This Is Not News

(Note: I wrote this post two years ago, in the summer of 2021, and then hemmed and hawed about whether I wanted to try to commit myself to more active blogging. Now in the summer of 2023, as I look at what’s happening in the world of social media, I feel like I should re-stake my claim to a corner of the Web. So I re-read this and discovered that it’s still a pretty accurate framing of my general outlook. I feel like we may be inching in a positive direction, but in a very two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way. But that’s a topic for future posts.)

I am quite sure I am not alone in being rather exhausted in this summer of 2021. I am, relatively speaking, very lucky. I know a few people who had COVID, but they recovered. My wife and I both kept our jobs and my daughter was able to come home and attend her college classes virtually. But even acknowledging that good fortune, I have felt worn out, and struggled to make as much progress as I wanted on any number of projects. After spending entirely too long staring into space and thinking about what I would write if I could get myself to write something, I think I have zeroed in on a major factor.

I am trying to work through a major crisis of confidence. The big picture ideas that motivated me through my 20s and 30s feel battered and frayed, and I don’t trust the compass that’s supposed to guide me as much as I used to. I don’t know whether I can repair the foundation, or build a new one, or just let myself sink into a “whatever-gets-me-through-the-day” cynicism. (That last option is the one I’m really trying to avoid, but that depends on making one of the first two work.)

I should probably recap those big picture ideas for the sake of anyone who hasn’t read all the pages of this long-dormant blog. I spent my 20s earning a PhD in philosophy, studying the democratic theory embedded in the philosophical school of pragmatism. What I eventually came up with in my dissertation is the idea that a real thriving democracy would be a community of citizens, working together to identify problems and figure out how to solve them based on a process of trial and error. This community would be able to learn from its mistakes and incorporate the different perspectives of its members, and while it would never be perfect, it could make progress through a better understanding of how the world worked.

I figured one way that I could contribute to moving the US closer to becoming this kind of thriving democracy would be to teach high school students, to help them actively engage with the world. So after the dissertation was done, I went back to school to get certified, and I’ve been teaching high school for the last 12 years. And that part has been absolutely as rewarding as I hoped it would be. I absolutely love working with high school students and seeing what they create. The problem has been in my ability to imagine the world that I’m helping them prepare for, and to do so from a perspective of hope and optimism that we can build a better future.

The first crack in my foundation actually happened while I was building it, during grad school. I took a political science seminar about how possible it is to identify what the people want and, if you can identify it, get the government to do it. It was a great seminar, and it’s where I read the book Stealth Democracy. The central thesis of the book is that most people do not want to spend a lot of time or effort on the work of politics. At most, they want to hire people to do that work, and for those people to go do their jobs, leave them alone, and not rip them off. So there’s a pretty substantial gap between my engaged democratic community and where we are today. I knew that, and I told myself that this was the sort of change that would take time to make happen.

Then I had to wrestle with my faith in empiricism. Now, I had never believed in anything like the infallibility of scientists, but I had a certain amount of faith in the knowledge-building structures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Then the replication crisis in social science hit. Studies whose results had been widely shared and accepted were re-examined – and found to be unreliable. This hit hard because a functioning system of creating and testing knowledge is essential to making any kind of community decision-making process based on empiricism work, and suddenly that system seemed far less reliable. I had shared some of the studies and theories that have since been questioned with my students – things like the marshmallow test and the theory of finite willpower, or the idea that the Stanford Prison Experiment shows how systems can foster abuse. It was one thing to write in my dissertation that we have to be prepared to accept new evidence that our beliefs aren’t as justified as we thought, but it is still a bit of a punch in the gut to realize that not only may I have been wrong in the past, I probably helped spread those wrong ideas. On the one hand, welcome to being human. We all get knocked down, what matters is getting up again. (This is where my daughter cues up the montage from Captain Marvel.) On the other hand, getting knocked down still hurts like the dickens.

The scientific community is working on the replication crisis, though. There’s a real opportunity to make the system more robust. (We also need to work through the crisis in academia but I’m poking at enough rattlesnakes in this post as it is.) So even though the wind was in my face, I felt like I was getting somewhere. And then 2020 happened.

