No Such Thing As A "Self-Made" Man?

I went and wrote another wordy thinkpiece on Facebook in response to a comic that someone was sharing. I figured I might as well repost it here for the sake of giving it a bit more permanence:

On Racial Inequality and Diversity, in the Wake of the Death of Michael Brown

I had planned on doing another brief thing for my podcast relating to the events of Ferguson, Missouri, but I wound up writing something pretty long and complex that I'll probably fail miserably at reading aloud. That won't stop me from trying, but on the off chance it takes me a while to get right, I wanted to share what I have written so far.

I'm not sure what the TL;DR version would be so I can't sum my thoughts up for you. If you actually care about race relations in this country, you'll have to take some considerable time out of your day to sit down and read this. I don't think that's too much to ask, though. Just make an effort. That's what it's all about.

Oh, wait, I guess that actually does kind of sum it up. There you go, I just saved you a lot of reading. If you still feel like killing time, though, here's the long version:

--

With the grand jury decision this past Monday the 24th, unrest and outrage over the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have reignited. I recorded a rant back in August about the situation, and while I think it's worth sharing again now while it's still relevant, I don't want to leave my commentary at that. What I said back then was largely reactive and largely insensitive, and as my understanding has evolved a bit since then, if I were to re-record that rant today it would likely sound a bit different. And maybe a bit less insensitive.

However, I really don't want to dwell on the specific events of this case anymore. I will just add this: I still think it's screwed up that when it comes to holding people accountable legally, police are seemingly held to a lower standard than the rest of us. You'd think it should be a higher one. A regular citizen who kills in self defense has to at least see their day in court, and might even be found guilty depending on circumstances like whether the assailant was armed, or what state it happened in. But a cop killing in self defense in the line of duty might not even make it that far. I know they do internal investigations on these matters, but it doesn't seem nearly transparent enough, and that's only compounded by the majority of cases where the cop ultimately faces little to no penalty for what happened.

But that's not what I actually wanted to talk about. This is:

Racial tension isn't going away because we're not facing it. Part of the problem is that a lot of people are still confused by where this tension is coming from in the first place. They think it's all resentment about the past; it's not. Not really. The tension doesn't emerge from what happened fifty-plus years ago, (which still sounds pretty recent when you put it like that). It emerges from what happens today, every day.

Black people in this country overwhelmingly have less opportunities to succeed than their white counterparts. It's built into how the system works. If you don't believe me, I'll be happy to explain my position momentarily.

Granted, many of the disadvantages they're facing are basically the disadvantages of poverty, but the fact is that minorities experience poverty at a much higher rate. When doors are closing on young black kids from poor neighborhoods, for our purposes here it doesn't matter whether doors are closing because they're black or because they're poor; the doors are closing just the same.

Now, I get the impression that a lot of my fellow white middle-class suburbanite types don't really understand where the opportunity gap is coming from, or even believe it exists, so I'll try to explain my limited understanding of the situation. Imagine a kid in an impoverished neighborhood. They're growing up surrounded by drugs, violent crime and failing infrastructure. They can't walk the streets outside their home after dark. They come home from school and are either told they'll be having fast food again (because decent fresh food is hard to come by or too expensive, or because Mom or Dad don't have time to cook because they're working). Other times they just won't be eating dinner at all because there's no food left in the house and Mom or Dad doesn't get their paycheck til tomorrow. This isn't a surprise for the kid; it's happened a lot before. As a kid they might at least enjoy the fast food; that still doesn't make it good for them, of course, but it's something.

At bedtime, they have to huddle under the biggest blanket they've got in an attempt to stay warm, because it's winter and their family can't afford heat. Assuming they can get warm enough to sleep, they're probably still going to have trouble staying asleep because of the sirens screaming by in the middle of the night. This is not a kid who is likely to believe they have a bright future ahead of them, or any future for that matter.

Are you familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Neither am I, really; I barely paid attention in psychology class. But that's kind of the point. For a guy like me who has the basic needs of life met, who had an overall happy and fulfilling childhood, a lot of what was happening in school just felt trivial to me. It's only by virtue of being the giant nerd that I am that I succeeded at all. Now, imagine that kid in the rough neighborhood, who spends much of their time hungry, cold, tired, or generally having to worry about their safety. When they pick up the Geometry or Earth Science text book they had to borrow from a friend, because their family can't afford to buy it and their school doesn't have the funding to provide one for every student, they're not realistically going to look at that book and think, “Yeah, this is my ticket out of here.”

