Work the Problems
This essay is written from an American perspective for all people living in the United States. I am only one person and do not claim any special expertise. I grew up near Charleston, South Carolina, studied economics in college, and worked for four years as a federal tax reporter in DC, starting with a stint on Capitol Hill. At the end of the day these are just my thoughts, most of them borrowed from people much smarter and more thoughtful than me. My goal is to provide a way forward from this horrible situation we find ourselves in.
Body and Soul
We are at a low point. I just turned 30. I thought 9/11 was the craziest event I would ever witness, or maybe the financial meltdown and Great Recession. President Trump’s long-shot election was high on the list. But for people my age and younger, the last four months have changed our perspective about everything. The federal government’s initial response to a once-in-a-century pandemic was so profoundly incompetent that the only viable policy to slow it was a total lockdown of society, triggering a once-in-a-century economic contraction that in many important ways lacks precedent. After two or three months stuck at home, we had virtually no emotional bandwidth to process George Floyd’s killing, which threw into sharp relief the chronic crisis of police brutality.
Make no mistake, COVID-19 should still be our top priority. Four months in, this plague is virtually guaranteed to be a leading cause of death in the U.S. this year. On a bad day, the virus still kills 1,000 Americans. It disproportionately kills black men. But even a plague cannot delay justice for George Floyd. The rest of us are waking up to the reality that black people in America are second-class citizens. “No justice, no peace” is a statement of fact: Peace implies and requires justice for all. The time for solutions is now.
Yet whether or not we actually solve these daunting problems will largely depend on our mental and emotional state. Freaking out is not a strategy. Almost every time I have driven during the pandemic, I have witnessed road rage. We are nowhere near the right headspace to heal our nation’s body and soul.
Contemplating race in America requires acknowledging how our institutions damage black people’s lives without the cops ever showing up. We will have to address myriad difficult issues — from education to drug policy to the long-term decline in family stability across all races — to realize a just and lasting peace.
Per Ardua Ex Astra
Oscar Wilde quipped, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I want to suggest that the stars offer us a way out of the gutter that has been 2020. Go back to Saturday, May 30th, around 3:22 p.m. Eastern Time. Reuters captured the moment: “The exhilarating spectacle of the rocket soaring flawlessly into the heavens came as a welcome triumph for a nation gripped by racially-charged civil unrest as well as ongoing fear and economic upheaval from the coronavirus pandemic.” It was a thrill to watch America launch humans into space for the first time in almost a decade. Astronauts. That must have been what got me thinking.
This sucks. I personally avoid profanity, especially in writing, but since the pandemic started I have seen no other way to articulate our deteriorating situation. We are in a tailspin. The warning lights are all flashing. Our ship is on fire. And I just heard an automated voice say, “Hull integrity compromised.” In a crisis like this, NASA trains astronauts to respond coolly and methodically. “Work the problem.” I am certainly not an astronaut, any more than you probably are, so that clinical calm is probably beyond our reach. But if we are going to figure this mess out, we have to take a deep breath and order our thoughts. We need to work the problems.
My epiphany was delivered by rocket, but for me the larger sense that we all need to calm down started with the Cooper incident. In addition to the racism, I was disturbed by how completely avoidable the whole thing was. I wish one of the Coopers had taken a step back, which was possible well before Amy tried to sic the police on Christian. Instead, they both ended up getting death threats. My desperate plea then and now is that we must figure out how to disagree respectfully, de-escalate conflicts, and constructively engage with each other, ideally to find common ground on which we can build a solution.
Don’t Wanna Fight
A startling minority of individuals, seemingly of no particular color or creed, think violence in some form or the other will help resolve our difficulties. Ideas range from bricks to tanks. Violence will only fuel more violence. If you see it as a viable response to police brutality and general societal oppression, set morality aside and consider that the U.S. military will ultimately kill the most people.
For you law and order types, that grim logic extends to looters and rioters: If you kill enough of them, they will start shooting back. And if you want the military to occupy American cities, remind yourself just how many guns there are in this country. Whatever victory is, it will not involve martial law or civil war. Someone else explained all of this much better than I:
In a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
Rage is a distraction. Hatred is a distraction. We are not going to destroy our way to a solution. We need to stop focusing on destructive actions and build sound institutions that will give us the outcomes we want. The work will be difficult. There will be setbacks. It will require patience, sacrifice, and discipline. We need to love, tolerate, or at least selectively ignore each other to stay focused. Here are my ideas for doing that.