I don’t even know where to begin. Remember what I said about “a community of citizens, working together to identify problems and figure out how to solve them based on a process of trial and error?” Did the world look anything like that in 2020? The scientific and medical community got caught flat-footed on COVID. I still remember telling my students in February 2020 that experts were saying masks probably weren’t important. And while many scientists rallied and got their act together relatively quickly, I think a lot of people around the country and around the world were slow to catch up. I don’t know how much of the problem was the experts being unable to convince the public and how much was the public not wanting to be convinced. But even when it’s a matter of life and death, reaching an empirical consensus and then acting on it is a lot harder than I expected.

I don’t think these problems are insurmountable, but they’re hard. I feel like I’m seeing experts warn about so many dangers – the pandemic; political instability and democratic backsliding; economic inequality; climate change; the list goes on. It feels like we’re just smart enough to see the edge of the cliff coming up but not smart enough to hit the brakes. I don’t want to resign myself to driving over the edge. So I’m looking for the reasons to hope. Looking for the signs that we can, in fact, learn from our mistakes. And there are some signs, don’t get me wrong. The vaccines alone suggest that we may be as good at getting ourselves of trouble as we are at getting into trouble in the first place. But I really hope we don’t stop there. It would be great to get this midlife crisis of confidence out of the way by the end of the summer. (Note from 2023: Well, I didn’t say which summer, so hope springs eternal . . .)

Boy, have I left this barren.

It’s interesting. In my teens and 20s, I thought of myself as a writer. And when I read or listened to professional writers speak, they often talked about this idea that they became writers because they couldn’t NOT write. I thought I had that same need. It carried me through high school and college, through essays and theses and newspaper articles. It carried me through grad school, when I started the website that evolved into this blog and wrote my dissertation.

And somewhere along the way, it faded.

I still like putting words together, but for a long time putting together a decent joke or anecdote on social media has been enough to scratch that itch. About a year and a half ago I was talking to a colleague, who’s an artist along with a teacher. I urged him to keep drawing, because that’s where his heart was, the thing he really loved. And I realized that for me, writing wasn’t that thing anymore.

Teaching kids, and being part of a school community, is that thing. I’m not me if I’m not in a classroom. Or at least thinking about being in a classroom.

And for the past two years I have been doing so much of that, that the energy to put something else together has just kind of fizzled.

With the summer here I am kinda doing the New Year’s Resolution thing and trying to get into shape, mentally and physically, so I’m better at all of the things I need to do. Daily writing and reflecting is a mental muscle that I think I want to spend more time working on. Facebook probably isn’t the place to do it for a host of reasons. So let’s see if I can get back into the saddle.

It’s been almost nine years since I finished my dissertation; a little more than six since I finished getting my teaching certification. I spent most of my 20s as a grad student and yet that part of my life is rapidly moving into my proverbial rear-view mirror. I talk about it with my students sometimes, often in the context of encouraging them to avoid student debt. But that life, with its intense focus on academic reading and writing, feel disconnected with who I am now.

I started thinking about this when I thought about how long it’s been since I wrote on this blog. I started it as a website in 2000, and it was meant to be a forum to talk about all the things I cared about at the time. Now I think about those sections and wonder if they still apply to my life in 2015. Am I still a philosopher if I haven’t read a journal article or written a philosophical essay in years? My reading and thinking about Dewey still influences the way I try to teach. Is that being a philosopher, or an educator, or both? I’m not sure.

I don’t know how much I can call myself a comics fan these days; I have a small pile of trade paperbacks to read, but since I stopped buying monthly comics and both major superhero companies did assorted revamps to their lines and continuity, I can’t say I’m heavily invested in the medium. I know a couple of creators whose work I like have independent projects, but even there I don’t race to the store (or to an e-commerce site) to grab copies. I still follow some of the news, go to a convention once in a while, and wear plenty of superhero shirts. Am I still a fan? I don’t know.

And then I come to the big question: Am I still a writer? I write material for my classes. I write short anecdotes to share with my friends and family on Facebook, and one-liners to share with folks on Twitter. But essays? Interviews? Deeper exploration of a topic? Putting one sentence in front of another until you have a paragraph, and then doing it again and again until you have a completed piece? I feel so rusty there, and so often I feel too tired to do the work of organizing my thoughts. There are things I want to write, and plenty of things I want to have written. But am I a writer?

