Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Dark Times

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This weekend, I’m attending the annual Frontiers of Democracy conference, which this year is themed around “the politics of discontent.”

I’m afraid it’s a timely theme.

17,410,742 people just had a profound and long-term impact on European politics and global economic markets.

535 people in the U.S. Congress can’t get anything done.

In his thoughtful opening remarks, Peter Levine quoted Bertolt Brecht:

Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.
What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need?

There is so much work to be done.

 

 

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Civic Engagement in the Zombie Apocalypse

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Imagine the early days of the zombie apocalypse: a few zombies shamble down the street but society hasn’t quite yet reached full-stage desolation.

It is very clear that something is wrong, but the whole situation is shrouded in chaos and uncertainty. People who seem more or less normal one minute become brain-hungry monsters the next.

Leaving the cities seems like a wise idea. With so many people becoming vicious and unpredictable, it’s probably best to isolate yourself from the mass of humanity.

But at the same time, you can’t cut yourself off all together. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I probably don’t have the skills to survive in the wilderness on my own. I’d like to think I’d have something to contribute to a small, post-apocalyptic society, but I would most certainly need a community – people to help me forage and fight back the zombie hordes. I’m fairly certain I couldn’t do that on my own.

I would also be inclined to argue that community provides broader value – that living amongst at least a few other people would be better than living in total isolation – but I suppose such an argument goes beyond the scope of what I’d like to write about today. Even on purely practical, utilitarian grounds, one must trust at least a few other people in the zombie apocalypse world.

The challenge here is that, especially during the initial waves of the zombie apocalypse, it is entirely unclear who it wise to trust. The zombies, after all, aren’t some inhuman creatures instinctually distinguished from ourselves – indeed, every zombie was a person first.

One might hope that the human/zombie distinction would be clear once the full zombification of a person has taken place, but there’s every reason to think that it would not be clear in the early stages. Indeed, until you properly learn to recognize the signs, a trusted human might go to monstrous zombie more quickly than you could anticipate the tragic transformation.

This leaves the important question of what civic engagement and civil society would or should look like during the zombie apocalypse.

Do you err on the side of welcoming people into your post-apocalyptic community, benefiting from their skills and talents but risking their future thirst for brains? Or do you isolate as much as possible – protecting yourself from infection, but cutting yourself off from the benefits of society and decreasing everyone’s chance for survival?

Both options have risks, and either could be decried as foolish.

For myself, I lean towards community. Isolation may have its benefits and at times may have its appeal, but ultimately, such tactics are a short-sighted solution. Facing the desolation and despair of the apocalypse, one would do well to remember: isolation may help you survive another day; but community is how you go on living.

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James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

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On June 21, 1964, three Americans working to register voters in Mississippi were brutally murdered by KKK members. Their bodies were found 6 weeks later.

The murders were among the most gruesome acts of a summer marked by violence; as America began to come to terms with its racist past and hateful present.

It was Freedom Summer, a remarkable effort led by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC. It was a summer which transformed our nation, though, more than 50 years later, we still have some transforming to do.

For details on this effort, which brought over 1,000 volunteers – mostly white, liberal, college students – to Mississippi to register African American voters, I highly recommend Doug McAdam’s excellent book, Freedom Summer, which thoughtfully details the selection of volunteers, their experiences, and the impact of the summer.

But today, 52 years after the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, I find myself reflecting on what has changed – and how much further we still have to go.

All the Freedom Summer volunteers faced significant violence. McAdams notes that over the course of the 10-week voter registration campaign 1,062 people were arrested, 80 of the Freedom Summer workers were beaten, and 67 black churches, homes, and businesses were bombed or burned.

Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were arrested. For speeding. They were denied the right to make phone calls, and civil rights organizers who called the jail looking for them were told the three men were not there. After they were released at about 10pm, the deputy sherif and Klansman who had arrested them followed them in his car – eventually forcing them out of their own car an into his. The Sherif’s deputy then drove the three to an isolated area where they were murdered.

Chaney, a black volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was savagely beaten. All three were shot.

I’d like to think something like this couldn’t happen today, but to be honest, I am not entirely sure. If I read this story in the news today, I would be saddened, but not surprised. People of color face so much violence in our communities – more, I’m sure, than I can truly appreciate.

Freedom Summer transformed our nation because it served as a wake up call for white America. When it was their sons and daughters being jailed, beaten, and murdered they could no longer ignore the deep injustice and atrocity faced every day by black people in the south.

