Take my car, please. And, by all means, don't tell me where it is, prevent me from accessing its contents without your permission. Under no circumstances are you to return it to me, until I ask for it. On certain occasions, I can have the car back at an agreed-to price and may even throw in a little more depending on how I feel when the car is returned to me.
It makes me think of the movie "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" and the scene where they park Cameron's dad's Ferrari at a downtown Chicago garage. We see the car disappear in one door and come right out of an adjacent door with two parking attendants who have promised to take very good care of it.
You go on about your business convinced that your vehicle is safely parked in a garage somewhere when, in reality, it could just as easily be anywhere else.
This is a trust relationship, an agreement between parties that is literally worth less than the paper it's printed on. Each party, the parker and the parkee, agree that they will respect the other and rely upon them to behave in a predictable way.
Whole societies have been built on similar understandings.
I work with a bunch of people who rely on this parker-parkee relationship to feed their families and fuel their futures.
Since I started there, I have met people from Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean and all parts of the U.S. Like the people whose cars they park, they are always moving, always trying to save time, to save money, to earn their way. And when they are not parking a car, or retrieving a car, they are scanning the horizon looking for a potential new customer who might be in need of our service. They watch as each new vehicle pulls up in front of the building to see if it will be a "park" or a "drop."
Parks are full of promise and the potential of a tip; drops are disappointments.
The days can be pretty "streaky" with many cars arriving or leaving at once, but there are other parts of the day when nothing happens, when you can hear the grass growing and feel time slowing down. During those times, my colleagues are on their phones: they are talking, they are texting, they are looking on the Internet. One guy was trying to collect money owed to him by a friend, another studying colloquial English so as to better understand his new country.
I won't pretend to be able to tell their stories, or even do them the justice of a good sketch, but I think it's important to know that there is an essential Horatio Alger ethic in play. No one, myself included, believes that they have reached their professional apotheosis working in valet parking; rather it is a means to an end, a flagstone in a much bigger, much longer walkway.
I've met more than one person who leaves their shift as a valet to go to another job where they stock shelves, or take classes, or both.
As I said, there is lots of slack time in this job and that works to my disadvantage. It gives me time to reflect and that is always dangerous. I'm fifty-five-years old and, as in most other aspects of my life, I seemed to have missed the critical life lessons that were supposed to result in a fair trade of hard work for prosperity and realized ambitions. I believe I have kept up my part of the bargain, but have seen only decline; a steady backsliding that increases stress and decreases prospects.
And the more I reflect, the harder it is to escape a sense of missed opportunities and a growing resentment of what looks like wave after wave of people who have skipped to the front of whatever line I happen to be in.
It shames me to admit it, but I am afraid.
I am afraid to get sick, I am afraid to get old, I am afraid to take risks. I am afraid to hope.
I suppose that is why I look upon the work I am doing now as the perfect metaphor for the cul-de-sac life that I have been living. Instead of being the person who is rushing to a very important something-or-other, I get to be the guy who stops to hold the car door while others rush by.
In the same way that misreading a menu can leave a bad taste in your mouth, I have a sense of having signed up for a class that is no longer being offered.
I too am an immigrant who came to the U.S. more than 30 years ago in part because I thought there was more opportunity available for me to pursue my teaching and other creative aspirations. In comparison to Canada, my country of origin, which was, at the time, mired in endless debate over cultural sovereignty, national identity,special relationships and regional disparities, America seemed like a place to just go and do the thing that you most wanted to do.
Perhaps I was looking at the grass with red, white and blue colored glasses, but based on scale alone, the odds seemed more to my liking. And, to be perfectly honest, part of my interest in coming here after I finished undergraduate school was that so many of my high school classmates had gone to the US right after graduation that an American graduate school was my chance to catch up.
But, soon after I got here, it was as if the country, as a whole, after spending the previous decade coming to terms with a lost foreign war, an emerging vulnerability to foreign-controlled fuel and a normalizing of multi-culturalism, decided that immigrants were a problem that needed to be more aggressively managed.
