This Is Not News

• My daughter really likes to play board games. I also really like to play board games. This works out very well. This week, she wanted to get a copy of Clue, so we went to Target. We came THISCLOSE to buying a newer, updated version of the game that changed a lot of the rules and the cards and would have sent me into a fit of complaining. It also wouldn’t have been the same version she played at school, so no one would be happy. Fortunately, Target also has a set of retro editions of a lot of Parker Brothers games, so the day was saved. Professor Plum rides again.
• Over the next year, I am adding “Learn how to build model castles” to my resolution list. This year we’re doing a lot of improvising, which is fine. But I may be able to be more help next year.
• I am trying not to comment on current news in the SF movie world as of 10 PM Eastern time January 24, because I feel a heavy case of Geek Curmudgeon Syndrome coming on.
• For the second time in three years, I think it’s gonna snow the weekend of EduCon. Hopefully we only get a couple of inches this time.
• I am also not commenting on the lack of filibuster reform in the Senate because you guys don’t want to read a post that’s the equivalent of a Don Music sketch on Sesame Street. (Is it true tat they retired him because they didn’t want kids to bang their heads on their desks? Or was that just me?)

I just realized that 20 years ago, I was using an IBM PC and a 1200 baud modem to connect to local bulletin boards.

I was getting ready to graduate from high school, and still didn’t know where I would go to college.

Bill Clinton was giving his first inaugural address:

I still feel like I’m that 17-year-old kid a lot of the time. The last 20 years feel like a perpetual ongoing “last week” in a lot of ways. It’s not until I look at images from that time, and they look almost like historical relics, that I realize how much we have all changed. Although as I listen to the speech, I also think about how much hasn’t changed.

I have had numerous opportunities to think about how fortunate I am. I am married to a wonderful woman wit whom I have an amazing daughter. We both have parents who worked hard to help us get good educations, and we have both been able to find jobs that let us use our skills and knowledge to provide a comfortable home for our family. We have access to many forms of leisure and entertainment, and we have a network of friends who provide us with joy and good company on many occasions. I mean, when I was a teenager I didn’t know how good I had it, and today I have it even better than I ever thought I would back then.

And as much as I am thankful for all of this, as much as I hope and work to keep building on this good fortune, it’s become very important to me to remind myself that I don’t deserve any of it. These wonderful things are not a prize I earned by completing some set of trials. They are the result of circumstances beyond my control combined with some good choices and lucky outcomes.

Have I worked hard and tried my best? Sure. Is it possible that I have worked harder or done more for others than some people who are materially better off than I am? It’s conceivable. But it’s also certainly true that there are others who have worked as hard or harder and don’t have nearly as much to show for it. As I sit here typing and listening to music, am I more deserving of this luxury than the person who worked in a factory to put together the chips for my computer and iPod? When my family decides to go out for hamburgers, have I scored more points in the game of life than the agricultural workers who got those ingredients on their way from the fields? When I hug my daughter to help her through a cold, am I somehow proving myself a better parent than the mother or father who has to watch their child struggle through cancer or some other disease? No. You can’t look at the scoreboard and say who’s better or who deserves more. The world’s too messy and complicated for that. Sometimes life deals you a great hand, sometimes it doesn’t, and no matter how much we try to work the odds in our favor, we don’t hold the deck. Here are a couple of examples.

Pattie and I met on her first day at Fordham. With one brief exception, I didn’t see her again for a year, until she decided to start writing for the features section of the school paper while I was features editor. If I had a different job – which I had originally applied for – or if I had quit the newspaper – which I had seriously considered a few months before – would I be here now? I don’t know. Maybe it would have worked out some other way. And I give myself credit for taking advantage of the opportunity when it came up, but there was so much out of my control that was required to get to that point that I am not going to claim that I have earned the happiness this relationship has given me for the last 16 years.

