A classic of my youth by Marvin Gaye, I often feel this is the perfect song for the times. But as I’ve aged, read, and learned, I’ve recognized it could be the perfect song for many times and situations.
From 1971, here is “What’s Going On.”
The Destination
You try the high road,
but you struggle with the reach.
So you slip into the low road,
but suffer in the stench.
So you look for the middle,
striving to be comfortable and well,
but every time you read the news,
you feel like we’re on the road to hell.
Wednesday’s Theme Music
So, reading and listening to news reports (“He was only shot three times in the back, not eight, with three shots in his side” — doesn’t change that he was armed only with his cell phone and was in his own backyard), an old Rolling Stones song started streaming through my mind.
The police in New York City
They chased a boy right through the park
In a case of mistaken identity
They put a bullet through his heart
Heartbreakers with your forty four
I wanna tear your world apart
You heart breaker with your forty four
I wanna tear your world apart
This song was released in 1973, over forty years ago. Pathetic how little has changed, with police shooting black men for little or no probable cause in America, a trend that’s being carried over to homeowners, who fear fourteen-year-old black boys asking for directions. Sad. Sickening.
Here it is, with the bizarre title “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” by the Rolling Stones, from 1973.
The Lead
To all those politicians, political parties, companies, and organizations who like to shade the truth, cut corners, exercise doublespeak, dismiss ethics and principles, and flat-out lie and cheat, you shouldn’t be surprise if your customers and supporters can no longer be trusted because they do the same thing.
They’re just following your lead.
Inundations
Don’t you hate it when you decide to sign up for a newsletter or magazine delivered by email, or sign a petition, or join a group, and they just inundate you with emails? One a day isn’t enough – they have to send you three a day. Doesn’t that suck? It’s like they all believe that the more emails that they send to you, the more you’ll remember and support them.
Yeah, I remember them, all right, but for the wrong reasons. I come to remember and resent them for all the emails they send me, and for making it difficult for me to unsubscribe or “manage” my subscriptions with them.
Politicians and political causes seem like the worst. I’ve reduced my donation levels because I don’t want them to have my name any longer. I’m tired of hearing from them. So often, they send things with weaponized headlines to grab your attention. “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT’S HAPPENING.” “WE NEED YOUR NAME TO STOP THIS! WON’T YOU STAND WITH US?”
That’s why I attempt to cap my posts to five a day. I know, they’re innocuous, with little thought behind them (yes, it shows, right?), and it’s mostly about me and my endless string of complaints, but they’re part of that greater burden of emails roaring into your inbox, demanding your attention.
Feel free to unsubscribe from me to reduce your load, because I feel your pain, brothers and sisters.
The Management Dream
I dreamed I was in upper middle management with a large, international corporation. I was part of a team, and we’d just realized that we’d made a huge mistake. I don’t know what the mistake was, but major negative career, environmental, and economic ramifications were expected as a result of our decision and the corporation’s subsequent actions. It was going to affect the company’s stock price, bottom line, and people’s employment.
Worried, we were having meetings to work out what we could to do save ourselves and mitigate the impacts that we were projecting. I began developing an idea. As I explored it, I was uncomfortable with the moral and ethical side of it, because it meant sacrificing someone by using them as the fall guy. It would save my career, along with many others, and reduce the economic impact, but at a cost to my principles. I didn’t like that.
While exploring that option, I called and visited others, searching for another way. As that happened, I ran into the person who would be the fall guy. They were a young, positive, and optimistic person. They’d realized that blaming them would go a long way to helping many others, and was essentially volunteering to do that. “I’m young,” he said. “I’ll rebound.”
I was dubious. I didn’t want to be convinced. I felt his youth and inexperience was making him over-optimistic. Basically, as the dream progressed, the rest of the management team and this individual put the burden of decision on me.
Back in the building where I worked, I sat in a meeting with the rest of the management team. The agenda was about other things, and not this crises. They were speaking in low voices. I was by myself at the end of a long conference table. I was aware that they sometimes glanced my way. I was aware that they awaited my decision.
I decided. Placing a call on a cell phone, I told the person on the other end, “I have a way out.” I knew I was sacrificing the volunteer. I knew it would work. I didn’t like it.
Hearing me on the phone, other team members began passing on the word that I’d decided. Relief flowed through the room like water.