And even so, let's assume that kid does everything right. They take their schoolwork seriously and do the best they can because someone important in their life drilled it into them that an education is their ticket to a better future. The next challenge is getting accepted to college. Not everyone who applies to a school gets in, and if you're the poor kid from the inner city who did their best in a public school, you're simply not competing on even ground with the kid who went to a private school and has a stellar SAT score because they took some expensive prep courses. Now assuming there's no nepotism going on at these schools (which is a big assumption), if they chose to admit the best of the best based on transcripts alone, most of the kids coming from a poor background wouldn't make the cut. Even with schools showing preference for diversity candidates, a lot still won't make it. They might still have a chance at community college, but the career opportunities from that won't typically go as far.

But let's assume the kid is fortunate enough to be accepted somewhere, and it's somewhere close enough they can afford to travel there. If they want to go to college, they need a way to pay for it. Loans might not be an option; not everybody has someone in their life with a good credit score. So then there are scholarships. Academic scholarships are hard to get, and for the same reasons we saw above, even harder for a kid graduating from a public school in the inner city.

Now, I've heard people express disapproval that there are scholarships set up explicitly to be awarded to black kids, Hispanic kids, kids from a Native American background, and so on. They feel that rewarding students based on their race rather than their achievements sends the wrong message, and while I understand where they're coming from, that argument seems to ignore the cultural context in which these scholarships are created. Personally, I would rather see those scholarships committed to awarding money to students based on their economic situation or the place they grew up rather than explicitly on race, and obviously they shouldn't be giving free money to people who don't take their education seriously, but if someone is applying for a college scholarship, let's work on the assumption that they're fairly serious about going to school, because for these kids that's no easy feat.

Even then, those diversity scholarships frequently don't award a full ride, and they never give very many of them. For the thousands and thousands of students who will apply, only a handful receive that award that makes school viable for them. This is a major problem, and arguing that the kids who failed to get a scholarship should have worked harder is not a solution. When the possibility of higher education is like playing the lottery, how can anyone in that situation be expected to conclude the system is working?

Personally, I think it's a travesty all around. Education, the pursuit of knowledge, is the most basic foundation of everything we have achieved as a society. In any modern society that boasts freedom and equality for all, education should not be a privilege. Federal and state funding for education should be primary concerns, even if it's just K-12. A government that spends more money on bombs than books is fundamentally failing its people. But that's tangential to the point of all this.

So far I'm sure all this sounds like a big white guilt trip, that because my ancestors enslaved their ancestors I'm somehow obligated to pay reparations or something. That's not it at all. Just because I'm white doesn't mean I don't have a personal stake in the success of the black community. The fact of the matter is, the American community at large needs the black community to succeed, because when they succeed, the rest of us will benefit. Because diversity makes us stronger.

Now I grew up in a school district where seeing a black kid was kind of like seeing an elephant. You knew they existed, but mostly from seeing them on TV or at the zoo. Before college I think I knew one black kid in my entire life. After college, I knew two. Diversity lies outside the realm of my personal experience, so the power of diversity is a concept it's taken me a good quarter of a century to be turned on to.

Anybody who has studied genetics understands why diversity in a population is crucial to the survival of that population, but this concept actually applies to society as well. As an example, let's take something I might be familiar with: the tech industry. Say a tech company is interviewing for a new developer position, and their choice comes down to two candidates, one of whom is a bit more qualified on paper, but the other would bring diversity.

Now, most employers would say they want what they perceive to be the better more qualified candidate, so they'll just take the first guy if they can. But the way a smart employer makes this choice has a lot to do with who they've already hired in the past. Let's say Candidate #1 is a white male who grew up in the suburbs of the northeast and graduated from MIT. If the company already has five people in that department who fit that description, unless this guy's some kind of prodigy, his presence is likely going to be kind of superfluous. In any field where critical and creative thinking are important, like the tech sector, where innovation can be the difference between the company thriving and failing, diversity is essential.

While a good idea can come from just one person, there's no way to know who that person will be. A homogenous group of people with the same or very similar perspectives and experiences will sooner or later be faced with a challenge they're collectively unable to handle. A diverse group yields diverse viewpoints and diverse ideas, meaning that when a new challenge comes along, there's a better chance at least one person in the group will produce an idea to tackle it, an idea that the others might never have come up with.

Besides, discussion among a group of people with the same viewpoint tends not to produce any really new ideas. They just spend too much time agreeing with each other to come up with something different. A varied group discussing their viewpoints has to bounce ideas around, compare different approaches, and while meetings like that can take longer, they'll ultimately be more productive when an idea is agreed upon. Possessing a wide range of perspectives and experiences gives a company a much greater ability to adapt and survive.