This is exactly what the black civil rights activists who organized Freedom Summer had in mind. They’d been working for justice for decades, but when it was black bodies dying, the sad truth was – nobody cared.

Bringing white volunteers to Mississippi for Freedom Summer put America’s violent, racial injustice on the front page of the news. The nation suddenly cared.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act – which was effectively gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court vote – was a landmark showing just how much we, as a nation, had changed.

But there is so much more work to do, and we have even lost some ground.

Before Freedom Summer, the injustice faced by black Americans was largely invisible to the mainstream. The experience of blacks in places like Mississippi had no effect on the lives of their white, Northern peers. And, as is commonly charged of white, Northern racism – before Freedom Summer, white liberals could comfortably pretend the problem simply wasn’t there.

When Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two nice Jewish boys from New York, were murdered by klansman, when for ten weeks the news was full stories of white Northerners being arrested and beaten registering voters – it became clear that something needed to change.

But there has been so much death already – so many people of color dead at the hands of police or others who felt the need to ‘stand their ground.’ I’d hope it wouldn’t take even more death to galvanize our nation to change.

The deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were horrific – and I wish they been the last.

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Utah v. Strieff

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Yesterday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a powerful dissent in the case of Utah v. Strieff. The full dissent is well worth reading and can be found with other court materials here.

The case centered around the 2006 arrest of Edward Strieff Jr. in Salt Lake City. As explained in the headnote for the Supreme Court’s decision:

Narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell conducted surveillance on a South Salt Lake City residence based on an anonymous tip about drug activity…After observing respondent Edward Strieff leave the residence, Officer Fackrell detained Strieff…He then requested Strieff’s identification and relayed the information to a police dispatcher, who informed him that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. Officer Fackrell arrested Strieff, searched him, and found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Strieff moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that it was derived from an unlawful investigatory stop. The trial court denied the motion, and the Utah Court of Appeals af- firmed. The Utah Supreme Court reversed, however, and ordered the evidence suppressed.

In a 5-3 decision, the Court overturned the Utah Supreme Court decision, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan also dissenting.

In the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas explained:

To enforce the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” this Court has at times required courts to exclude evidence obtained by unconstitutional police conduct. But the Court has also held that, even when there is a Fourth Amendment viola- tion, this exclusionary rule does not apply when the costs of exclusion outweigh its deterrent benefits…The question in this case is whether this attenuation doctrine applies when an officer makes an unconstitutional investigatory stop; learns during that stop that the suspect is subject to a valid arrest warrant; and proceeds to arrest the suspect and seize incriminating evidence during a search incident to that arrest. We hold that the evidence the officer seized as part of the search incident to arrest is admissible because the officer’s discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized incident to arrest.

On its face, this seems reasonable. Strieff was a criminal engaged in illicit activity. Perhaps, then, the officer was right to detain him and to initiate the chain of events which led to the discovery of evidence of Strife’s criminal behavior.

Justice Sotomayor, however, strongly disagreed:

It is tempting in a case like this, where illegal conduct by an officer uncovers illegal conduct by a civilian, to forgive the officer. After all, his instincts, although uncon­stitutional, were correct. But a basic principle lies at the heart of the Fourth Amendment: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Because the officer did not search Strieff until after he learned of Strieff’s outstanding warrant, the majority opinion found the discovered evidence to be admissible; the search itself was entirely legal.

And perhaps stopping essentially random people, checking for a warrant, and then conducting further searches if needed, seems reasonable. Perhaps its better to inconvenience some people in order to catch criminals.

But, as Justice Sotomayor points out, this is an increasingly pervasive, institutionalized tactic:

Justice Department investigations across the country have illustrated how these astounding numbers of warrants can be used by police to stop people without cause. In a single year in New Orleans, officers “made nearly 60,000 arrests, of which about 20,000 were of people with outstanding traffic or misdemeanor warrants from neigh­ boring parishes for such infractions as unpaid tickets.”…In the St. Louis metropolitan area, officers “routinely” stop people—on the street, at bus stops, or even in court—for no reason other than “an of­ficer’s desire to check whether the subject had a municipal arrest warrant pending.”…In Newark, New Jersey, officers stopped 52,235 pedestrians within a 4-year period and ran warrant checks on 39,308 of them.

I do not doubt that most officers act in “good faith” and do not set out to break the law.…Many are the product of institutionalized training procedures. The New York City Police Depart­ment long trained officers to, in the words of a District Judge, “stop and question first, develop reasonable suspi­cion later.”…The Utah Supreme Court described as “‘rou­tine procedure’ or ‘common practice’” the decision of Salt Lake City police officers to run warrant checks on pedestrians they detained without reasonable suspicion.

