Tag: debate

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Oh, G’s

Stephen Wilhite led an animated life.

OK, his is not a name that leaps to mind like Maya Angelou, Steve Jobs or (heaven help us) Justin Bieber. But if you’ve been online at all, you touched his work. Wilhite, who died recently at 74, invented the GIF, the moving photos that turned social media into a special effect out of Harry Potter.

He also, years after their invention, triggered one of the internet’s most long-running minor debates with just five words:

“It’s pronounced ‘jif,’ not ‘gif.’”

Yes, like the peanut butter. That had actually been part of the documentation for  the Graphics Interchange Format since day one … which of course most people never saw. And in a jiffy (or even a giffy), we reconfirmed two essential truths of our species.

First, that people will argue about absolutely ANYTHING, and the flames only get hotter as the stakes get lower. Online battles over the “proper” pronunciation of GIF still rage back and forth with the intensity of a Star Wars movie, joining such timeless classics as “that stupid call in the Super Bowl” and “who needs the Oxford comma, anyway?”

After a while, the exchange gets pretty predictable:

“Well, the G stands for ‘Graphic,’ so of course it’s a hard G!”

“The U in SCUBA stands for ‘Underwater,’ are you going to start saying scuh-ba?”

“It’s like ‘gap’ or ‘get!’”

“No, it’s like ‘genius’ or ‘giraffe.’”

“Jif sounds stupid!”

“You sound stupid!”

“NYAAAAAAH!”

Verily, this is a philosophical discourse that Socrates himself would envy.

The second essential truth is more subtle. Namely, that the meaning of an idea doesn’t start and stop with its creator.

Any literature fans reading this will recognize this immediately as “the death of the author,” Stripped of PhD language (you’re welcome), this basically says that the author isn’t the only one who gets to decide what a story’s about. Just as an invention can be created for one purpose and used for another, a story can change when it reaches the reader’s hands. Yes, the author has intents and purposes, but the reader brings their own experience to the tale, which may lead them to discover something quite different.

It’s a little scary and a little exciting. It means that reading a story or watching a movie isn’t just a matter of cracking a code (“what did they mean by that?”) but a process of adventure and discovery (“what will I find here?”) J.R.R. Tolkien called it the difference between allegory – a strict this-means-that definition by the writer – and applicability.

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence,” he wrote. “I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

That’s challenging.

It means that while stories shape us, we can also shape them right back. It means that we don’t just have to accept ideas in couch-potato fashion. We can grapple with them, challenge them and take them in new directions. All sorts of concepts can be transformed this way, from fiction to ideologies to language itself.

So if 20 years down the road, the “hard G” folks win the GIF battle for good (or even for jood), it’s not an error or a crime. It just means the story wasn’t over.

It’s your tale. Choose as you will.

Just be gentle – or gracious – to those on the other side.

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A World of Difference

Written Nov. 16, 2019

And now, to boldly go where everyone and their brother has gone before.

No, not the well-traveled corridors of the starship Enterprise – though this will take us to the final frontier. Namely, to the vicinity of Pluto, the frozen world with the simmering debate: is it a planet, a dwarf planet, or a really lost California skier?

For the head of NASA, it’s incredibly obvious.

“I am here to tell you, as the NASA Administrator, I believe Pluto should be a planet,” Jim Bridenstine said earlier this month to the International Astronautical Congress – as opposed to the International Astronomical Union, which demoted our distant neighbor to dwarf planet status 13 years ago, making grade-school textbooks around the world obsolete at a stroke.

If this sounds like a really weird thing to argue about – well, yeah. But the most passionate arguments can flare up over the smallest things. Daylight Saving Time. The “real name” of This-Sponsor-Here Stadium at Mile High. Heck, if you want to inflame a group of Star Wars fans for the next 40 minutes, just sidle up and ask them whether Han shot first.

In the case of the Pluto War, everyone’s got their official-sounding reasons, such as whether the planet “clears its orbit” (or whether any planet does), or the presence of moons or an atmosphere, or maybe even eventually whether there’s ever been an Elvis sighting there. All of which underscores the fact that “planet” is a really fuzzy concept – about as fuzzy as “continent.”

