never benefited from slavery. I now believe that I was and still am benefiting from the history of slavery. The economic structure of the country I grew up in was founded on slave labor. I'll come back around to this in another post, because the idea that even if I was not directly responsible for something I may still have benefited from that thing becomes a recurring theme.

I read a few books around the same time that made big impressions. One was “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody, another was “The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass”. Those were both assigned reading in school. After I graduated I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin. I won’t try to get in to what I took away from each of those books, but one consistent thing that became clear was that there is no way for me to viscerally understand what it is like to grow up and live as a black person in the United States. This may seem trite. After all we all know the old cliche "Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes." But what if the gap is so profound that you can never make that walk? What if the worlds you live in are so fundamentally different that they can't be internalized in less than a lifetime?

Somewhere in all of this it started to dawn on me that there had been a fundamental flaw in how I was thinking about privilege. This is where the definition of privilege that I have been including in every post starts to come in to play. It took me 20+ years to stop associating privilege, and in particular white or male or white male privilege with what I thought I was hearing when I was 17 (See Part 2 for a recap). I finally started to understand that privilege means something other than having everything.

I think as a culture when we hear the word privilege we tend to think of extremes. We hear privilege and we think of Ethan Couch, the affluenza teen whose defense four killing four people while driving drunk was that he had grown up too rich to know right from wrong.  We hear privilege and we think of a C student getting into Harvard because his family donated a building. We hear privilege and think of Brock Turner getting sentenced to six months for assult and rape and only serving three. Or maybe that’s not cultural perception, maybe that was just me. Be that as it may, once I stopped thinking of privilege as having everything and started thinking of it as having one thing that is not generally available to other people I started being able to see privilege everywhere I looked.

I said in the chapter intro to this post that I reexamined a whole slew of things and I’ve focused mainly on racial and economic privilege.  I may try to delve more into gender bias in a future post, but for now this has taken me far too long to write, so I’m going to hit publish and move on.

privilege

[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]

1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

Footnote

Only about 30 percent of 18 to 24 year olds whose parents did not graduate from high school reach college, compared to about 85 percent of 18 to 24 year olds where the householder has a bachelor’s degree or more from college. 

Day, Jennifer C., and Curry, Andrea E. (June 1998). School Enrollment-Social and Economic Characteristics of Students: October 1996 (Update). U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P20-500. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

https://degreesolutions.com/parents-educational-influence/

Privilege from the inside. Part 5 of a multi-part series.

Part 5

In which Darrin casually jokes about something good in his life so often that he finally realizes that it is really something special and light begins to dawn.

Okay, so I started writing Parts 3 & 4 and quite frankly they were long, chatty and not all that interesting. I really didn’t set out to write an autobiography, but my tendency toward unbounded narrative was getting out of hand. So I’m going to skip ahead to the point at which some glimmer of understanding began to dawn.

12 years after I left Antioch to pursue a dance career (also known as dropping out of college) I reached a point in my life where I decided to go back to school. I started out taking math classes and when I hit something in my homework I didn’t fully understand I fell back on my childhood strategy regarding math questions. I called my mother.

My Mom was a math major in college and was responsible for most of my math education up to that point. If you’ve never met her she’s a pretty smart cookie (gross understatement) and pretty good at explaining things. This started a pattern which persisted through algebra I & II and trig. Any time I had trouble understanding something or needed help with homework I called Mom and she worked through it with me.

When I moved on to calculus Mom handed me off to my father for tutoring. My Dad has a PhD in math and was a math professor before going to work for NASA. He is also a pretty smart cookie (also a gross understatement). When I was taking chemistry and had questions I called my cousin who was working on her PhD in chemical engineering at the time (there are a lot of smart cookies in my family). Do you see a pattern here?

While I got help from several people during my return to academia my father ended up being the single biggest source of tutoring. He helped me through three semesters of calculus, two semesters of logic, linear algebra, probability, and discrete mathematics. At some point during that I started joking that I was the only person in my classes getting on demand, one on one, PhD level tutoring for the price of a long distance phone call (about 3.5 cents/minute at the time). Haha Haha, pretty funny huh? I don’t remember how long I had been making that “joke” before something clicked in my head.

