Anecdotes – Renaissance Guy

Walking Down Main Street, USA

I was at Disney World recently. I’ve been to Disney world many, many times over the last decade and a half. Not that long in the scheme of things, I grant you, but long enough to have an impression and an opinion on how things ought to be. Enough to recognize the difference between when Disney lives up to their advertising, and when it falls short. This last trip, it seemed to fall short.

Unlike other times where some catastrophe has wrecked part of my trip, there wasn’t a singular issue. Rather, it was the collective effect of many little issues. Things like “Bell Services was slow” or “the app was buggy” or “there weren’t enough servers working the kiosks.” Little annoyances that, individually excusable, collectively undermine the experience. For another vacation, I might not even mention them. After all, these things happen. But Disney advertises itself as being a cut above the rest precisely because it supposedly smooths these issues over through its trademark pixie dust and monopolistic panopticon of an area the size of Manhattan.

The blame, according to people who follow Disney religiously, lies with the new executives. In trying to squeeze more profit from the parks, they have stripped things down to the bare bones. Cast members are overworked, overstretched, and underpaid, and the result is burnout and absenteeism. Thus, the usual layer of pixie dust becomes a bit spottier. It’s a compelling story, which is part of why I doubt it. It’s a little too quaint, a little too storybook, with a simple villain making bad choices, to explain systemic breakdowns.

Of course, that doesn’t make the story untrue. Disney has been cutting costs. Like any large institution, there is a measure of redundancy within the organization, at which the new executives seem to be taking aim. The new thinking seems to be that theme parks can still sell merchandise without needing a gift shop at every ride, so a lot of shops are being closed and the workers reassigned. But what happens when you keep cutting? The rides still function, but the lines are longer. The cast members, who are covering more people, are just a little less bubbly. Luggage takes a little longer to arrive. Food is just a little less fresh. The shelves aren’t restocked as quickly.

But if the answer is Disney’s CEOs, why is the same true everywhere across the country? If the reason for so many shops at Disney’s Hollywood Studios being closed is Disney corporate strategy, why are shops closing in my hometown? Why are the ingredients at my local grocery store less fresh, and the mail running late, and the store shelves restocking so slowly? You could say something like “supply chain issues” or “worker shortages” but really this only pushes the problem back a step. Why is the supply chain struggling now? Where have all the workers gone?

What seems more remarkable is that no one wants to mention the obvious answer. We’re in the midst of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans before many states just stopped counting. Millions more have been sickened, and are unable to work to the same capacity. Others are restricted from working in order to support people in the former group. And this is only the disruption to the United States, not even touching the dislocation caused by disruption to global supply chains and migration.

The idea that society- any society -can shrug off upwards of a million excess deaths and millions more disabled, without any kind of social or economic disruption, is a fantasy far beyond anything at Disney World. The idea that workers will be just as eager to compete for the same wages, despite the increased danger of infectious disease, coupled with the pressure of having to cover for sickened or dead colleagues, likewise ignores the basic tenets of supply and demand. When this happened during the bubonic plague, it was the beginning of the end of feudalism, as high-demand workers gained more leverage and began to upend traditional hierarchies. The decades after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic were a high point of labor unrest and economic turmoil in the United States, which only began to dissipate after the New Deal fundamentally restructured the American economy.

Disney continues, as it long has, to be a microcosm of American society at large. Price hikes, staff shortages, shorter business hours, longer lines, are all making themselves known. And likewise, some of the early attempts to grapple with the issue are on display. In response to a more competitive labor market, in addition to tightening time off policies, Disney has been forced to look to new demographics, expanding and accelerating its college recruitment program. At the same time, since it cannot afford to lose the talent it has, the company has been compelled to become more inclusive in its rhetoric.

Which, if you consider the ongoing spat between the right wing Florida state government and Disney, is hilarious. It is the head-in-the-sand public health policies, coupled with xenophobic protectionist immigration controls that have pushed Disney to embrace a more liberal political stance to attract talent. If this pattern ripples out to the wider American economy, and without aggressive government intervention in the labor market and public health, it almost certainly will, it will be a reversal of fortunes worthy of the Disney storytelling tradition.

One Small Correction

I wasn’t going to say anything about the Republican convention, but I want to set something straight: Joe Biden is not a communist. I know a few communists. Some I met at events, others I know through university. The thing about communists is, they’re not subtle. I mean, they literally carry red flags. You can’t get much more obvious.

The idea of the subtle or hidden communist really died with the USSR. China and Russia today have made it clear, both in words and actions, they don’t care what party line the rest of the world follows, as long as the rest of the world is made to revolve around them. Sure, they do foreign subversion all the same, but not communist subversion. They back whoever they think will best undermine the US, without regard to partisan allegiance. Meanwhile, Communist parties in the US don’t believe in subtlety as a matter of principle. It defeats the purpose of building class consciousness towards a revolution, which is kinda their whole schtick. Working within the system, and especially pretending to be moderate, would mean delaying progress towards the class war.

Even if Joe Biden secretly believes, in his heart of hearts, that Marx was right and capitalism needs to die, and managed to get elected by subtly pretending he believes otherwise, the communists- those who have been marching and striking and carrying red flags all their lives -wouldn’t take him. For that matter, the people who actually call themselves communists unironically probably wouldn’t take Sanders either. Or anyone you’ve heard of. Communists don’t believe in compromise, at least, not with the establishment. Communists despise the Democratic Party, often more than they despise the Republican Party. The latter are at least transparent in wanting to exploit workers.

Do communists support voting for Biden over Trump? In most cases, no. Many don’t believe in voting at all, thinking it makes them morally beholden to the system by participating. This is also true of the anarchists I know. For the small group that do endorse voting as a means of making revolution, many would actually prefer to vote for Trump. Not because they agree with him, but because they expect he will further divide and undermine the United States, pushing the country closer towards social collapse and sowing the seeds for political violence. Communists expect Trump will bring them closer to the revolution they want, while Joe Biden will move the country further from communism. This line of thinking is called accelerationism, and it means voting for the most controversial, destabilizing candidate.

But wait, I hear you ask. What about all those people who supported Bernie Sanders, and have since lashed themselves to the Democratic candidate? Almost all of them aren’t communists, at least, not in an orthodox Marxist sense. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds of leftist terminology here, because between constant infighting, the shifting of terminology between elections and generations, and political labels being always to some degree in the eye of the beholder, there are no perfectly correct answers, but Sanders supporters are mostly not communists. If you held a gun to my head and made me pick labels, I’d say that most of Sanders’ core supporters are some flavor of democratic socialist or social democrat.

Much ink has been spilled over these two labels, and the difference between them, particularly given how much they often hate each other. The General difference, near as I can tell, is that social democrats prefer reform, while democratic socialists demand revolution. Social democrats think democratic socialists are dangerous Molotov-throwing radicals who don’t understand how economics and politics work, and democratic socialists think social democrats are spineless cowering liberals who won’t put their money where their mouth is when it comes to actually making change. On the second point, both groups feel this way about the Democratic Party at large.