What’s that? Everyone knows what a continent is? Well, sort of. Some of us were taught in school that there were seven. Others learned that there were six, since Europe and Asia aren’t truly separated by anything but history. An alien from outer space might argue that there are four – the big American land mass, the big Europe/Africa/Asia land mass, plus Australia and Antarctica. And is Australia really the world’s smallest continent, or just its biggest island?

It’s a matter of perspective.

Debates like these are safely amusing because whoever wins, it doesn’t really change much. (Except for the textbook budget, of course.) But when they get so passionate, they can edge into a gray area where strongly-held opinion takes on the power of fact.

From there, it’s a short step to the genuinely dangerous area: the belief that facts are malleable. The idea that every fact is just someone’s opinion, and that if the facts disagree with what I think, then the facts must be wrong.

That’s not a funny debate at all.

It has consequences for human dignity. For law and justice. For anything that relies on reason and inquiry – which is to say, our ability to live side-by-side with each other at all. Anything becomes justifiable and correct if you get enough people to agree with you. Our history, past and present, has some very scary examples of that.

Granted, even our capacity for wishful thinking has limits. If you’re firmly convinced that you can fly, and you step off a 500-foot cliff, the physical universe will quickly disabuse your notions. (“See how quickly I flew downward?”)  But if we have to hit those walls, the ones where Captain Obvious gives us a dope slap, then we’re already in trouble.

As I’ve said many times, we all have a story. But our own stories aren’t the only ones that matter. We have to step away. To see the stories of others. To digest the facts that we don’t want to hear but that aren’t going away.

I know. Easy to say. Hard to do. But you have to acknowledge the need before you can start. And as a species, we need some perspective.

How much?

Well – I hear Pluto’s nice this time of year.

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That is The Question

Every so often, the human race finds itself dealing with the Big Questions. “What is the greatest good?” “Paper or plastic?” “Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?”

Now, it looks like we get to add another one to the list: “Yanny or Laurel?”

Umm – can we get back to the chewing gum?

If you’ve missed the latest minor craze on social media, welcome back to Earth and I hope you’ll take me with you when you leave again. Yanny or Laurel is a brief sound clip that dares to ask “How long will you listen to a bad recording that didn’t hit No. 1 on Billboard?” You push Play to hear a garbled word, decide if the speaker is saying “Laurel” or “Yanny” and then share your findings online to begin a calm, reasoned discussion of the matter.

OK, just kidding. You pop online to join the cheering section for your word of choice, often with an enthusiasm for the “obvious” choice that could get you on nine out of 10 American game shows. (Come back to “Jeopardy!” when you’ve calmed down a bit.)

The thing is, it’s actually not that hard to find the answer. Besides the fact that “Yanny” isn’t even a word (unless you’re misspelling Greek New Age musicians), it only takes a little hunting on the Web to read an account from the teens who started all this. It began when they played an online vocabulary page for the word “laurel,” realized each of them were hearing different tones, and sent it out to the world.

But that would be too easy. Like the “blue dress/gold dress” Facebook photo before this, Yanny or Laurel isn’t about learning the right answer. It’s about knowing what you heard and insisting on its rightness to the world.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A lot of politics – heck, a lot of what passes for online discussion these days – seems to be a longer game of Yanny or Laurel. It doesn’t matter if facts can be found and myths can be busted in less time than it takes to ruin the Colorado Rockies’ pennant chances. What matters is picking your team, shouting your slogan, and remaining impervious to any attempts at reason or compromise.

Sure, it’s annoying – but only when those guys do it. It’s easy to fall into the same trap. Studies suggest that the wiring of our brains makes us want to fit in rather than break with the crowd – it’s easier and more satisfying to simply join the crowd of people who believe the same things we want to believe, than it is to examine those beliefs and see if they hold up.

It’s not inevitable. But like running marathons instead of watching six hours of YouTube, changing the habit takes work that’s usually uncomfortable and sometimes acutely painful. It takes curiosity and a willingness to ask the next question. Even with something that seems obvious. Especially then.

More than once, I’ve quoted the distinguished philosophers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” When we can beat that reflex, any question can become interesting. Even “Yanny or Laurel?” can start a long discussion on why some people hear certain tones, or whether we all experience the same reality.

It’s worthwhile. But it takes effort.

You can’t just rest on your Laurels.