Adapt or die. It's the rule of nature, and it applies to business, to the tech sector especially.

So, if I have a central statement to make here, it's that the problem of racial disharmony is one that all of us, including white guys like me, need to pay attention to and think about ways to alleviate it. That disharmony hurts all of us, and if we can't even acknowledge that fact, if we can't see something like the shooting of Michel Brown as anything more than a black issue, then the status quo isn't going to change. And if you're a white guy and the status quo has been pretty good to you, you need to recognize how things could still be so much better.

Conversely, if you're white and things really aren't so great for you, which I think probably applies to most of us on some level, you must understand that if you want black people to sympathize with your issues, you need to be able to sympathize with theirs. I'm not saying it's easy. The problem hasn't persisted this long for no reason. Relating to someone who is very different can be hard. Maybe their experience is something that those of us outside that community can't fully understand. That doesn't mean we can't try.

The Anti-Rant Podcast is Live

http://antirant.libsyn.com/

Yeah, I actually did it. You thought I was full of it, didn't you? Well, I have an honest-to-goodness podcast now. I actually have a good deal of stuff previously recorded that will gradually migrate there, but for now there is some new content to listen to there. You can either listen directly on the Anti-Rant blog thing, download the mp3s, or use the RSS feed to subscribe with your favorite podcast aggregate app.

The podcast is not listed yet on iTunes because my destestation of Apple is both passionate and undying. However, I know it'll get more exposure there so I'll try to get it in their directory eventually.

If you're wondering at all why I am doing this, the short answer is that I want more practice speaking and reading aloud so I can hopefully become a better orator. My writing skills are decent enough at this point, and when I do write I generally want to work on fiction. Anything more tied to real life tends to either be condensed into a tweet or morphed into a spoken piece of this podcast.

I could see continuing to write here for certain things, but for the most part I think we can call this the end of an era, and joyously the start of a new one. If anyone is genuinely disappointed to see me writing less here, I'm sorry to disappoint but I hope you'll at least give my other endeavors a try. (I say endeavors plural because there's still a novel I'm working on, plus that one other thing that's still too far from completion to hype at this point)

That's it. I don't know when I'll have more updates here, but just in case, I'd better go out with one more well-wishing sign-off. Peace and love, dear readers. I hope you'll become listeners as well.

Random religion rant

I stepped into a tired, circular conversation about the existence of God online. This is what I had to say about it.

You know, I've spent many an hour pondering the big mysteries, on whether we have a creator or not, about whether there is a life after this one, and so on. This is what I've most recently concluded: I don't care.

How the universe came to be is fun to think about, sure, but now that it's here, it doesn't really matter. I think there might be some kind of divine power beyond our understanding, and even some form of life after death, but neither of those things have too much bearing on this life and this world. All a person should need to live this life well is the understanding that what they do affects other people, and their lives are no less important than your own.

Those big questions don't have much effect on this world. What does is the distance people will go to and the depths they'll sink to in order to rationalize their most hard-fought deeply-ingrained beliefs. If beliefs were valued simply as ideas like they should be, they could be shared more freely and with a lot less grief. What's more, if people didn't cherish their own beliefs so much more than the next person's, maybe they wouldn't be so slow to empathize with and respect them.

All that's required to commit an evil act is to diminish someone enough to convince yourself that hurting them is acceptable. If you don't respect their ideas, that's very easy to do.

My point is, have fun thinking and talking about the possibilities, just don't take it too seriously. We've all got to die someday. Until then, we should try to be tolerable to be around.

That's it. Thanks for reading, and thanks even more for listening. Peace and love, Internetizens.

Something I wrote on a whim

The weak shout into the abyss and hope the noise will echo into the ages, outliving their own fleeting existence, validating them and giving them purpose. But the abyss doesn't care about our insignificant hopes and wishes, our thoughts and fears. Our vain cries drown in the endless silence.

The brave know there is no point in screaming and struggling. They swallow their pride and let themselves be swept into the eye of the storm, where all the rest end up no matter what, and sometimes, if they're lucky enough, a few float to the top. They don't ask for this privilege; they are hurled into it, ready or not. Still fewer remain there. Most lose their way and fall, ending in obscurity with the rest of us.

But those few, those precious few, they swirl above it all in eternity, tiny pinpoints of hope and inspiration for the rest of us. They guide us, drive us, and above all serve as a reminder that in the depths of that crushing black void, we are never truly alone.

Peace and love, readerlings.