It's part of national folklore that, as a nation of immigrants, it's always the ones that come after us that fuck everything up. We are good, "they" are bad. "This would be such a wonderful place if it weren't for all the sick and tired and huddled masses. What's the matter with them? We're breathing free over here.... That's the problem with this country: too much yearning."
I recognize that my perceptions about the country may have no relationship to fact, but I really believed that all I had to do was show up and I could go wherever and do whatever. At some level, I likened it to playing with my brother's Hot Wheels collection: sure, there were going to be some awkward questions and hell to pay if I ever scratched, or broke, one of them, but, at the end of the day, not much a problem.
We used to be so proud of having the longest undefended border in the world....
Nobody talks about that much anymore.
There is "inside" and there is "outside" and ever-higher walls to separate them.
We spoke in terms of a "Reagan Revolution" and the transformation of the "Me" generation into the "Just Me" generation. Like most things, apparently, it took me a long time to appreciate what was happening. In graduate school, I met my first 19-year-old with a "Reagan for President" button and I couldn't believe it. How could someone so young be taken in by the Nick-at-Nite nostalgia for a time when the nation's challenges were as simple as black and white and cowboys versus Indians? He put it to me quite simply: "Because I want a job when I graduate."
In truth, I too wanted a job upon graduation, I just wasn't prepared to pay such a high price for it.
As a result, I had to not only convince someone to hire me--not an easy thing for a shy Canadian--but I also had to be worth the trouble, in their eyes, of dealing with an increasingly difficult Immigration and Naturalization Service. (At least, in those days, it was a "service" and not the now more aggressively named Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Any prospective employer had to demonstrate that there was no qualified American candidate for the position.
No pressure.
I was in the same candidate pool as scientists and programmers who were being brought in from other countries and yet I was applying for an entirely different kind of job.
And as American politicians further embraced the "Us-versus-Them" as a campaign issue, there were discussions of limiting the overall number of visas in my category and so I soon found myself competing with the scientist for one of those visas. It was another brick in the wall between who was "inside" and who wasn't.
The rest my twenty-year progress from "alien" to citizen--my "landing," if you will--is not very interesting, if indeed any of the above was, but it is important to know why I persisted.
I persisted because of that contract, that implied bargain trading effort for return, investment for interest.
It could fairly be asked, I suppose, whether I was indulging in my own heavily-filtered, overly-simplified vision of my future, but the terms of that contract were and are easily understood; they are so straightforward that they can be expressed within the 140-character limit of a Tweet and the same very definitely could not be said about the Canadian dream; we have too much inclusive language and too many subordinate clauses.
Simple, direct, easy-to-understand: these are the features upon which America and Americans have made their fortunes. Or, at least, selling those features as being part of the national OS, has been central to the idea of America. "Nuance" and "interpretation" have always been things of which America claims to be suspicious; they are tools of the "old world" that are used to skirt and subvert and are not all that far removed from "malfeasance" and "misdirection".
Simplicity and direct-ness are also part of the feature-set of youth; they are the default positions of children who don't know, or reason to know, differently. Youth is binary, it is one and zero, on or off and it knows of no valid reason why wanting something and getting something are not the same.
My mother is in mourning.
After experiencing a stroke, about five years ago, my step-father now lives with dementia and all of the foreshortening that comes with that labyrinth of related symptoms. His world consists of what fragments of memory he can dredge up and only those things that he can put his arms around. Sometimes, that includes my mother, but often it does not.
Their marriage was the second chance that both of them wanted and needed; it was an opportunity for them both to know that their lives could have a different focus, perhaps it was not the one they might have chosen for themselves earlier in their stories, it was however, an immensely rewarding partnership that helped to balance the hard-earned furrows of worry on their faces with an equal, or greater, number of laugh lines.
Their relationship was richer for what it cost them both to have: it's a nuanced interpretation, but, what do you want from me, I'm old.
My mother mourns because she looks at her husband and sees him both for who he was and who he is becoming. She carries the weight of holding two realities in her head simultaneously. She is living in Orwell's doublethink dystopia and feels the pressure to accept the world as it is described to her without the permission to free herself from memory and from her own expectations.