I’m not sure. I think it’s time to find out.

I’ve been waiting to write about the mistrial in the Jordan Davis murder trial because I have been hoping to hear something about the jury’s deliberations. The jurors agreed that Michael Dunn was responsible for firing 10 shots at Davis’ car and endangering the three other people who were in the car. They agreed that he was criminally wrong to do so. But they could not agree that beyond any reasonable doubt he was criminally responsible for murdering Davis.

I have so many questions about that. Was there a single holdout on the jury, or an even split? Was there something about Florida’s self-defense laws that proved to be a sticking point? Did the jurors believe Dunn when he said he saw a weapon?

The thing is, all of these questions are technicalities. They’re important technicalities. They’re technicalities that we need to understand so that we can intelligently work to reform self-defense laws, weapons laws, and other parts of the criminal justice system. But they don’t do a damn thing to address the hurt and pain that I have seen on Twitter and commentaries across the web. For millions of people, the fact that Dunn will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison if the guilty verdicts are upheld pales next to the fact that the jury could not deliver the simple, clear statement that Dunn murdered Davis.

That’s the part that hurts me, that has me feeling so lost right now. Because at the moment, I have a lot of sympathy for that jury. Our legal system is not always set up to deliver straightforward statements; sometimes you have to read between the lines. Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. Plenty of people get busted for obstruction and not for the actual crime they committed. So if there was something that made it hard for the jury to make the specific point about Davis’ death, they were still able to make the point that what Dunn did was horribly wrong and that he needs to pay for his actions. There are people like Martin Longman at Booman Tribune who see that point and accept the verdict as adequate, albeit imperfect, justice.

My initial reaction to the verdict was along similar lines. Based on the evidence that I have read, I am pretty sure that Dunn is both racist and reckless, and that those two traits combined with a gun to result in a horrible death that is Dunn’s fault. I could also see how that same racism and recklessness could lead him to panic, and that in that panic he could suddenly believe that he was the one at risk. I wasn’t surprised that under Florida’s laws, some jurors might find that panic enough to raise reasonable doubt. I thought that this was another example of how our gun laws and self-defense laws can lead to tragic results, and felt relief that the verdict found another route to punish Dunn.

But then there are so many people like Tonyaa Weathersbee who see that verdict as a “hollow victory,” and ask what would have happened if Davis had been alone in his car. The mistrial speaks so loudly to them that no appeal to the end result can take away the pain. The deadlock calls out so loudly that no discussion of technicalities can make sense of the senseless. I did not have that immediate emotional reaction to the verdict, because I did not hear the same thing that they heard. But just because I did not hear what they heard does not mean that it wasn’t there. Indeed, the fact that so many people heard it makes me sure it was there, even if the jury didn’t mean for it to be there.

I’m grateful that Twitter and the educator communities that I belong to helped raise those voices up so that it was easier for me to hear them. I’ve been asking myself why I don’t see the verdict through the same lens that they do. It might be privilege. It might be my philosophical background leading me to view the verdict as an epistemological exercise. It might be my own experiences as a juror, when I have been torn between what I believed happen and what I believed the law required. It’s probably a combination of these and half a dozen other factors.

But beyond any of that, we live in a society that has a legacy of injustice. That legacy infects us in so many ways, frequently with tragic results. We need to confront that injustice every day. I do not know if we will ever get to a point where there are no Michael Dunns with their fear and anger towards others. I do not know if we will ever get to a point where the American justice system is not stacked against a significant part of its population. But we have to try or we will never stop inflicting these wounds on ourselves and each other.

So last week turned out to be an interesting one in my life as an alumnus.

At the start of week I read that Fordham University – where I met my wife, first studied philosophy, and first coined the title that graces this blog – had changed the lyrics of its alma mater from “Hail men of Fordham” to “Hail Rams of Fordham.” I smiled when I read this. I smiled a lot, actually, and it might seem strange to be so happy about something that isn’t really a big deal. Truth be told, I don’t ever remember singing the alma mater, and probably wouldn’t get the words right if you spotted me the first verse.

