prejudice

January 22, 2017

What I Have Learned so Far: Life Lessons, Part II

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Here is a second round of ideas about the process of living accumulated in a lifetime of observation and action — success, error, and reflection. My profession allowed me access to the thoughts and stumbles, ascensions and tumbles of thousands of folks. Some of my learning is crafted into the bits below. I published an essay on January 8 with the same title, labeled Part I. Perhaps there will be a third set after a while. Here goes the second one:

  • “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” Einstein most often gets credit for saying so, but the real author is William Bruce Cameron. So much for justice.
  • “Buddies don’t count,” as my friend John Kain says. He meant we should not keep score or expect perfect equity in any relationship. Close attention to a balance sheet will make us (and our soon-to-be former friend) miserable.
  • “Know thyself” is inscribed at the Temple of Apollo. I never met anyone who understood himself completely, myself included. Self-awareness is a “more or less” commodity. We consume too much time preoccupied with what others think of us, analyzing why they did what they did, said what they said. One might more profitably endeavor to know oneself and do good in the world.
  • The ability to start over is essential. I counseled people who made dramatic career changes (from powerhouse attorney to clergyman, for example). I had to evaluate patients afresh to see if I was missing something or misunderstanding their makeup. We must occasionally wipe clean the mirror of our thinking and let ourselves be shocked or enlightened by our unphotoshopped image. As Max Weber suggested, whether we wish to or not, our lives will be influenced by how much truth about ourselves and the world we can bear.
  • To understand yourself you need to know your roots. Our ancestors survived, chose mates, and produced children. We inherited their genes and therefore possess the same urges. These forebears also had to detect who was like them and might be friendly, and who was different and might be dangerous. Fruit enabled survival, so we were handed their love of sweets. The creation of tools further enhanced the chance of staying alive. The ability to form cooperative groups helped, as well. Since they didn’t live long, the genes they delivered to us gave us instincts that worked for what we now think of as the first half of life.
  • A troubling aspect of evolution is that it enabled survival, not happiness. Happiness became the bi-product of human actions only if the emotion helped make sure the kids were born, survived, and thrived. The joy produced by love, for instance, bonded families and increased the likelihood the children would come to generate offspring of their own in time.

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  • We tend to think in terms of before and after: before and after school, before and after you left home; a first job, the death of someone you loved, a first sexual encounter, etc.
  • We don’t need permission from very many people. Asking “to be allowed” means you will hear “no” more than the guy who doesn’t. Such requests make you the hostage of waiters, your children, and people you will never meet again. Often it is OK to just do what you want. No one will stop or question you. The world, within limits, tends to adjust. A wonderful sense of liberation awaits.
  • We need to evaluate our default (automatic) tendencies. Some of us take action, others wait. Some routinely approach, others reflexively avoid. Our strengths can also be our weaknesses when applied to the wrong situations. Best to apply as needed, rather than by default.
  • Personality disorders cause us to rerun mistakes, like an old episode of a poor TV show. One is well-advised to recognize flawed life strategies — recurring behavior patterns contributing to our disappointments. We otherwise risk familiar and fruitless searches for the wrong people; too many or too few chances taken and, either ignoring tomorrow for pleasure today or focusing so much on tomorrow we miss the glory and opportunity offered by the new sunrise.
  • “In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.” Within a group of unremarkable people, you can stand out without being extraordinary. Becoming a big fish in a small pond is easy because the pond is tiny, with little competition, and the other fish are not so fine as you are.
  • There are fewer small ponds these days. Over our history, especially when villages and small towns predominated, we could achieve high status without difficulty. Now we must compete with people all over the globe.
  • The only thing you control is what you do, what you think. The attempt to change other adults is a fool’s errand unless they want to be altered, like an article of clothing needing to be resized. Remember the old psychotherapy joke:

Question: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: One, but the light bulb must want to be changed.

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  • Most selfish people don’t experience much guilt. Those who fear their own selfishness tend to overstate the danger. Even then a self-sacrificing person must care for his own needs. Please recall the airline safety instructions:

If the oxygen mask comes down and you are traveling with someone who is dependent on you, put the mask on yourself first. (Otherwise you’d be of little help to your companion or child).