As an aside, my secret suspicion is that a lot of particularly young Americans who are disenchanted with the mainstream, many who self identify as democratic socialist, or further left, would probably be social democrats or even just progressive leaning liberals if American culture didn’t imbibe the “socialist” label with such mythical rebellious qualities. Most developed countries, such as Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and so on, have major social democratic parties, as well as small far left socialist and communist parties. But as America paints everything left of the Democratic center as socialist, it also pushes a lot of otherwise moderate voters into the label as well.

But I digress. Among democratic socialists, you will find some accelerationists who are voting for Trump. Among both groups, you will find people who are so upset with Biden that they have vowed not to vote for him. I have not met a single person who self-identifies as socialist who likes Biden. To them, Sanders was the compromise candidate, and Biden is a right wing stooge, only a shade better than Trump. Many of them wish, and I quote, “that Biden were half as radical and socialist as republicans paint him”. Of those who have resolved to vote for him anyways, the reason is never that he is actually going to push the country in a socialist direction, but usually some variation of “I fear the violence Trump started will spiral further out of hand”. For these people who are hoping to make progress towards equality by reform and legislation, this is a bad thing.

On the other hand, the militant communists, as opposed to the people who wind up at the same protests, are hoping and betting that Trump will win and accelerate the course of collapse and violence that has already started. The longer he’s in office, the more people lose hope in the American Dream, and the more people they can recruit. Of course, fascist and neo-Nazi recruitment has also gone up under Trump, but this doesn’t change the Marxist view that once it comes to open class war, the workers will prevail, since that is an article of faith. These are the people who actually want to dismantle America. And they’re backing Trump.

Who Needs Facts?

Let us suppose for the sake of discussion that the sky is blue. I know we can’t all agree on much these days, but I haven’t yet heard anyone earnestly disputing the blue-ness of the sky, and in any case I need an example for this post. So let’s collectively assume for the purposes of this post, regardless of what it looks like outside your window at this exact moment, that we live in a world where “the sky is blue” is an easily observable, universally acknowledged fact. You don’t need to really believe it, just pretend. We need to start somewhere, so just assume it, okay? Good.

So, in this world, no one believes the sky isn’t blue, and no one, outside of maybe navel-gazing philosophers, would waste time arguing this point. That is, until one day, some idiot with a blog posts a screed about how the sky is really red, and you sheeple are too asleep to wake up and see it. This person isn’t crazy per se; they don’t belong in a mental institution, though they probably require a good reality check and some counseling. Their arguments, though laughably false, coming from a certain conspiratorial mindset are as coherent as anything else posted on the web. It’s competently and cogently written, albeit entirely false. The rant becomes the butt of a few jokes. It doesn’t become instantly popular, since it’s way too “tinfoil hat” for most folks, but it gets a handful of readers, and it sets up the first domino in a chain of dominoes.

Some time later, the arguments laid out in the post get picked up by internet trolls. They don’t particularly believe the sky is red, but they also don’t care what the truth is. To these semi-professional jerks, facts and truth are, at best, an afterthought. To them, the goal of the Wild West web is to get as many cheap laughs by messing with people and generally sowing chaos in online communities, and in this, a belief that the sky is red is a powerful weapon. After all, how do you fight with someone who refuses to acknowledge that the sky is blue? How do you deal with that in an online debate? For online moderators whose job is to keep things civil, but not to police opinions, how do you react to a belief like this? If you suppress it, to some degree you validate the claims of conspiracy, and besides which it’s outside your job to tell users what to think. If you let it be, you’re giving the trolls a free pass to push obvious bunk, and setting the stage for other users to run afoul of site rules on civility when they try to argue in favor of reality.

Of course, most people ignore such obviously feigned obtuseness. A few people take the challenge in good sport and try to disassemble the original poster’s copied arguments; after all they’re not exactly airtight. But enough trolls post the same arguments that they start to evolve. Counter arguments to the obvious retorts develop, and as trolls attempt to push the red-sky-truther act as far as possible, these counter arguments spread quickly among the growing online communities of those who enjoy pretending to believe them. Many people caught in the crossfire get upset, in some cases lashing back, which not only gives the trolls exactly the reaction they seek, but forces moderators on these websites to take action against the people arguing that the sky is, in fact, [expletive deleted] blue, and why can’t you see that you ignorant [expletive deleted].

The red sky argument becomes a regular favorite of trolls and petty harassers, becoming a staple of contemporary online life. On a slow news day, the original author of the blog post is invited to appear on television, bringing it even greater attention, and spurring renewed public navel gazing. It becomes a somewhat popular act of counterculture to believe, or at least, to profess to believe, that the sky isn’t blue. The polarization isn’t strictly partisan, but its almost exclusive use by a certain online demographic causes it to become of the modern partisan stereotype nevertheless.

Soon enough, a local candidate makes reference to the controversy hoping to score some attention and coverage. He loses, but the next candidate, who outright says she believes it should be up to individual Americans what color they want the sky to be, is more successful. More than just securing office, she becomes a minor celebrity, appearing regularly on daytime news, and being parodied regularly on comedy series. Very quickly, more and more politicians adopt official positions, mostly based on where they fall on the partisan map. Many jump on the red-sky bandwagon, while many others denounce the degradation of truth and civic discourse perpetuated by the other side. It plays out exactly how you imagine it would. The lyrics are new, but the song and dance isn’t. Modern politics being what it is, as soon as the sides become apparent, it becomes a race to see who can entrench their positions first and best, while writers and political scientists get to work dreaming up new permutations of argument to hurl at the enemy.

It’s worth noting that through all of this, the facts themselves haven’t changed. The sky in this world is still blue. No one, except the genuinely delusional, sees anything else, although many will now insist to their last breath to wholeheartedly believe otherwise, or else that it is uncivil to promote one side so brazenly. One suspects that those who are invested in the red-sky worldview know on some level that they are lying, have been brainwashed, or are practicing self-deception, but this is impossible to prove in an objective way; certainly it is impossible to compel a red sky believer to admit as much. Any amount of evidence can be dismissed as insufficient, inconclusive, or downright fabricated. Red-sky believers may represent anywhere from a small but noisy minority, to a slight majority of the population, depending on which polling sources are believed, which is either taken as proof of an underlying conspiracy, or proof of their fundamental righteousness, respectively.

There are several questions here, but here’s my main one: Is this opinion entitled to respect? If someone looks you in the eye and tells you the sky is not blue, but red, are you obliged to just smile and nod politely, rather than break open a can of reality? If a prominent red-sky-truther announces a public demonstration in your area, are you obliged to simply ignore them and let them wave their flags and pass out their pamphlets, no matter how wrong they are? Finally, if a candidate running on a platform of sticking it to the elitist blue sky loyalists proposes to change all the textbooks to say that the color of the sky is unknown, are you supposed to just let them? If an opinion, sincerely believed, is at odds with reality, is one still obligated to respect it? Moreover, is a person who supports such an opinion publicly to be protected from being challenged?