I went to a high school that introduced me to a lot of friends and mentors and was absolutely essential in giving me the chance to grow into a responsible adult. I worked hard in school, got good grades and did most of the stuff I was told to do, and spent a lot of time on activities. But when I think back to the things that had to happen for me to get to that school – from my mother insisting that I take the entrance test when I had no desire to do so, to an administrator who was willing to go several extra miles to get me an affordable aid package to afford the tuition, to living in a neighborhood that made it a relatively easy school to get to in the first place – there’s no way that I can say that everything I gained there is because of something I did.

Now, why am I harping on this point? I am not trying to rub my good fortune in anyone’s face. Instead, I’m doing it to remind myself, and urge everyone, to look at the world with humility. The universe gives some of us more than we “deserve.” I’d argue that anyone who has had some success and happiness can point to those moments where the world lined up in our favor. Maybe we did something to give circumstances a nudge, and if so we can give ourselves a pat on the back. But we shouldn’t confuse that nudge with the whole lift. If we assume that everything that we have is solely the result of our own actions, then it becomes easy to take the next step and assume that anyone who is less fortunate must be less fortunate because of their own actions. Then we have no responsibility to figure out how we can help them, and no need to sacrifice anything of our own. Indeed, to do so would be to interfere with the fairness of the universe in giving everyone what they deserve! But if we’re humble and appreciative of what we have, we are more likely put ourselves in each other’s shoes and try to build a world that works better for all of us.

This humility can be scary, because it forces us to accept that we are not always the masters of our destiny. Our hopes and dreams and work and ambitions can be torn away in a matter of seconds, just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They may lay unfulfilled because we never find the right environment to nurture them. They may be cut short because of some quirk of our genes. When you spend a few minutes thinking of all of the things that can go wrong, it can seem like a miracle that anything ever goes right. But rather than being a reason to give into despair or resignation, I think that this humility and appreciation for the universe’s capriciousness can motivate us to reach out and share our good fortune, or lift up those who have been brought low by tragedy or circumstance. And when we do that, we leave the world a little bit better than we found it. Since the world has given so much to me, I think the world deserves it.

So as part of the professional development program that my school and district have implemented, my principal has suggested I keep a reflection journal. I truly think this is a good idea. I spend a lot of time thinking to myself – my wife says she can hear me thinking when I’m supposed to be going to sleep – but the act of wrestling a thought to the point where it makes sense in written form is a whole different thing. It’s even something I meant to do at the start of the year, but I always found excuses not to follow through. I’ve become so scared of the blank sheet of paper – or the blank screen – and so tired that I don’t have the hours to sit and noodle at the keyboard. By the time I was done my dissertation, I had gotten into the habit of pretty much trying to sneak up on a writing project by leaving the screen open while I read something in another tab, and every now and then jotting down a thought until I had actually filled up a page. That doesn’t work so well when you’re sitting down and saying “I have to find something to say right now, in the next 45 minutes!”

There’s another thing that some of my reading has contributed to. I’ve talked in other posts about how I struggle against the logic of determinism. I read books like The Victory Lab, which explains how political scientists and political campaigners are able to test and predict the way people will vote and be persuaded to vote. I read about the links between socioeconomic class and academic success and think about the structures that have shaped the way I see the world. I see – and feel – the evidence that our physical state affects the way we think and feel. And while some of it motivates me to want to work for a better world, part of it becomes an escape hatch. I’m sick, I think, so I should rest and let my body do what it’s trying to do. I’m tired, I decide, so I shouldn’t try to write when my thoughts are so foggy. I need to figure out some ways to reverse that feedback loop, so instead I’m thinking about how excited I am by this new idea, and I need to write about it to share it. I hope the journal will help me with that push. I hope this post does this same.

Day 1 of the rest of the year. Let’s see where it goes.

So I was running over some election trivia, partially because it connects with a post I hope to write soon and partially because, hey, it’s Sunday, and I started thinking about the vice presidency as a stepping stone to the presidency. Now, there have been a fair number of vice presidents who became president through succession – the president that they served under died or resigned.