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Teaming Up

The threat of rain had passed. The clouds lingered, leaving a perfect day for softball. Missy and her friends were all geared up, and nothing could stop the launch of another great season.

Not even a little thing like having enough players.

Some of you may remember the Monday night softball league from previous columns. The rosters feature disabled players, great enthusiasm, and absolutely no concern for strikes, balls, outs, or even runs. It’s an hour in the sunshine to hit, throw, and run (or walk, or wheel) to the cheers of friends and family as each lineup makes its way around the bases.

“There’s a lot of love on this field,” one parent told me at the season opener. I had to agree.

It’s a couple of steps beyond informal, and that’s its glory. Sun Tzu once called a formless strategy the pinnacle of military deployment. I’m not sure how many softball teams Sun Tzu coached, but the same idea applies here: things are so loose that anything can be adapted to.

So when one team showed up with practically every member who had ever worn the jersey, while another had a bare handful signed up and ready to play, the answer was obvious. No, not forfeit.

Share players.

Minutes later, about a third of Missy’s teammates had crossed to the other dugout. The uniforms no longer meant a thing. The game had always been friends playing with friends, now it became even more so.

The different teams didn’t matter. The game was more important. And the game went on.

That’s an example to learn from.

It’s easy to get attached to teams. One way or another, we do it most of our lives, and not just in Bronco orange or Rockies purple. We stake out grounds based on politics. Creeds. Histories. Origins. We find a thousand ways to draw the line and define who we are – or, sometimes more vividly, to define who we’re not.

Now an identity is not in itself a bad thing. I’m not advocating that we all join the ranks of the formless, the gray, the uncommitted who just move through the background and leave without a ripple. Ideas CAN be important; concepts CAN be urgent enough to fight for or toxic enough to oppose with spirit and conviction.

But when the team becomes more important than the game, something is out of balance.

It happens when winning becomes more important than how you win. It happens when rules, or consideration, or even simple civility become less important than self-aggrandizement. It happens when conversation stops and the participants begin talking past each other – beyond not seeing each other as equals, all the way to literally not seeing each other.

It happens when “I” becomes paramount. When “we” becomes the people that agree with me. And when “they” ceases to exist in our awareness altogether.

Each of us could quote a dozen examples in just a week’s headlines. I won’t waste the space here. But we all know the atmosphere it creates, as deadly as any greenhouse gas.

The thing is, teams are temporary. The Federalists were once the hottest thing going. Now they’re a line in a Broadway musical. Parties, movements, loyalties of a hundred kinds are born of a moment in history. They change, they grow, they merge and split, they even disappear – and the players almost always find another team.

But the game has to go on.

Without the game, there’s no reason for a team at all.

I’m hoping that most of us believe that. If we do, if we act on it, the toxic clouds can lift again. We can have disagreement, even passionate argument, without the discord that drowns out any useful theme.

We can walk in the sunshine again. I think we will.

Maybe we can even play a little softball.

Batter up.

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A Time To Think

There’s a fire racing through Facebook.

This time, the spark came from talk of Syrian refugees. Before that, it was gun control. Before that, some other broad and powerful issue of the day, building an audience faster than the rumor of free Bronco tickets.

By itself, that’s not so bad. Big and important issues should be discussed by a free people, after all. I’ve seen some approach the impromptu debate with thought and care, and I’ve done my best to take part in the same manner.

All the while, I know we’re in the minority.

Most of what happens isn’t a discussion or debate. You know it. I know it. Most of it is a shouting match at best, the verbal equivalent of Mark Twain’s duel with axes at two paces – swing hard and fast, with no particular care for accuracy so long as blood is drawn.

“Behold the power of my inflammatory photograph!”

“Hah-hah! Your photograph is impotent in the face of my video of dubious origin!”

“Oh, yeah? Well have at thee with an unsourced blog post!”

“Pah! Now you shall see the might of my snarky cartoon!”

Sometimes the borrowed memes and images open a new line of thought. More often, they’re an opportunity to raise the voice, plug the ears and carry on, invincible. No listening. No learning. No need for the other person to even be in the (virtual) room.

And thus, a wildfire. Plenty of heat. Plenty of damage. Precious little in the way of useful light.

Please understand: I’m glad that people care. In the face of an issue like this, apathy would be an indictment of us all. I want this to be on our minds and hearts and I know others feel the same.