“Wait, hold on. You mean not everyone's parents are helping them with their college math homework? Wow, I guess I really am lucky to have that going for me.”
I should clarify that when I say tutoring I mean exactly that. Lest you think that getting help with homework is cheating, I can't remember an occasion when any of my family just gave me an answer or hints on a specific problem. No matter how much I might have wanted that at the time (and believe me there were times that I did) I didn't get hints or tips. I got detailed explanations of the underlying principles and theory. My Dad in particular had no interest in helping me complete a given problem if I didn't understand the 'why'.

And there it is. The glimmer of understanding I mentioned. The realization that I am very fortunate to have college educated parents who were willing and able to actively help with my education. That opened the door for other lines of thinking...
"I guess there are a lot of students who's parents never took or don't remember calculus."
"For that matter there are lots of students who's parents never went to college."
"You know, I bet there are plenty of high schools students who's parents can't help with their homework either."
"You know, I bet there are students at every level who's parents would like to help with their homework, but they are too busy supporting their family and can't do both."

There were several other factors that had been percolating around that same time, but educational opportunities and support were the gateway.

Stay tuned for part 6 for the elaboration.

privilege

[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]

1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

A Quick Word About Zog

It has been pointed out to me that many people these days have no idea why I called this "The Zog Blog".

It has further been pointed out that there are some contexts in which "Zog" is controversial or even offensive.

In my case it is a nickname. Nothing more, nothing less. Many years ago I had a friend who’s roommate just could not seem to remember my name. She said that “Darrin” just didn’t fit or something and that I needed a nickname so that when I called I could just say “It’s Zog” and she would know who I was.

Given that “Zog” is far better than most of the nicknames that had been bestowed on me over the years I decided to go with it. For several years in the 90s I was known as Zog and many of my early e-mail addresses and chat handles incorporated “Zog” in some way.

When I moved to Texas in 1999 I did not make any effort to establish myself as Zog and over 20 years it has largely fallen into disuse. I’m not sure what prompted me to use “Zog” when I started this blog in 2011. It may have been habit or it may have been an attempt to not take myself too seriously.

In any event, in case you were wondering about the deeper meaning of “Zog”, now you know. There isn’t one.

Privilege from the inside. Part 2 of a multi-part series.

Part 2

In which Darrin is told that everything that is wrong with the world is his fault and how he reacts.

I was 17 when I first learned that all the problems in the world, or at least in the US, were my fault. This was something of a shock to me since, like most people, I had always thought that I was a pretty decent guy. Sure, I'm a little grouchy, but that doesn't mean I'm a bad person, right?

I went to a very small, very liberal, Liberal Arts college and during my first year there I started hearing "Oh wow, you grew up a white guy in America. It must have been so awesomely easy being you."
Now please note that I said I started hearing that, I did not say that anyone was actually saying that. In fact looking back I'm fairly sure that no one ever said anything even remotely resembling that. In retrospect I think what people were actually saying was more along the lines of

The socio-economic structure of this country strongly favors white people and men and belonging to both demographics you were the beneficiary of advantages you probably weren’t even aware of.

No, my fellow 17-22(ish) year old students were probably not being that delicate or phrasing it that carefully. But I also don’t think most (if any) of them were saying “Everything you have comes from the sweat and blood of slaves and the oppression of women and that blood is on your hands.”

30+ years is a long time to try to think back and reconstruct months of cafeteria, classroom and dorm room conversations so it’s hard for me to remember the exact words that translated that way in my mind. I know that as a 17 year old I felt like I was being blamed for things I was pretty sure I hadn’t done. I know that I was very aware of the presence on campus of support or interest groups for almost every minority demographic imaginable. (Again this is a perception thing. I didn’t have much imagination and I’m sure there were many demographics not represented).