Reared with a Depression-era mindset, my mother and her husband were planners and savers; they lived less in the present so that they could enjoy a comfortable future. Unexpectedly, their futures arrived with that stroke and it was not the one they had planned for.
So, what do you do when you find yourself forced to play in the High Stakes room surrounded by unfamiliar games of chance?
There really are only two choices: you learn the new games and try to make the best of the opportunities that come your way, or you keep looking for the exit and a way back to familiar surroundings with more manageable risks.
Eric has been forced, literally by factors beyond his control, to adapt. He no longer can express any connection to another reality; one that doesn't involve secure wards and wave after wave of familiar strangers. Once in a while, he might connect to a sound, or a taste or. some other primal trigger, but, for now, he's like a plastic bag caught in an air current: buffeted by forces he cannot recognize.
And, because the course of dementia is degenerative, change is relentless and mourning is never broken. My mother visits him almost every day, sits with him, holds his hand and watches for any recognition, even if it is that she is the same stranger that came to see him before. She wants the deal she signed up for, the contract she made with her husband wherein they would grow old together and enjoy hearth and home, friends and family and, above all, certainty.
The world is a confusing enough place and is full of what Douglas Adams described as "infinite improbability." Just when you think you understand your place in the world, there comes a group of monkeys who want a minute of your time to discuss an idea for a play they've been working on.
So powerful a motivating force is this improbability that Adams makes it the energy source that powers the spaceship in his story. It is, so the reasoning goes, just as improbable that we are at any given point in our lives as it would be if we were anyplace else, therefore, if improbability is a constant and we would rather be anyplace else other than where we are, why not be there instead?
Given the unassailable nature of the principle of improbable motivation, it is a wonder that the world had to wait for a writer to describe it. Customarily, it is the province of writers to record, to document, to assign inevitability. In essence, writers deal in recipes: they define the ingredients, describe how they are combined and overstate the outcomes. (Feeds six? Maybe if you're having dinner with five Barbies.)
I watch my mother as she sees the outcome of following her three-decade recipe and works to understand and accept the differences between what she has now and what she had expected and I marvel at the persistence of trust.
To be alive in this world is itself a product of improbability. Making it from one day to the next, one breath to the next, is to overcome significant barriers. Providing a roof, four walls and three squares for yourself and those you care for is a tremendous achievement; one that would not be possible without agreements and understandings, stated and implicit.
We agree to trade our independence for some constants like food, electricity, and some measure of security.
We trust that by showing up to work every day, we will get a check. We follow the rules of the road in the expectation that we will neither killed nor arrested. We surrender our keys to the valet fully expecting that we will get them, and our vehicles, back when we are ready to leave.
We trust.
We know this is a risk, because we have an innate appreciation for improbability, but we trust.
And I want to be clear that trust is very different from faith. I don't give my car keys to an idea, I give them to a person who I can look in the eye and who can look into mine. They don't get my keys until they get "the look" from me that says "I'm getting these back, right?"
It's a contract.
Even in a time when everyone knows that contracts aren't binding, that there always seems to be a way out for people who are, or who can hire, masters of the fine print, we still give up the keys.
It's a remarkable reflection on us that, even despite evidence to the contrary, we continue to trust one another and that, sometimes, we are prepared to take great risks based on that trust.
I come back to my colleagues in the car park and those who have made affirmative choices to leave their countries of origin and come to America because they trust that the country will provide a safe place with more opportunity for them and their families. Even if a compelling case might be made for America playing a pivotal role in creating the instability and the lack of trust, in their country of origin, they still come.
That's trust: trust in the power of an idea despite evidence to the contrary. It's why they're here and it's what keeps my mother returning to the care facility to see her husband.
You have to respect that level of trust.
And you have to respect the people who are willing to trust.
Respecting the trust of other people is, regrettably, an old-fashioned idea. Today we celebrate the fixers, the fine-printers, the super-humans who seem to be immune from the rules and regulations that allegedly confine and restrain all of us. "Ha-ha, no mere Law of Gravity is going to keep me from jumping off this tower!"
