I wanted to talk about how angry I am at all of the wasted energy, the smoke, the mirrors and the real human cost of chasing power at the expense of managing the country.
What follows is a revised version of the Politically Correct post. I am very grateful for the feedback received from the readers of that effort. Those comments helped me to clarify my thinking and correct my many typos.
I am an immigrant.I came to the U.S. more than 30 years ago because I thought there would be more opportunity for me to pursue my teaching and other creative aspirations. Canada, my country of origin, was, at the time, mired in seemingly endless debates over language, immigration, cultural sovereignty, national identity, special relationships and regional disparities. It was like living in a household that was being held together for the good of the children. America, by comparison, was like spending the weekend with the non-custodial parent: anything could happen. It 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 in my favor. And, to be perfectly honest, part of my interest in coming here was that so many of my high school classmates had crossed the border right after graduation that an American graduate school would be 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.I arrived in the midst of another American revolution.Like its predecessors, this was a rejection of oppressive old ideas. Out with the love beads and the anti-establishment alphabet soup of openness and experimentation; no more therapy and self-actualization. It was the “Reagan Revolution“ and an entire generation was evolving from “Me” to “Just Me.”After growing up listening to American news and an establishment coming to terms with a post-war generation, it was as though talking about that g-g-g-generation had suddenly become too tiring; figuring out how to recover from a protracted and unpopular war, recognizing the essential fragility of the American economy and that, in many respects, the horizon—the one natural resources it seemed to have in limitless supply—was actually a lot closer than anyone thought gave everyone a headache.The 'big idea” in 1983 was to have no more big ideas and to instead focus on a more transactional analysis: what's in this for me?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."And the way he said it was so certain that you couldn't even tease him about it. It wasn't a Coke versus Pepsi conversation, but much closer to being an article of faith.Perhaps it was the time in which I was born, or indeed my alien-ness, but a 19-year-old Republican? Today, it seems quaint to even comment on, but that was transformational. It remains, to this day, a bellwether of a changing America.I too was hoping to get a job after graduation.I didn't really know going in how it would happen, but I thought if I worked hard that it would somehow just work itself out.To get a job in my field, 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.
And, to make matters worse, I was in the same category of foreigners as the scientists and programmers that were being relied upon to drive the innovation economy.Every prospective college or university employer had to decide whether to invest their time and energy in applying to the government on my behalf—a theatre production technician—or on behalf of a candidate of higher economic value.And the closer I got to graduation, the more heated the public debate over these visas and the total number that would be allowed each year. It seemed to be common currency that if the number of opportunities for foreign workers were reduced then a counter-balancing number of domestic candidates would suddenly appear. This too seemed to be expressed in the absolutist terms of that 19-year-old that made the position invulnerable to logic, or debate of any kind.My journey 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 what I thought of as the promise of America, the contract, if you will, the 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 have 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.Recently, I started a new job working for a company that provides valet parking services. Every day, drivers of all makes and models bring their similarly variegated vehicles to our door and give us their keys fully expecting us to ransom their cars back to them.
Take my car, please. And, by all means, don't tell me where it is and prevent me from accessing its contents without your permission. Under no circumstances are you to return it to me, until I ask for it. 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.
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 to school to take classes, or both.
The slack time in this job 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.Anyone who has picked a check-out lane at the store only to find a new lane open, or all others suddenly clear out will have some sense of what I'm talking about.
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 their car door.
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.During one of our recent slack periods, I spent the time helping one of my colleagues to resolve a payroll issue he was having with the company. Though he had started shortly after me, almost two months ago, he had only received one paycheck and was trying to figure out how to get the rest of the money that was his due.Since English was not his native language, I was pressed into service to tell his story to a series of customer service representatives at the company and their payroll service contractor.Feeling the pressure of a rent payment, my brother from another country was getting frustrated because he did not understand why he couldn't just have a check instead of the pre-paid debit card that he was being offered.As I was doing my best to explain his issue to the operator and their issues to him, I thought of the famous chicken salad scene in “Five Easy Pieces” and, not with no small pride, the long tradition of peacekeeping in Canada.At stake was about five hundred dollars and, what I took to be, a significant amount of anxiety about his as-yet unmet obligations.After several rounds of call-the-company-no-call-the-bank-no-call-the-company, my friend in frustration said he wanted to close the account and have them send him a check for the money that was owed, even though it would take up to ten business days.This decision quickly brought the negotiation to a close.By this time, as a full-blooded Canadian, I had internalized his frustration and was confused by this choice given the imminent deadline he was facing.My friend smiled at me and said that it really wasn't such a big deal. He had come from a country where he had had to be on the alert all the time; where his last name and his location relative to a river could mean the difference between life and death. In his country, he was always being watched, being forced to pay bribes to keep his business afloat and to sleep with one eye open for fear of violence directed at him, or his family.He smiled because he had made his way to America where the problems were trifling by comparison; frustrating, no doubt, but, compared to his experience, trifling.
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.)
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.America, as an idea, is built upon the idea of harnessing improbability.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 be 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.They are betting against the odds and on improbability.That's trust: trust in the power of an idea despite evidence to the contrary.
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 our key rings are choked with tags denoting preferential status by virtue of our loyalty to the places we shop. I don't think, we ever stop to appreciate that the cost of premium status is paid out of our shared "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 millennium, 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.
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 a 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, made 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 States 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 before storming 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.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 then, 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 to deliver.
I can almost hear the objections, the concerns about "unfunded mandates" and the tyranny of unmet expectations. If I 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. I expect it to be honored just as I expect to keep up my part of the bargain.
And besides, they've got my keys.
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