Even now, more than 30 years later, I’m still trying to understand why this stood out so strongly to me. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted a place or a group that was exclusive to my race, gender, sexual identity, religion, eye color or shoe size. It also wasn’t that I particularly wanted to be allowed to join any of the specific organizations on campus. I just didn’t understand why these groups felt the need to say “this group of people is OK and can be part of us and no one else can.” I think in my mind I translated this as “Everyone needs and deserves support except you.”

I should also be clear that not all of the support and interest groups were necessarily on good terms with each other. There was a certain amount of disagreement about who was the most oppressed or the most marginalized or the most under-served. There were also support groups who felt that their demographic had been treated poorly by other minority groups. The thing they all agreed on was that the primary source of their oppression was the white male hierarchy. As such no straight white men, no matter how well intentioned they might consider themselves, were to be trusted or included. 

Generally speaking Antioch was not the kind of place that attracted people who were outspokenly racist, misogynist or homophobic. I think most of the men there at the time would have considered themselves to be open minded, and supportive of people of all races, genders and gender identities. I certainly believed that I was fair minded and that my background in theater and close interaction with the LGBTQ community before coming to school entitled me to at least the benefit of the doubt that I might not be one of the bad guys.

As I learned over time that type of credibility and trust has to be re-earned every time you encounter new people who have no reason to trust you and every reason to mistrust you. I certainly didn’t understand or appreciate the irony of feeling like it wasn’t fair that I had to overcome stereotypes and assumptions made about me because of how I looked or who my ancestors were.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know where I come from. You don’t know what I’ve had to overcome.”
Sound familiar? How about this?
“I may be white, but that doesn’t mean my family was rich. I’ll compare ‘we was so broke’ stories with anyone.”

I had grown up believing that slavery was one of the greatest evils in the history of our country, but I was not a slave owner. I was not descended from slave owners. Most of my family had not even come to this country pre-civil war. How then could it possibly be my fault? (Teaser: This will be answered in a future post)
I understood that there were men who were disrespectful or abusive of women, but I did not feel like I deserved to be counted among them. For any given period in my life I had personally known women who were better than me at pretty much everything I had ever done and I respected them for it. (It was only much later that I learned that my exposure to strong female role models growing up was itself a privilege.)
You can’t imagine my disgust realizing that the things I was saying then sound a whole lot like the excuses coming out of the old, white guys in congress now. There are limits to what young and stupid excuses.

All I knew then was that hearing (or believing I was hearing) that white men were responsible for all the ills in the world and that I as a white man shared that responsibility left me feeling defensive, confused and more than a little bit hurt.

To Be Continued...

privilege

[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]

noun

1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

Next Time????

This week marks the one year anniversary of the Santa Fe high school shooting in Houston. Today on the news there were stories about the shooting. There were stories about some of the survivors a year later and their memories of the shooting. There were were stories about how Texas schools and Texas government have addressed school safety.

Every single measure that has been taken has focused on additional preparation for an “active shooter scenario”. This included things like adding more security personnel, adding more metal detectors and more training for teachers and students. In other words everything that has been done has been totally focused on being more prepared for Next Time.

Next Time??
Is that where we are now? Resigned that there has to be a Next Time?
What this says to me is that the United States has accepted school shootings as a new and unavoidable norm. That we have made the statement that we can’t prevent this from happening, all we can do is prepare to try to limit the damage.
Have we really given up on trying to make the most recent school shooting the last school shooting?
Have we just accepted that there is going to be a Next Time and nothing we do will change that?

The report talked about Santa Fe High School having been considered a model of preparedness right up until a pissed off 17 year old proved that you will never be able to cover every detail of every scenario. The president of the board of trustees for the district which contains Santa Fe is on record saying that the district's policies and procedures worked. As the Denver post reported afterwards Santa Fe school had a shooting plan, armed officers, and practice. And still 10 people died. But in typical fashion the response has been to look at rectifying specific failures like substitute teachers not having keys to classroom and safe room doors and remodeling to get rid of windows in classroom doors. There is also a plan to upgrade the school police officers’ weapons to include AR-15s.