  • Many folks don’t buy into the belief their choices are as genetically determined as they are. Example:

Maybe you say, “I dress the way I do to look nice.” Well, an evolutionary scholar would tell you ancestors who made a good appearance were more likely to have their choice of healthy, faithful mates and thereby ensure they would create fit offspring. That tendency is “built-in,” so we incline toward concern about appearances well after our biological clocks stop.

  • The average 16th-century man had less information to process in his short lifetime than can be found in a single, daily edition of The New York Times. We must narrow our focus or drown in a sea of real news, fake news, and drivel. Too many of us attend to things of no lasting value.
  • Change can be unsettling. The effort to keep our world exactly as it is, however, can lead us to reduce the size of our lives, resist unfamiliar experiences, and fail to incorporate new people in our circle. Flexibility is a key to life satisfaction. Change is an opportunity to reinvent oneself.
  • Don’t expect sincere apologies any time soon. In 1942 West Coast Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to internment camps by the federal government, which alleged potential disloyalty during the ongoing war. World War II ended in 1945. Not until 1988 did the USA formally apologize, citing the real reasons for this disgraceful act against a group which included 62% U.S. citizens:

Race prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.

  • Inaction, stillness, and patience are powerful tools. Passive-resistance has been a major and successful method of changing the world, one practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Here is a modest illustration of how passivity can work for you:

When my wife and I bought our current home, we dealt directly with the owner. He proposed a price. I was silent. As the seconds passed he lowered the number a few times. The man assumed my failure to respond meant he’d not reached a figure acceptable to us. The truth was, however, he went below what we were prepared to pay.

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  • If you chase people they are inclined to flee. Stop chasing and they may turn toward you or even walk in your direction. Consider this with respect to your romantic life.
  • I had the pleasure of a friendship with a Japanese businessman residing in the USA. His favorite teacher advised him to choose a career that was his second love, not the thing he loved best. Why?

If you do what you love best as your vocation you will discover it becomes a thing you must do, not an activity you choose to do. You may kill the thing you love.

  • Luck is most often defined by happy accidents and near misses: finding a dollar on the street, winning the lottery, that sort of thing. A bigger scale exists. My wife’s maternal grandmother was an indentured servant in Poland. She served on a farm before indoor plumbing was common. When using the outhouse in wintertime she jumped from one cow patty to another to keep her bare feet warm.

In my mother-in-law’s childhood, she and her young friends picked up lumps of coal that fell off passing freight trains to help heat their homes. I can remember washboards and clothes lines in my youth, a day of few washing machines and dryers. In graduate school we used mechanical calculators to compute research results until giant computers became available. The point?

Be grateful for what you have.

  • Think about random events for a moment. The most unlikely event in your life is that you exist at all. Had my grandparents not left Europe at the beginning of the 20th-century, I could have been murdered by the Nazis some time later. Moreover, for each of us to exist as the unique person we are, every ancestor had to meet and procreate with just the mate with whom they did. Had only one made a different choice or perhaps had intercourse on another day, we wouldn’t be here. Others would.
  • I worked for a quirky psychiatrist at a now defunct psychiatric institution. MJ was enormously bright and also quite full of himself. One day he asked me to sub for him at a meeting. I reported back the criticism I heard aimed at him. He was unperturbed. MJ’s only comment was, “A big tree casts a long shadow.” In other words, MJ viewed himself as a big, imposing tree and therefore believed some people were going to take shots at him, be jealous, etc. I thought to myself, “You really are full of yourself.” A second later I realized he was right:

If you are going to do anything significant in life and hold opinions not universally agreed upon, you need to let the bullets bounce off. There will be bullets.

  • In his Politics, Aristotle writes about those who “proceed on the supposition that they should either preserve or increase without limit their holdings of money. The cause of this condition is that they are serious about living, but not about living well.”
  • Aristotle was born over 2400 years ago. Lucky for us, some of the best advice has been around for a while.

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The first image is called Study for Inner Improvement by Helen Almeida, dating from 1977. The next one is Even if Happiness Forgets You Occasionally, Never Forget It Completely, a year 2000 work of Hasson Massoudy, followed by an Untitled 1993 painting of Albert Oehlen. Finally comes Evening Magic created in 2000 by Eyvind Earle. All are sourced from Wikiart.org.