But how it’s done matters.

If you are one of the people involved, please. Take a moment, or several, before hitting Enter. Take the time to think.

Think about the image, or the video, or the report that you’re about to put out there. Have you checked its accuracy? Does it have identifiable, verifiable sources? This is especially true if it seems to agree with your feelings and beliefs in every particular – these are the items we are least likely to check, because they seem so obvious. (Reporter’s Rule No. 1: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”) If it is true, does it add anything new and useful to the discussion?

Think about what you’re for, not just what you’re reacting to. What can you offer as a next step? If you favor sealing the borders, how do you propose helping those who need help, without putting them at risk of being radicalized? If you favor welcoming the stranger, what do we as a society and as individuals need to stand ready to do, to make sure our aid is more than an empty ‘welcome’ banner and an isolation within a new society?

Think about what the other person is saying and examine where you stand. Have you put yourself in a place that you’ll regret when the passion of the moment has died down? Our history books are full of people who earnestly argued positions that have since been exposed to wrath and ridicule. (One of those, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, is even now the subject of a Broadway production.) Are you so sure that you want to be so sure? Even the unbending Oliver Cromwell himself once implored “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Sure, I want to win people to my side of the argument. I’m human and the subject is important to me. But I think calm consideration is more likely to do that than angry sloganeering. If it can’t, then maybe I have a few things to examine of my own.

I’ll take that risk. This is too important to be decided purely by gut impulse. This is the time to think of who we are as a community and a nation, and what we want to be. A “Thinksgiving” season, if you will.

Some fires bring warmth, and light, and inspiration. Please help this be one of them.

Haven’t we all been burned enough?

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Mountains and Molehills

When I was a kid, my folks once got into an argument over whether or not peanuts were a fruit. It was silly. It was inconsequential. And it was hard to stop once it got started.

On our first Christmas together, Heather discovered my family had always done stockings last, after presents. I discovered that her family did them wrong … er, I mean, first. The resulting “holy war” has had more than its share of laughter but never entirely died down, either.

And somewhere in Alaska, a mountain got a new federal name this week. You might just have heard about it.

I’m not sure how many of the people on social media have actually been to Denali, the peak that many of us learned in grade school as Mount McKinley. But when President Obama announced that the feds would recognize the name Alaska had been using officially since 1975 – well, the Internet reacted with the passion usually reserved for a minor Kardashian sister or the cancellation of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Mind you, the mountain itself doesn’t especially care what it’s called. (Imagine THOSE headlines!) That’s left to us and in particular to:

1) The people and leaders of Ohio, who argue that President McKinley was an important man whose reputation and legacy should be remembered, even if you’ve never actually given him two thoughts since your freshman year in college.

2) The people and leaders of Alaska, who argue that “Um, it’s our mountain, dudes.”

An alien watching from orbit would probably decide we were all nuts. (Mind you, he’d probably reach the same conclusion after watching a typical football game.) Not necessarily for endorsing one side or the other, but for putting so much energy into it.

But that’s what happens. The less significant a debate is, the more importance it actually assumes.

A professor, Wallace Stanley Sayre, once observed that academic politics were so intense “because the stakes are so small.” But it’s not just academia. At any level, a small scope can engender big feelings. A county government might spend minutes discussing a multi-million bond issue … or hours on a $2,500 budget item. A family that navigates the big issues with ease can spend all day on … well, presents and peanuts.

Why do we this to ourselves? I suspect it’s partly survival, partly relief.

There are a lot of big, complicated issues out there. We get drowned in them every day, issues of war and terrorism, politics and civil rights, straining economies and questioning minds. It’s a lot to take in, and we’re never really given a quiet space in which to do it.

“Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence,” Walter Lippmann once wrote. “But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions.”

In that situation, a trivial issue can seem heaven-sent. Simple in scope, easy to understand, no challenge at all to form an opinion on. And because it’s so easy, we can’t see how anyone could possibly reach a different conclusion.

But of course, they do. And it’s off to the races!

Fundamentally, those sorts of debates are more or less harmless. They may even be a good way to vent for a while. But they take time. They can generate hard feelings if they go on too long. And sometimes they even seduce us into thinking all issues should be this easy – that any major subject of debate can be quickly simplified into memes, quotes and a cute animation.