As far as I can tell the Santa Fe shooting wasn’t even a blip in the national debate about gun control. In this case the guns used were a shotgun and handgun both legally owned by the shooter’s father. No assault weapons were involved and since it is unthinkable that we might change regulations on shotguns or handguns, why even talk about gun control? Aside being unwilling to consider regulating gun ownership we can’t even seem to talk about what responsible gun ownership would look like. I have seen no mention made of how the guns or ammunition were stored or that they were apparently accessible to the 17 year old. If anything the guns being legally owned, non-assault weapons has been held up as evidence that there was no way this could have been prevented.

I’ll have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure the second amendment does not say that anyone has a right to be utterly irresponsible about who has access to their firearms.

PSA: Never trust a single repository for Important work

Allow me to pause and digress briefly from the current series of posts to remind everyone out there that if you have any work that would be problematic or painful to recreate save it in more than one place.

This is a reminder that we all hear all the time and I think at this point almost everyone either has a personal story or knows someone personally who has lost valuable data or work to a hard drive crash or some form of data corruption.

How is it then that this has not become second nature to all of us?

Well, I'm here to share this message once again from the perspective of someone who though he was being responsible by hitting save regularly but put too much faith in the system of record. It turns out that Blogger.com saves exactly one version of your work and that it very helpfully auto-saves every few seconds.

I have been working on the second installment of the "Privilege from the inside" series and was getting close to publishing part 2 when I came home to discover that we had a power outage and that my desktop had shut down unexpectedly. I was not too panicked by this with regard to the blog because I had been saving obsessively. The post had been harder to write than I expected, so when I got a sentence I liked I immediately hit save.

So I started up my computer, launched my browser and navigated to the blog. The rest of this is sheer speculation, because no one can tell me for sure what happened. The end result was that when I loaded the draft I had been saving so diligently I discovered that it was a 5 day old version that was missing my slow and painful progress.

As nearly as I can reconstruct when I launched my browser it said that the last session had ended unexpectedly and did I want to restore. I clicked Restore. All of my previous tabs came up including the blog. My guess is that my local browser restored an older version of the draft for some reason, and then the auto-save very helpfully saved that version before I could tell it to restore the version that should have been saved to the cloud. 

So here I sit another five days later still trying to reconstruct what I lost because I'm quite sure it was far better than what is coming to me on the same topic now.

There are a couple lessons to be learned here.

1. No single repository is 100% safe. Even if it is on a cloud. 
1. If something is important enough make sure you have independent backups.
2. Consider using versioned storage.
1. Yes, this sort of thing is normally reserved for things like code or legal work where the history and evolution of something might be important.
2. But that doesn't mean you can't use it for something as simple as a writing project.
3. When something happens and you lose some work get over it.
1. Yes, it sucks losing all that careful wordsmithing.
2. No, it probably was not Shakespeare. The only reason you think it was so brilliant is that it isn't around to prove you wrong.
3. Lost work is like the fish that got away, and it is just as pointless to ramble on about it.

Privilege from the inside. Part 1 of a multi-part series.

It seems like you can't turn on a radio or TV, or open a browser or social media feed, or even (goodness not that) open a newspaper or magazine without stumbling on a discussion about privilege. Most of the discussion these days seems to center around white privilege, and specifically white male privilege in the United States. Okay, so let's talk about it.

Spoiler Alert:
I'll spare you the suspense if you are wondering where I stand on this. My answer is "Yes" pretty much across the board.
Yes, I believe that privilege exists in our culture.
Yes, I believe that racial privilege exists.
Yes, I believe that gender privilege exists.
The list goes on and on. Economic privilege is real. Gender identity privilege is real. Educational privilege is real. Physical appearance (size, attractiveness, skin tone, hair color, hair quantity [and lack thereof], body art, visible disabilities) privilege/denial of privilege is real.
Yes, I believe that white male privilege in the United States is real and ongoing (and in the present political climate getting worse not better).
Yes, I believe that as a middle-aged white male I have been the beneficiary of this privilege most of my life.
And finally:
Yes, it took me a very (very) long time to figure this out and to truly understand that I grew up with huge advantages that I was never aware were advantages.
It took me even longer to try to give voice to my understanding.