Mind you, this isn’t just a thought experiment; plenty of real people believe things that are patently false. It’s also not a new issue; the question of how to reconcile beliefs and reality goes back to the philosophical discussions of antiquity. But the question of how to deal with blatantly false beliefs seems to have come back with a vengeance, and as the presidential election gets up to speed, I expect this will become a recurring theme, albeit one probably stated far more angrily.

So we need to grapple with this issue again: Are people entitled to live in a fantasy world of their choosing? Does the respect we afford people as human being extend to the beliefs they hold about reality? Is the empirical process just another school of thought among several? I suppose I have to say don’t know, I just have very strong opinions.

My Camera

I have a bit of a strange relationship with photographs. I love to have them, and look at and reminisce about them, but I hate taking them. Maybe that’s not so strange, but most people I know who have a relationship with photographs tend to have the reverse: they love taking them, but don’t know what to do with them after the fact.
Come to think of it, hate might be a strong word. For instance, I don’t loathe taking pictures with the same revulsion I have towards people who deny the school shootings that have affected my community every happened, nor even the sense of deep seated antipathy with which I reject improper use of the word “literally”. Insofar as the act of taking pictures is concerned, I do not actively dislike it, so much as it seems to bring with it a bitter taste.
Why? Well, first there is the simple matter of distraction. A while ago I decided that it was important that I pay more attention to my experiences than my stuff. Before that, I was obsessed with souvenirs and gift shops, and making sure that I had the perfect memories of the event, that I often lost focus of the thing itself. Part of this, I think, is just being a kid, wanting to have the best and coolest stuff. But it became a distraction from the things I wanted to do. Some people say that for them, taking pictures of an event actually makes them appreciate the experience more. And to that I say, more power to those people. But in my case, trying to get the perfect shot has almost always made me enjoy it less.
Incidentally, I do find this appreciation when I sit down to draw something by hand. Trying to capture the same impression as the thing in front of me forces me to concentrate on all the little details that make up the whole, and inspires reflection on how the subject came to be; what human or natural effort went into its creation, and the stories of how I ended up sketching it. Compared to taking photographs, sketching can be a multi-hour endeavor. So perhaps the degradation of attention is a consequence of execution rather than lineage.
I also get some small solace from deliberately avoiding taking pictures where others presumably would take them to post to social media. When I avoid taking pictures, I get to tell myself that I am not in thrall to the system, and that I take pictures only of my own will. I then remind myself that my experience is mine alone, that it is defined by me, and no one else, and that the value of my experience is totally uncorrelated with whether it is documented online, or the amount of likes it has. It is a small mental ritual that has helped me keep my sanity and sense of self mostly intact in the digital age.
But while these reasons might be sufficient explanation as to why I don’t take pictures in the moment, they don’t explain why I maintain an aversion to my own exercise of photography. And the reason for that is a little deeper.
With the exception of vacations, which usually generate a great many pictures of scenic locales in a short time, the most-photographed period of my life is undoubtedly from late 2006 through 2007. Taking pictures, and later videos, was the latest in a long line of childhood pet projects that became my temporary raison d’être while I worked on it. I didn’t fully understand why I was moved to document everything on camera. I think even then I understood, on some level, that I wasn’t seriously chasing the fame and glory of Hollywood, nor the evolving space of vlogs and webshows, else I would have gone about my efforts in a radically different way.
From 2006 through 2007, the photographs and videos rapidly multiply in number, while simultaneously decreasing in quality. The disks in my collection gloss over the second half of 2006, then are split into seasons, then individual months, then weeks. The bar for photographic record drops from a handful of remarkably interesting shots, to everyday scenes, to essentially anything it occurred to me to point a camera at. Aside from the subject matter, the picture quality becomes markedly worse.
We never imagined it, but in retrospect it was obvious. My hands had started shaking, and over time it had gone from imperceptible, to making my shots unrecognizable even with the camera’s built in stabilization. At the same time, my mind had degraded to the point of being unable to concentrate. Everything that captured my attention for that instant became the most important thing in the universe, and had to be captured and preserved. These quests became so important that I began bringing in tripods and special equipment to school to assist.
I felt compelled to document everything. My brain was having trouble with memories, so I relied on my camera to tell me who I had spoken to, where, and when. I took voice memos to remind myself of conversations, most of which I would delete after a while to make space for new ones, since I kept running out of space on my memory cards. I kept records for as long as I could, preserving the ones I thought might come up again. I took pictures of the friends I interacted with, the games we played, and myself getting paler and skinner in every picture, despite my all-devouring appetite and steady sunlight exposure. I was the palest boy in all of Australia.
Not all of the adults in my life believed me when I started describing how I felt. Even my parents occasionally sought to cross-examine me, telling me that if I was faking it, they wouldn’t be mad so long as I came clean. I remember a conversation with my PE teacher during those days, when I told her that I felt bad and would be sitting out on exercises again. She asked me if I was really, truly, honestly too sick to even participate. I answered as honestly as I could, that I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but something sure was, because I felt god-awful.
I was sick. I knew this. I saw that I was losing more and more of myself every day, even if I didn’t recognize all of the symptoms on a conscious level, and recognized that something was deeply wrong. I didn’t know why I was sick, nor did any of the doctors we saw. So I did what I could to keep going, keeping records every day with my camera. I shared some of them. I became a photojournalist for the school newsletter, on account of the fact that I had been taking so many pictures already. But the overwhelming majority I kept for myself, to remind myself that what I was feeling, the deteriorating life I was living, wasn’t just all in my head.

My camera was a tool of desperation. A last ditch stopgap to preserve some measure of my life as I felt it rapidly deteriorating. I have used it since for various projects, but it has always felt slightly stained by the memory.

Unreachable

I suspect that my friends think that I lie to them about being unreachable as an excuse to simply ignore them. In the modern world there are only a small handful situations in which a person genuinely can’t be expected to be connected and accessible.

Hospitals, which used to be a communications dead zone on account of no cell-phone policies, have largely been assimilated into the civilized world with the introduction of guest WiFi networks. Airplanes are going the same way, although as of yet WiFi is still a paid commodity, and in that is sufficiently expensive as to make it still a reasonable excuse.

International travel used to be a good excuse, but nowadays even countries that don’t offer affordable and consistent cellular data have WiFi hotspots at cafes and hotels. The only travel destinations that are real getaways in this sense- that allow you to get away from the modern life by disconnecting you from the outside world -are developing countries without infrastructure, and the high seas. This is the best and worst part of cruise ships, which charge truly extortionate rates for slow, limited internet access.

The best bet for those who truly don’t want to be reached is still probably the unspoilt wilderness. Any sufficiently rural area will have poor cell reception, but areas which are undeveloped now are still vulnerable to future development. After all, much of the rural farming areas of the Midwest are flat and open. It only takes one cell tower to get decent, if not necessarily fast, service over most of the area.