That’s when it’s time to step back. To breathe. To take some time and gain some perspective.

Because I promise, the mountain doesn’t care.

Energy and passion are good things. We just need to figure out where to aim them, and how to weld them to some kind of understanding.

Because the last thing we want to do is peak too soon.

 

 

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Nation in Progress

For a moment, the show seems to be over. Then the fresh explosion comes. BOOM! Sound and fury light up the landscape until it feels like a battle in full swing, with moments of fiery brilliance giving way to a continuous background chatter, holding the floor until the next burst.

Watching Facebook is really something, isn’t it?

OK, maybe the comparison’s a little inaccurate. After all, even the longest Fourth of July fireworks show is eventually over. But our national fulmination never seems to end, always finding a new source of fuel. A Supreme Court ruling. An inept political remark. A decision to pull “The Dukes of Hazzard” reruns from the airwaves.

Squeeeeeeeeeeee-BOOM!

Between an unsettled nation and unsettled times, it can feel a little exhausting. It’s easy to wish for quiet, for stability, for a little time to make everything make sense before we have to go on to the next crisis.

It’s also about as foreign to this country as Justin Bieber in a Beatles movie.

Sorry for that image. But on this, I think even George Washington might agree. Once he got the tune to “Baby, Baby, Baby” out of his head, anyway.

I think it comes down to something simple: America should never be a comfortable place to live.

I don’t mean the landscape should look like something out of a Mad Max movie. And I’m certainly not suggesting a “Love it or Leave It” attitude that urges all dissenters to make a run for the border of their choice.

But America has always been a little more than a country. It’s a concept. A conversation. Even a dream.

And as such, it’s never really finished.

Once in a while, some pundit will appeal to the Founding Fathers and what they did or didn’t intend. My reaction is always the same: “Which Fathers?” To look at the American Revolution and the years that followed it is to see chaos in a bottle, a group of people that sometimes seemed unable to agree on the lunch bill.

Some wanted to save slavery, or to kill it. Some wanted 13 loosely tied sovereignties with little national leadership, while at least one wanted to do away with state governments all together. We were a year into our war against Britain before we could even agree on why we were fighting. Even our Constitution, venerated by many, is deliberately vague on several points – and had to be, so that everyone could think their side had won.

We are a wrangling people, in the middle of a country that’s always under construction. And that’s not going to change. We’re always working out what America means and we always should be. If we ever stop challenging each other, or being challenged, worry.

A free land should never be a quiet one.

Mind you, I’m not saying we have to be a bunch of rude, bumptious yahoos, either. Part of the constant struggle is that it’s a struggle to find a way forward, not just to make noise. There can be respect. There can be compromise. There can be intelligent consideration of the facts (I swear, even as the network news tries to say otherwise every night).

But what there can’t be is apathy. Or complacency. Even the loudest boor adds more (if maybe not much more) than the individual who steps out of the fight entirely.

The conversation has to go on. Even if it sometimes wakes the neighbors. Or, if we’re lucky, the nation.

Enjoy the fireworks. And don’t forget to light a few of your own.

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Putting the Pieces Together

A small hand held the thin puzzle piece in midair for a few moments, then struck.

“Looka,” Missy said, motioning for my attention and pointing. She had indeed put together two more pieces of the Mickey and Minnie Mouse jigsaw puzzle – but with Minnie’s shoe pressed into Mickey’s body.

“Not bad,” I told her with a smile, scanning the landscape and the remaining bits. I found a fresh piece to one side, began a swap. “But what about this?”

Missy’s face brightened into a wide smile. “Yeah!”

My wife’s developmentally disabled aunt is a lady of many talents. When the mood strikes her, Missy will dance endlessly to a full-volume stereo. Or enthusiastically beat me at bowling. Or take a brush, some paints and a piece of construction paper and create one more art work for the family gallery. (The moment when I realized that a green streak and a blue one were actually two of our parakeets remains pretty exciting for me.)

But many times, in the middle of the living room, she’ll reach for one of the children’s puzzles nearby. By now, she knows many of the patterns well. But when she’s tired or frustrated – and while fighting a cold last week, she was definitely both – she’ll take shortcuts, hammering a piece where she wants it to go. Children’s puzzles being what they are, the piece will usually let her.