But I think that fact that it is a small thing is what made it matter to me. I watch my daughter when she encounters something that assumes that male terms can be used as gender-neutral, and I see that it upsets her to be made to feel left out. There is now one less thing in the world that can upset her that way, and the university that helped me build so much of the foundation for my life is responsible for that. Fordham’s administration didn’t have to do it, and there are going to be people who are mad at them for doing it, and they did it anyway because they decided it was the right thing to do. I felt proud to be associated with the institution, and felt like my good feelings and support for the university were being returned.

In contrast, by the weekend, the Philadelphia media were reporting that Holy Ghost Prep, the high school that I graduated from and without which I never would have made it to Fordham or taken advantage of the opportunities I found when I got there, had fired a teacher. The reason for the dismissal was that the teacher, who had not hidden the fact that he was in a same sex relationship during the 12 years he taught at Holy Ghost, had applied for a marriage license in New Jersey with his partner. That violation of Church policy warranted firing an alumnus who had taught at the school for over a decade.

I watched the story spread over the Philadelphia media and beyond throughout the weekend. More significantly I saw it spread through my Facebook network, which includes many of my classmates. Many of us, whether we are straight or gay, were disappointed by the decision. I suppose it’s easy for me to disagree with it; I’m a marriage equality supporter who has moved even farther away from the Catholic Church than I was when I was in school. And as a teacher of high school students, I see how a lot of casual homophobia gets thrown around in the way students talk to each other, which makes me more conscious of how a school needs to support its LGBT students and make sure that they know that they belong and are valued.

But you shouldn’t need my experience or my distance from the Church to imagine how this hurts people, and in fact you don’t. On Holy Ghost’s website, the school promotes its dedication to forming a community in one heart and one mind. No community is perfect, but I have been a part of that community for over 20 years. I formed relationships there that I will always treasure and had experiences that formed me. Many of the students and teachers there inspired me to become a teacher myself. And this weekend I watched the leaders of the administration tell members of my community that they weren’t welcome, that their lives and their loves weren’t good enough for the Catholic Church or for Holy Ghost Prep. I watched the leaders of the administration tell any gay students that they had better be willing to deny part of themselves if they wanted to be fully included.

It isn’t right. Where Fordham University as an institution helped bring its community closer together this past week, Holy Ghost Prep as an institution chose to divide it. It will be a long time before I can forgive the institution for that. But I have seen many in the community express their opposition to the decision, including several who have supported an online petition against it. It’s a shame that many students and teachers seem to have learned the lessons Holy Ghost taught better than its leaders, but at least I can still say I am proud to be among them.

I read a lot of good articles and essays while I was working on the last post on PEDs. Before I close those tabs on my browser, I wanted to share them here.

The new ephedra?: Shaun Assael at ESPN investigates a new supplement that might contain amphetamines. This is one example of the dangers of the lightly-regulated supplements industry – problems that extend beyond professional athletes.

Whatever happened to the spitball?: Jonah Keri at Grantland explores the history of the doctored baseball and examines players’ ambivalent relationship with this form of cheating.

Baseball experts say amphetamines ban, not steroids, is major reason for steep drop in offense: Bill Madden of the NY Daily News explores the effect that MLB’s ban on amphetamines has had on baseball. Amphetamines were part of the game longer than steroids, so this gives good context for the discussion on how PEDs have affected the history and tradition of the game.

Justice Served?: Keri again, although I didn’t realize he had written both Grantland pieces on this list till I went back to check bylines. This piece makes clear that Keri is more forgiving of PED use than many other fans and writers.

Understanding A-Rod’s infractions: Jim Caple at ESPN puts steroid use in perspective with baseball’s history of cheating and the fans’ demand for excellence.

The next two links aren’t really recommended for their writing, but I think they’re useful in thinking about how reporters and columnists can try to rework history. I found the two links on Baseball Think Factory.

The first is a Tom Verducci piece on si.com celebrating the fact that Alex Rodriguez is finally being held accountable for PED use. Among the many attacks on Rodriguez, Verducci talks about a conversation that he had with Rodriguez in 2002; Verducci says it was “chilling to listen to his feigned ignorance.”