Contrast this to the geography of the Appalachian or Rocky Mountains, which block even nearby towers from reaching too far, and in many cases are protected by regulations. Better yet, the geography of Alaska combines several of these approaches, being sufficiently distant from the American heartland that many phone companies consider it foreign territory, as well as being physically huge, challenging to develop, and covered in mountains and fjords that block signals.

I enjoy cruises, and my grandparents enjoy inviting us youngsters up into the mountains of the northeast, and so I spend what is probably for someone of my generation, a disproportionate amount of time disconnected from digital life. For most of my life, this was an annoyance, but not a problem, mostly because my parents handled anything important enough to have serious consequences, but partially because, if not before social media, then at least before smartphones, being unreachable was a perfectly acceptable and even expected response to attempts at contact.

Much as I still loath the idea of a phone call, and will in all cases prefer to text someone, the phone call, even unanswered, did provide a level of closure that an unanswered text message simply doesn’t. Even if you got the answering machine, it was clear that you had done your part, and you could rest easy knowing that they would call you back at their leisure; or if it was urgent, you kept calling until you got them, or it became apparent that they were truly unreachable. There was no ambiguity whether you had talked to them or not; whether your message had really reached them and they were acting on it, or you had only spoken to a machine.

Okay, sure, there was some ambiguity. Humans have a way of creating ambiguity and drama through whatever form we use. But these were edge cases, rather than seemingly being a design feature of text messages. But I think this paradigm shift is more than just the technology. Even among asynchronous means, we have seen a shift in expectations.

Take the humble letter, the format that we analogize our modern instant messages (and more directly, e-mail) to most frequently and easily. Back in the day when writing letters was a default means of communication, writing a letter was an action undertaken on the part of the sender, and a thing that happened to the receiver. Responding to a letter by mail was polite where appropriate, but not compulsory. This much he format shares with our modern messages.

But unlike our modern systems, with a letter it was understood that when it arrived, it would be received, opened, read, and replied to all in due course, in the fullness of time, when it was practical for the recipient, and not a moment sooner. To expect a recipient to find a letter, tear it open then and there, and drop everything to write out a full reply at that moment, before rushing it off to the post office was outright silly. If a recipient had company, it would be likely that they would not even open the letter until after their business was concluded, unlike today, where text messages are read and replied to even in the middle of conversation.

Furthermore, it was accepted that a reply, even to a letter of some priority, might take some several days to compose, redraft, and send, and it was considered normal to wait until one had a moment to sit down and write out a proper letter, for which one was always sure to have something meaningful to say. Part of this is an artifact of classic retrospect, thinking that in the olden day’s people knew the art of conversation better, and much of it that isn’t is a consequence of economics. Letters cost postage, while today text messaging is often included in phone plans, and in any case social media offers suitable replacements for free.

Except that, for a while at least, the convention held in online spaces too. Back in the early days of email, back when it was E-mail (note the capitalization and hyphenation), and considered a digital facsimile of postage rather than a slightly more formal text message, the accepted convention was that you would sit down to your email, read it thoroughly, and compose your response carefully and in due course, just as you would on hard copy stationary. Indeed, our online etiquette classes*, we were told as much. Our instructors made clear that it was better to take time in responding to queries with a proper reply than get back with a mere one or two sentences.

*Yes, my primary school had online etiquette classes, officially described as “nettiquete courses”, but no one used that term except ironically. The courses were instituted after a scandal in parliament, first about students’ education being outmoded in the 21st century, and second about innocent children being unprepared for the dangers of the web, where, as we all know, ruffians and thugs lurk behind every URL. The curriculum was outdated the moment it was made, and it was discontinued only a few years after we finished the program, but aside from that, and a level of internet paranoia that made Club Penguin look lassaiz faire, it was helpful and accurately described how things worked.

In retrospect, I think this training helps explain a lot of the anxieties I face with modern social media, and the troubles I have with text messages and email. I am acclaimed by others as an excellent writer and speaker, but brevity is not my strong suit. I can cut a swathe through paragraphs and pages, but I stumble over sentences. When I sit down to write an email, and I do, without fail, actually sit down to do so, I approach the matter with as much gravity as though I were writing with quill and parchment, with all the careful and time-consuming redrafting, and categorical verbosity that the format entails.

But email and especially text messages are not the modern reincarnation of the bygone letter, nor even the postcard, with it’s shorter format and reduced formality. Aside from a short length that is matched in history perhaps only by the telegram, the modern text message has nearly totally forgone not only the trappings of all previous formats, but indeed, has seemed to forgo the trappings of form altogether.

Text messages have seemed to become accepted not as a form of communication so much as an avenue of ordinary conversation. Except this is a modern romanticization of text messages. Because while text messages might well be the closest textual approximation of a face to face conversation that doesn’t involve people actually speaking simultaneously, it is still not a synchronous conversation.

More importantly than the associated pleasantries of the genre, text messages work on an entirely different timescale than letters. Where once, with a letter, it might be entirely reasonable for a reply to take a fortnight, nowadays a delay in responding to a text message between friends beyond a single day is a cause for concern and anxiety.

And if it were really a conversation, if two people were conversing in person, or even over the phone, and one person without apparent reason failed to respond to the other’s prompts for a prolonged period, this would indeed be cause for alarm. But even ignoring the obvious worry that I would feel if my friend walking alongside me in the street suddenly stopped answering me, in an ordinary conversation, the tempo is an important, if underrated, form of communication.

To take an extreme example, suppose one person asks another to marry them. What does it say if the other person pauses? If they wait before answering? How is the first person supposed to feel, as opposed to an immediate and enthusiastic response? We play this game all the time in spoken conversation, drawing out words or spacing out sentences, punctuating paragraphs to illustrate our point in ways that are not easily translated to text, at least, not without the advantage of being able to space out one’s entire narrative in a longform monologue.

We treat text messages less like correspondence, and more like conversation, but have failed to account for the effects of asyncronicity on tempo. It is too easy to infer something that was not meant by gaps in messages; to interpret a failure to respond as a deliberate act, to mistake slow typing for an intentional dramatic pause, and so forth.

I am in the woods this week, which means I am effectively cut off from communication with the outside world. For older forms of communication, this is not very concerning. My mail will still be there when I return, and any calls to the home phone will be logged and recorded to be returned at my leisure. Those who sent letters, or reached an answering machine know, or else can guess, that I am away from home, and can rest easy knowing that their missives will be visible when I return.

My text messages and email inbox, on the other hand, concern me, because of the very real possibility that someone will contact me thinking I am reading messages immediately, since my habit of keeping my phone within arm’s reach at all times is well known, and interpreting my failure to respond as a deliberate snub, when in reality I am out of cell service. Smart phones and text messages have become so ubiquitous and accepted that we seem to have silently arrived at the convention that shooting off a text message to someone is as good as calling them, either on the phone or even in person. Indeed, we say it is better, because text messages give the recipient the option of postponing a reply, even though we all quietly judge those people who take time to respond to messages, and will go ahead and imply all the social signals of a sudden conversational pause in the interim, while decrying those who use text messages to write monologues.