There is something wrong with our justice system when police officers are trained to assume people are guilty until proven otherwise. Not only does this go against the heart of what our judicial system ought to stand for, it introduces – or extenuates – opportunities for systemic discrimination.

At the core of ‘citizenship’ is the idea that all people – regardless of legal status – have something of value to add to their communities. That their voices and perspectives matter. Allowing this random stopping of citizens paints an entirely different picture; that people must prove their right to be treated as full-fledged members of a community, that they may not be worthy of respect.

While many elements of the Utah v. Strieff case give weight to the Court’s majority finding, we ought to think long and hard about what kind of society we want to be and what kind of justice system we want to have. As Justice Sotomayor points out, this is the beginning of a very dark path, and – at the very least – we should know what we’re doing before we go down it.

I will let Justice Sotomayor conclude this post, then, with her powerful words of warning:

Writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences, I would add that unlawful “stops” have severe consequences much greater than the inconvenience sug­gested by the name. This Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine you. When we condone officers’ use of these devices without adequate cause, we give them reason to target pedestrians in an arbitrary manner. We also risk treating members of our communities as second-class citizens.

Although many Americans have been stopped for speed­ing or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more. This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact…The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambigu­ous.

The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal…he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.” …If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’ ”

The officer’s control over you does not end with the stop. If the officer chooses, he may handcuff you and take you to jail for doing nothing more than speeding, jaywalking, or “driving [your] pickup truck . . . with [your] 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter . . . without [your] seatbelt fas­tend.”…At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to “shower with a delousing agent” while you “lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.” …Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the “civil death” of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check. And, of course, if you fail to pay bail or appear for court, a judge will issue a warrant to render you “arrestable on sight” in the future.

This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, supra, at 8, many inno­ cent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner…But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. …For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.

By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere….They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

I dissent.

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Okinawa and the Shadow of U.S.-Japanese Relations

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Yesterday, some 65,000 people in Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, gathered to protest U.S. military bases on that island.

The protest was sparked by the recent rape and murder of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro, a crime which has been linked to an American military contractor, and is reminiscent of the 1995 protests which followed the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen.

Among Okinawans, there is a widespread perception of U.S. bases as “hotbeds of serious crime,” though, as the New York Times points out, “defenders of the military point to statistics that show American soldiers and sailors in Okinawa are charged with crimes by the Japanese authorities at lower rates than locals.”

The strain between the U.S., Okinawa, and Japan, however, runs deeper.

Teacher and protestor Noboru Kitano, 59, is quoted in the  Japanese Times as succinctly explaining the heart of the matter: “Japan is still a military colony of the United States. This base symbolizes that.”

The U.S. has had a continuous presence in Japan since the end of the second world war. Following the post-war occupation, the 1952 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan – which has been active in its current form since it was updated in 1960 – provided for the permanent presence of U.S. forces on Japanese soil.

The majority of those forces are on Okinawa.

As of January 2016, the Japanese census puts 1,432,387 people living on Okinawa, including about 50,000 Americans – making it home to about half the American soldiers and sailors stationed in Japan. About three-quarters of the acreage taken up by U.S. bases in Japan is on Okinawa.

But, here’s the thing – Okinawa and the Ryukyu Island chain of which it is a part, has its own distinct culture and a long history as a political pawn between Japan and China. In 1879 – around the same times our own U.S. civil war – Japan’s Meiji government annexed the then-sovereign Ryukyu Kingdom, creating the Okinawa prefecture we know today.

During the second world war, just 66 years after its annexation, Okinawa was the scene of one of the bloodiest skirmishes in the Pacific, and the largest military engagement in history. The brutal, 82-day, battle claimed the lives of 14,000 Allied forces, 77,000 Japanese soldiers and somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 Japanese civilians died.

Nearly all those civilians were Okinawan, and many of the Japanese soldiers were in fact Okinawan conscripts, drafted by the Japanese government against their will. The shocking death toll of this battle would then be used to justify U.S. use of nuclear weapons – as the American government became convinced that a land battle on the Japanese mainland would be just as horrific as the Battle of Okinawa, if not more so.

It’s entirely unclear if this is true, however. Seen as Japanese by the American troops and considered second-class citizens by the Japanese troops, Okinawan civilians suffered atrocities at the hands of both sides. Caught between the two superpowers, it was Okinawan civilians who suffered – one of the reasons for the horrific toll.