The second is another Verducci piece, this one from 2007 when Barry Bonds was indicted for obstruction of justice. While slamming Bonds and his career home run record as tainted, Verducci says that baseball is turning the page on Bonds by placing its trust in another superstar. That superstar?

Alex Rodriguez.

Among the quotes:

Unlike Bonds, Rodriguez has never played under suspicion that his performance was enhanced by drugs, and he is not expected to be named as part of the Mitchell Report.

Also:

As The United States of America v. Barry Lamar Bonds became a reality, so too did baseball officials’ hopes for a new face of the game. In A-Rod they trust.

Verducci doesn’t sound particularly chilled or suspicious in talking up Rodriguez there. Makes you wonder which of today’s heroes will be facing scorn in six years.

As I sit down to write this, Major League Baseball fans have been waiting for weeks to hear how MLB will punish players implicated in the Biogenesis performance enhancing drugs scandal. The rumor mill has constantly hyped an announcement of multiple suspensions that was just around the corner, but so far the only player to be suspended is former MVP Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers. As the story has been in the news, I have been trying to get a handle on my own feelings about athletes’ use of banned substances. I’m somewhat surprised to find that while I remain a goody-two-shoes who disapproves of anyone breaking the rules, I do not perceive PEDs to be the major threat to the integrity of sports that man critics and fans do. The reason, I think, is that I’m having a harder and harder time seeing the use of PEDs as something completely distinct from many other behaviors that are considered praiseworthy in athletic culture.

I do not want to overgeneralize here about people who like to play and watch sports. What I’m saying is mostly focused on the most popular professional leagues and competitions. I believe that the reason that these organizations have the audience and reach that they do is that a large number of people want to see people who are the very best at what they do, doing things that few people on the planet can do, under great psychological pressure. And not only do we want to see the best of the best, we want to see them pushed to the very limits of human ability despite the risks involved. You can not take physical (and psychological) risk out of the sport because the risk is part of why people are watching in the first place.

There is no clearer example than American professional football. Violence and danger have always been part of the sport’s appeal. Many players feel the effects of the sport long after their careers are finished. Now we are learning that the risk may have been even greater than we thought, thanks to increasing awareness of the effects of head trauma on the brain and the psychological problems that can result from that trauma. Pro football players – and all those who aspire to be pro football players – are expected to accept this risk with enthusiasm, and to push themselves past the pain that results. Read this story by Dan LeBatard about former Miami Dolphins cornerback Jason Taylor and what he endured in order to stay on the field. Medical science does not exist to help players get healthy in these situations. It exists to help them find short term fixes so that they can ignore what their bodies are telling them and continue to perform. If a player wanted to do what was best for his long term health, he would face pressure from the fans, his coaches, his teammates, and himself to take the risk instead.

We’re somewhat used to thinking of football and some other sports as dangerous, but this notion of pushing past your body’s limits at the risk of permanent damage isn’t limited to football. Baseball players may not risk the same brain trauma as football players, although they do face risks from batted balls to the head and other freak accidents. But the very act of throwing a baseball at 90-plus miles per our puts a strain on the body. Look at how many pitchers break down and require surgeries to repair the damage. Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies has needed numerous cortisone shots to play past the pain that hundreds of baseball games have produced in his legs and feet. These shots have their own health risks and may have long-term effects; indeed, there are some who speculate that the ruptured Achillies tendon that Howard suffered on the last play of the 2011 season might have been caused in part by the shots. But no one was putting pressure on Howard to take it easy and let his body rest. People wanted him back on the field. He wanted to be back on the field. So he took the risk and took the shot.

So we have an athletic culture that clearly promotes taking on long-term health risks in order to be able to perform at your best. I find myself asking why taking a weekly Toradol shot to stay on the field is considered “natural” but taking anabolic steroids is an affront to the competitive fairness of the sport. In both cases, a person is using chemistry to be able to do something that he would not be able to do otherwise. Some people suggest that using painkillers is different because it only allows an athlete to perform up to his natural level of ability, rather than to surpass it. But I see two problems with this argument. The first is that very few athletes are ever at their full, peak state of health – the wear and tear of playing ensures that they will not be at 100%. Part of what determines an athlete’s success is his or her ability to perform well even when he is not at his or her absolute peak. So mitigating that deterioration is, in fact, working against the athlete’s natural limits. Second, pain is a physiological function. Therefore the ability to ignore it and continue to play is, itself, a natural ability that is being artificially enhanced by painkillers.