I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating after all the complaints I’ve given: I like text messages, and I even prefer them as a communication format. I even like, or at least tolerate, social media messaging platforms, despite having lost my appreciation for social media as a whole. But I am concerned that we, as a society, and as the first generation to really build the digital world into the foundations of our lives, are setting ourselves up for failure in our collective treatment of our means of communication.

When we fail to appreciate the limits of our technological means, and as a result, fail to create social conventions that are realistic and constructive, we create needless ambiguity and distress. When we assign social signals to pauses in communication that as often as not have more to do with the manner of communication than the participants or their intentions, we do a disservice to ourselves and others. We may not mention it aloud, we may not even consciously consider it, but it lingers in our attitudes and impressions. And I would wager that soon enough we will see a general rise in anxiety and ill will towards others.

Esther Day

About a year ago now, on October 10th to be exact, I received a gift from a mother on behalf of her dead daughter. Perhaps the peculiar power of that sentence explains why this small lime-green wristband, valued by market forces at approximately five dollars, has quickly become one of the most thought-about objects I own.

Calling it a personal gift might be a bit much. I never met the daughter, Esther, in life, and had only had peripheral contact with the mother, Lori, twice before; once seeing her onstage at a conference, and once online, and never properly meeting in a way that we could be called acquainted. I received this gift because I happened to heed a call for a Nerdfighter meetup. Everyone there who didn’t already own a wristband was given one.

Still, I wouldn’t call it a giveaway; not in the sense of the mass, commercial connotations of the word. It was a gift given to me, and the others who received identical gifts, because I was, by virtue of being there at the time and being enthusiastic about it, was part of the Nerdfighter community, which Esther was a part of and had found immense joy in. Because Nerdfighters that show up to gatherings should have Esther’s wristbands as a matter of course. Because I needed one, and it would be rude to make a friend pay for something they needed from you.

Perhaps you can start to grasp why this small action and token have given me so much cause for reflection, especially given that I consider wristbands to have a special meaning to them. Clearly this one is a token of sorts. But of what? I wouldn’t call it a reward; the manner in which they were given doesn’t bespeak a reward, and I certainly haven’t done anything to merit this specific one. As a symbol of fraternity and comradeship? Possibly, but though I may believe that Esther and I would have been friends had I known her, we weren’t, and it’s a stretch to say that I’m friends with someone I never knew existed while they were alive.

I have gotten a few hints. The first comes from John Green’s remarks regarding Esther, both in his videos, and in his speech at Nerdcon: Nerdfighteria. He talks about her, at least partially, in the present tense. This is echoed in the literature of This Star Won’t Go Out, the foundation set up in her honor which manufactures and sells the bracelets in question. Esther may be gone, but the impact she had on their lives during hers continues to reverberate.

This talk is familiar enough to me. It comes up at the conferences I attend; how we have an impact on each other, on others, and in terms of advocacy, on policy and the world. The wristband pulls at those same strings, and so feels sentimental beyond the story behind it. It reminds me of stories I’ve heard a hundred times before, from tearful eulogies to triumphant speeches, in soliloquy, and in song. It reminds me of the stanza from In Flanders Fields that always stops me in my tracks.

Take up your quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch: be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders’ fields, in Flanders’s fields

I am always drawn to this stanza, particularly the second and third lines. Because yes, it’s a sad song, but those two lines hint at something more. The torch isn’t lost; on the contrary, it continues to be held high. There is tragedy, but there is also a chance for something like redemption. Not revenge; it’s the wrong kind of song to be a proper up and at ‘em fighting song. Rather, a chance at making some good come out of the situation. Yes, this group failed to finish what it started, but all is not lost so long as someone picks up the torch. It’s a sad song, but it also has hope in it.

So the torch, or in this case, the wristband, is mine. Now what? How do I hold it high in this situation? More crucially, how can I make sure I don’t break faith? How do I ensure that this star doesn’t go out? If I had ever met Esther, or even known her online when she was alive, instead of only in past tense, I might know how to do that. And from what I’ve been able to gather, she made it clear that she had no desire to be remembered only in past tense (hence my very careful wording, and focus only on my own perspective).

Luckily for me, I once again have several hints. I know the causes she championed, and those which others close to her have championed by her inspiration. Many of them mirror the same ideals I hold. Indeed, some months after that day in October, I received some feedback on a pitch I had made to This Star Won’t Go Out regarding a Project Lovely idea, essentially telling me that while my idea wasn’t quite what they were looking for at that moment, that my head and heart were in the right place. The message seems to be that I am expected to carry the torch / keep the Star shining simply by continuing to have a positive impact, or in Nerdfighter parlance, by not forgetting to be awesome, and decreasing worldsuck, through whatever means seem best to me, at my own discretion.

The wristband, then, is a symbol of that mission. It is a good mission, and a mission I was probably going to try and accomplish even without a wristband, which is probably why it seemed so natural that I should get one. Perhaps I shan’t accomplish it in my time, in which case it shall be my turn to throw the torch from my failing hands, so that others in turn shall wear wristbands. There is a comforting poetry to this.

All of this has a special relevance today, since, for those who haven’t figured it out, today, August 3rd, is Esther Day. When John proposed to make her birthday a holiday in Nerdfighteria, she responded that she wanted it to be about love and family. This has been interpreted as being a sort of Valentine’s Day for non-romantic love. In particular, the tradition is to tell others in so many words that you love them.

This is difficult for me, for two reasons. First, the obvious: I’m a guy, and an introvert at that. Guys are only ever expected to voice love towards others under a very narrow range of circumstances. So I’m squeamish when it comes to the L word. And secondly, I have an aversion to dealing in absolutes and making commitments I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to keep absolutely. This is learned behavior, ingrained by years of having medical issues wreck plans, and uncompromising administrators hold me to the letter of my commitments despite extenuating circumstances making those promises all but impossible.

Even now, typing words out, I find myself backpedaling, tweaking phrases to avoid putting things plainly and opening myself up. But I’m going to suck it up. Not for Esther, because I never met her, and it isn’t fair for me to do things in her memory since I don’t actually have a memory of her. But for Esther Day. For the things she set in motion. For the trust that the people she trusted put in me.

I love my brother, despite bitter arguments. I love my parents, who enable me to live probably more than my doctors. I love my friends, both old and new. I won’t name them, despite convention, for their own privacy, but you know who you are, and you have open license to confront me and demand to hear the words personally over the coming days. I love the Nerdfighters and Tuatarians I have met, both in real life and online, who proved that whether or not the world at large is cruel, there are pockets of kindness all over. I love my disabled comrades, who give me perspective and inspiration. I love my doctors and nurses, who keep me alive, and indulge me when I value things above following medical advice precisely as given.

