Entry 512: Bad Week

So many things happened this week, most of them bad, most of them racially-charged, that I don't even know where to begin.  Actually, I do, because one them is much bigger than the rest: the killing of George Floyd by a policeman and the subsequent riots.

Let's start with the riots.  I don't like them; I wish they would stop; I think they ultimately hurt the communities they are putatively meant to serve; but I understand them.  There is only so much people can take before they retaliate -- and retaliation isn't always rational.  It's fight or flight, and sometimes there's nowhere to run.  Imagine if people in your community kept being killed by heavy-handed police officers over petty shit like using a fake $20 bill or selling bootlegged cigarettes.  How would you respond?  How many deaths could you sit by and watch before you lashed out?

One of the ironies of this is that hard-core Trump supporters, who are surely among those least sympathetic to the rioters,* should be the ones who understand them the best.  They are constantly threatening violence for government overreach.  I mean, they're freaking out over having to follow basic safety guidelines in a time of a global pandemic.  Imagine if one of them got choked to death by a police officer for not wearing a mask.  Imagine if the police officer was black.  It reminds me of something Charles Barkley said in one of his books: Poor white people have much more in common with poor black people than they do with white people who aren't poor.  If they ever accepted this, they would have so much more power in this country, but they don't.  It's like they'd rather it be that they have a dollar and a black person a nickle than both people have ten dollars.

*Trump of course played to type by tweeting "when the looting starts the shooting starts," which is horrific even by his standards.  Twitter responded by flagging it, which, in my opinion, is worse than doing nothing.  Calling more attention to an inflammatory or false statement only amplifies it.  If Twitter wants to do the right thing, they can delete it.  That's the only way to handle it.  Until they starting doing that they are complicit in the spread of Trump's lies and propaganda.

As for the actual killing of Floyd, I haven't watched the video and probably never will.  But I've seen the photos and read the reports, and it sounds like murder to me (in fact he has been charged with third-degree murder*).  So senseless and so unnecessary.  Once Floyd said that he couldn't breath, all the officer had to do was ease up.  That's it.  Take his knee off his neck; get the man off his stomach; let his chest expand and get some oxygen.  He was handcuffed and surrounded by four police officers.  What's he going to do?  Where's he going to go?  And if that wasn't bad enough, the officer didn't even release him after he went motionless.  He kept the pressure on for nearly three minutes!  That's... that's... I can't even think of the right word -- despicable isn't harsh enough.  And none of the officers tried to revive him after they realized he was unconscious.  They did call an ambulance, but by then it was too late.

*And here you do have to wonder if this would have happened if not for the riots.

It will be interesting to see if the officer, Derek Chauvin, actually goes to trial and is convicted.  The standard for this type of thing is almost impossibly high, and there are already people claiming that the technique used by Chauvin is not improper.  (One of them, from near my hometown, has been fired for flippantly posting as much on a social media account.)  Also, the coroner's report doesn't state asphyxiation as the cause of death and mentions that his preexisting medical conditions and possible intoxicants could have aided in his death.  So, you can see the defense forming.  Step 1: Dredge up Floyd's past offenses to make him sound like a violent criminal (even though his alleged offense was using a phony $20 bill).  Step 2: Describe a scene in which Floyd was raucously resisting arrest before the cameras started rolling.  Step 3: Confirm that a knee to the neck is a legitimate, non-life-threatening technique for controlling an insubordinate suspect (even though many police departments have abandoned it).  Step 4: Argue that it was Floyd's preexisting heart condition that killed him, not the officer's knee on his neck.

Will it work?

I don't know, maybe.  Even with that defense, it's pretty hard to get around the fact that a man who was alive and fine at time x was dead ten minutes later, and the only thing that changed was that an officer pinned him down and knelt on his neck while he complained about not being able to breath.  I mean, even if he did have preexisting health issues -- does that make it okay?  The officer willfully ignored all signs that his charge was struggling for life -- to the point that he brushed off other officers' suggestions to ease up, and to the point he was getting called out by bystanders.

You don’t have to sit there with your knee on his neck,” exclaimed a bystander off-camera, addressing the officer in language salted with expletives. “He is enjoying that. You are. You are enjoying that. You could have put him in the car by now."

