This Is Not News

“When in human history has positive change not been incredibly costly, selfless and bloody?”

Christian Gossett asked that question in an interview on this site, almost a year ago, and it’s been at the back of my mind ever since. Not News is dedicated to the idea that people can come together, talk through problems, look at evidence in a critical fashion, and come to an agreement on what should be done for the good of everyone. We sit at computers, surf the web for research, make some phone calls and post on the forums. Doesn’t sound very costly or bloody . . . or even all that selfless. The thought has entered my mind, more than once, that maybe all we’re really doing is salving some guilty consciences.

That thought hit especially hard as I read William H. Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights, an excellent book that tracks the progress — and lack thereof — of the civil rights movement in Greensboro, NC from the mid-50s through the 70s. Drawing on extensive interviews and written archival materials, the book is a tightly focused narrative that goes into great depth as it covers the community leaders and members that can get missed in larger overviews of the civil rights movement.

What is most fascinating, and most troubling, about the book is the vast disconnect it portrays between Greensboro’s image of itself and its reality. Greensboro had long considered itself a ‘progressive’ Southern city, with a more modern outlook and economy than many cities in the Deep South — and certainly with better, and fairer, relations between the city’s white and black populations. There was a black member of the city council in 1951, and also a black member of the school board. Several of the city’s philanthropists contributed significant sums to facilities in black neighborhoods, and a few major institutions were willing to work toward integration. And city leaders were almost always willing to discuss race relations in civil discourse, through official committees and informal talks.

The key word, there, is ‘civil.’ The powers that be did not want to ruffle any feathers, they did not want to provoke controversy, and they certainly did not want to suggest that conditions in Greensboro might be less than ideal. Change in Greensboro was expected to be attained through consensus, which meant that if anyone objected to change, then the status quo would be maintained in the name of civility, until the objector could be persuaded to change his mind. And rest assured, if a change would require that whites give up some of their entrenched power or privileged space in society, there would be objectors.

Greensboro was the birthplace of the student sit-in movement in February 1960, when four students and North Caroline Agricultural & Technical College grew frustrated with the slow pace of reform — lunch counters were still segregated, many jobs were off limits to blacks, and six years after Brown vs. Board of Education, black children still weren’t attending white schools. The students went to a downtown Woolworth’s, made purchases, and then st down at the lunch counter. When they were refused service, they stayed. Within days, dozens and then hundreds of students — and eventually adults — joined in the effort and brought commerce in downtown Greensboro to a standstill.

Here’s the interesting part. The powers that be of Greensboro did not respond to the students with a statement of, ‘Thank you for bringing this blatant hypocrisy and act of disrespect to our attention; we will remedy it immediately, and please accept our apologies.’ They criticized the protestors for being disruptive, threatened to enforce anti-trespass laws, and refused to believe that the protestors reflected the will of Greensboro’s black population. “It seems apparent,” said North Caroline Attorney General Malcolm Seawell, that these incidents have been promoted, encouraged, and even supervised by persons coming into North Carolina from other states” (Chafe 86).

Some white liberals did attempt to use the demonstrations as a catalyst for social change, as did a very small number of city leaders. But even those efforts showed the limits of a consensus-driven approach — a group of community leaders came together to negotiate first a moratorium on demonstrations and then an overall solution. They got the moratorium, but with the pressure off, and with the negotiating group having no official power to sanction anyone, businesses retrenched. The community leaders operated under the assumption that it was necessary to build up something close to unanimous public support for integration before anything could change. Meanwhile, the local Woolworth’s manager wrote to the governor, “We are fighting a battle for the white people who still want to eat with white people” (Chafe 93) — which pretty much sums up the chances for such a consensus. Fed up with the lack of progress, the students resumed the demonstrations, and eventually the lunch counters were integrated. But change only occurred when the oppressed made life uncomfortable for the oppressors, many of whom refused to believe they were doing anything wrong.

The civil rights movement is full of such stories. Local residents showing great courage and determination called attention to injustice, and when they tried to play within the existing system, they found their needs sacrificed in the name of political expediency. In 1964, for example, a group of Mississippi activists challenged the credentials of Mississippi’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention, on the grounds that black voters had been disfranchised — but President Johnson was unwilling to anger Southern Democrats by letting a vote on the credentials challenge go to the convention floor (where it almost certainly would have won). And when civil rights leaders began to call attention to the racial inequities of the American economic system, many of their political allies turned a deaf ear. Clearly, there are limits to working within the system, and you could make a strong case that a reform movement that relies on politely asking the system to change its ways is no reform movement at all.

So what are we left with? Is the only honest, and honorable, solution a remorseless, revolutionary struggle (to steal a phrase from Abraham Lincoln)? I’m not sure that’s the answer either — such a struggle is bound to cause resentments, and even if a revolution somehow put a just system into place, the overthrown would be more likely to nurse their grievances rather than become a part of the new society. There’s another Gossett quote that comes to mind: “No war has ever ended that did not begin another.”

The only truly lasting change will come when we change our hearts and our minds, and I don’t think that change can come at the end of a gun. It can only come slowly, and it will take a critical mass of everyday people who are willing to recognize that it is necessary. It will take people with the tools to analyze the world around them, to see where and how it could be better. One of the inspiring elements of Chafe’s book is the four students’ recollections of the role models that gave them the courage to take a stand — the teachers and leaders of their community, the people who did work within the system but weren’t afraid to tweak it where they could. When I think of what Not News can be, that’s what I like to imagine. We will always need heroes to stand up and shout, to call our intention to injustice. And it may be getting time to shout a little louder. But we also need people to talk to each other — and that’s why we’re here.