The result may be a pterodactyl’s wing on a tyrannosaur’s body. Or maybe a princess dress that moves jarringly from Sleeping Beauty blue to Ariel pink. Over the scene, Missy may look down in satisfaction or wrinkle her face as she realizes something isn’t quite right.

“I c’nt do it.”

“Sure you can, let’s take a look here.”

Even with help and patience, there’s always the temptation to go for the “easy” fit, to make the picture work. Even when it doesn’t.

In an alternate universe, Missy’s probably debating politics today.

If you’ve been on Facebook or any online forum – or even just a corner of a party at the wrong time – you know what I’m talking about. There’s always the one friend, who may be from either end of the political spectrum, who’s bound and determined to make their view of the world fit. Anything that supports the picture is latched on to unhesitatingly, anything critical is pushed aside, without hesitation and usually without verification.

At best, the result is approval from the choir and bit lips from everyone else. At worst, things can blow up into a heated argument, all the worse for everyone knowing deep down that they have the right of it and the other person’s just not listening.

And when it steps beyond social media, it can burn a lot more than just friendships.

A lot of national attention’s been given to the Jefferson County school board recently, where a proposed history curriculum would urge that “Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”

The stated motive, according to one board member, is to make sure kids become “good citizens” and not “little rebels.” But given how much of this county’s history has resulted from civil disorder or social strife, from the Boston Tea Party to the civil rights battles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, a number of students, teachers and watchers are insisting that pieces of the puzzle are being lost or left out.

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” wrote another Jefferson — Thomas, in this case.

The picture just doesn’t fit.

Jigsaw jams can be repaired. It sometimes requires an outside eye, it often requires patience. But the one thing it always requires is the willingness to dismantle the old picture first.

That’s not easy for any of us to do. (Myself included) It’s always easier to believe assumptions and react from reflex, much harder to entertain the thought that we might be wrong. Paul Simon once wrote that “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

It’s fun. It’ll finish the puzzle. But it won’t really complete it. That’s the goal, or it should be.

Ask Missy.

She knows what it’s like to finally get the picture.

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Fighting Free

OK, last soccer story for a while, I promise.

When our good-but-not-yet-great U.S. soccer team got knocked out of the World Cup, coach Jurgen Klinsmann wasn’t surprised. He’d been expecting it. Even predicting it. And not because his team lacked ability or talent.

What they lacked, he said, were consequences.

“If you have a bad performance, then people should approach you and tell you that,” Klinsmann told the Associated Press. Get criticized, scolded, told off – and get stronger rather than go through it all again.

We’re familiar with that in Bronco country. When the orange and blue falter in the national spotlight, the phones light up at every talk radio station in the area. People write to the paper, post online, erupt across every social media outlet around and a few that haven’t been invented yet. If Joe Biden were found to have sold military secrets to the Purple People-Eaters of Mars, it would get bumped to page 3 to make room for Denver football outrage.

Get outshot four-to-one at the World Cup? Meh. Most folks shrug, walk away and go back to not caring about the “other football.”

So why bother improving?

It’s why I’ve got only lukewarm optimism for our future soccer prospects. But a lot of hope for this country.

Because if there’s one thing we do really, really, really well, it’s argue about freedom.

It only takes 10 minutes with the news, or five minutes with Facebook, to find a constitutional crisis. The Colorado attorney general facing off with the county clerk over gay marriage. Outrage and excitement over the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, and what it means for the religious rights of employer and employed. Quips, wisecracks and sometimes knock-down drag-out arguments over guns, wiretaps, property rights and a dozen other issues.

Some of the results frighten me. Some make me proud. All of them prove to me we still have people who care. Sometimes without a lot of information, true. But it’s a lot easier to educate the ignorant than ignite the apathetic.

So long as we care, we’re still in the game.

More than that. So long as we care, we can decide what the game will be.

We’ve been an argumentative people for a long time. One historian pointed out that if you go through colonial records, one thing you will quickly find is a lot of petty lawsuits. A lot of times, all that energy goes in no particular direction, sparks and cinders, quickly lit, quickly out.

But when it’s focused – then you get a bonfire.

We forget, you see. We forget that while government can lead, while government can set the boundary lines, we can change the entire conversation. That the decision about what freedom means doesn’t sit with a court or a Congress or a president – it rests with us.