Turning away, I spoke on the phone and put the plan in action.
The end.
Icebergs
I was dealing with an iceberg yesterday. The iceberg in this instance was a story twist; I could see the tip but not the vast majority of it.
That’s what causes writing to be fun and challenging for me. I like seeing the tip of teh story and the concept and then imagining and writing to find the hidden depths.
people and then imagining what’s unseen underneath, discovering bravery and cowardice, honesty and betrayal under that tip.
The same is true with those characters. I often see and begin with the tip. Writing the story reveals the rest of the character’s iceberg. While I begin with a general idea of the character’s traits and their role, more becomes revealed as the story’s icebergs are explored.
Walking yesterday, and watching drivers making errors, I thought about how much we as people are ice bergs. I saw drivers making bone-headed errors in judgement. I had to remind myself that that was just the tip, and it wasn’t a matter of awareness, intelligence, or ignorance, that broad labels that I often misapply. I don’t know what mental, physical, and emotional issues are attacking them, what problems that they’re dealing with through meds, thought, or by fleeing. They might be driving, but we don’t know what’s happening in their brains and bodies.
Most of us are the same kind of icebergs on the outside, a typical bi-ped. Despite commonalities between us, like a body, two eyes and ears, and a head, things are different inside. Inside that head is a brain, and in that body are organs. Lots of chemicals are being produced and are being employed via neurons and neuro-transmitters and receivers.
It all doesn’t work the same, right? Have you seen any of the studies about the right amygdala and its size and activity in people who tend toward being conservative in their political views? Their right amygdala is larger and often more active. They tend to be more fearful, and tend to dislike change.
That doesn’t mean they’re cowards. Being fearful and being a coward aren’t the same.
The study also found that the amygdala’s activity could be shifted, and that shift affected people’s outlook. It all began with the observation that the United States became more politically conservative after the attacks of 9/11. A Business Insider article by Hilary Brueck best states it:
“The hypothesis social scientists developed about this effect is perhaps best summed up in a 2003 review of research on the subject: “People embrace political conservatism (at least in part) because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity; and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals,” it said.”
A Yale psychologist, John Bargh, wrote about it in a new book, Before We Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do. Bargh explores how our brain’s responses affect our political views, and how that can be changed. For example, in one experiment, after a baseline about political views was established, an exercise was conducted. In the exercise, everyone was told to imagine they were like Superman. Bullets bounced off them. Fire couldn’t hurt them. They’d survive falls off a cliff without injury, and they could fly.
That exercise caused a dramatic change among conservatives and their responses, but no change among liberals. The exercise enabled conservatives to feel safer and less fearful, which triggered more compassionate and optimistic responses in their political views. They became more open to change, and more hopeful.
It’s something that we should keep in mind as we drive around and encounter one another. It’s not always about facts and logic, intelligence and awareness. We’re all icebergs, and what we see is only the tip.
It’s also something to keep in mind as we write about our characters and their motivations and actions.
Time to write like crazy and explore my icebergs, at least one more time.
The Matters & The Change
Stormy Daniels was on Sixty Minutes. I watched. Didn’t learn anything new. Her situation with Donald Trump isn’t changing anything.
Nor will Karen McDougal’s situation with Donald Trump change anything.
Nor will what the other sixteen women who claimed, with graphic details, how he sexually assaulted and molested them, change anything.
Trump supporters will not, or do not, care for the most part. A few outliers will quit supporting him for this behavior. Most of Trump’s supporters will not. They’ll say, as Rush Limbaugh has said, “Bill Clinton,” cherry-picking exactly what happened, and twisting memory into making history different. And, or, Trump supporters will say that his personal behavior doesn’t matter, that it’s his political agenda, and what he’d doing, draining the swamp, that matters.
All that infuriates Democrats, many Independents, and those on the left. They’re disgusted when this behavior is uncovered, no matter who the person is, from Bill Clinton to Al Franken, to Hollywood actors and producers. Anger and support withdrawal usually quickly follows.
It’s been pointed out multiple times that Trump hasn’t drained the swamp with the quality of people he’s selected for his cabinet and leadership positions. Trump claims the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were huge mistakes, but he hired one of the architects, John Bolton, to be his NSC advisor, and John Bolton is hiring more of the thinkers behind PNAC and the horrific continuing wars of the Middle East. That’s one more point that seems to prove that what Trump says doesn’t matter, just as he said he’d never be on vacation as POTUS, and never go golfing, because he’d be too busy.