OK, so you’ve heard the one about the guy who gets called for jury duty a week before his vacation and has to put off all the classes he’s teaching. At least, I hope you have. If not, you seriously need to go back and read it. Dave wrote it last month. Or maybe the month before. Probably the month before. But go read it, because it’s pretty good. Better than this story, anyway.

But they’re both about crime, which is the topic of today’s Humor column. Because crime can affect YOU, mister smarty pants. Yeah, you. With the Doritos. Put ’em down and listen.

This is a story about how crime can strike anyone, at any time, even in the middle of a major metropolitan area with a high crime rate at 3 a.m on a deserted street with no cops around. It’s the story about how one time I went out for ice cream and lost TWO DOLLARS to a roving gang of armed bandits. It’s the story of a boy and a horse, and their love for one another. And it’s all true, except for the part about the horse, which I just made up right now.

It was the summer of 1993. Bill Clinton was firmly entrenched in the White House and a young rapper named MC Hammer was well on his way to abject poverty. I understand he’s some sort of minister now. So it just goes to show the curveballs life can throw you sometimes.

I had just graduated from high school and had my entire life ahead of me. Well, except for the part that had already occurred, which was actually behind me, if you want to get technical. I was at home with my friend Dennis, who had come to spend the night at my house because my mother had gone somewhere for the weekend and didn’t want me getting into trouble.

Remember that: My mother didn’t want me getting into trouble. And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

So after a long night of playing fantasy role-playing games and watching premium-channel soft porn (Remember: High school! I’m actually very cool now! And quite successful with the ladies!), Dennis and I decided that some ice cream would hit the spot. So we struck out for a local convenience store, not really thinking that it was 3 a.m. and the muggers clocked in at about midnight. Hours of fantasy RPG and The Red Shoe Diaries will do that to you.

I bought one of those ice cream sandwiches where it’s actually two chocolate chip cookies with ice cream in between them. Dennis bought the latest LSD-inspired flavor from Ben and Jerry. Shine on, you crazy diamond!

So we left the convenience store. That’s when I asked Dennis if he wanted to hit the local Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home. Now, pay close attention:

Get ready for this: Dennis didn’t want to go to Dunkin’ Donuts because he wanted to save his money. And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

So we walked in the direction of the muggers. Only at the time we didn’t actually know there were muggers there, of course. That would have been stupid.

Eventually, we crossed paths with them: Three guys walking on the same side of the street, toward us, making eye contact. We didn’t think anything about it until they stopped us.

Let’s pause here, because this is the part of the story where nearly every white person I have ever met asks the same question. “Were they black guys?” they ask. Or sometimes: “They were black guys, right?” Occasionally, even: “I assume they were black guys.”

So: Yes. They were black guys, okay? Black as the freaking ace of spades. They were considerably blacker than the white prep school boys that, for absolutely no reason, tormented me on the school bus for three years. And much blacker than the white guy who threatened to kill my mother when he held up the convenience store she worked in when I was little. Now kindly insert your head back into your rectum.

Anyway.

They stopped us, and their leader explained that they didn’t want any trouble.

“We don’t want any trouble,” he said. “And we’re real sorry to have to do this. But we’re gonna have to ask you to give us all your money.”

That’s when the guy closest to me took out the gun and pointed it at my stomach. It was a cool gun, actually, one of those guns where you cock it by pulling back on the thing that goes over the part behind the barrel. I wanted to ask him about it, maybe have him show it to me and explain how it worked, but I figured he was busy mugging me and I didn’t want to bother him while he was at work.

Like I said, there were three guys: The Gun Guy, who was next to me, who was likely chosen via some sort of Coolest Afro/Sunglasses combination contest; the Leader, who was likely chosen because he was well-spoken and also very tall; and the Lookout, who was probably chosen because he was the guy who’s all nervous and says stuff like “Guys? I got a bad feeling about this. Guys?”

The Gun Guy took care of me. Leader and Lookout shook Dennis down. Fortunately, I only had two dollars on me, since I had spent the better part of a five-dollar bill on ice cream and some other junk I can’t remember. Dennis had about $50 on him, which Leader and Lookout were more than happy to relieve him of. They took his ice cream, too. They didn’t take mine, probably because it was half-eaten.

There was this one part where the Gun Guy was patting down my pockets and found my house keys. When he asked what they were, I showed him and told him he couldn’t have them because I needed them to get back into my house. He said okay.

In retrospect, this was very stupid. I mean, he had a gun, you know?

So they finished mugging us and we all came back together to close the deal.

“Okay,” said Leader. “Thanks for your time. Sorry to have bothered you.”

He seriously said this.

“Hey,” I responded. “Anytime.”

And we parted ways. Or at least, we tried to. It turned out we were all going in the same direction.

“Look,” said Leader. “You can’t follow us.”

“Well, we’re going this way too,” I said.

“But you can’t follow us.” He was pretty clear on this point. We’re pretty sure the Gun Guy was in his camp too, which made any subsequent discussion purely academic.

“Okay, how about this,” I said. “We’ll hang out here for a few minutes while you guys get going. Then after we’ve given you a sufficient head start, we’ll get on our way.”

Leader thought about this.

“Okay,” he said.

They turned around and walked away. They looked in the plastic bag they stole from Dennis to see what kind of ice cream they got.