This is a popular though unrealistic aspiration because our capacity to trust has been hobbled. Believing we have properly observed the democracy of the line, we have seen too many able to skirt that by paying for premium, primary, access. Even at Disney World, if nothing else a celebration of American values and ideals, they now have two lines for each attraction: the "FastPass" which allows priority seating for customer who pay for the privilege, and the "Stand-By" line for everyone else who could not, or would not, plan ahead.
FastPass is not a new idea for Disney, what is new is the characterization of the regular line as "stand-by." In the very phrase "stand-by" is the notion of chance, of gambling and the very real possibility of disappointment. FastPass is the new normal and Stand-by is for the "others."
We obsess over fairness even as we struggle for premium status and, I don't think, we ever stop to appreciate that the cost of premium status is paid out of our "trust" account.
Each time we have visited Disney World, we have been to the Hall of Presidents. It is a sobering presentation of America's political ideals as manifested in the process of selecting its President.
After a predictably stirring introduction by America's conscience, Morgan Freeman, the curtain parts to reveal a stage full of animatronic representations of the country's 43 presidents. Everyone of the figures moves and several speak to the idea that one of the country's big ideas is that it picks its leaders from among its citizens, that president serves and then returns to civilian life.
Given everything we know about the toxic effects of power, it really is a remarkable idea that someone can become the leader of the nation, if not indeed, the "Free World" and then will, in four to eight years, simply step back in favor of a successor chosen by the citizenry,
That's trust.
And the thing is, we all know how inherently fragile an idea that is because of the raft of conspiracies and works of speculative fiction that exist speaking directly to this point. It's as though, after a quarter of a millennia, we cannot ourselves believe that it still works.
If you have read this far, thank you, and, in exchange for your trust, your belief that I would, sooner or later, come to the point, I will begin to wrap this up.
This is a trust relationship, an agreement between parties that is literally worth less than the paper it's printed on. Each party, the parker and the parkee, agree that they will respect the other and rely upon them to behave in a predictable way.
Whole societies have been built on similar understandings.
I work with a bunch of people who rely on this parker-parkee relationship to feed their families and fuel their futures.
Since I started there, I have met people from Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean and all parts of the U.S. Like the people whose cars they park, they are always moving, always trying to save time, to save money, to earn their way. And when they are not parking a car, or retrieving a car, they are scanning the horizon looking for a potential new customer who might be in need of our service. They watch as each new vehicle pulls up in front of the building to see if it will be a "park" or a "drop."
Parks are full of promise and the potential of a tip; drops are disappointments.
The days can be pretty "streaky" with many cars arriving or leaving at once, but there are other parts of the day when nothing happens, when you can hear the grass growing and feel time slowing down. During those times, my colleagues are on their phones: they are talking, they are texting, they are looking on the Internet. One guy was trying to collect money owed to him by a friend, another studying colloquial English so as to better understand his new country.
I won't pretend to be able to tell their stories, or even do them the justice of a good sketch, but I think it's important to know that there is an essential Horatio Alger ethic in play. No one, myself included, believes that they have reached their professional apotheosis working in valet parking; rather it is a means to an end, a flagstone in a much bigger, much longer walkway.
I've met more than one person who leaves their shift as a valet to go to another job where they stock shelves, or take classes, or both.
As I said, there is lots of slack time in this job and that works to my disadvantage. It gives me time to reflect and that is always dangerous. I'm fifty-five-years old and, as in most other aspects of my life, I seemed to have missed the critical life lessons that were supposed to result in a fair trade of hard work for prosperity and realized ambitions. I believe I have kept up my part of the bargain, but have seen only decline; a steady backsliding that increases stress and decreases prospects.
And the more I reflect, the harder it is to escape a sense of missed opportunities and a growing resentment of what looks like wave after wave of people who have skipped to the front of whatever line I happen to be in.
It shames me to admit it, but I am afraid.
I am afraid to get sick, I am afraid to get old, I am afraid to take risks. I am afraid to hope.
I suppose that is why I look upon the work I am doing now as the perfect metaphor for the cul-de-sac life that I have been living. Instead of being the person who is rushing to a very important something-or-other, I get to be the guy who stops to hold the car door while others rush by.