July 19, 2015

How Well Do You Know Yourself? An Answer in Ten Minutes or Less

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We spend more time trying to understand the motivations of others than our own. Not that we aren’t focused on ourselves, but our internal machinery is more likely to ask “How shall I handle this problem?” than why you did or didn’t do something.

“What caused me to do what I just did?” is not at the top of our self-examination question list.

If we are already sure of our motives, as most of us are, self-analysis doesn’t occur. The reasons for our actions seem obvious.

For example, Donald Trump recently said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. And they’re bringing those problems with us (sic). They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

In response to criticism over his remarks, Trump countered, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”  Mr. Trump is certain of his motives without even a bone scan to prove it, but I am much less confident than he is. Is his belief about himself correct? We might ask the same question of ourselves. Ergo, my title: How Well Do You Know Yourself?

I will give you a chance to find out shortly.

I raise the topic because we aren’t as insightful about ourselves as we might be. For example, in matters like politics and religion, we arrive at our opinions intuitively, but think we reasoned them out. In fact, according to Jonathan Haidt, our attitudes are driven by instinct and bubble up from our unconscious. Only later does our logical brain kick-in and generate reasons for those predetermined opinions. The thinking cerebral cortex therefore takes the job of defense lawyer or public relations advocate to justify attitudes and make them palatable to ourselves.

Haidt says we are like monkeys riding elephants. The emotional elephant is 90% in charge of leading the way, but the monkey logician on his back thinks he is in control. I imagine you believe this about some of the people you know — the ones who fool themselves. Perhaps not yourself, however.

You might consider Mr. Trump to be like a friend who doesn’t understand himself — isn’t honest with himself. “The Donald” denies any kind of dominant, irrational, and instinctive prejudice, despite his recent comments disparaging Mexican immigrants. If you believe you are more self-aware than Mr. Trump, his example won’t cause you to question your own psychological self-rationalizing process.

Nearly everyone believes himself to be thoughtful — careful not to jump to conclusions. Indeed, you might believe the two of us are like the majority of those who answered the following Gallup telephone survey with a “yes,” saying they’d vote for a woman, a black, or a Hispanic for President.

The Gallop poll results are below. The question asked of participants comes first, then their responses:

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I don’t believe the data, at least in the top few categories. Why?

First, most of us recognize the political incorrectness of saying we wouldn’t vote for a woman, black, or Hispanic. Even to someone on the phone who promised not to share the information. Second, we are hesitant to admit our bigotry to ourselves.

Finally, look at the question again. The second sentence reads (with my italics): “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be ____, would you vote for that person?” If you are prejudiced, you could well rule out most any woman, black, or Hispanic instinctively. At the same time, however, you might say to yourself, “but if (hypothetically) he has the right stuff, then he’d get my vote.” It wouldn’t take long before you pat yourself on the back for being enlightened. In effect, you have persuaded yourself, “the person’s gender, race, or nationality isn’t important, but only the ability to do the job.” The poll, in the example just described, would produce an inaccurate result.

Now is your chance to find out who you are. The good folks at Harvard developed something called The Implicit Association Test.  Their creation is not like Gallup’s poll. They don’t ask only about your beliefs, but measure your reactions to pictures and words to uncover what your implicit (unconscious) attitude is.

You might be sure you lack bias, but the test is capable of surprising you. No guarantees either way. Perhaps you are as color blind as you think you are.

Take the 10-minute measurement: Implicit Association Test. Click on “Social Attitudes.” Then you will have at least a partial answer to the question: how well do I know myself?

There are a great many tests on the site. They deal with our imbedded reactions to race, age, overweight, sexual preference, mental illness, etc. Don’t expect, if, say, you are black, to automatically have a more favorable implicit association to blacks than to whites on the test particular to such responses.

Another point. You are likely to ask yourself whether a connection exists between preferring “white” over “black” (for example) and your chance of discriminating against someone who triggers an implicit prejudice. Not necessarily. You will find a more detailed answer imbedded within the site after you decide to take a test.

Of course, I don’t know how you, dear reader, will score. Are you, as Dostoevsky wrote, a hostage to those “things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself?”

Do you have the courage to find out?