Following the war, the Japanese had little choice but to cede to American interests – which included establishing a strong presence of military operations in the east.

Okinawa, then, provided the perfect setting for rebuilding U.S.-Japanese relations. A strong U.S. presence there mitigated the risk of loosing the island prefecture to China – a manuver in the interest of both U.S. and Japanese officials. Furthermore, the Japanese lost little by ceding Okinawan land, while simultaneously ameliorating their U.S. occupiers. It was a win all around – except for the Okinawans.

This is a history that’s critical to understanding today’s Okinawan protests of American military bases. It’s almost beside the point whether local perceptions of American military crime are accurate or exaggerated. Just a few generations ago, the Ryukyu Kingdom was a proud, independent nation. Desired by China, annexed by Japan, and then colonized by the U.S., Okinawa has found itself continually caught between the interests of these global superpowers. And while great games of politics play out across the world stage, it seems it’s always the Okinawan people who suffer.

That is why they protest.

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Utopia and High Modernism

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I’ve recently started Erin McKenna’s The Task of Utopia, which thoughtfully explores and compares numerous utopian visions.

Primarily, she critiques the popular conception of utopia as a static, end-state, vision, arguing instead for a process model of utopia. What makes this commentary so compelling is that McKenna deftly dismisses both proponents and detractors of this end-state model.

I have written before about this end-state debate. On the one side are utopians who argue in favor of a static society, peacefully at equilibrium, but in which individuals are devoid of personality and incapable of growth and change. Detractors, on the other hand, find that the cost is too high – the generally bad elements of war and pain and grief may be eliminated, but without them we can not also experience the positives of love and joy and creativity.

McKenna summarizes the debate between these views:

This end-state approach seeks to control the future so completely that any future individual participation will become meaningless and unnecessary. The belief is that by gaining control over nature, over the ordering of society, we will be able to achieve the right ordering of individuals in society and achieve a lasting harmony. It is this idea of rational control leading to final harmony that promotes the view of utopian visions as static, totalitarian nightmares. 

End-state utopias, then, may indeed be well-ordered societies, but they are ultimately little more than a dangerous and destructive expression of high modernism.

In Seeing Like a State James C. Scott argues that high modernist ideology “is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress…” However, “high modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term ‘ideology’ implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”

High modernism goes hand in hand with an end-state vision of utopia: it is the arrogant belief that with enough rational thought, with enough scientific process, and with enough control, a select class of humans have the capacity to bring about a utopian society.

Scott argues that this high modernist ideology – along with a totalitarian state capable of implementing this vision and a weak civil society which is unable to resist – ultimately led to “the great human tragedies of the twentieth century.”

The destruction wrought by the high-modernist experiments led, as McKenna notes, to the end-state utopia more recently falling out of favor. Humans were foolish if they thought they could achieve utopia, and wrong if they thought coercion and control were acceptable means of achieving it. The cost, indeed, was too high.

McKenna, however, finds an alternate path. “Those who call for (or lament) the end of utopia have a limited vision of what utopia can entail,” she argues. “They tend to fall back on an end-state model of utopia…Utopian visions can avoid these problems when they no longer seek a final goal, but realize that it is the process of transformation itself that needs to be addressed.”

I’ll cover her approach, a process model of utopia, in a future post, but it seemed worth spending some time connecting the problems of the end-state model with the dangers of high modernism.

In part, this topic is making me revisit the most resent work of utopian fiction I read – Sándor Szathmári’s Voyage to Kazohinia. While Szathmári clearly favors the well-ordered society of the Hins, I – like those concerned about utopia above – found them too lacking in love and art.

I had attempted to provide some arguments rejecting the premise of having to choose between the well-ordered, equilibrium society and a passionate society of extremes, but I ultimately  decided that this was a question worth exploring.

McKenna, on the other hand, seems solidly convinced that the choice may not be forced – the seeming dichotomy is simply an artifact of end-state thinking.

I note this here because Szathmári’s ideal Hin society is not an end-state utopia. We see the Hins only through the eyes of an Englishman, and it is this proud man of Western civilization who deems their society a repugnant, end-state, dystopia.

But that critique is too simple. Unlike the end-state dystopias described by McKenna, the perfect, peaceful society of the Hins did not come about through totalitarian coercion. The are people who evolved, who collectively decided to act in ways that were better for everyone. Far from suffering under a totalitarian regime, the Hins don’t even have a government – it is not necessary because everyone shares a continual understanding of what is best.