Second Spoiler Alert:
No, I don't have a solution. I'm not sure that I have even part of a solution. As a culture we seem to be stuck in the starting gate on having a conversation about the very existence of privilege let alone discussing what to do about it. So even though awareness isn't nearly enough it is a necessary first step that appears to be a problem for a great many people.

I have some totally unscientific, unsupported theories, based on my own experience, as to why awareness is such a hard step. Rather than trying to tell anyone else why they should take that step I think I will share a bunch of semi-random anecdotes that when taken together may provide a glimpse in to the long and convoluted path that led to me getting a clue.

I'm not going to try to do this all at once because I am convinced that the result would be utterly unreadable. I'm thinking this probably needs to be split in to at least three of four parts along the lines of

1. This post.
2. In which Darrin is told that everything that is wrong with the world is his fault and how he reacts.
3. In which Darrin becomes more aware of social injustice but remains smugly confident that he is one of the good guys.
4. In which Darrin decides to improve his life and is totally unsurprised when doors fall open in front of him.
5. In which Darrin casually jokes about something good in his life so often that he finally realizes that it is really something special and light begins to dawn.
6. In which Darrin starts to re-examine everything he thought he believed regarding social justice, racial and gender equality and the whole concept of privilege.
7. In which Darrin realizes that the existence of racial and gender privilege is so obvious and so ubiquitous that he is dumbstruck and ashamed that it took him so long to clue in.
8. In which Darrin spends years accumulating more anecdotal evidence before finally trying to speak out.

Hmmmm. That appears to be more than three or four entries. Hopefully, some of those can be combined because I really don't want this to take seven more posts to finish.

To Be Continued...

privilege

[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]

noun

1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

A Totally Unscientific Survey

If we have talked in person any time in the last couple of years you have probably already heard this. If you have not heard it I would be very interested to hear your reactions. If you have heard it I would be interested to hear if you have ever mentioned it to anyone else and what reactions you have gotten.

The Survey goes like this.

If you had a choice right now as President of the United States between Richard Nixon circa 1974 and Donald Trump circa now who would you choose?
.
Think about your answer a moment.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Scroll down for the follow-up question.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
If your answer was Richard Nixon here is the follow-up question...
.
.
Who or what will happen in 45 years that could make you nostalgic for Donald Trump?

In case you are wondering... No, I don't think this is funny. When I first thought of it months ago it wasn't funny and it has become increasingly less funny as the Trump debacle continues.

The remarkable thing is that in one regard Trump continues to be the Wizard of Oz. Just by being himself he has re-written the history of those who preceded him. When compared to Trump he has given
George W. Bush a Brain
Bill Clinton respectability and family values
George H. W. Bush a Soul
Dick Nixon Integrity

If we allow this man to continue defining reality as he goes along it is just a matter of time before we are going to be told it is time to celebrate Hitler as a misunderstood patriot.

Don't underestimate Wait Staff and Bartenders

I just saw a social media post that alluded to republicans trying to use Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having worked as a bartender and waitress as a negative. I don’t have a specific quote or publication in which this happened, so I’m not going to address that directly. Instead I want to talk about why we should not be so quick to dismiss these jobs and the people who hold them.

 First and foremost, to quote Carol Burnett, “A job’s a job.” This, of course, can be said of any job. Not every job is going to be your dream job. Not every job is going to be on the path to your dream job. Not every job is going to make full use of your experience or education.
 Sometimes a job is just a way to pay the rent and buy groceries while you are working on getting those other things lined up. Service industry jobs can be particularly well suited to this because they tend to have schedules with enough flexibility to work around hunting for your dream job, or training, or going to school, or surviving a period in which your dream job is not paying enough to live on.

 On top of this (here is where the soap box really comes out) DO NOT underestimate the skills that can be learned in a “Service Industry” job.