That's the bottom line.  It's plain as day how completely unnecessary and cruel it was to keep George Floyd pinned down in that manner, for that long, against his pleas for help.

Another passage from the article linked above that especially caught my eye:

The fact that Mr. Chauvin kept applying pressure when Mr. Floyd was no longer struggling made it appear to be a case of an officer trying to punish a suspect for doing something that the police did not like — which could include resisting arrest, spitting or insulting an officer, experts said. 

If it was a form of “street justice,” that is considered a form of bullying that police academies also instruct against. “It is teaching someone a lesson — next time you will think twice about what you do,” said Philip M. Stinson, a former police officer turned criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.

This makes the most sense to me, and it exemplifies what I think is wrong with policing in our country.  Too often we treat policing as if it's a war to be won against the criminals -- "war on crime" is literally the slogan -- when it should be treated, in my opinion, as a peacekeeping pursuit.  Many officers in Minnesota, in particular, have embraced a warrior mentality in their work.  But we don't need warrior police officers.  (If you want to be a warrior, join the military and literally be a warrior.)  People getting arrested aren't foreign invaders trying to take over our country.  They're by and large members of our community who are doing the same shit as everybody else and happen to be the ones who get caught, or they are struggling in some way -- financially, emotionally, mentally.  The objective of police work shouldn't be to win wars; it should be to avoid them.

And this gets back to racism, because the fucked up thing is that I think the vast majority of people in this country, of all political persuasions, would agree with me on the above paragraph, but for the fact that too many white people are terrified of black people.  That's why this shit never changes.  There are too many people that don't really mind seeing somebody like George Floyd die.  I'm not saying they like it; they might even admit it's not right, but -- but -- deep down they think, Well, at least I'm safe.  At least, this is keeping me safe.  And they're not wrong.  But there's another way.

Alright, I could easily continue on this subject for another 1,500 words, but I'm running out of time, so I'll just stop here.

Until next time...

Entry 511: Sleep In The Time of Coronavirus

Quarantine has been messing me up physiologically in two ways: 1) I'm eating worse; 2) I'm sleeping worse.  I'm able to mitigate the former by exercising a lot -- I do a strenuous workout almost every day.*  The latter is more difficult to manage.  I've never been great at sleeping.  The only time I'm able to get the amount of sleep my body requires is when I'm able to sleep in until at least 10 am.  And I can probably count on my fingers the number of those days since I became a father.

*My regimen, if you are wondering, is to take virtual Krav Maga (shadow boxing and calisthenics) Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; go for a long run on Wednesday; take a "boot camp" class (weights and calisthenics) on Thursday; go for a long hike Saturday or Sunday; rest/recover the other day.

It's even worse now.  Without the responsibility of needing to be awake and alert to get my kids to school or get myself to the office, I'm gradually pushing my bedtime back further and further.  It's now past 12:30 am and sometimes later than that.  Two nights ago I went to sleep around 2:00 am.  The problem with this, of course, is that I'm still waking up at the same basic time, because the kids wake me up.  My mindset is, "Who cares?  I'm barely leaving the house today." I know that that's a bad way to think -- I still need to work and there is inherent benefit in just not being tired all the damn time -- but it's a difficult thing to change.  I can do it for a night or two, but then I slide right back into my familiar ways.

To makes matters worse, my anxiety levels have been a lot higher than usual because of the virus.  (Haven't everybody's?)  There's no real end is sight, even if we've decided as a country to open up and just pretend like things are better now.  It also doesn't help to consume true crime podcasts right before I go to bed and try to sleep.  The other night I listened to a 30 for 30 about this biathlete from the '80s, Kari Swenson, who was abducted while trail running by a son and father, in some sort of demented, troglodytic attempt to capture a bride for the son.  She escaped only after getting shot in the chest and watching a friend, who had come to rescue her, get shot in the head and killed.  It's a fascinating story, and it ends on something of a positive note -- she survived and the men were ultimately brought to justice -- but it's not the best material to put one's mind at ease.  That night I had a dream that I was trapped in a coffin-like box with an IV attached to keep me alive to maximize my suffering.  The tenor of the dream wasn't actually as terrifying as it sounds (I can't image a worse thing in real-life), but it was definitely weird and unsettling.