That said, I can certainly see how a governing body might say that some substances that allow the human body to exceed its prior limits are acceptable, but that some are so dangerous that they are beyond the pale even for risk-taking athletes. I would absolutely love to see the major professional leagues, doctors, scientists, and athletes work together in order to help establish these boundaries in a clear way. The problem is, I don’t think we’re in that world. Not when the average person can go into a mall nutrition store and buy supplements that have been cited as having potentially dangerous amounts of heavy metals like cadmium. Not when it’s taken years for many sports to acknowledge the dangers involved with concussions. Not when scientists aren’t even clear on the dangers of anabolic steroids, let alone all of the other new substances that are out there.

This doesn’t mean that I am advocating for a free-for-all, or that I think Saturday Night Live‘s All-Drug Olympics was a great idea. I am all for the governing bodies setting limits. If it were up to me, I would probably ban more substances, including many of the painkillers. But at that point we’re talking about the rules of the game. And there’s something else about the ethics of sports that we need to acknowledge.

Athletes cheat. A lot.

Do a Google search for the phrase “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying hard enough.” It’s officially a cliché. Ask any offensive lineman if he ever got away with holding – or what goes on at the bottom of a pile after a fumble. MLB pitcher Gaylord Perry was notorious for throwing doctored balls, and he’s in the Hall of Fame. Indeed, for decades, baseball players used unprescribed amphetamines to help them get through the season. When we celebrate athletics figures who say that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing, we are helping to create a culture that says, “Do whatever it takes to be the winner. Push yourself. Push your teammates. Push the rules.” If we’re looking to pro sports to find role models for fair play, we are probably looking in the wrong place.

Again, I am not saying that this means we should get rid of the rules. As a teacher, I know that when I give a test or assign a paper, there’s a good chance someone is going to cheat and that I am not going to catch that person. It doesn’t mean that I don’t set the rule. It doesn’t mean that I don’t catch who I can. It doesn’t mean that the cheater is not wrong. It just means that I should not be surprised that some people cheat, and I have to live with the knowledge that I can not be 100 percent sure that every single result is 100 percent honest. I have to do my best and live with the outcome.

We should do the same with sports. Set rules. Establish methods to check that the rules are being followed, looking for the balance point between being thorough and being reasonable. Penalize those who are caught breaking the rules. Acknowledge that some people are breaking the rules but not being caught. And enjoy the game, but be careful about drawing life lessons from it.

In high school and college I had an ambition to become a writer. I liked putting words together to create stories and share ideas. I was pretty good at it, too . . . not brilliant, and I needed a lot of practice, but I felt like I had potential.

But as I went through grad school, I started to think that maybe that wouldn’t be my profession. It was a slow process, but there was something I saw a lot of writers say that made me think about myself and whether I had what it takes. The idea is that you become a writer because you can’t not write. It’s not just something you like, or something you want to do. It has to be something you need to do. And I’m not sure I have that. I have to read . . . if I’m away from books and magazines and websites for more than a day or two I start to get itchy. But as you can see from the time stamps on this blog, I can go long periods without putting words together on a blank screen. I’m always thinking about things I want to write, things I want to say. Life, work, and the need to step away from those things and relax take the time and energy I need to get the words out of my head and onto the screen. I wish it were different, but I haven’t made the commitment to make it different. If I had a job where I had to write every day for a living, I think that would be different. But I don’t have the daily need to do it for myself that I would probably need to ever get myself to a point where I could get such a job.

I’m OK with that . . . I think that teaching and my family give me plenty of chances to do meaningful work with my life. But even if I don’t have the daily passion, I can’t stay away from writing forever either. So every so often I pull myself back to the keyboard. That time has come again. I promised myself that among the projects I would carry out over spring break would be to resume a rhythm of writing every day, at least for a while. So I consider this a warmup. Let’s see where we go from here.