So we went home. I was a little shaken up, and so was Dennis. We didn’t call the police, mostly because we forgot.

All in all, it was a pretty good experience, and well worth two dollars for such a cool story. It impresses people, anyway, and I get to feel all intrepid when I check “yes” on surveys that ask if I’ve ever been the victim of a violent crime.

But I guess we failed in our primary goal, which was to get ice cream. I mean, I still had my ice cream after the mugging, but Dennis grabbed it from me and threw it in the gutter when I started gloating about it. So we went out to get ice cream, and came back with none.

And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

The worst thing about coming back from vacation is getting back to work. The best thing about coming back from vacation is telling people who didn’t go anywhere about what a great time you had. I figure if I combine the two and write a column about my vacation, I’ll come out somewhere in the middle and for once seem like a normal, well-adjusted fellow. At least till I get to the part about the four hour line for a sketch, but that’ll come in its own good time.

Now, Pattie and I have never taken a real extended vacation; the closest we’ve come is a weekend at a bed and breakfast. So this year we decided, to heck with it, we’re gonna fly somewhere on a jet plane, stay in a hotel, the whole nine yards. We both decided it would be cool — and pay attention here, because one reason I married this woman is that she would actually think this is cool — to fly out to San Diego for Comic-Con International, the biggest comic book convention in the world. Four days of comic buying, autograph getting, and watching people dress up like Jedi and stormtroopers. I had to promise her something about seeing the rest of San Diego while we were there, but I figured one day of cruising around California was a small price to pay for a visit to Graphic Art Nirvana.

Of course, first we had to get there, which is where the jet plane came in. Now, I am over six feet tall, and we were flying in coach. Despite this, and the fact that I booked the plane tickets, I forsake any hope of an aisle seat so that Pattie could sit by a window that may have been twice the size of my thumb and look at the clouds. As a result, I was slightly cramped during the six hour flight. Fortunately, I had my revenge, as the cramping resulted in my ankles cracking loudly for the rest of the day and night. Foley artists have recorded my ankles in order to better replicate the sound of a fierce thunderstorm, which can make trying to sleep in the same room with me an . . . interesting experience, to say the least. Cramping aside, the flight was fairly pleasant, the in-flight meal was actually pretty tasty, and everything was going along smoothly.

Until we started our descent, of course, and I experienced the most agonizing pain I can remember as my ears tried to deal with the change in air pressure. Ten sticks of Wrigley’s Spearmint did absolutely nothing to help me, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t hear a darn thing. Pattie would try and say something to me, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. Now, a medical excuse to not hear any of your wife’s requests may seem like a good thing at first, but since we were on vacation there was no chance she was asking me to clean the dishes or take out the garbage, and besides, she’s a pretty good conversationalist most of the time. To say nothing of the fact that without any sense of hearing on my part, regulating the volume of my own voice was suddenly a challenge. Next time we fly, they’re gonna have to pull some kind of BA Baracus stunt on me, because I do NOT want to go through that again.

Anyway, we get to San Diego, and let me tell you, I’ve heard all sorts of claptrap about how the weather’s always perfect in San Diego, and it’s so beautiful, and the sun’s always shining, and I’m here to tell you it’s just not true. Just as an example, on Friday, I saw a cloud. It was one of those perfect, fluffy cumulus clouds, but still — it was a cloud. And I think the high temperature may have deviated by a degree or two during our five day stay. And once, for a moment, I think it may have been slightly humid before a breeze came in off the bay and took care of that. So really, we Northeasterners with our humid 100 degree summers and our slushy below freezing winters don’t have a thing to be jealous of, and I think those Southern Californians should just stop fooling themselves.

I’m running out of room here — why do I never have this problem when I’m trying to write a philosophy article? — so let me get to the con itself. When I say it is enormously huge, I’m understating it. Walking the floor of the San Diego Convention Center was probably more exercise than I get in a month. And it was full of retailers, artists, companies, filmmakers, you name it. I got to meet people whose work I’ve been reading for years and tell them how much I enjoyed it. Or at least, I could attempt to. Once or twice I got a wee bit tongue tied. The worst was when I hoped to commission a sketch from Jeff Moy, one of my favorite artists who drew the Legion of Super-Heroes for several years. I was standing by his table, patiently waiting for him to finish what he was doing so I could talk to him and trying to figure out what exactly the protocol was for commissioning a sketch, since I’d never done it before, when he stopped, looked up at me and asked something along the lines of “What can I do for you?”

Now, I’m in graduate school. I’ve given lectures and presentations pretty much on the fly. I consider myself a fairly intelligent articulate guy. Of course, since I all of a sudden was put on the spot, what came out was, “Um, yeah . . .sketch . . .can I get one? Or two? With characters? If I paid for them? Or something?” Let’s just say I’m sure I’ve made better impressions. To top it off, he didn’t have any more openings to do sketches that day. (I did manage to go back and get one the next day, so at least that story has a happy ending.)

One of the things Pattie and I had done in the weeks before the con was to go over the programming list to select all the entertaining and informative panels that we would attend. Unfortunately, these well laid plans were shot to pieces pretty quickly, especially for me on Sunday. George Perez, one of my favorite artists (whose work appears in the corner of the first Not News cover image, by the way), was at the con and doing free sketches for his fans. Unfortunately for me, George Perez has had a spectacular 25+ year career in comics, and he’s a LOT of people’s favorite artist. So much so, that somehow the lines for his sketches managed to be full practically before the convention opened for business each day. (I am still trying to figure out how that worked, by the way. The ability to distort time and space in that fashion would pay off my student loans in a hurry.) In true comic fashion, I got my sketch in the nick of time, with about 15 minutes before the whole con closed, and after a four hour wait that absorbed most of the day. Now you can say that’s crazy, but hey — someday, I might find myself stuck in a six hour line at DisneyNation and look back fondly on the old days.