Speaking of weird and unsettling, how about the fact that Joe Biden is the only thing standing between sane people and four more years of our petty, incompetent, wannabe-tyrant president?  I still think Biden was the best choice from a less-than-stellar Democratic field, and I haven't lost all hope that he could win in November (anti-Trumpism might carry the day, no matter what), but, my goodness, the man just doesn't instill much confidence.  I think his latest gaffe with Charlemagne the God will blow over pretty quickly, but it's definitely cringe-inducing.  It reminds me of the Quentin Tarantino video below.  But, the thing is, like Quentin Tarantino, I don't think Joe Biden's stock will fall that much will black people.  Many, I suspect, even agree with his sentiment, if not the clumsy way he conveyed it. 

[This video would be much funnier without the subtitles trying to be funny.]

The allegations of sexual assault again Biden by Tara Reade are much more troubling.  I haven't said much about this before now, because I didn't really know what to say.  I still don't.  I don't have a strong opinion on the matter.  That's a bizarre thing to say about such a serious matter, I know, but I don't feel like I have enough knowledge to form a strong opinion.  I don't think anybody does (with the exceptions of Biden and Reade, of course), and I don't think anybody ever will.  The dearth of evidence makes it virtually unknowable.  The best we can do is guess and speculate and that's not very satisfying, and maybe not even appropriate.

What I will say is that I am still quite comfortable voting for Biden in November, especially given his opponent.  I mean, if you want to turn this election into a referendum on women's rights, well, it's not even a contest.  But, you can say that about literally every issue, as far as I'm concerned.

Until next time...

Entry 510: Quarantine Continues, For The Most Part

I was listening to the writer Chuck Klosterman on a podcast the other day, and he was talking about how when this pandemic is final over – like, really over – there is going to be a spate of human interest stories about parents of young children feeling voids in lives because their kids are no longer with them 24/7.  I think this is spot on, because I can tell I’m going to be one of those parents.  As much as I want everything to go back to normal, as much as my children drive me insane (and they do drive me insane), I genuinely cherish the extra time we have together now.  I know there is going to be a weird sadness in my life when they go back to school.

And when will that be?

Who knows?

Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is that here in DC school will start next fall as usual.  I don’t know if it should or not, but unless things go really badly in the places that are already opening up now, I don’t think we have it in us as a city to hold out past that.  In general, my hunch is that everywhere is going to open up too early, from a public health standpoint, and then places are going to shut back down piecemeal if they are hotspots of resurgence.  This won’t really work, because the damage will already be done by the time one area decides to shut down again, and the virus will already be passed on to the next place.  We are going to carry on in this way -- flare-ups and shutdowns -- until we develop a treatment/vaccine or we build up herd immunity, neither of which is likely to happen anytime soon.  The result is going to be a lot of unnecessary death and sickness.

I hope I'm wrong.  I could be.  That’s always a possibility.  It’s not out of the question that people and businesses will social distance even if there aren’t any official guidelines in place.  You see photos of people in a crowded bar in Wisconsin, but that’s probably because the ban just lifted, and it’s also probably a one-off political statement (albeit a stupid one). I doubt that's how that bar will look on a Thursday afternoon once the newness wears off and the cameras go away.  It's possible enough people will be safety-conscious on their own – either out of fear of catching the disease or out of social pressure – to keep things leveled off.  The result will be a lot of unnecessary death and sickness, but less than it would be otherwise.

One reason why this more optimistic scenario could come to bear is that it is in every person's own immediate and obvious self-interest not to get infected.  It's easy to delude yourself that something like climate change is a fake crisis because nobody is going to personally get sick and die of climate change in the next few weeks.  It's a lot harder to do this for something like the coronavirus that can affect you unquestionably and quickly.  This is why the overwhelming majority of people support quarantine in some form, and why the governors who have responded most aggressively are the most popular right now.  There's a scene in the movie Dallas Buyers Club (didn't love it, but it had its moments), when Matthew McConaughey's character is first diagnosed with HIV, and he's in denial about it, telling his friend that's it's all a bunch of BS, and his friend says to him, "What if it ain't?"  And that's a question that might keep even most skeptics in line.  "What if it ain't?"  We shall see.