January 24, 2015

Defining Yourself by What You Hate

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Personality tests put us into categories: introversion/extroversion, thinking vs. feeling, etc. Today I’ll suggest a different method of evaluating yourself: what do you hate? And, by the way, what is the value of hatred?

Dating sites ask you to list your interests, loves, and desires: the types of music, activities, and vacation locations you favor. But wouldn’t you want to know what your prospective lover dislikes? Especially those things that make him red in the face when he speaks of them? What might be on such a list if he were honest?

  • People who are “over-emotional.”
  • Those of a different political party.
  • Humanoids of another religion, or particular ethnic or national group.
  • Children or pets.
  • Fans of a rival sports team (or the team itself).
  • The rich or the poor.
  • The homeless, the elderly, the infirm.
  • Elitists or populists.
  • New York, the West Coast, Texas, etc.

There are two qualities we should consider for each item on the “hate” list:

  1. What is the rationale given for the intense enmity? Does it seem reasonable to you? Is the person open to new information and reconsideration of his opinions or is he closed off?
  2. What is the degree of intensity to his emotion? Sure, most of us possess pet peeves, favor the home team, and wish a particular political party behaved itself. But some people hold such strong dislikes that any mention of the object of their distemper risks causing their heads to explode. Why? More worrisome, what might that tendency predict when they find something troublesome in you?

As Jonathan Haidt notes in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why People are Divided by Politics and Religion, we tend to form opinions and beliefs intuitively — that is, before we evaluate the facts. Our reasoning brain is not only a step behind our intuitions, but inclined to act as a defense attorney or public relations specialist to justify the instinctive stance.

Haidt likens us to riders and elephants, both within the same person. You might believe your rider is in charge, directing the elephant. On the contrary, Haidt says the elephant — the intuitive and quick acting part of our emotional/intellectual being — is the one who determines beliefs for us most of the time. Only then does the rider get engaged and try to rationalize our convictions. To Haidt, we are 90% elephant-like and 10% rider-like regarding the extent to which our instincts or our capacity for thoughtful analysis, respectively, are in charge.

Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and other social scientists point to the historical survival value of being able to come to quick decisions, decide who is a friend and who is a foe, etc. Moreover, strong dislikes and hatreds have been a necessary part of staying alive since the dawn of man. Even today, a too-rational soldier might question why he is about to kill another man who, in the abstract, deserves to live just as much as he does. The propagation of our species demands the capacities to love and to hate — the latter, at least, in extreme circumstances.

Now I’m going to throw you a curve. I will offer a thought experiment, meaning a hypothetical scenario, to help us understand the “role” of hatred. What would happen if we erased every dislike in the world and any recollection of those dislikes? How would we be different? Would we all live in peace?

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Well, to some extent we can already observe a variation of that thought experiment in the USA and other so-called “civilized” countries: political correctness (PC), an idea not yet in the culture in the 1950s. Back then it was not difficult to find people who were proud of stating their bigoted convictions about various racial, religious, and national groups. I’m not suggesting folks like those disappeared, but public discourse is more careful to avoid frank prejudice. Even some of the most intolerant main stage figures attempt to deny their bigotry, however obvious to the rest of us.

How successful has the PC movement been at tamping down outrage? While there are fewer cross burnings and lynchings, I imagine you’d agree we haven’t wiped out indignation and those who feed on it. Moreover, I believe a real life version of my thought experiment would reveal the invention of new hatreds to fill the role of those eliminated. Kind of like a spring-loaded Pez candy dispenser, once you remove the top object, an ill-willed person will find something else popping up to chomp on.

Those of you old enough to remember the ’90s will recall that once the USSR fell, US religious fundamentalists who could no longer rail against godless communism changed their focus to homosexuality. Their hell-fire and brimstone sermons were directed at “those people.”

Some of our fellow humans — not a small number — are better described by what they hate than what they love. Indeed, one might argue that in the absence of the hated “other,” the angry ones wouldn’t know who they are. Without “sinners” who must go to hell, there can be no humans who are given a heavenly reward because of their goodness — the opposite of whatever they deem bad and deserving of harsh judgment.