Have you read Not News’ privacy policy yet? I hope you have, because a) Pattie put a lot of work into it and b) I want you to understand that I take respecting people’s rights, including privacy rights, seriously. That said, there seems to me to be a good chance that we’ve been tackling this privacy issue all wrong, or at least that we haven’t been as robust in our thinking as we could be. Right now much of the privacy debate focuses on standards of encryption and laws that forbid people who have certain information from using that information in certain ways. (Check out sites like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more info.) The argument is that everyone should have access to the technological tools that can keep other people from knowing what they’re doing, that anonymity and secrecy are vital to the protection of a free society. But maybe, and paradoxically, an effective solution can be found by making it easier for us to get information about each other.

We’ve gone over this topic before, in our message forums. It was there that I first brought up David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which I’d like to discuss in a little more depth here in the essays section of the site. Brin, an astrophysicist/SF author/commentator, argues that encryption/secrecy proponents are actually working against the interests of a free society, which requires that information flow as freely as possible in as many directions as possible. In a society such as ours, in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of corporate and government entities, the emphasis on secrecy works in favor of the powerful. Not only do they have more to potentially lose if many of their doings become public, but they have a greater ability to amass the technology necessary to effective gather and process information, and avoid or minimize the penalties for misusing that information. Think of how Microsoft has managed to thus far mitigate the damage from its unfair business practices. Or of how the control of surveillance and observation cameras seems to rest in one set of hands.

Transparency, or information flow, on the other hand, works to the benefit of everyone in society. One of the reasons the American financial markets are so popular with global investors is that for all its faults, our Securities and Exchange Commission requires American companies to disclose far more details of their operation, in a timely and accessible manner, than just about any other country. There are accounting scandals and problems in America, to be sure, but they are minimized because anyone can head over to a site like FreeEDGAR and peruse a company’s recent 10-K report. As long as privacy is the weapon of choice, large entities with more to hide will always do a better job of hiding it. But if everyone knows everyone else’s business, then we can rely on each other to watch out for each other. One reason why people do things that work against society’s interests is that they believe there is little chance they will be discovered. Transparency works against that, and helps keep people on their best behavior.

The most frequent complaint against Brin’s thesis is that while transparency may be all well and good, there are certain things that people don’t want other people to know, and that the ability to see what someone else is doing is not a sufficient tradeoff for someone to see what they’re doing. Brin takes this into account by saying that certain zones of privacy would be necessary; he’s not offering a black-and-white, all-or-nothing solution. A transparent society would, he claims, again paradoxically, protect privacy by making it easier to spot those who would violate the bounds of common courtesy, rather than leaving the tools of privacy-invasion in the hands of a privileged few. But I would also like to examine the emphasis on privacy and anonymity that exists in American culture, particularly on the net. Andrew Leonard’s Bots discusses net culture (or at least net culture circa the mid-to-late 90s, when the book was written) and finds example of example of individuals using the net’s cloak of anonymity to commit antisocial behavior, disrupting discussion forums and chat rooms, crashing sites, and so on. Message board protocols often suggest that you shouldn’t post anything you wouldn’t be willing to say to someone face to face, where you would be accountable for your words. Maybe a little transparency wouldn’t be such a bad thing there.

But what about people who aren’t committing antisocial acts but still want anonymity or privacy because of an unfair social climate that might stigmatize them? What about an adolescent who’s trying to deal with the possibility that he or she might be a homosexual, or an individual who might have a socially-unacceptable disease like HIV? Here I’m not so sure. I agree with Brin’s notion of privacy zones for things like this, but I know that in some instances those will be breached. Am I willing to see that happen? I don’t know. Part of me thinks that a lot of stuff would become less socially unacceptable if we all knew how common it was, or at least how many people all had some kind of ‘guilty pleasure’ — if we all had to accept each other’s quirks in order to be sure that our own quirks were accepted, wouldn’t that contribute to a more robust society in the long run? I can’t help but think that it would . . . which leads me to believe that the growing pains of getting to such a place, while uncomfortable and unfortunate, would be worthwhile. We may not quite be totally ready for transparency yet — we may have a generation or two of greater tolerance and open-mindedness to teach before we get there — but I can’t help but think of it as a worthy goal.

Even those of us with less than 10 years working experience can recognize bad management skills when they see them. Between my jobs in college, my semester internships and my post-college employment roller coaster rides, I could probably pick poor management skills out of a line-up at three in the morning. So in honor of the first month in my MBA program and just because I feel like it, I’m writing an open letter to my bosses letting them know that the dumb things they did have not gone unnoticed. My collection of past and present supervisors will be consolidated under one false name for space and privacy purposes. (Not that I really need to worry that any of them are wasting time reading this. Most of them have a very busy puppy-kicking schedule to keep.)

TO: Maurice Ron
FROM: Me
RE: The Sense God Gave You, Lack Thereof

Good advice is something one seldom asks for but always needs. Please take my advice for what it is worth and remember that constructive criticism builds a better you.