In other news, my boys and I all got haircuts since my last entry.  It went pretty well.  S ordered a decent set of clippers online, and then after that, it's really just picking what guard you want.   The kids' cuts look fine, but you can clearly tell they were done at home by amateurs.  They're just buzz cuts; they're not cute.  I mean, they are, because they're on my kids, but they're not  fashionably styled like they are when we go to cartoon cuts.  They're not kid chic.   Also, we messed up at first, so Lil' S2 has a patch on the back of his head that's cut nearly to the skin.  S meant to use a three guard, but instead she used a one guard (3 mm), so it took off much more than we wanted.  No biggie.  It's in the back, and he's four, so he couldn't care less.

My cut, on the other hand, looks almost the exact same as it does when I get it done by a professional.  I doubt anybody could tell it apart unless they really studied the edges, which nobody ever does.  This begs the question: When quarantine is over, will I have S cut my hair for me all the time?  Probably not.  It's just easier to give somebody $25 and be done with it.  Plus, I feel miserly when I do shit like that on my own.  I feel like, if you can afford to pay somebody to cut your hair, then you should pay somebody to cut your hair.  But that's just me.

Anyway, that's enough for now.

Until next time...

Entry 509: B-A-N-A-N-A-S

A lot going on in our nation right now -- states are starting to relax their social distancing guidelines; Joe Biden made a statement about the sexual assault allegation against him; murder hornets are apparently a new thing we need to worry about -- so naturally I'm going to do a post about bananas.



First off, I love bananas.  They are probably my favorite fruit all things considered.  They taste good; they're plentiful and affordable; they're easy to prepare; they're don't drip juice everywhere; it's easy to tell how ripe they are; and even after they turn brown, you can use them in smoothies.  Just an all-around top-notch fruit.*  They aren't the very best at any one thing, but they don't have a weakness.  They're the Willie Mays of fruits.  We always keep our fruit bowl stocked with bananas.  In fact, at the moment, it's the only thing in our fruit bowl.

*And don't give me any of that technical botanical mumbo-jumbo, "Actually, the banana is a berry..."  No it isn't.  It's whatever we say it is, and we say it's a fruit, so it's a fruit.  Although, it's an inside joke with my friend JW that the banana is the world's largest herb.  

The other day, I noticed our banana supply was getting low, so I added five bananas to our weekly Instacart order.  The shopper, for some reason, interpreted this as five bunches of bananas.  Such is the danger of using Instacart.*

*It's still a good service though, and I didn't report the mistake or anything like that.  Those shoppers are putting their health on the line to bring me food.  I have a big tip, no complaints policy right now.  Come to think of it, I pretty much always have that policy, if only for selfish reasons.  I'm too lazy to bother complaining, and I don't like making people mad who know where I live.

What to do with 30 bananas before they attract a swarm of fruit flies?  Thankfully, we were able to offload a dozen on our neighbors.  This nice Italian family recently moved in down the street, and they came over once (the wife and three kids; I still haven't met the husband) and then everything got locked down.  Since then, we've talked to them from a distance a few times, and S exchanges occasionally texts with the wife.  They left some Nutella and homemade bread on our doorstep once, which was really sweet, so I guess we returned the favor with bananas.  I think we got the better end of that exchange.  Although, it was sourdough bread, which is not my favorite.  So...

S made banana bread today, but it's quite terrible to be honest.  I guess she's worried about the kids' sugar intake because she only used half the amount the recipe asked for.  It's not very sweet, and it's also really dry for some reason.  She said she followed all the other instructions, but I dunno.  She's not very careful about things like that.  I give it about a 50-50 chance she messed something else up.  But I'm certainly not going to press the issue.  The last thing we need is to get into a quarantine fight (a quar-rel, if you will) about banana bread.  I'm also not going to eat the bread though.  Nobody is going to.  That thing is destined for our compost bin.  I'd put it in there tonight, but S asked to save it for at least another day.  She's hoping the kids will magically like it tomorrow, even though she knows they won't.