In the same way that misreading a menu can leave a bad taste in your mouth, I have a sense of having signed up for a class that is no longer being offered.
I too am an immigrant who came to the U.S. more than 30 years ago in part because I thought there was more opportunity available for me to pursue my teaching and other creative aspirations. In comparison to Canada, my country of origin, which was, at the time, mired in endless debate over cultural sovereignty, national identity,special relationships and regional disparities, America seemed like a place to just go and do the thing that you most wanted to do.
Perhaps I was looking at the grass with red, white and blue colored glasses, but based on scale alone, the odds seemed more to my liking. And, to be perfectly honest, part of my interest in coming here after I finished undergraduate school was that so many of my high school classmates had gone to the US right after graduation that an American graduate school was my chance to catch up.
But, soon after I got here, it was as if the country, as a whole, after spending the previous decade coming to terms with a lost foreign war, an emerging vulnerability to foreign-controlled fuel and a normalizing of multi-culturalism, decided that immigrants were a problem that needed to be more aggressively managed.
It's part of national folklore that, as a nation of immigrants, it's always the ones that come after us that fuck everything up. We are good, "they" are bad. "This would be such a wonderful place if it weren't for all the sick and tired and huddled masses. What's the matter with them? We're breathing free over here.... That's the problem with this country: too much yearning."
I recognize that my perceptions about the country may have no relationship to fact, but I really believed that all I had to do was show up and I could go wherever and do whatever. At some level, I likened it to playing with my brother's Hot Wheels collection: sure, there were going to be some awkward questions and hell to pay if I ever scratched, or broke, one of them, but, at the end of the day, not much a problem.
We used to be so proud of having the longest undefended border in the world....
Nobody talks about that much anymore.
There is "inside" and there is "outside" and ever-higher walls to separate them.
We spoke in terms of a "Reagan Revolution" and the transformation of the "Me" generation into the "Just Me" generation. Like most things, apparently, it took me a long time to appreciate what was happening. In graduate school, I met my first 19-year-old with a "Reagan for President" button and I couldn't believe it. How could someone so young be taken in by the Nick-at-Nite nostalgia for a time when the nation's challenges were as simple as black and white and cowboys versus Indians? He put it to me quite simply: "Because I want a job when I graduate."
In truth, I too wanted a job upon graduation, I just wasn't prepared to pay such a high price for it.
As a result, I had to not only convince someone to hire me--not an easy thing for a shy Canadian--but I also had to be worth the trouble, in their eyes, of dealing with an increasingly difficult Immigration and Naturalization Service. (At least, in those days, it was a "service" and not the now more aggressively named Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Any prospective employer had to demonstrate that there was no qualified American candidate for the position.
No pressure.
I was in the same candidate pool as scientists and programmers who were being brought in from other countries and yet I was applying for an entirely different kind of job.
And as American politicians further embraced the "Us-versus-Them" as a campaign issue, there were discussions of limiting the overall number of visas in my category and so I soon found myself competing with the scientist for one of those visas. It was another brick in the wall between who was "inside" and who wasn't.
The rest my twenty-year progress from "alien" to citizen--my "landing," if you will--is not very interesting, if indeed any of the above was, but it is important to know why I persisted.
I persisted because of that contract, that implied bargain trading effort for return, investment for interest.
It could fairly be asked, I suppose, whether I was indulging in my own heavily-filtered, overly-simplified vision of my future, but the terms of that contract were and are easily understood; they are so straightforward that they can be expressed within the 140-character limit of a Tweet and the same very definitely could not be said about the Canadian dream; we have too much inclusive language and too many subordinate clauses.
Simple, direct, easy-to-understand: these are the features upon which America and Americans have made their fortunes. Or, at least, selling those features as being part of the national OS, has been central to the idea of America. "Nuance" and "interpretation" have always been things of which America claims to be suspicious; they are tools of the "old world" that are used to skirt and subvert and are not all that far removed from "malfeasance" and "misdirection".
Simplicity and direct-ness are also part of the feature-set of youth; they are the default positions of children who don't know, or reason to know, differently. Youth is binary, it is one and zero, on or off and it knows of no valid reason why wanting something and getting something are not the same.