• The management course you took that advised keeping ill-informed, angry, inept workers on your front lines (e.g. in customer service, on your sales force) was not seeing the whole picture. I would seriously consider rethinking this tactic.
• Do not implement an expensive and complicated software system before at least two people in your company understand it. Also, for the love of all that is good and decent, don’t take the older system off-line before you have a plan in place to fix the new one when (and I do mean when) it breaks.
• Please do not change the security code on the restrooms without telling anyone. It’s really not funny after the first two times.
• Proving Darwin’s survival theory with free pizza is not everyone’s idea of a good team building strategy. We truly do not like having to outwit, outsmart, or outplay our colleagues for food. In short, when ordering lunch for the office, do be sure to order enough for everyone.
• Do not refer to female employees over the age of 18 as “your girls” no matter how much you may think you look like Cary Grant.
• If you monitor your employees’ Internet use, do so wisely. The occasional Steven Wright-isms email is not cause for a memo. On the other hand, a 75% increase in traffic to Monster.com may be worth looking into.
• For the last time, learn the difference between “Reply” and “Reply to All.” It’s much easier than trying to explain how you meant “damn pain in the ass” in a good way. The corollary to this advice is to remember to hang up the phone completely before calling the person you were talking to a bastard.
• Do not assume that one over-performing department can make up for five under-performing departments. No, not even if they work Saturdays.
• The karaoke machine you rented for the office Christmas party did not make up for the lack of bonuses that year. It really didn’t.
• Your “whoever buys my lunch gets to be favorite employee of the day” routine wears thin really fast.
• Publicly berating people for their work performance does not make them better workers, it just makes them pissed at you and they often quit. You end up with empty positions and unfinished work. So when you think about it, your legendary tirades serve only as complete wastes of time.

Sincerely,

Your employee

Author’s Note: While I have exaggerated a bit for comic effect, most of the situations on which these comments based actually happened. I’ll be more than happy to explain on the boards if you’re really interested. I’d much rather read your additions to this list, though.

My first attempt at an honest-to-God full time job after I graduated from college was at a public relations firm in Manhattan. It was my job to coordinate a lot of the logistics of our efforts to get our clients better press, and I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that I was absolutely terrible at my job. A large part of the job was keeping track of various pieces of paper, and one look at my office will tell you what a poor match that was. My real downfall, however, was that I had to photocopy a lot of articles from magazines and newspapers and whatnot. A smart person would have made the photocopies quickly and then gotten back to keeping track of the pieces of paper. Not me. I stopped to read all of the darned things. I was single-handedly responsible for at least a tenth of a point reduction in the national productivity statistics. But while my three months in PR are not exactly the high point of my resume, all that reading did have a payoff. Since the main client I was responsible to was a maker of personal-finance software, a lot of the stuff I read taught me things about the financial world that I probably never would have had a clue about otherwise.

So after I left, I read books and subscribed to financial magazines. I added stock discussion boards to my bookmark list, and started to at least think about retirement planning, how I could achieve at least some level of financial security, and all the other little things that you need to know in order to be a functional adult in the American economy but that the school system never seems to get across. Part of it was natural curiosity, part of it was fascination with the psychology of the decisions that millions of investors around the world make every day, and of course part of it was a very practical desire to “do well.” But that desire raised another question. As you can probably tell from some of my other writings, I am critical of the decisions that many wealthy individuals and corporations make in order to protect and increase that wealth, because I think those decisions are often unfair and inflect great harm on a large number of people. How, in good conscience, could I then try to profit from those decisions through investments?

After all, the Standard & Poor 500 Index, which is the basis for at least a part of the stock components of many 401(k) and retirement plans, includes any number of tobacco and oil companies, companies with poor environmental or labor records, and so on. Right now there any number of mutual fund managers plowing into energy stocks, inspired by the power shortfall in California and the Bush Administration’s “Conservation? How’s that spelled again?” energy policy. There are a number of mutual fund companies that have tried to screen out the worst of these offenders. The Domini Social Equity Fund, for example, is based on the Domini 400 Social Index, a collection of companies that excludes tobacco and oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and other corporations judged to have poor records. The Fund has done pretty well; until technology stocks took a nose dive in 2000 , it matched or exceeded the performance of the S&P 500. And it’s not the only “socially responsible” fund; leading fund company Vanguard has one that tracks the Calvert Group‘s own social index, and there are plenty of others out there. But even these socially conscious funds may not give you a clear conscience. If Kathie Lee Gifford’s sweatshop activities with Wal-Mart gave you pause, Domini would have been a bad place for your money until very recently — Wal-Mart was part of the Domini 400 until February of this year. If you think Microsoft has behaved unethically, stay away from Domini and Calvert — it’s a principal holding. You can try to pick individual companies that you think behave well — but you can never be sure that somewhere along the line, they’re not outsourcing their manufacturing to some small country with absurdly cheap labor.