Alright, gotta go.  It's getting late here.

Until next time...

[Here's a screenshot of the order: 5.0 Bananas.  Notice the picture is of a single banana and the approximate weight is that of a single banana.  I just wanted to make very clear that this was not an error on my end.]

Entry 508: Idea Thievery

I very rarely answer my phone if it’s from a number I don’t recognize.  If it’s truly important, I figure, they’ll leave a message, and I can call them back.  But the other day I let it go through to voicemail, and it turned out to be from Michelle Obama!  Yeah, okay, it was just a recording.  She was calling on behalf of DC mayor Muriel Bowser about Coronavirus updates.  I’m not sure why Michelle Obama was doing this and not the mayor herself.  I guess more people will listen if it’s the former first lady.  To any event the message was basically: Yeah, this sucks, but please continue to sit tight. 

And I think that’s the correct message.  Physical distancing is the only weapon we have right now against this pandemic.  There’s no treatment and no vaccine.  All we can do is lessen the spread until these things are developed or the virus runs it course.  Quarantine is the least worst of a few awful options.  If we go a different route, we are likely going to experience the same negatives as quarantine and a bunch more people will be sick or dead.  That to me is why “opening up the economy” is such a bad idea.  It’s not an either/or.  If the disease is running roughshod over society, there isn’t going to be much of an economy, because nobody will want to go out in public.  Most people – even most people who claim they support opening everything back up – probably aren’t going to go to bars and movie theaters and sporting events if they think there’s a chance they could get really sick or die.  And how do you ensure a reliable, healthy workforce?

You might notice I used hedging words above like "to me" and “probably.”  I think these are important qualifiers.  We don’t know very much about the virus and societal trends and human behavior are very difficult to predict.  I don’t think anybody on either side of the debate (so far as there is one) should be completely confident in their position.  Everything is uncertain, and while people can (and should) say that right now this uncertainty dictates we proceed very cautiously, nobody can say they know how things will turn out.  Bad processes sometimes lead to good results and vice-versa.  Shit happens or it doesn’t.  You can end up looking really foolish or painting yourself into an alternate reality if you don’t allow for this.

Beaches are good example of what I'm talking about.  There has been a lot made of photographs of people congregating kinda closely together on beaches, and different decision-makers have handled this differently.  In Florida the governor has been very hesitant to limit access to the beach; in California the governor has been more strict.  It's turning into a red-state/blue-state thing, but it shouldn't.  And those of us who have a more liberal outlook on life should be wary of falling into this trap. If red-staters want to play politics and deny reality (and many of them clearly do), then that's on them.  But those of us who don't want to do that, shouldn't then move to a polar opposite position; we should move to the true position, as best as we can discern it.

With respect to the beaches, it might be the case that being outside, even in relatively close contact with strangers, is not that dangerous.  I listened to a podcast recently with medical professionals discussing this.  The virus seems to thrive indoors much more so than outside.  You might be okay at a relatively crowded beach.  But it's not safe to say this for sure, and that should be the message.  It shouldn't be OMG! Everybody on the beach is an idiot and they are all going get coronavirus and die.  It should be We need to assume this is not safe right now.  Once we learn otherwise, we will open things up.  It's about how you communicate risk.

If I was the governor of a blue state, and I was getting a lot of push-back for my stay-at-home orders, I would say explicitly it's a risk mitigation strategy.  I would say that my state is not going to be the "guinea pigs" for the rest of the country.  I would frame it in a way as if the decision to open up is stupid (because it is based on what we know) while allowing for the possibility that it could work.  Then I would watch those states that are opening up and see if there is something to be learned from them.  I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.  It's a cliché to say the virus doesn't care if you're Democrat or Republican, but it's true, and it cuts both ways.  The virus isn't going to wreak havoc just to give irresponsible people their comeuppance.

In general, there is a tendency to reflexively hate on ideas made by people on the opposite side of the political spectrum.  It's understandable, but not everything terrible people say is terrible.  The real cunning move is to steal the other side's good ideas and turn them into your own.  That's what I would do if I was a politician.  It'd be DG 2020: The Idea Thief.

Until next time...