Of Vitriol and Malcontent

I'm no stranger to coarse language nor indignant rage, but I make an effort these days to control both, (hopefully not at the expense of entertainment value). I'd like to explain why I worry about the digital aether being over-saturated with outrage, and why maybe we all need to cool our heads a bit even when our anger feels justified.

Clearly, I'm no stranger to outrage. For years, the better portion of what I did here was complain passionately about random topics and hope it was vaguely funny to somebody. It's not hard to see why I did it; I enjoyed it. An acquaintance on a forum once said,

Being angry is fun. And it's so easy.

That phrase has been in my signature ever since. It's funny because it's true.

In contrast, let's consider what a close friend I've known in person for several years said about me recently. I'm paraphrasing slightly, but the gist of her comment was,

Dan, you don't get angry. You only have two settings: unperturbed, and slightly less unperturbed.

It's easy for people who know me to get this impression. I am by no means a Zen master, unwavering in placidity, but that is definitely what I strive for now. I am a paragon of restraint. If I ever have an unkind word for anyone, it should never be delivered in anger, only a firm tone with a calculated disregard for their feelings. If push comes to shove, I'd rather come off in a verbal fight as a heartless bastard than a raging maniac.

Now, to be fair, anger in the right person fosters passion, and passion is the seed of motivation and ambition. So, I can't say that negative feelings never yield something positive. The point is just that I'm extremely cautious and distrustful of my anger, and I think I have good reason for being so. It basically comes down to what that person said online:

Being angry is fun, and it's easy. That's why it's dangerous.

Raging out is fun. Being angry or upset triggers a heightened mental state, the effects of which can actually feel pleasurable. It's that Fight-or-Flight response we've heard so much about. It's like the adrenaline rush you get from watching scary movies, or taking part in dangerous sports and activities like skydiving, snowboarding, or injecting methamphetamine into your bloodstream. At least with the meth you're kind of aware of what it's doing to you. Even if you aren't consciously aware of it, your brain likes being in that dramatic elevated state, and if you experience it often enough, it's easy to become addicted.

Now, couple that with the fact that getting angry is easy. Finding your fix takes no effort these days. If you don't have anybody in the immediate vicinity to bother you, you're not stuck in traffic, no Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on your door this evening, it's not 2012 and the Obama campaign didn't send you another god damn email, you're still ready to rage. All you have to do is turn on the TV news (or what passes for news on TV), or log onto your favorite Internet-enabled device, and you'll be readily bombarded with hate-porn. Look, all around you! Bad people are being wrong and doing and saying wrong things! Be mad about it!

The great thing about being addicted to rage is that, unlike traditional feel-good drugs, there are no real side-effects to speak of. I mean sure, there's the embarrassment from when you got into a shouting match with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving, the monetary cost you were charged to fix the display you overturned while screeching at a cashier at Wal-mart about expired coupons, the damage you've done to your career after that ugly hate-speech you put on after getting drunk at the office holiday party, and the untold emotional damage you've done to your friends, your spouse or significant other, and any kids who might have the great misfortune of calling you a parent, but those things tend not to slow a true addict down.

Oh, did I mention that being addicted to rage means you get mad more easily? Well, it does. Like any addiction, you develop a tolerance, and so need a bigger fix to get the same high. Luckily, in the case of rage, your brain handles this for you by gradually trimming all those pesky connections to empathy and logic that you weren't using, and strengthening the paths that trigger an anger response, thus allowing you to get much angrier much faster with much less prodding. Isn't that convenient? And it explains why that lady in the grocery store is able to go from perfectly calm and pleasant to livid and violent at the mere sight of two guys holding hands or a teenage girl holding a baby.

So clearly, there are a lot of things that make rage an easy and tempting pass-time, but I just don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to use my ego, my sense of personal entitlement and superiority, or my political, social or spiritual beliefs as some kind of excuse to justify my selfish desire to feel good, to fill my communications with others with violent obscenity, and my brain with delicious rage-juice. If I allow myself to indulge too much, I'm afraid a day will come when I can't stop it.

Besides, I know this is a big leap in logic, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that of all the people who have ever thrown a rock through a window, caved in someone's eye socket with their fist, set someone's house on fire, shot somebody in the chest seven times, hung someone by the throat from a tree, or killed crowds of complete strangers with an improvised explosive device, very few of those people could be described as "slightly less unperturbed." The less I have in common with those people, the better.

So, that's the long and short of it. I hope that made some kind of sense. I feel a bit bad that I don't have any scholarly sources to back up my bullshit about the science behind addiction. If anyone knows of papers or articles that back up my observations, please do send them along so I can include them. If you have any material that could disprove me, kindly keep it to yourself; that's not what science is for. It's to make me sound smart, nothing more.