I’m not sure how proud I am of the way I resolved this potential crisis of conscience. But I realized that there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy I have to accept in myself. I am not a wealthy person by any stretch, but I can afford to buy steaks and wasteful prepackaged foods. I run my air conditioner almost full time during the summer months. I sit in an office surrounded by CD players, PCs, DVDs, full bookcases, dozens of plastic toys and action figures, comic books and other knickknacks. I’m afraid to even look at the label of most of my clothes. So my hands are far from spotless; I’m no Mother Theresa. I like to say I do what I can, but really, I do what I’m comfortable with, and if that’s more than many people who are better off than me are comfortable with, does that even reach the level of damning with faint praise? But my consumeristic choices do keep other people employed, even if it’s not as many as I’d like, and I like to think I’m using the technology and tools at my disposal to improve the situation. If the articles I’ve written about education funding and taxation help spark a dialogue, and that dialogue contributes to new ways of addressing these problems, isn’t that a better result than if I just took a vow of poverty and no one ever knew why? If renting The Matrix gives me material I can use to be a more effective teacher, is my VCR a waste? The only way I can stay sane is to not let the good that I have not done blind me from seeing the good that I have done. I think the same holds true for would-be socially-conscious investors — if you somehow make money from an enterprise that you’re not one hundred percent comfortable with, that gives you a responsibility to use some of that money to benefit others, and turn a negative into a positive. I realize this principle can be taken too far, and justify doing some pretty crummy things and then trying to buy your way to redemption — but hey, I’m a pragmatist. Rough guidelines and judgment calls are my stock in trade. And in a world where nobody’s perfect, I don’t think they can be avoided.

I visited the battlefield at Gettysburg a couple of weeks ago as part of a seminar on the Civil War. While I had seen plenty of memorials before, I believe this is the first time I actually set foot on the ground where men fought and died. It is an odd experience, particularly in Gettysburg, where the town has crept right up to the edges of, and in some cases right into the middle of, the battlefield. One regimental monument was right at the corner of what I believe was an inn. On the one hand, it seemed somewhat crass; on the other, it reminded me that that the armies of the North and South fought in and near towns throughout the country. I’m not sure that was the intent, but you take your learning opportunities where they come.

Regardless of any perceptions of crassness or commercialism, I recommend a trip to Gettysburg, or Antietam, or maybe some of the battlefields out West. It amazes me to see the scale of these things, to realize how large these conflicts were. And it amazes me to realize how much the Civil War still shapes our society. Intellectually, I know it did, but I had never confronted the emotional response that people have – the closest I have come has been in reading the debates over the Confederate symbol on state flags and capitals and occasionally listening to (and admittedly screaming at) some country songs.

At Gettysburg, there is a memorial placed near the Union line, where the final Confederate assault fell short. (I was amazed by how much ground the troops had to cover, and how little ultimately separated them from their goal.) Some people consider Gettysburg to be the military climax of the war, and the Union troops that erected the monument soon after the war were certainly willing to agree; a large bronze “book” lists the regiments that fought on the Union side, underneath a legend that states that at this point was the “high water mark of the rebellion.” One of my classmates — the only southerner in the group, I believe — took one look at the inscription and said words to the effect of, “Now that’s what gets people from the South seeing purple . . . high water mark of the rebellion.” I wish I had asked her which words bothered her — the words “high water mark”, which I suppose might seem like they’re gloating, or just the use of the word “Rebellion,” which seems to annoy people who would prefer to think of the war as having been between two sovereign powers. I should have asked.

The thing is, I’m not totally sure what I would have said. I mean, quoting a dictionary definition of rebellion probably wouldn’t help matters much. It all makes sense to me. “They rebelled, this is as far as they got, OK, great, moving on.” But that’s because I’m looking at it as a monument to an event a hundred years ago, and others — like the wave after wave of men with their Confederate shirts and their Confederate bumper stickers — look at it as a front in an ongoing battle of cultures, between an industrial North and a more civilized, even genteel, agricultural South. I don’t know how to separate those two perspectives, but it’s something that needs to happen.

Part of it is probably doing a better job with the way we teach and understand the war. I’m not sure that enough of a distinction gets made between why certain Southern leaders chose to secede and why many Southerners fought in the war with great ferocity. For example, I find it hard to understand why anyone could deny that slavery was a prime motivator in the decision to secede. Southern leaders had spent much of the 1850s agitating to invade Cuba or Nicaragua or other points south of the Rio Grande, for the express purpose of adding land to the Union below the Missouri Compromise and increasing the number of slave states. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, for example, declared: “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamalipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason — for the planting and spreading of slavery.” When American William Walker invaded and briefly captured Nicaragua in the late 1850s, southern newspapers urged Southerners to move into the country, expand slavery, and thus bring civilization to the era. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott decision were the culmination of efforts to finally overturn the Missouri Compromise and bring slavery north. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the Richmond Examiner stated, “A party founded on the single sentiment . . . of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power” in country. When African-Americans argue that the Confederate flag is the symbol of an effort to keep them in slavery, it’s hard not to see the point. (The quotes in this paragraph are taken from James M. McPherson’s excellent book, Battle Cry of Freedom, which is reviewed elsewhere on the site.)

That said, not every Southerner held slaves, and many of the yeoman farmers who enlisted or were conscripted into the Confederate Army were more concerned with the fact that Union troops had invaded their territory than with the desire to broaden slavery. It was, for example, the firing of shots at Fort Sumter that prompted several of the states of the upper South to finally secede; Robert E. Lee called slavery a “moral and political evil” in 1856, but felt he had to defend his fellow Virginians and Southerners. Yes, it is certainly true that by extension, Lee was fighting for slavery — were it not for slavery, he would never have been fighting in the first place, and if he had won, slavery would have continued for some time. But I find it hard to believe that was his motive, the cause in his heart. And I am sure that there were many like him in the Confederate forces. Is there some way to respect them for their loyalty and courage in what they viewed as the defense of their homes without defending the cause for which they fought? Can I criticize their decision without attacking their character? At what point do I go from understanding their point of view to ignoring their culpability for their actions? I don’t have answers to these questions yet; I hope we can discuss them in the forums. Until we answer them, until we can really understand the meaning of the events that have brought us where we are today and discuss them with honesty, Gettysburg will only divide us.