I know I’m supposed to say, now that I’ve said it, it wasn’t so hard. But, actually, no, that was terrifying, for all the reasons I outlined above, and it’s still terrifying to know I’ve said it, let alone to leave it up. But I’m going to leave it up. Because it’s the thing to do. Because even if others don’t follow my example as is the tacit understanding, having a world with more love and appreciation in it, even a small amount, is a good thing.

Happy Esther Day.

Time Flies

I am presently strapped to a metal cylinder hurtling through the air at a high enough speed that the ground is far below us. This is very fascinating by itself. But what is more remarkable, at least where I’m concerned, is that, owing to my direction of speed relative to the rotation of the earth, I’m going to arrive at my destination having spent less time traveling than I did on the plane.

Some back of the envelope math, and a bit of fiddling around with simulations suggests that it is (barely) within the technical specifications of the aircraft I’m on to fly fast enough to theoretically arrive before I left, but this would require ideal conditions.

So, everyone else would have to get off the plane and take their luggage with them, and the plane would have to be fueled up to maximum capacity to allow it to burn continuously at full throttle. Also, the ballistic trajectory which I calculate would be best for maximizing speed and minimizing air resistance would jeopardize cabin pressure, risk burnout in the engines, and break several laws and treaties. And the fuel usage would mean we’d be gliding in for landing, that is, assuming the aircraft didn’t break up reentering the troposphere. All things considered, it’d probably be simpler and safer just to find a faster plane.

I’m not technically time traveling. Well, technically technically I am, but only in the deeply unsatisfying way that I’m being pushed forward in time at a rate of about one second per second. This is slightly different from on the ground, because of my velocity and distance from the earth’s center of gravity. The difference isn’t really meaningful to humans, and any relative advantage I might gain from moving faster through space, and ever so marginally slower in time (or technically, altering my velocity through spacetime in a way that temporarily favors space over time… you know what, just go get a physics textbook) will be cancelled out by the marginal increased long term risk due to radiation exposure.

Any real time change is because of time zones. Time zones are in a weird place between being arbitrary, since they’re ultimately human drawn lines on a map, and having some higher relevance, since they do, to a degree, reflect the earth’s orbit. One isn’t really time traveling, though they are in a sense switching around the hours of the day.

But even though it all comes out even, it is still meaningful, at least in human terms. Not all hours in the day are equal, and one extra daylight hour might mean as much as two hours asleep. Where those hours fall in the day matters a great deal, as does how they are spent. Indeed, Einstein used this notion to help illustrate the concept of relative time in general, saying “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

In this instance, as I am flying west in the morning towards a destination I am excited about, the rearranging works in my favor, giving me an extra hour to adjust after landing, and perhaps more relevant to my case, making my late-to-bed, late-to-rise sleep schedule seem more normal in comparison.

There’s another quote along similar lines that I like, usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens. Then there are weeks when decades happen.” I’ve heard this quote thrown around a lot lately to describe the feeling of political and social upheaval, but I have always felt that it applied to me on a deeply personal level. Specifically, how it applies to my patterns of activity.

It is no secret that I tend towards being a homebody. This is not because I spend most of my time at home; this is misleading in two respects. Firstly, because I do in fact leave the house regularly, and secondly because with the modern internet, staying in the same physical vicinity is becoming increasingly common. Rather, I am a homebody because I am not a consistent participant in society, online or off. I do not go on social media, I do not go shopping, I do not discuss current events with my peers or participate in contemporaneity in any meaningful way.

Or at least, I do not do so consistently to be more than a cameo in most other people’s narrative. To explain in detail why this is true would mean repeating the points which I have already expounded upon at length. Suffice it to say that between my disabilities and my disposition, participation is far more difficult than it might appear.

This means that the few occasions when I can participate without hinderance are all the more valuable. An extra hour of time like this is worth a hundred hours sick in bed.

Life Changing?

What does it take to change a life? To have such an impact on another person that it changes their default behaviors and life trajectory, even if subtly? Certainly it can be argued that it takes very little, since our behaviors are always being influenced by our surroundings. But what about a long-term difference? What does it take to really change someone?

The year 2007 was perhaps the most important and most impactful of my life. I say that 2007 was the year that my childhood ended. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but not by much. It was a year of drama and trauma, of new highs and extreme lows. In my personal history, the year 2007 stands out like 1914 in European history. It is a date I measure things from, even more so than my birthday.

That year contained both the best and worst days of my life to date. The worst day, July 20th, 2007, and the bad days that followed it, I have already written about. But what about the best day? What happened on that day?

January 5th, 2007 had all the hallmarks of a good day. I was on school holiday- summer holiday, in fact, since the Australian school calendar follows Australian seasons so that our main break comes around Christmas -and I was traveling. Being ever-curious and ever-precocious, I loved traveling, especially by plane.

All the mechanisms of air travel fascinated me: the terminals, with their lights and signs and displays, acting as literal gateways to every far flung exotic locale on the planet. Customs and security, with its fancy DHS eagles, and its sense of officiality, and finality, advertising that it once you cross this line, you have crossed some important threshold from which you could not simply return, as if somewhere, someone reading your story would be holding their breath while turning the page. And of course, the planes themselves, which not only seemed to defy physics in their flight, not only liked the world together, but did so in such comfort and luxury.

That day, we started early from the family farm in Indiana to the Indianapolis Airport, via a road that had enough dips and bumps that we called it affectionately “the rollercoaster road”. We arrived at Indianapolis Airport for our short flight to transfer at my all time favorite airport, Chicago O’hare, which I adore for its dinosaur skeleton, its Vienna beef hot dogs, and its inter-concourse tunnel, where I would stare up in wonder from the moving walkway at the ceiling light display. I was told that the abstract neon colors were meant to represent the aurora, but for my part, having seen both, I have always thought the lights at O’hare to be more impressive than the aurora.

We arrived in Orlando at about 8:00pm, which, to my then childish mind, was a kind of magical hour. Things only happened after 8:00 on special occasions- watching New Year’s fireworks or space shuttle launches on television, calls from relatives in different time zones. After 8:00pm was the time of big and exceptional things, and the fact that we were only now boarding the bus from the airport to Disney World only seemed to vindicate the feeling I had woken up with that morning that it was going to be a great day.

Much of the resort was already closed by the time we arrived. But even then, there was much excitement to be had. We found our rooms, and as we wound our way around the Port Orleans Resort, I remember drinking in every detail of the scenery and design, and thinking to myself about how much attention and intent must have gone onto adding all the little details and embellishments. At this time I used to enjoy drawing, but whenever I did, I would become obsessed with details and embellishments. I would draw an airplane, and become fixated on the precise curvature of the engines, the alignment of the ailerons, the number of windows depending on whether it was a Boeing 747 like the one we took to San Francisco or an Embraer like the one we took…

You get the idea. Details were important to me. For me to see that someone had paid enough attention to the details to add all these little decorative Easter eggs, like hidden Mickeys, or a plastic frog on a Lilly pad in a small pond beside the concrete path. To see these little acknowledgments of my attentiveness told me that other people had been paying at least as much attention as I had, which put me at ease, and made me feel welcome and safe, at a time when I had spent most of my life as a foreigner, and a great deal of my time at school being bullied.