 Let’s start with the obvious; Customer Service and people skills. You are in direct contact with your customers on a constant basis. They are not faceless, nameless statistics. They are people who have gone through their day so far, had good experiences and bad, and are now ready for something to eat and drink and probably a little social time. As a server you have a few seconds as you approach and greet a table to get a read on those customers. Are they feeling gregarious? Do they want you to be conversational? Are they looking to get some food with minimal interaction? Do they want you to be formal or casual? Are they having a good day, a bad day, or just a day. You have to be aware if your establishment is busy that they have been waiting and may be a little frustrated or at the very least really ready to get started.

 Next major skill; workflow and time management. As a server you are constantly in motion from the dining room to the pass (where food comes out from the kitchen) to the dish room with occasional side trips to the kitchen, the walk-in, the bathrooms, the dumpster. The busier you are the more important it is to combine tasks and avoid wasted trips or low productivity trips. At one restaurant where I worked “Full hands in, Full hands out” was a mantra. It meant if you are heading in to the dish area/pass there is almost certainly something you can take in with you. If you are heading out of the pass there is almost certainly something that needs to go to the dining room.
 There is also a huge element of prioritizing tasks based on urgency but also factoring in impact and timeline. The thing that will generally take the longest is the time from when you enter a customer’s order to when food starts coming up. With few exceptions once you have an order in hand you want to get that entered in the system so that the kitchen can be working on it while you are doing other things. But there are exceptions to this and figuring out when something is so pressing that you need to sacrifice some optimization to move a task to the top of the queue is another skill that you hone over time. e.g. A customer is out of their beverage and they have food so hot they can't continue their meal without a refill.

 Teamwork. Remember “Full hand in, Full hands out”? Those things won’t always be for your tables. As you are headed for the kitchen can you grab some dishes off a table at a neighboring station? Can you help someone bus an empty table so it can be turned? On the way out can you run some food to another table? Does someone need a hand taking drink refills to another table? Does the bar need a bucket of ice? Are you watching out for the servers around you to have a feel if someone is getting in the weeds (industry term for being slammed) and might need a hand? Are you building a culture among the staff where people watch out for each other and pitch in? In a restaurant, as in so many other places, teamwork can make or break you.

 For bartenders you have all of that and add in several more things. A bartender is expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of drink recipes. Even in places that have a drink menu that is generally to let patrons know about house specialties or drinks out of the ordinary. Everyone assumes that any ‘standard’ drink is available whether it is on a menu or not.
 If you are working a bar connected to a restaurant you have to balance serving your patrons directly with getting drinks ready for the wait staff to pick up. You have even more possibility of customers who want to be chatty. You are sometimes expected to be an amateur psychologist. In some states as a bartender or a server you are expected to be a human breathalyzer. In Tennessee, for example, it is illegal to serve alcohol to an intoxicated person. A restaurant or bar and the staff in it can be held liable for the actions of someone who gets intoxicated there. It doesn’t matter if a patron has eight drinks at some other bar and then comes to your restaurant and orders one. If you serve that person alcohol and they get in an accident you can be held partially responsible. So with every drink order you as a server have to decide if the customer should be cut off. (And let me tell you, that is never a fun conversation, when you tell someone that you are not getting them another drink).

 Now bring this back around to people who scoff at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having worked as a server and bartender. Here you have someone who graduated cum laude from Boston University with a major in international relations and economics. I’m not familiar with the types of jobs someone with that background generally goes for, but I have to assume that the reason AOC was working as a bartender and waitress as that it was the best option available for her to take care of herself and her family. In the course of doing that she worked in a job that brought her in direct contact with a large number of people from the area she now represents in Congress. I would imagine that she had ample opportunity to hear directly and indirectly what people care about, what is important to them, and translated that into how they would like to be represented.

 AOC was quoted recently saying of Congress, “Our job is to serve, not to rule”. In theory the members of congress are supposed to be the voice of the people. Who better then to represent the people than someone who has spent real time listening to them?