The children’s protests, walk-outs, and March for Our Lives won’t matter either, to Trump supporters and the NRA. They’re doing their damn best to ensure that the narratives are twisted to fit into a surreal political reality.
In the larger context of our politics, it all matters to the world’s citizens. What Trump and his supporters say, how they say it, and what they do, reveal enormous logic gulfs, and shreds their claims to ethics and morals. They can’t see it, won’t acknowledge it, or, when they acknowledge it, rationalize that it doesn’t matter.
No, the best that can be said about these matters is that America’s youth are bending more sharply to the left and equality every day.
Left is such an easy label, but we’re forced to use it, because gun control and equality are defined as left issues. So, every mass murder in a school followed by nothing more than thoughts and prayers pushes America’s youth further left. Every action against equality for transgender people and the LGBT citizens of America that Trump announces, like his ban on who can serve in the military, pushes them further left.
Because here is the funny thing. Not many of the youngest American generations watch television. They don’t read the mainstream media. They find their own news. Those children who organized, who hear Trump’s words and see how his statements don’t align with his behavior, how he flat-out flips on issues and lies about what’s going on, are being pushed further to the left. Every time they go through these lock outs and lock downs in their schools, and hide in fear, they think, “I am tired of this. It’s not fair.” That’s what they said this weekend. And they move further to the left.
Which isn’t good news for Democrats and the Democratic Party. That party holds itself in the center. It’s opportunistic, short on principles and leadership, and doesn’t offer a great vision for America itself. No, this isn’t about whether Hillary should have won, would have won, or did win. Hillary, despite what so many on the right say, has nothing to do with it.
This is about, for example, stripping away the laws put in place after the last economic meltdown, which is what Democrats and Republicans in Congress just did. This is about, as Trump supporters have pointed out, business as usual in Washington D.C., and the merry-go-round of elected officials and lobbyists, and the influence of money in politics.
Trump wasn’t the answer to that.
Neither was Hillary.
No, this is about a new political will that’s growing and shaping itself. It’s growing among the young people. I’m not sure what shape it’ll take. I’m old, male, and white. They, the young, no matter what their color, race, gender and sexual identity, don’t think as I do. They create their own spin, decide their own truths, and pursue their own actions. Egged on by the high costs of living in America, dwindling opportunity, and failed government leadership, they’re moving away from the institutions and norms that were set up as the functioning center for the last one hundred years. Fewer of them are driving, so cars matter less. Manufacturing had already drifted away and they, the young, no longer see it as the savior it was after World War II. Money matters less because they have to do without it. Bankers have already betrayed them, and revealed their infinite greed, so the young have grown up not trusting them.
Water matters more because they see and experience what happens without it. The environment happens more because they see the impact of the plastic dumped into our waters. Equality matters more, because they know people who are transgender, and LGBT, and recognize them as equals and friends, regardless of the law.
And that is the change that matters, because they are bold and powerful, and growing in numbers. When they finally take control, it’ll be something to behold.
Friday’s Theme Music
So, confession, again. I enjoy the original Mad Max trilogy. The first is the least of them, but I will watch The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome again and again without too much thought.
Which is what I did this week. Thunderdome ends with Tina Turner singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Which makes sense in that context; they’ve already lost it all. Civilization has been wiped out, and they’re trying to rebuild something out of the wreckage, something more humane than Bartertown and the Thunderdome.
But I wake up and read the news, and think, we need a hero. Seems like any fucking day, someone is going to decide, “Today is a nice day to nuke! Let’s find someone and make a radioactive statement.” Then a shit storm of retaliation will fire up. Anarchy and chaos get stirred in as civilization’s plastic veneer melts, and norms, morals, and ethics get tossed.
(As an ironic aside, I first saw The Road Warrior on VHS while I was on temporary duty with the Air Force in South Korea.)
Yeah, gloomy fucking Friday, right? Not really. A hero can stop all that. I don’t see anyone riding in at the moment, but I’m always an optimistic person that eventually sanity prevails.
So listen to Tina singing in 1985, and think about it. Focus on the song’s words, “Looking for something we can rely on, there’s got to be something better out there.”
Yes, there’s got to be.
Michael Seidel, writer 