“I Might Be Wrong”
Start with how you communicate and interact, which I think unfortunately requires a sermon: The partisanship must stop immediately. This is not red versus blue. We are all Americans. We must stop treating each other as enemies. We must stop assuming the worst about each other’s intentions and intellect. Casting stones prevents us from seeing the wonders we could achieve together. Literally, and I do mean literally, the one thing the vast majority of elected officials ultimately care about is winning reelection, which these days means pandering to base instincts. I saw this up-close in the House and Senate. There is maybe a handful of exceptions, but now is not the time to try to identify them. Focus your political energy on policy and outcomes, not individuals and ideology. Politics has been functioning in most of our lives as a false religion, reality TV, or maybe a really lame sport.
In political debates, we largely talk past each other because our worldviews do not intersect. EconTalk host Russ Roberts recently reshared his review of Arnold Kling’s book, “The Three Languages of Politics.” Liberals see a battle between victims and oppressors. Conservatives see a battle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians see a battle between freedom and coercion. (I am libertarian and this essay is an attempt to prevent and reduce coercion.) This may explain why Trump’s threat of martial law caused a younger conservative I know to renounce the president and a middle-aged conservative acquaintance to finally embrace him. The young man endorsed the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee while the older man praised the president’s gall, for pledging to restore law and order.
Politically, we all have the same basic goal: roughly, for good people to be able to live in peace. “Once you realize that other groups are coming from a different place than you are, you actually can empathize with their views,” Roberts wrote. “It may not be as fun, but … it shows the foolishness, other than for therapeutic catharsis, of yelling at your opponents oblivious to why they don’t understand the wisdom of your views.” Misunderstanding is a two-way street.
The second step is some basic intellectual humility. By an implausible chain of events I befriended a man named Jonathan Rauch. In addition to being a trailblazing public advocate for gay marriage, Jon literally wrote the modern book on free expression and discourse, “Kindly Inquisitors.” (His reaction to this essay: “You’re a Stoic!”) A key premise of his brilliant argument is the omnipresent possibility that a person is wrong. That means you, me, and everyone else. We are all always, possibly wrong, about pretty much everything, and we can never be sure we are right. I am not expecting you to read the book but its underlying principles are prominent in this excellent video essay on how to win an argument without making enemies. It is a quick, polished overview of how we need to be listening and talking to each other. If you take only one thing away from my verbiage, take this: “I might be wrong.”
The third step is evaluating your relationship with information. And suffice to say that most of us are overloaded, especially by mass media. I buy into pop evolutionary psychology enough to think that we humans really are not meant to constantly absorb urgent information about the entire world — especially perceived threats. Figure out a level of news media consumption that keeps you informed without making you less happy than you have to be. If you want a factual, high-quality news source, I like Reuters (its veteran congressional reporters also happen to be thoroughly kind, decent people).
As for social media, real talk, y’all: we know it makes us miserable, from lived experience and a pile of research. I admit that I found myself chasing the high, often irrationally looking for something to make me feel good on Facebook, only to end up feeling more frustrated and depressed.
News media is a means to useful information, not an end. Social media should be a place for deepening connections, not resentments. If media is preventing you from living your best life, then put it down and immerse yourself in someone or something that nourishes you.
I have always loved Descartes’ aphorism: “Conquer yourself rather than the world.” We cannot let our fear of the world conquer us. The biggest change you can make starts with you.
Postscript 1: Potential Solutions
The U.S. has been playing defense against COVID-19. The CDC fumbled diagnostic testing for 50-plus days at the crucial beginning of the outbreak here, and we never recovered. We need to play offense. We need to play to win. We need to actually ramp up testing and tracing. The Pandemic Resilience Roadmap is a solid, realistic plan to rapidly crush the virus and restore the economy until a vaccine is widely available (which by the way could be in 2025). The roadmaps’s impressive, reputable creators encompass myriad ideologies and scientific disciplines. We must also eliminate super spreader events, which cause something like 80% of transmission. And we need to somehow isolate nursing homes, which account for almost half of U.S. COVID-19 fatalities.
Campaign Zero seems to be a really dialed-in police reform group. This Twitter thread by co-founder Samuel Sinyangwe — tellingly from October 5, 2019 — our wakeup call is overdue — outlines multiple practical, evidence-based reforms, some working right now across America. At least two of the proposals might have saved George Floyd’s life. “More restrictive state and local policies governing police use of force are associated with significantly lower rates of police shootings/killings by police,” Mr. Singyangwe reported. And weeding out chronically abusive cops would have netted Geroge Floyd’s killer, who faced 17 prior complaints, only two of which yielded formal punishment. He may have been innocent the other 15 times, but perhaps not.
Postscript 2: Origin Story
After President Trump promised to dominate rioters and looters with overwhelming military force, I ended up taking the next day — Tuesday, June 2nd — off from work to process the state of the world, try to articulate a constructive path forward, which ultimately produced this essay. I hope you find value in it.