Thus assured that I was in a place that was safe and well designed by people who thought like I did, I let loose, skipping happily along as I never did in school for fear of being mocked, and sang songs I had memorized from the inflight children’s “radio station” (which was actually just a recording loop) about fishing worms, the state of Michigan, and carps in tubs.

The next day, I was reunited with my Best Friend in the Whole Entire World, whom I knew from Australia, but who had recently moved to Denver. It was the first time we had seen each other since he had moved away. I had missed his going away party because, in what now seems like a foreshadowing of what was to come, I had been in the hospital with Acute Pan Sinusitis, and after having my immune system wiped out by the drugs, was stuck in protective quarantine.

Together, we tore up the parks, going on rides and eating Mickey out of house and home. This last point proved to be dire foreshadowing, as looking back I can say it was the first time that the earliest symptoms of the medical calamity that would consume my life just six months later were indisputably noticeable. In fact, the symptoms of hunger and thirst were so bad that they caused problems trying to eat off the Disney meal plan. It was the only bittersweet thing about the trip- that it was the last great experience of my life unmarried by the specter of disability and looming death. But that’s a story for another time.

So, back to the question at hand: what does it take to change a life? Was my trip life-changing? Did it change who I am as a person, or alter my future behavior or trajectory in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Despite picking a solidly philosophical topic I’m not willing to sit down for the requisite hours of navel gazing to try and formulate the probable alternate histories if that trip hadn’t gone just so.

It’s tempting, then, to brush it off and say that even though I definitely see that event as one of the high points of my existence, that it never changed who I am at my core. It certainly didn’t change the course of events that were about to happen, which were in retrospect so obviously already in motion. It would be easy to extrapolate that the whole event had no effect on me, but for the fact that I know of a counterexample.

The day itself, more than a decade in the past, has gotten old enough in my mind that parts of it have started to fade around the edges. I don’t, for example, remember which side of the two connecting rooms my brother and I slept in, and which side my parents slept in. The parts I do remember are as much vaguely connected vignettes as they are a consistent narrative, and correlate more to the things that struck me as important at the time than what might be important to the story now. Hence why I can’t tell you what rides we went on, but I can describe the exact configuration of the twisty straw that I had with my milkshake.

One of the things that I remember clearest about that day, one of the things that to this day will occasionally interrupt my stream of consciousness, was the in flight radio. In particular, I recall there being several songs about environmental themes. And I recall sitting there, consciously rethinking my point of view. My train of thought went something like this: The reason I’m hearing this song, which, though decent, isn’t artistically great, is because it’s about a cause, which is clearly important to whomever is picking songs to play.

The kind of causes that get songs written about them, and, despite artistic shortcomings, played constantly at children, are ones that are important to society at large: learning one’s ABCs, being prepared for emergencies, and national crises like a world war (Over There) or pandemic (there was a song about washing one’s hands that was circulated during the Mad Cow scare). That I am hearing this song indicates that it is viewed not just as something of idle interest, but as a crisis of immediate concern.

It was at that moment that I remember mentally upgrading the issue of environmentalism from something that I was merely passively sympathetic towards, to something which I actively supported where possible. Hearing that song on that trip changed my life. Or if it is melodramatic to say that hearing a song single handed lyrics changed my life trajectory, then at least it is accurate to say that hearing those songs at that time provoked me into a change in attitude and behavior.

Would I still have had such a moment of revelation on a different day? Probably, but I doubt I would have remembered it. But as to the question of what it takes to change a life, we are forced to consider how much effort it took for me to hear those songs. There is no good answer here. On the one hand, it took a massive amount of societal machinery to record, license, and select the song, and then see that it was played on the flight that I happened to be on. To do this purposely would require a massive conspiracy.

On the other hand, it requires no small number of miracles from a huge number of contributors to get me the iPad I’m writing on, and the web server I’m posting to, and massive amounts of effort to maintain the global system of communications that allow you to view my words, and yet I’d hardly argue that my writing here is the pinnacle of all of society thus far. Perhaps so, in a strictly epistemological, navel-gazing sense that is largely meaningless for the purpose of guiding future individual actions. But realistically, my authorial exercise here is only slightly more effort than recording my unpolished stream of consciousness.

The truth is, even when I can identify what it has taken in the past to change my own life, I can’t extrapolate that knowledge into a meaningful rule. It’s clearly not that hard, given that it’s happened so many times before, and on such flimsy pretenses. But it also clearly can’t be that easy, or else everyone would already be their best self.

People have in the past attempted to compliment me by insinuating that my writing, or my speeches at events, or my support, have changed their lives. Despite their intentions at flattery, I have generally been disinclined to believe them, on the grounds that, though I may take pride that my writing is decent, it is certainly not of a caliber great enough to be called life-changing. But upon reflection, perhaps it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps the bar isn’t nearly that high. Perhaps, I venture to hope, one does not need to be perfect to change another’s life for the better.

Entitlements

I am decidedly upset because of what happened a few weeks ago as I was hassled in public at my local theater because of my disability. At a bag check, immediately after several people, including my able-bodied family were passed over with no more than a cursory inspection, I was stopped and briefly detained. I was told that I would not be allowed in with the contents of my bag. I explained that the items which she had indicated were medically necessary. The woman persisted, insisting that it was house policy, to which I replied that denying me access over a matter of medical necessity where it pertained to a legally recognized physical disability would be a blatant case of discrimination and a clear violation of the law. Or I tried to; I was flustered by her unusually pugnacious attitude, and the crowd that was gathering behind me.

After a few more moments of back and forth she switched to saying that while I might be allowed to bring in my backpack, I would certainly have to dump out the contents of my water bottle, which I also need for medical purposes. I was initially prepared to accept this on the assumption that it was a matter of security (this is, after all, what I do at TSA; I empty my water bottle before screening and refill it after at a public fountain) until she added the suggestion that I could purchase water at the concession stand; that this was a matter of commercial policy. That’s a horse of a different color. After all, I need my water. If I’m not able to refill it for free, then I’m being forced to pay because of my medical condition. And of course, when one is compelled to pay extra because one is disabled, that’s discrimination.

I tried explaining this. The lady seemed to relent on the water, but then demanded that I prove that I’m disabled and need these things. This is a trap, for two reasons. First, it’s essentially impossible for a person to positively prove that they need something to survive and be healthy to someone who is determined to be skeptical. To use an intentionally ludicrous example: Sure, you say you need oxygen, but have you tried going without it? Maybe you should try not breathing for a while and then get back to me. So asking someone to prove they’re disabled isn’t so much an honest question as a remarkably effective logical fallacy used to browbeat people.