The rules said blacks and whites weren’t equal. People fought that and people won.

The rules said women had no voice in the nation’s business. People fought that and people won.

The rules once said our future wasn’t up to us at all, that the most important decisions would be made over an ocean, on an island, by people who had mostly never seen our shores. We told them that if we didn’t like our government, we had the right – indeed, the obligation – to change it.

We hold the power. But only so long as we refuse to be satisfied until we get things right.

“(A)ll experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed,” a certain red-haired Virginian wrote in 1776. But test that point too far, he warned, and people will demand change.

True of a soccer team. True of a nation.

I’m not saying complaining is all we need to do – absent any drive or action, it can get a bit tiresome, I agree. But it’s the vital first step. To everyone who says “Oh, it’s easy to complain,” stop and consider those words. There’s plenty of places where it’s not easy at all. There’s quite a few where it’s outright deadly.

Long may we brawl in the best of causes.

Maybe we’ll even get a decent World Cup out of it.

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Putting the Pieces Together

Missy has a unique way of playing Concentration.

To start with, her cards always stay face up. That in itself might not be unusual, given her disability. Simply locating and matching a pair of cards counts as a triumph, even without the added challenge of remembering where a certain pair is hiding.

But it’s what happens next that gets my attention.

Because Missy’s matching doesn’t stop with pairs.

Cards showing markers are stacked with cards showing crayons. Cards showing airplanes get sorted with cards showing rockets. Any card that has a picture of food on it finds its way into a common pile.

In short, she’s finding patterns.

More, she’s finding patterns that everyone would recognize.

In this day and age, that’s not just a triumph. That’s darned near a miracle.

***

“Still a man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest.”

— Simon and Garfunkel, “The Boxer”

 

There’s a lot of anger in the country these days.

Anger over gun laws and gay rights. Anger over drones and bugs, over hours-long filibusters and mile-long health care plans. Anger over what exactly happened on a rainy Florida night between two strangers that left one dead and the other notorious.

I’m not discounting that anger or proclaiming myself immune. I’ve felt it. You probably have, too. And frankly, it’s good for citizens of a democracy to be uncomfortable at times, to not be complacent, to look at the world and say “This is not how it should be.”

But going there isn’t enough.

You have to decide what the next step is going to be.

For some, the urge to anger becomes the urge to destroy. Hit back. Tear down. It’s the most primal urge of all, the most tempting. The blow thrown in rage. The bomb set in Boston. The war that consumes all of Europe, then all the world.

To let the heat become fire, all-consuming.

For others, anger is a chance to build and transform, the righteous anger that cleans moneychangers from the temple or slavery from a nation. To say “This is not right” and replace it with something better.

To let the fire light the way to a different path.

For most of us? It becomes hot air. Something to vent on Facebook and Twitter, to rant about in the halls of power, to air the dissatisfaction without necessarily seeing it become action.

Now, that talk has its place. It’s better to shout than to shoot, after all.  Sometimes that debate can even lay the groundwork for those who do act, if only by helping one more neighbor to see and appreciate a view that’s not their own.

That way can lie understanding. Compromise. Even cooperation.

But … and this is a big “but” … there has to be a place where minds can meet.

And that can’t happen if everyone has their own personal reality.

The Zimmerman trial was only the most recent example. We’ve seen others. Cases where so many already know what happened, know what the truth is. And will pull out everything they can, be it fact or rumor, to support that pre-determined conclusion.

Doesn’t fit the picture? Shuffle it back into the deck.

Need that matchup to work? Go ahead. Stack the pizza cards with the crayons. Who’s to say you’re wrong?

I mean, besides any kind of objective reality.

Facts are uncomfortable things. They’re not always going to be on the side we want. It is, indeed, useful to recognize patterns and draw inferences from them – but only if we’re ready to follow where they take us.

If it mars our pretty picture, so be it. Better an honest uncertainty than a conviction built on air.

And if we can’t do that … well, then we get today’s Congress. And much of today’s social media. A lot of echo chambers, each sure of their righteousness and the other guy’s error, none ready to acknowledge the horrible possibility that they might be mistaken.

It doesn’t take much to change it. Just open eyes. An honest mind. And a willingness to put sense before pride.

Missy will be glad to demonstrate.