Thanks for listening. Peace and love, gentle readerlings.

More thoughts on faith

A group of friends of varying religious backgrounds are discussing their unique beliefs. One of them asks the others, "So, what is the difference between Gnosticism and Agnosticism?" The Agnostic friend says, "I don't know." The Gnostic friend says, "I do!"

Just wanted to talk about an indie game

I haven't talked about Lone Survivor before now. Probably because tonight was only my second time playing it. I don't take to survival horror well, apparently. Or maybe I take to it too well. I'll get to that. The point is, this is a game I will likely reference a lot in the future and say "See, this is how survival horror games should be made, and this is why."

Now, I'm not going to write a review on this. For one thing, more credible gaming-columnist-types have reviewed this fine piece of indie gaming before. For another, I've only logged just over an hour, and I play very slowly, so I can't exactly review the product as a whole.

(image borrowed without permission from pocketgamer.co.uk, because come on, it's not like they made it)

So, why am I going so slowly through the game? Well, aside from being a bit of a wimp, I seem to worry a great deal about the main character's well-being. Really, that's a good thing for a horror game. A lot of modern "survival horror" games are really just action games with creepy monsters, because that's what big developers think people want.

Here's the thing: you do encounter and sometimes fight monsters in this game, but in the time I've played, one of the more unsettling parts of the game in my opinion has been the creeping dread that my character is going to slowly starve to death because he's been stuck in this apartment building for a week and has barely found any food. That's putting emphasis on the "survival" in survival horror.

Tonight, I ate the last of the beef jerky I found the other day and was still hungry shortly thereafter. I tracked down several cans of goods but was without a can-opener. Meanwhile, my character complains constantly of hunger and is acting delirious. I wound up popping some mysterious pills out of desperation. You can't imagine the wave of relief I felt after fighting my way to a neighbor's kitchen, where I found the sought-after can opener, and a fresh ham. Never in my life have I been so elated by the sight of ham. Now, if only any of the ovens in the building were working...

That brings me to the other half of what's great about this: there really is no clear metric for how well your character is doing. You know you need food to survive, but don't know how much is enough or when the hunger will go from a minor annoyance to a mortal concern. The same is true of sleep. You know the pills you find can probably be useful, but it's not clear how, and they probably have nasty side-effects. You know monsters will hurt you but you don't know how much. Your odds of survival are always an unknown.

On the other hand, you're keenly aware of the amount of charge remaining in your flashlight, the number of bullets left for your gun, and the number of edible food items you've located, all of which are ever dwindling. Well, at least there's a stuffed animal I can tell my woes to.

So, to my point: many games are popular because the player gets the opportunity to control a powerful avatar and go on epic adventures. But when you're making a survival horror game, you want to go the other direction and make the player feel relatively powerless. Cowering in the dark, eating rice pudding and talking to your stuffed animal might not sound like great fun, but it makes for a very engaging horror experience.

Obviously, this can be tricky, because if a game makes the player feel too powerless and lost, they'll just get frustrated. That's why it's important to remember the power of that fresh ham in the refrigerator. Those little moments of hope can keep the player going. Couple that with a story that is slow to betray the secrets of the world we're trying to survive in, and you'll keep players intrigued and emotionally invested in the game.

Anyway, that's about all I wanted to say tonight. Hopefully I'll have something more universally engaging to talk about soon. In the meantime, I need sleep.

Peace and love, you wonderful reader people. May life hand you a fresh delicious ham when you least expect it.

Just thought I should mention

My life really isn't as miserable as I portray it here sometimes. This can't be overstated: I have a great family, and some very wonderful friends. Yesterday was absurdly fun.

I'm unfortunately feeling a little sickly today, so I won't be able to adequately tell the story. For now, suffice to say that I had the pleasure of hanging out with some of the coolest people I know. Among other things, we watched a good movie, ate good food, talked about a variety of silly things, climbed a tree, and did that silly thing where you lay in the grass in a circle. It's a shame we didn't have an aerial camera; it probably looked very amusing.

Anyway, aside from that, I got some nice news today, but it's not set in stone and I'd rather not jinx myself, so I'll get into that next week sometime.

I also kind of want to use the "boobs" tag on this post, but am having a tough time coming up with a good reason for it. You'd think there would always be a reason for boobs.

So yeah, life is good. I need to take more time out to acknowledge that. Also, to climb more trees.

Peace and love, readers.