* * *
My mother is in mourning.
After experiencing a stroke, about five years ago, my step-father now lives with dementia and all of the foreshortening that comes with that labyrinth of related symptoms. His world consists of what fragments of memory he can dredge up and only those things that he can put his arms around. Sometimes, that includes my mother, but often it does not.
Their marriage was the second chance that both of them wanted and needed; it was an opportunity for them both to know that their lives could have a different focus, perhaps it was not the one they might have chosen for themselves earlier in their stories, it was however, an immensely rewarding partnership that helped to balance the hard-earned furrows of worry on their faces with an equal, or greater, number of laugh lines.
Their relationship was richer for what it cost them both to have: it's a nuanced interpretation, but, what do you want from me, I'm old.
My mother mourns because she looks at her husband and sees him both for who he was and who he is becoming. She carries the weight of holding two realities in her head simultaneously. She is living in Orwell's doublethink dystopia and feels the pressure to accept the world as it is described to her without the permission to free herself from memory and from her own expectations.
Reared with a Depression-era mindset, my mother and her husband were planners and savers; they lived less in the present so that they could enjoy a comfortable future. Unexpectedly, their futures arrived with that stroke and it was not the one they had planned for.
So, what do you do when you find yourself forced to play in the High Stakes room surrounded by unfamiliar games of chance?
There really are only two choices: you learn the new games and try to make the best of the opportunities that come your way, or you keep looking for the exit and a way back to familiar surroundings with more manageable risks.
Eric has been forced, literally by factors beyond his control, to adapt. He no longer can express any connection to another reality; one that doesn't involve secure wards and wave after wave of familiar strangers. Once in a while, he might connect to a sound, or a taste or. some other primal trigger, but, for now, he's like a plastic bag caught in an air current: buffeted by forces he cannot recognize.
And, because the course of dementia is degenerative, change is relentless and mourning is never broken. My mother visits him almost every day, sits with him, holds his hand and watches for any recognition, even if it is that she is the same stranger that came to see him before. She wants the deal she signed up for, the contract she made with her husband wherein they would grow old together and enjoy hearth and home, friends and family and, above all, certainty.
* * *
The world is a confusing enough place and is full of what Douglas Adams described as "infinite improbability." Just when you think you understand your place in the world, there comes a group of monkeys who want a minute of your time to discuss an idea for a play they've been working on.
So powerful a motivating force is this improbability that Adams makes it the energy source that powers the spaceship in his story. It is, so the reasoning goes, just as improbable that we are at any given point in our lives as it would be if we were anyplace else, therefore, if improbability is a constant and we would rather be anyplace else other than where we are, why not be there instead?
Given the unassailable nature of the principle of improbable motivation, it is a wonder that the world had to wait for a writer to describe it. Customarily, it is the province of writers to record, to document, to assign inevitability. In essence, writers deal in recipes: they define the ingredients, describe how they are combined and overstate the outcomes. (Feeds six? Maybe if you're having dinner with five Barbies.)
I watch my mother as she sees the outcome of following her three-decade recipe and works to understand and accept the differences between what she has now and what she had expected and I marvel at the persistence of trust.
To be alive in this world is itself a product of improbability. Making it from one day to the next, one breath to the next, is to overcome significant barriers. Providing a roof, four walls and three squares for yourself and those you care for is a tremendous achievement; one that would not be possible without agreements and understandings, stated and implicit.
We agree to trade our independence for some constants like food, electricity, and some measure of security.
We trust that by showing up to work every day, we will get a check. We follow the rules of the road in the expectation that we will neither killed nor arrested. We surrender our keys to the valet fully expecting that we will get them, and our vehicles, back when we are ready to leave.
We trust.
We know this is a risk, because we have an innate appreciation for improbability, but we trust.
And I want to be clear that trust is very different from faith. I don't give my car keys to an idea, I give them to a person who I can look in the eye and who can look into mine. They don't get my keys until they get "the look" from me that says "I'm getting these back, right?"
It's a contract.
Even in a time when everyone knows that contracts aren't binding, that there always seems to be a way out for people who are, or who can hire, masters of the fine print, we still give up the keys.