Anger is part of our nature; something too handy (necessary?) to completely discard. We bind ourselves together as much by the things we hate (such as, the Chicago White Sox) as the things we love (the Chicago Cubs). Not every sports fan is a maniac, but if even athletic teams can trigger out-of-control partisan riots, as sometimes happens in European style football (soccer), no wonder we are prone to other corrosive divisions: people of color vs. whites, Democrats vs. Republicans, Turks vs. Greeks, etc.

The human race turns with ease into good guys and bad guys, as demonstrated by psychologists like Stanley Milgram in his work on obedience to authority, and Philip Zimbardo in his prison experiment.

For a fictional view of whether hatred would be suppressed by my memory-wiping fantasy, I urge you to read Howard Jacobson’s brilliant novel, J, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. J presents us with a world without recollection, where history books and mementos are absent and one’s lineage is almost impossible to trace. Ancient enmities and prejudices are forgotten. Proper etiquette requires regular apologies to others in the face of even the small possibility of offense.

This sounds serene, but J describes a world inhabited by metaphorical ghosts who reside in a past never fully described. The negative afterimage of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED is always in the background — a distant, dark event so terrible (if it occurred, since no one is sure) discussion is discouraged. The book suggests our animal nature is not easily suppressed by laws or political correctness.

Who will win? Our better angels or those creatures who fit a Hobbesian vision where “the life of man (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?” I am rooting for love, but I think our best chance of self-correction is first to look at the human condition in all its imperfection. Jacobson’s J gives us an opportunity to do this. The novel is also LOL funny (at times) and beautifully written throughout.

Nonetheless, the author offers us a cautionary tale of what it means to be different in a civilization full of grievances an inch under the surface. It implicitly asks the reader whether love can triumph over the dark side of human nature — the worm at the heart of the rose.  J will get you thinking about who you are and who we are. The greatest books do.

June 27, 2013

Hurting People: How Our Distance Makes a Difference

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We tend to associate distance with safety. We even have a phrase for it: “a safe distance.” When you were little, mom would say “Be careful. Stay away from X.” The danger might have been traffic, fire, a particular person. Mom’s advice was, in effect, to keep a distance. But there is a problem with separation that isn’t usually mentioned: that, at a distance, we can be safe, but others are more easily harmed.

A troubling thought? Perhaps you won’t continue to read, and thus distance yourself from that which is bothersome.

I suppose it started with the bow and arrow. Or maybe just a rock and some strong-armed caveman. It was doubtless easier and less messy to fell an enemy 50-yards away than to have to grapple with him hand-to-hand, pit your strength against his, smell his breath. No fun to hear his voice and his bones both cracking, and be fouled by his blood.

The machinery of death has only gotten capable of greater distancing since then. Missiles and torpedoes and drones allow men and women to avoid even the sight of those they injure. The infliction of death has become a computer game, but without colorful imagery.

We distance ourselves from violence in other ways, as well. Our volunteer army fights our fights. Our own hands don’t get dirty or injured; we don’t see the gore, except on TV. Wars become easier to start and continue if someone else’s children are fighting them. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, “…violence has been taken out of sight, rather than forced out of existence.”

We distance ourselves from illness, too. Doctors still made house-calls when I was a little boy and the sick did most of their suffering at home where families watched close-up. Now we go to the MDs alone or with one other person and, even worse, to hospitals for treatment. True, visitors are allowed, but they only see the pain and suffering in small doses. Other people (doctors, nurses, and aides) do the caretaking. Mortality is kept neatly shrouded. No wonder that so many of us act as though we will live forever.

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We have created institutions that make it easier to avert our eyes from the first-hand observation of death, with its personal message about our fate and fatality. TV, another modern intermediary between us and life, adds its message that death is something that is acted, not experienced; that tomorrow, today’s dead movie character will get up from the floor and take a different role in another fictitious life.

The business world is not free of this distancing. A CEO can fire people she has never met. She doesn’t see the children who no longer have decent meals to eat. She won’t observe the sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression of the mother she dismissed; the one whose life she diminished with the stroke of a keyboard.

That same keyboard lets us shatter the lives of a loved one with impulsively expressed anger or a cowardly, antiseptic message of rejection. Email missives become missiles, targeting hearts to be broken, protecting the sender from the faces that dissolve into waterfalls of tears.