The other reason this is a trap relates to HIPPA. Legally*, medical information is confidential and privileged, unless and until the patient reveals it voluntarily. Once the information is disclosed, however, it’s fair game. Kinda, sorta. It gets complicated real fast, and comes down to the comparatively squishy world of case law, reasonableness and intent. But it does mean that they can try and argue, based on whatever bits of medical trivia they happen to know, that they know your disease better than you, and they can (try to) say you don’t need whatever specific thing you’re asking for.

Usually, this is a moot point, because HIPPA is very clear that a person can’t be coerced to reveal their confidential medical information. The interpretation of coercion is broad enough that it could reasonably include requiring disclosure of medical issues to receive disability accommodations. The logic here is that if you are, in fact, disabled, that either option results in your rights being violated; either your right to equal opportunity or your right to privacy.

As a result, most institutions have a policy of not asking at all and only acting on what you give them. So, at most places, if you tell them you need a water bottle, and you haven’t given them any reason to disbelieve you (i.e. you haven’t mentioned a specific diagnosis that they think they’re familiar with), they won’t bother you. But apparently this lady didn’t get the memo.

I showed her the Medic Alert bracelet that I wear just to get her to let me go. Of course, I didn’t tell her that the bracelet, which is a third party nonprofit, wasn’t particularly more legitimate as proof than my backpack, which is a design given by another nonprofit to families with children diagnosed with one of my issues. The truth is that there is no universal, or even officially sanctioned, form of proof, since that too would either violate privacy by being tailored to specific diagnoses, or would have to be so broad as to give every person carrying an EpiPen personal aides, full access to handicap parking, free motorized wheelchairs, and every other accommodation in history.

I did politely tell her, because at this point I was growing rapidly annoyed with her attitude, that asking me to reveal my diagnosis and to try and prove it was a violation of my HIPPA rights. And since I’m the only person being required to disclose, is still discrimination. She shook her head indignantly, and tried to justify to me, claiming that she had encountered many other people who had claimed to need various things for medical reasons, but didn’t really need them.

I kept my mouth more or less shut, because I couldn’t at the time think of a polite way to respond; to suggest that it was quite possible that some of those people, though perhaps not all, did in fact need as they said, and that rather than catch the guilty, she had merely browbeaten the innocent into bending their medical protocol and risking their health in the process, as has happened to many I have met. I did not retort that her finding a way to reconcile her employer’s policy and federal law is distinctly not my problem, nor is it my problem to speak on behalf of everyone who might need disability accommodations to bring her up to speed.

If ever I seem to act entitled, it is because, as a matter of fact, the world does owe me. The world owes me not because I have suffered pain in the past, or because I have been discriminated against in a society that is supposed to avoid such things, and punish violators. Although it might be nice to receive some recognition for the struggles I have gone through, I am not so naive and petty as to think that the world is fair, and that I am entitled to compensation, even if I might deserve it. I am, however, entitled to my rights, and to my dignity. I believe that I am entitled to going out in public without being accosted and interrogated. I do not think this is too much to ask.

*Obligatory reminder: I am not a lawyer. And while I do my best to always be right, if you’re having actual legal issues, you should consult an actual lawyer. Which I am not.

A Song of Flame and Snow

Where I lived growing up in Australia, there was no snow. There was barely rain, and if it ever gold cold enough for water to freeze, the entire city lost its mind. The closest experience we ever had to snow was a massive hailstorm. Shops closed, preachers proclaimed the end times were upon us, there was mass panic, and people used surfboards (remember, this is Australia) to try and recreate sledding as seen on TV, with the layer of ice on the streets instead of snow.

It wasn’t that we lacked our own weird weather. It’s just that we didn’t get a whole lot of storms. We did get droughts. It got hot and dry enough that if one wasn’t careful, a backyard pool that existed at the beginning of the beginning of the week could easily be a dry hole in the ground by week’s end. Water rationing made this harder.

The storms we did have were more often firestorms. With the land as dry as it was, the threat of fire loomed over everyone. A single match, or cigarette dropped accidentally or negligently, could kindle a fire that would consume the country. A single bolt of lightning striking the wrong tree could ignite a blaze that would render the most flammable parts, which were mostly the areas surrounding population centers, uninhabitable.

Through the summer months, public information adverts warned citizens of hazards that could create the spark that would burn down our civilization. School projects demonstrated how a glass bottle discarded in the open could, if left at the wrong angle, magnify the sun’s raise and start a fire. Poster campaigns reminiscent of WWII and Cold War civil defence campaigns lined walls at public places, warning of the danger. Overhead, helicopters scouted and patrolled daily, checking for any signs of smoke, and marking off which pools, ponds, and lakes still had water that could be used if needed. Meanwhile, ground vehicles checked water meters and sprinkler setups, and issued stiff fines to those who used more than their fair share.

At school, we conducted fire drills, not only for evacuation, but for prevention, and active firefighting. We were quizzed on which tools and tactics worked best against which type of fire. We drilled on how to aim and hold a hose while battling flames, how to clear a fire break, how to fortify a residential structure against an oncoming firestorm, how to improvise masks to prevent smoke inhalation, and other first aid. We were told that if the fire reached our homes, the professionals would likely already be overwhelmed, and it might well be up to us to do what we could, either to shelter in place, or to eliminate any fuel from our homes before retreating.

When the fires did come, as they did almost every summer, we followed the progress along, marking down on maps the deployments of the fire brigades, the areas that were being cleared to create a break, the areas that were marked for evacuation, and so on. We noted the location of our local teams, and the presence of airborne units that we saw on television and publicity material. The campaigns often lasted for weeks, and could span the length of the continent as new theaters flared up and were pacified.

While there are some similarities, a blizzard is something quite different. Whereas the Australian bushfires are perhaps best understood as a kind of siege, blizzards of the sort that exist in the American northeast are closer to a single pitched battle. Blizzards are mostly contained within the space of a day or two, while bushfires can rage for an entire season.

A blizzard is almost quaint in this way. It forces people to break routines, and limits their actions in a way that creates the kind of contrived circumstances that make interesting stories. Yet the inconvenience is always temporary. Snow melts, or is removed, power lines get repaired, and schools go back into session.

Bushfires are only quaint if one is sufficiently far away from them, and only then in the way that people call the Blitz, with its Anderson Shelters, blackouts, evacuations, and “we’ll all go together when we go” spirit, quaint, in retrospect. A blizzard may impact a larger swath of land in a shorter period, dumping snow to knock out electricity to large numbers of people, and closing roads. But bushfires will scour towns off the map, suffocating or burning those who stand in their way. And while snowstorms are mostly bound by the laws of meteorology, a sufficiently large bushfire will spawn its own weather system.

It is an interesting contrast to consider while my house and the landscape around it is buried in snow.