And, most importantly in illustrating that it is not an end-state utopia, Hin society is not static. Our English hero is repulsed by their norms, but throughout the novel, we see Hins interested in growing and learning and changing. They are not static, the have a good society but they still quest to be better.

There still seems something tragic in their loss of love and art, but perhaps I was too quick to dismiss the Hins as little more than a vision of end-state ideal. Perhaps a choice between equilibrium and extremes is not required. Perhaps, indeed, we can have a process model of utopia.

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Adventures in Network Science

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Every time someone asks me how school is going, I have the tendency to reply with an enthusiastic but nondescript, “AWESOME!” Or, as one of my classmates has taken to saying, “WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!”

Truly, it is a privilege to be able to experience such awe.

As it turns out, however, these superlatives aren’t particularly informative. And while I’ve struggled to express the reasons for my raw enthusiasm in more coherent terms, I will to attempt to do so here.

First, my selected field of study, network science, is uniquely interdisciplinary. I can practically feel you rolling your eyes at that tiredly clichéd turn of phrase – yes, yes, every program in higher education is unique interdisciplinary these days – but, please, bear with me.

I work on a floor with physicists, social scientists, and computer scientists; with people who study group dynamics, disease spreading, communication, machine learning, social structures, neuroscience, and numerous other things I haven’t even discovered yet. Every single person is doing something interesting and cool.

I like to joke that the only thing on my to-do list is to rapidly acquire all of human knowledge.

In the past year, I have taken classes in physics, mathematics, computer science, and social science. I have read books on philosophy, linguistics, social theory, and computational complexity – as well as, of course, some good fiction.

I can now trade nerdy jokes with people from any discipline.

And I’ve been glad to develop this broad and deep knowledge base. In my own work, I am interested in the role of people in their communities. More specifically, I’m looking at deliberation, opinion change, and collective action. That is – we each are a part of many communities, and our interactions with other people in those communities fundamentally shape the policies, institutions, and personalities of those communities.

These topics have been tackled in numerous disciplines, but in disparate efforts which have not sufficiently learned from each other’s progress. Deliberative theory has thought deeply about what good political dialogue looks like; behavioral economics has studied how individual choices result in larger implications and institutions; and computer science has learned how to identify startling patterns in complex datasets. But only network science brings all these elements together; only network science draws on the full richness of this knowledge base to look more deeply at interaction, connection, dynamics, and complexity.

But perhaps the most exciting thing about this program is that it truly allows me to find my own path. I’m not training to replicate some remarkable scholar who already exists – I am learning from many brilliant scholars what valuable contributions I will uniquely be able to make.

Because as much as I have to learn from everyone I meet – we all have something to learn from each other.

There are other programs in data science or network analysis, but this is the only place in the world where I can truly explore the breadth of network science and discover what kind of scholar I want to be.

 

I joke about trying to acquire all of human knowledge because, of course, I cannot learn everything – no one person can. But we can each cultivate our own rich understanding of the puzzle. And through the shared language of network science, we can share our knowledge, work together, and continue to chip away at understanding the great mysterious of the universe.

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Collective Emotions

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It is not uncommon for groups of people within a shared community to experience what’s known as “collective emotions.”

Sociologists Christian von Scheve and Sven Ismer define the term as referring to “the synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object.” Communities may celebrate together and they may grieve together. They may feel fear together or may share a collective sense of shame.

Importantly, as philosopher Bryce Huebner argues in detail, such collective emotion is different from simply plural emotion. That is, “there are emotional states that are not merely states of individuals in aggregation.” Collective emotion is something more.

In developing a model for collective emotion, Scheve and Ismer argue that “for collective emotions to emerge, individuals have to appraise an event in similar ways, which in turn requires a minimum of shared appraisal structures or shared concerns.” People must not only respond to an impetus in similar ways, they must be aware of each other’s emotional response.

I find it important to think about this as our nation continues to reel from the tragedy in Orlando and from too many other horrors our world has experienced.

In my own circles, I felt that sense of collective grief, collective anger, collective fear, and collective love.

But I’ve been struck by how many people have told me they didn’t.

They went to work on Monday to small talk about weekend plans and the weather. As if nothing had happened. As if nothing were wrong. When casually asked how they were doing, they found they had little choice but to respond politely:

I am fine.

Events like these, I suppose, expose our cultural fault lines. Many people in America consider the victims of the Orlando shooting to be a part of their communities – a community of humans, Americans, Latinos, or LGBTQ folks – but many others, it seems, do not.