Our distancing, both psychological and physical, allows those who represent us to do damage for which we hardly feel responsible. In ancient Greek city-states like Athens, all the citizens had a direct hand in making decisions; that is, legislating. There, a real democracy existed, (although women and slaves were excluded).

In our much larger democratic-republic, we elect people we have never met to act in our name. These days, few who are paying attention are happy with the result, but many behave as if politics is somewhere else, someone else’s problem. Better not to think of it, they say. And, once again, the damage comes with our remoteness from the nitty-gritty of governance.

Sometimes the distance does cause us damage rather than those faraway. Say you buy something over the internet. No human contact involved, quick, and easy. But just try to contact customer service. Now you want human contact. How many telephone prompts are you willing to endure? Is it even possible to get to someone who might have the authority to remedy your situation? You have been distanced into virtual helplessness.

Small businesses in our nation’s antiquity existed when people worked for themselves at some craft, on a farm, or in a “mom and pop” store. When you purchased something from them, you dealt directly with the persons who made or supervised the making of the product or the growing of the produce. Now the business owner is most often unseen and might have no idea how his products are actually manufactured; no first-hand experience.

It is said that the distancing influence of bureaucracies and factories enabled the 20th century’s greatest crimes: the well-organized and systematic attempts to destroy entire ethnic groups like the Jews and Gypsies of Central Europe. Indeed, the Holocaust required a level of remoteness and the employment of interconnected systems of manufacture that couldn’t have been imagined at any earlier time in history. Countries other than Germany had greater and more violent histories of anti-Semitism, but none were so advanced technologically and so organized bureaucratically.

The assembly line that made cars easier to produce made the destruction of humans easier, as well, and required as little passion. The person at the far end of that assembly line hardly had any sense of what he was contributing to.

The Nazis learned that they risked push-back from the part of the German public that was upset by seeing pogroms against the Jews in their neighborhoods, as happened on Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”) in 1938. They came to realize that the worst of their crimes had to come in a place where they could not be seen. And, that “out of sight” soon meant “out of mind” to most Germans, a point made in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, an important book upon which this essay draws significantly.

Distance also enabled those involved in a small piece of the giant Nazi killing machine to miss the moral implications of what they were doing. Without the factories to build the railroad cars, the everyday laborers who laid the railroad tracks, the clerks who kept transport schedules to bring the human “cargo” for “special handling” (a linguistic distancing) to the death camps, the atrocities could only have happened on a smaller scale.

Without the architects and engineers who designed the crematoria, and scientists who created and manufactured the poison gas — all at a great remove from the actual act of committing the murders — the genocide of millions in less than four years would have been impossible.

Remember, too, that the Nazis took away the names of their victims and assigned them tattooed numbers, still another form of distancing that made their targets easier to treat inhumanly. Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, understood the distancing effect of numbers very well: “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.”

Xenophobia lives most comfortably at some distance from the alien objects of its dislike. How many anti-Muslims in the USA have ever had a conversation with a Muslim except for a few seconds in a check-out line? Or a similar exchange with an immigrant from south of the border?

In the absence of interaction that is personal and intimate we can imagine anything we want about others. We mentally take away their individual characteristics and make them uniform members of a category. Our fantasy and fear can transform them into bomb-throwers or economic leeches, as we choose. And, if a prejudice-based effort to keep them away fails, what else is there to do but aspire to live in a gated-community where the self-imposed distance is maintained by walls and security guards?

There is an old saying, “to have a heart.” That is, to be capable of pity — to be sensitive to the hurt in our fellow-woman and fellow-man. But the heart is an organ that is best engaged by what can be seen and what can be touched. In effect, we are more often touched by what we can, quite literally, touch. The world today removes that opportunity much too often.

There is no going back, of course. By that I mean that we cannot return to ancient Greece and have each citizen (now, thankfully, including women) vote on all matters of civic importance any more than we can get rid of remote-controlled missiles and the impersonality of email communication coming from someone higher-up or faraway. But we should be aware of what has been lost and try, as best we can, to recreate a personal, intimate concern for people. We can look into the eyes of those potentially affected by our actions at close range. We can fight a kind of last-ditch stand against a further erosion of the compassionate contact that is necessary in any life worth living.

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The top image is a mileage sign on Highway US 41 to Gowers Corner, FL by Dan TD, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.