It's a remarkable reflection on us that, even despite evidence to the contrary, we continue to trust one another and that, sometimes, we are prepared to take great risks based on that trust.
I come back to my colleagues in the car park and those who have made affirmative choices to leave their countries of origin and come to America because they trust that the country will provide a safe place with more opportunity for them and their families. Even if a compelling case might be made for America playing a pivotal role in creating the instability and the lack of trust, in their country of origin, they still come.
That's trust: trust in the power of an idea despite evidence to the contrary. It's why they're here and it's what keeps my mother returning to the care facility to see her husband.
You have to respect that level of trust.
And you have to respect the people who are willing to trust.
Respecting the trust of other people is, regrettably, an old-fashioned idea. Today we celebrate the fixers, the fine-printers, the super-humans who seem to be immune from the rules and regulations that allegedly confine and restrain all of us. "Ha-ha, no mere Law of Gravity is going to keep me from jumping off this tower!"
This is a popular though unrealistic aspiration because our capacity to trust has been hobbled. Believing we have properly observed the democracy of the line, we have seen too many able to skirt that by paying for premium, primary, access. Even at Disney World, if nothing else a celebration of American values and ideals, they now have two lines for each attraction: the "FastPass" which allows priority seating for customer who pay for the privilege, and the "Stand-By" line for everyone else who could not, or would not, plan ahead.
FastPass is not a new idea for Disney, what is new is the characterization of the regular line as "stand-by." In the very phrase "stand-by" is the notion of chance, of gambling and the very real possibility of disappointment. FastPass is the new normal and Stand-by is for the "others."
We obsess over fairness even as we struggle for premium status and, I don't think, we ever stop to appreciate that the cost of premium status is paid out of our "trust" account.
Each time we have visited Disney World, we have been to the Hall of Presidents. It is a sobering presentation of America's political ideals as manifested in the process of selecting its President.
After a predictably stirring introduction by America's conscience, Morgan Freeman, the curtain parts to reveal a stage full of animatronic representations of the country's 43 presidents. Everyone of the figures moves and several speak to the idea that one of the country's big ideas is that it picks its leaders from among its citizens, that president serves and then returns to civilian life.
Given everything we know about the toxic effects of power, it really is a remarkable idea that someone can become the leader of the nation, if not indeed, the "Free World" and then will, in four to eight years, simply step back in favor of a successor chosen by the citizenry,
That's trust.
And the thing is, we all know how inherently fragile an idea that is because of the raft of conspiracies and works of speculative fiction that exist speaking directly to this point. It's as though, after a quarter of a millennia, we cannot ourselves believe that it still works.
It has stuck in my craw for some time that, as has been observed, the country can no longer afford to be "politically correct." The idea is that, somehow, by respecting that there are differences between us that cannot be settled over a beer and a cheeseburger is somehow a threat to the national soul. Acknowledging that everyone may not be in the country for the same reasons, or believe the same things, is a sign of weakness?
Political correctness has become rallying cry, the "dog whistle" that speaks to a country full, or apparently full, of people who resent feeling obligated to say "African-American" or would rather just raise their voice when talking to someone whose first language is not English than accept that acquiring some cultural sensitivity might actually simplify their lives in a changing society. As one local public official was heard to say, "Cultural Competency is just something the government makes us do."
Somehow the idea has been seeded that openness and understanding, or at least a readiness to understand, is a representation of government over-reach instead of what we--as travelers to this country--have always understood to be a major thread woven into the American welcome mat.
Paragraphs like the last one must surely paint me as some sort of doe-eyed optimist, a refugee from some Capraesque country where people always say what they mean and mean what they say. In my own defense, I would point out that even BedfordFalls had room for both George Bailey and Mr. Potter.
Capra, the immigrant, what have come to be seen as the most American, or perhaps idealized version of American stories. His characters were always presented with a choice between doing what was "right" and what was "easy" and they always chose to do the right thing. And, for as much as the independent, the lone figure striking off to meet his destiny is a part of the national ethos, so too is this idea of always doing the right thing.
Is this still true?