It is not necessarily that they don’t see this horror as tragedy, but rather, that they have some emotional distance from it. It may as well have happened on the moon. It is easy to switch the news off and go about your day.

I’ve heard similar reflections from people of color following the many, many, many, acts of violence and brutality faced by that community. After hearing the news of the death of Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, or any of the other 102 unarmed black people killed by police in 2015, they go out into the world saddened and angry, only to find their white peers, blissfully unaffected by the news, smiling and asking amiably, How was your weekend?

Having no doubt done this myself at times, I suppose it’s just a reminder of how important this collective emotion can be. That’s not to say that white people should take over the grief of people of color, or that straight people should make the mass murder of latino LGBTQ folks all about them.

But whether we see ourselves in the faces of the victims or whether we see the loving faces of our human brothers and sisters, we can, and should, all grieve together, all mourn together, and, above all, all work together to prevent such atrocities from happening again and again and again.

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No Words…

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There are no words in the face of tragedy. No words to fully express the confusing mix of horror and love and anger. No words to change the terrible past. There are no words.

And yet, I find I am left with little else. I’ve no response but to love, to speak out, and to act.

I am not powerless; these are my tools.

But I’ve written this post too many times, seen too many good people die, seen too much violence against our most vulnerable communities.

We can and should pass an an assault rifle ban, but that is not enough. Like most civilized countries, we should limit access to firearms – but we must also change our culture of violence and hate.

50 people died in an attack targeting the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. And yet LGBTQ people are being straight-washed from the story by elected officials who have continually and vocally denounced this community. By elected officials who may very well continue to spew homophobic hate after the requisite moment of public grieving has passed.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, managed to deftly ignore both the LGBTQ victims and the U.S.-born perpetrator, choosing to highlight in his statement: “We are a nation at war with Islamist terrorists.”

It is all of it too much.

I can’t stomach the hate.

As I try to make sense of this senseless situation, as I grope for some sanity in this mad world, I find I am left with little but a deep, profound love for every living being. Yet, as many before have pointed out, that is not enough. So, I am full of love, yes, but full, too of a certain divine dissatisfaction; a need to keep working until the work is done; until we’ve collectively put aside hate and violence and found a way to simply love, to embrace our collective humanity.

I’m afraid this is little to offer in the face of such an insurmountable task, but this is what I can do. Love, speak, and act – those are my tools.

And there is so much left to do.

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Self-Skepticism

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I have complained before about the common solution to the so-called “confidence gap” – that those with less confidence (typically women) should simply behave more like their confident (typically male) peers.

There’s a whole, complex, gender dynamic to this conversation, but even putting that issue aside, I have a hard time accepting that the world would be better if more people were arrogant.

Of course, those advocating for this shift don’t call it arrogance, preferring the positive term of confidence, but there is a fine line between the two. If a person lacks the confidence to share a meaningful insight, that is a problem. But it is just as problematic – perhaps even more problematic – when someone with unfounded confidence continually dominates the conversation.

Confidence is not intrinsically good.

Thinking before you speak, questioning your own abilities – these are good, valuable traits. It’s only at their extreme of paralyzing inaction that these traits become problematic. Similarly, confidence is appropriate in moderation, but quickly becomes tiring at its own extreme of arrogance.

Finding a balance between the two is the skill we all ought to work on becoming good at.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good word for the opposite of over-confidence. Modesty is one, but it doesn’t quite capture the concept I’m trying to get at. Modesty is a trait of accomplished people who could reasonably be arrogant but manage not to be. Can you be modest while sincerely unsure of yourself?

I’ve started using the term self-skeptism; a sort of healthy, self-critique.

The word skeptic has a somewhat complicated etymological history, but is derived in part from the Greek skeptesthai meaning, “to reflect, look, view.” This is the same root as the word “scope.”

It implies a certain suspension of belief – an ability to step back and judge something empirically rather than biased by what you already believe. And, it implies that skeptical inquiry is a valuable process of growth. The skeptic neither loves nor hates the subject they are skeptical about – rather, they hope to get at a better, deeper understanding through the process of inquiry.

Applied to one’s self, then – though perhaps more typically called by the general term of self-reflection – self-skepticism can be seen as the process of trying to become a better person through healthy skepticism of yourself as you currently are.

This, to me, lacks the judgement implied by “lacking confidence,” while embracing that we are all flawed and imperfect in our own ways – though we can always, always work to become better.

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