But by my count, only four out of the 47 vice presidents that the US has had served out full terms as VP and then got elected to the presidency in their own right. Two Republican have done it fairly recently: Richard Nixon served as VP from ’51 to ’59 under Dwight Eisenhower before being elected in ’68. George H.W. Bush served as VP for Ronald Reagan from ’81 to ’89 and got elected to succeed him as president in ’88.

But on the Democratic side, you have to go way back to the early 1800s. Thomas Jefferson served as VP under John Adams back when we made the presidential runner-up the VP, and then beat Adams in the 1800 election. And Martin Van Buren won the election of 1836 after serving as Andrew Jackson’s VP. Since then, nothing. And not for lack of trying: the Democratic Party has nominated its last three vice presidents in subsequent presidential races: Hubert Humphrey in ’68, Walter Mondale in ’84, and Al Gore in 2000. All three lost the presidency by varying margins. I think this is just a weird quirk of history, but it does suggest that unless tragedy strikes, the VP slot isn’t likely to lead to bigger things.

Let-me-rest-my-eyes became oh-wow-time-to-get-up-for-work really fast.

First day of class today, and my brain is friend. Whoever had the bright idea to move political conventions to September was no friend to political junkie teachers, I’ll tell you that. Been pulling thoughts together and hoping to say more this weekend. I was reading a New York magazine piece comparing Clinton’s and Obama’s speeches, and got to this line: “Had [Romney and Ryan] not elevated Clinton in the first place, putting him in ads, using him as an example of the kind of “good Democrat” that Obama definitively is not, 42’s repudiations of the claims and his validation of 44 might have less purchase.” It’s not the first time I’ve seen that notion that the Republicans have elevated Bill Clinton’s profile in the effort to take Obama down a peg.

I will freely admit that’s not a universe I ever expected to live in, where Republicans attacked a Democrat for not being enough like Bill Clinton. I think the 1990s are rolling over in their grave right now.

I did a blog post as part of the convention coverage for Women Rise Up Now, a women’s rights site run by Pattie and my friend Jen. So I will direct you there for this evening’s bloggery.

Empathy and the More Perfect Union

Fifteen years ago I was working at a PR firm. In the summer of ’97, Steve Jobs had recently returned to Apple and the big news was that Microsoft had agreed to invest $150 million in Apple to help keep the company stable. I remember looking at the front page of a newspaper that had a picture of this moment on it:

I said something to my boss like, “Well, that certainly sums things up,” because at that it looked for all the world like Microsoft had dwarfed Apple.

I think of that picture a lot these days, most recently when I saw Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo mention that for the first time in his site’s history, more than half of the visitors were using something other than a Microsoft operating system.

The odds that the future we envision will resemble the actual future on more than a handful of points is so very, very small. Some things we just can’t prepare for, and it seems like half the time we look back and say “We shoulda seen that coming.”

Look at the table of contents for the issue of TIME Magazine that discussed that Apple/Microsoft deal. Welfare-to-work programs as a new development. Hey, what’s up with the crazy El Nino weather? How does Wall Street feel about lower capital gains taxes? It seems familiar and alien at the same time.

And as I’m typing that, I’m trying to figure out how to get copies of 5-year-old magazines so my students can experience the first draft of recent history, but that’s not where I was going with this . . . but I’m gonna have to come back to that.

My central point at the moment is, we put a lot of effort into understanding the world, and that’s a good thing. But if anyone says they know for sure how it’s all going to turn out, just show ’em that picture of Bill and Steve.

• I’m glad to live in the world that Neil Armstrong and Jerry Nelson contributed to.
• My daughter likes roller coasters much, much more than I do.
• For everything I’ve read about the Apple-Samsung case, I’m still not sure what I think about it.
• I’m trying to wrap my brain around the latest Boston Red Sox news and how it connects to ideas of sabermetrics and empirical investigation in sports, but I can’t quite get the argument to gel. I may come back to that one, too.