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.

No, actually, that’s not true. Actually, everyone is a genius, and if they only saw things your way, they would certainly defer to your sound logic and reasoning. In fact, they’d arrive at the very same conclusion themselves! So how to explain the apparent idiocy? I realized the answer when reading an issue of Powers a while back. I put the relevant piece of dialogue up on our Quote-a-rama thread, but even then, I did not understand its significance:

“It’s like: How do I know that when I see the color blue — how do I know that you are seeing the same blue I am? It’s one of those questions you just try not to think about–“

The simple truth is, you are not seeing the same blue everyone else is. Color perception is an extremely subjective thing, and even though we can all agree that blue is the color of the sky and green is the color of grass, who knows what shade of what color each of us really means by those words? And these subtle shifts in hue shift the way we look at the world, so that what makes perfect sense to you makes absolutely none to someone who looks at a banana and sees the color you see when you look at an apple.

Having finally cracked this infernal code, I am pleased to announce that I will be publishing my own life-planning guide, entitled What Color Is the Sky in Your World? The book will provide examples and exercises that help you translate from one color scheme to another, along with special color-changing lenses (which I have acquired at a wholesale liquidation discount from an out-of-business 3D glasses manufacturer) that will finally give all of us a common frame of chromatic reference. A few examples of the lessons to be learned from What Color Is the Sky:

• You are a former denizen of Wall Street who gets it into his head that selling books and all sorts of other things on the Internet would make a dandy business. You start the business, everyone loves it, Time names you Man of the Year. Just one problem: you forget to actually make any money in the process, and the value of your company drops 90% and you find yourself deeply in debt. The color of your sky is red — readjust your vision right away, but make sure you’re sitting down when you look at your balance sheet afterward.
• You are an Australian individual prone to saying ‘Crikey’ a lot and shoving your fist down the throats of crocodiles. The color of your sky is a light brown. You’re pretty much harmless, so there’s no rush to change . . . but really, man, those teeth are not bee-you-tee-ful. They’re just damned sharp.
• You are that guy who stands right in front of the entrance to the train and tries to cram your way in while the rest of us are trying to get out. What the heck is your rush, anyway? The color of your sky — chartreuse — is clearly preventing you from realizing that the train will not go anywhere until we all get off. Your blood pressure will thank you for getting that taken care of.
• You are Kathie Lee Gifford and you don’t understand why the ratings for Live! with Regis and Anybody Else have gone up since you left to pursue your other endeavors, including but not limited to your relief efforts for the sweatshop workers who make your clothes for Wal-Mart. Readjust your vision so that the sky is no longer fuchsia, watch a few of your old tapes, and get back to us.
• You are the guy that mugged me last November about 100 feet from a Temple University Police watchtower. You clearly chose your spot well, since the cops never saw you, but you tried to mug a graduate student, the form of life on this planet least likely to have any money. Once the color of the sky in your world is no longer green with yellow stripes, you will hopefully apply your keen planning skills to a more lucrative, and hopefully legal, venture. (You may want to talk to the Man of the Year, while you’re at it.)
• You are Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I am still trying to figure out what the devil you’re looking at.

Clearly, we are at the dawn of a new Golden Era (one that will, perhaps, match the brilliance of the sky in Bill Gates’ world), and all it takes is one slight, teensy-weensy, itty-bitty life-altering shift of perspective. It’s a small price to pay, really. So pick up your copy of What Color Is the Sky in Your World? today, and —

What’s that? You want to know what color I see when I look up at the clouds? Blue, of course. Clearly, I have the proper perspective on everything. It’s the rest of you pikers that need to get with the program. So c’mon, get those Visas and MasterCards ready.

Back when I was in college, the career guidance office was fond of pushing a book called What Color Is Your Parachute?, which was allegedly chock full of helpful advice for planning a career and hunting for a job. I don’t know for sure, as I never read it. I was a carefree, the-future-will-take-care-of-itself kind of guy. Besides, I knew exactly what I was gonna do for a living. I was going to be a journalist. No, wait, a philosopher. No, wait, strike that, I was going to move out to LA and try and break into writing for TV and film. Or did I decide against that? That may have been the week I was going to be a graphic designer. Regardless, I was not big on the whole life planning thing, but I know people who were.

Thing is, they didn’t necessarily follow their plans either. Why? Because life gets in the way. Some other jerk gets promoted even though you did most of the grunt work. The company you work for was counting on an Internet business to invest capital. Your significant other decides that, contrary to his or her previous opinion, yak farming is a preferable substitute to your continued company. Your pet turtle runs away. Other people, in other words, are almost never cooperative with your plans, even though it is clear that your plans are by far the most sensible possible way the world could work out.

There’s actually a very simple reason for this. Other people are morons.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Will Wright could probably teach the big tobacco companies a thing or two about marketing addictive products. In fact, I’m seriously considering reporting him to the ATF or the FCC or whoever the heck is handling that sort of thing these days. Well, as soon as save enough money for Walter to buy a hot tub so he can have a party so he can make some new friends so he can advance in his career.

Hmmm, I should probably explain what I just said. No, there is too much. Let sum up. I put this computer game on my Amazon.com wish list. My sister brought it for me. I played said game and pretty much everything else in my life came to a screeching halt. That’s probably not enough so I’ll give you some more detail. The computer game in question is called The Sims. It was created by an evidently sadistic chap named Will Wright, who had previously contributed to the decline of productivity in this country by creating the hugely popular Sim games.