Perhaps because the stakes in Capra's America were so clear, quite literally black and white, it was easy to see the country's character reflected in them and to understand what the right thing is. Almost a century later, the world is much less binary and the national pallet is a lot bigger.
But just as having access to a broad spectrum of colors provides the artist the opportunity to paint a richer portrait of their subject, having a diversity of talents and perspectives only improves our ability to confront challenges and overcome obstacles. Even characters like Batman and Superman need a diversity of talents to respond to their biggest challenges. When the chips are down, you need a League to fight for justice, or to assemble a team of Avengers.
This is stuff we all know.
More is better; the "right" answer is most often a combination of ideas and inputs from different sources.
We know that one person cannot have all the answers even though we might like to imagine it possible.
This is the first year since I have been living in America that I will be able to vote in a presidential election. I've been watching from the sidelines for a long time, but this will be the first time I will be allowed off the bench. I have to tell you that it has made watching the endless campaigning deeply unsettling.
One does not so much have the sense of joining a team as coming into the middle of a family feud--and not the Steve Harvey version, either.
Over and over again, we hear that the major-party candidates have historically low approval ratings. It has become almost common currency that this year's election will be less a contest of ideas, of visions for the country's future than of nose-holding and lesser-of-two-evils-picking.
This is still the United State of America, right?
The country of big ideas?
Is the best idea really to build a wall?
Really?
Voter interviews routinely return quotes like, " Oh, he really doesn't mean that...," or "He's a straight shooter...."
They also say that she is the most qualified candidate with tons of leadership experience and is untrustworthy.
The most prized value this election season is "change." Not the gradual, evolutionary change that comes from building on success and learning from failure,, but the change that comes when your little sister loses a board game and tosses everything in the air and storms out of the room.
The voters want change and they have had it, lots of it.
They just don't like it.
Whether you like it or not, the country and the world have changed and will continue to change. And, like my mother's relationship with her husband, that change is not always positive. The country, like my mother, has the same choices of adapting or denying.
And, just as my mother has had to adapt to a life where her husband is no longer available to reach the items on the top shelf, the country will have no choice but to adapt.
Countries are not businesses, despite what you may have heard, they cannot just decide to close if they don't like the customers they are getting.
Countries cannot ignore the changing realities on the ground. (Well some can, but they are not normally the countries that are
predicated on a regular and orderly transition of leadership.)
Don't get me wrong, I am old enough to be nostalgic for simpler times, for a time when air travel was glamorous and anything was possible, but I am also old enough to know that those days will never come back and we will be forever surrendering our belts, and our dignity, to move around the country.
I am a stranger here, well, I'd probably be a stranger anywhere, but it seems to me that the country was FOUNDED on the idea that people could think for themselves, believe for themselves, and, despite coming from different perspectives, could join together for the common good.
This model has worked very well for a long time--perhaps too well. In the beginning, the differences may have been less obvious, or you may have had to travel greater distances to see them, but now, differences are everywhere. We see different ways of dressing, hear different languages, smell different foods and listen to music that has been fashioned from, quite literally, a whole world of influences. This is not "new" it is just more apparent.
Accepting that the United States of America has been quilted together from the people and cultures of the rest of the world is not bending to a trend, but an authentic acknowledgment of the country's history and addressing the people in the manner of their preference is a sign of respect, the drive for which is what built the country.
And, if that idea, that respect is too complicated an idea to be recognized in speech and in accommodation, we should simply honor the trust that we all share in our collective ability to work things out, to get along.
There is a national trust and it is not a treasure hunt and it is not in forces beyond our control, but it is trust in an idea that with enough hands on the typewriter, regardless of where they came from,we can eventually come up with something pretty great.
That is the contract we each made with America, the one that brought most of us here, and we are trusting in one another deliver.
I can almost hear the objections, the concerns about "unfunded mandates" and the tyranny of unmet expectations. If I am am talking about the inevitability of change, then I have to expect that the contract will change too.
I do.
It has.
And I have not always been happy about it.
But I keep going, trusting that I can adapt and overcome.
What else can I do?
I signed a contract.
And besides, they've got my keys.
No comments:
Post a Comment