For those who are not up on the computer gaming world (and I don’t pretend to be either), Sim City is a simulation game that allows you to build and control a major city from the ground up. You build buildings, design neighborhoods, fight crime, control the power supply, etc. While the Sim series has been enjoying tremendous popularity for ten years, The Sims has only been around since March 2000. However, most people who find themselves unable to turn the game off at three or four o’clock in the morning (present company included) don’t seem to mind its relative infancy.

Basically, with The Sims, instead of controlling cities, you control people. That got your attention. The game takes place in a neighborhood, according to the game literature, actually a suburb of Sim City. There are several predefined homes, some with predefined inhabitants. There are also other lots available for the user to add new homes. Your task: create or import new Sims (people) into the neighborhood, find them jobs (or not), acquaint them with their neighbors, and keep them happy.

How do you know if they’re happy? Well, there’s this slick-looking dashboard on the bottom of your screen that keeps you informed of each Sims’ needs: hunger, bladder, (you don’t actually have to watch them go, the bathroom scenes are mostly censored), energy, social, room, hygiene, comfort, and the all-important, fun. Depending on your Sims’ personality traits, these needs can move up or down pretty fast, and it’s up to you to direct your Sims to do what it takes to meet their needs. So, if your Sim is hungry, you can direct them to cook a meal, have a snack, or call for a pizza. But wait, Mr. Wright has thrown in another curve: if you haven’t directed your Sim to bone up on his or her cooking skills, he or she just might burn the kitchen down if they try to cook. Or, if your Sim hasn’t been going to work regularly, he or she might not have the cash to afford the pizza. I made the unfortunate mistake of directing a mechanically inept Sim to change a light bulb; the poor shlub was electrocuted. Oh, I should have mentioned, your Sims can die if their needs get perilously low. You’d think they would have put that in larger print somewhere on the box.

As you’ll quickly discover, playing The Sims becomes a race against time. You need meet all your Sims’ needs while still getting them to put in a good seven-hour workday so they can advance in their careers. Not an easy task, and the Sims’ get very cranky when their needs are not met. Sound familiar? Say you’ve got a Sim on the Pro Athlete career track (one of ten tracks offered in the standard game), unless you keep your athlete in a good mood, he or she will refuse to work out, a necessity in moving ahead or even keeping a job in that field. One of my Sims flat out refused to use the home gym I directed him to buy. Can you believe that guy?

Which brings me to what are probably the most addictive options in the game: Build and Buy modes. If you are so inclined, and your Sim has the requisite cash, you can build the home of your dreams or at least a reasonable electronic facsimile thereof. The standard game comes with dozens of flooring, wallpaper, and landscaping options as well as over 150 items to furnish the home. Believe me, I was knocking down walls and re-tiling patios until all hours of the night just last week. The kicker is, generally the more expensive the item, the better it will meet your Sims’ needs. Sims who sleep in the priciest beds don’t need to sleep as long, which gives you more time to battle their other seven needs.

There is no “end” to this game, no real goal per se, except to keep your little community moving along and keep the interactions between your Sims (they can fight, get married, have kids, etc.) into infinity. And to make matters worse, Maxis, the company behind the game, has started putting out expansion packs with more items to buy, more housing options, and more career tracks. Yes, I have one. The Sims: Livin’ Large Expansion Pack followed me home from the store one day. Freakish thing. Maxis even offers a Sims Exchange portion of the game’s website, where registered users can upload and download Sim families, publish family albums, and chat with other gamers. (Editors’ note: Pattie will be happy to learn that Electronic Arts will soon be releasing another expansion pack, The Sims: House Party along with a game that supposedly mixes Sim City with The Sims, called Simsville.)

From the web site, I’ve learned that The Sims is a game that’s very dependent upon the player’s personality. Having played the game (virtually nonstop) for the past month I’ve developed a key strategy on maintaining happy Sims (one that will probably not surprise anyone who knows me): multitasking. Listing to the stereo will boost a Sims fun level but dancing with a neighbor boosts both social and fun needs. But all this multitasking doesn’t leave a lot of time for decorating so my Sims live in modest-sized homes furnished with the whatever necessary items they can afford at the time. It was not until I downloaded a house created by a fellow gamer that I was apparently not fully appreciating the Build and Buy modes. This Sim home had among other things, forty bedrooms, half a dozen bathrooms, and a casino. I think there’s a reason this is not a multi-player game.

So before I get back to my pal Walter and his woefully inadequate social life, a few final words about this game:

1. It should come with a warning from the Surgeon General and not one of those wimpy cigarette ones, either, a real one.
2. I hope the folks at Maxis have had fun laughing at the irony of selling a game that depends upon the characters honing their efficiency skills to consumers who will likely spend hours upon hours at their computer while they should be doing laundry. Real funny. Ha Ha. (I will find out where they live, I swear it.)
3. If you read too much into the game and extrapolate what it says about our society and our consumerist culture, you will begin bleeding from the ears. Just play.
4. Simply playing Life when you were a kid will not prepare you for this game, you do need to read the instructions lest your Sims start dropping like flies. It’s quite like the game of Life if you think about it, if the game of Life were designed by mad scientists on steroids.
5. If you do purchase this game, do yourself a favor and pick up a newspaper or call a friend once a while – just to remind yourself where you are.