Waiting

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

My father always told me that it’s better to be 30 minutes early than 1 minute late, so I’ve spent a significant portion of my life waiting.

Apparently, I am not alone in this – in 2012 the New York Times reported that Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line.

It’s somewhat unclear, but I assume that estimate doesn’t include time waiting not in line – waiting for your child’s soccer game to finish, waiting for the meeting before yours to finish, waiting for a building to open, or waiting for the bus (which may or may not be in a line).

The Times argues that the “drudgery of unoccupied time” leads to complaints about waiting. Moving baggage carousels further from a gate, for example, reduced complaints since passengers had more occupied time walking to the carousel and less unoccupied time waiting at the carousel.

In some ways this makes sense, but in other ways I find it baffling.

Unoccupied time? What does that even mean?

Don’t get me wrong, I can get impatient with the best of them. About 4 and half hours into the flight to California I am about ready to jump out the window to get off of the plane. I get anxious when I’m running late and unfocused when I’m waiting for news.

But just waiting in general?

I don’t know. Isn’t that…kind of what life is? Finding ways to occupy unoccupied time?

Maybe I’ve just read Waiting for Godot too many times.

My father, after all, also taught me that when you arrive somewhere 30 minutes before you have anything to do there, it’s wise to bring a good book. Add snacks and water to that list and I’m good to go.

And if it’s too dark to read, that’s no big drama. After all, there’s always something interesting to think about.

What Can be Done?

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Faced with the ills of the world it is not uncommon to ask, What can be done?

This may be regret, heaved with a heavy sigh – what can be done?

Or it may be hope, seeking tactical advantage – what can be done?

Either way the question is the same. Whether the problems of the world seem utterly insurmountable or whether scrappy solutions seem effective enough, the question remains: what can be done?

The question itself is arguably disempowering – conjuring images of far-off experts or distant lands. What can be done [by those in power]? The question seems to ask.

In civic studies, we focus on an individual’s agency and on the collective power of people. Instead of asking what can be done, we ask what can we do?

What can be done by you and I? What can be done collectively by anyone seeking solutions to our most challenging problems? What steps can you and I take today, tomorrow, and ever onward to make the world better? What can we do?

The question is a daunting one. Putting the focus on ourselves puts the pressure on ourselves. What can we do?

What can I do?

I could do nothing. An option, perhaps, but a wholly dissatisfying one.

I could do something. A more promising tack, but with many questions in its wake. What something should I do? How much something is enough?

There is no solution, no easy formula, no simple way of knowing that x number of hours or y number of dollars fulfills your moral obligations to your fellow man. So still we are left with the question, what can we do?

You can try to logic your way into an answer – I shouldn’t give so much time that I burn out, I shouldn’t give more philanthropically than is sustainable. But to me those answers always feel hollow.

There is always more work to be done. There is always more I could give.

And then there are the myriad challenges for which I have no solutions. For which I have no knowledge and no real capacity to bring about positive change. Thousands are dying in Nigeria.

What can I do?

The haunting answer maybe nothing.

There are certainly things in this world which are beyond my control. I’ve no powers over life or death, over good fortune or ill. There are times when you have to let go. There are times when there is nothing to be done.

But this doesn’t have to be an icy fate. Even knowing the odds, knowing the challenges, knowing how little power we have in the face of cataclysmic challenges. Even knowing all this we can still pause and ask…

What can we do?

Protest Strategies

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Last week, protesters in Boston shut down 93 in both directions during rush hour. As they explained in their statement, they took this action to “disrupt business as usual” and protest police and state violence against Black people.

And disrupt they did.

But over the last few days, I’ve watched a fascinating debate emerge: was this the best form of action?

There are concerns about safety: at least one ambulance was diverted as a result of the action. There are concerns about precedent: do we want to be telling anyone that the dangerous act of blocking traffic is okay? There are concerns about effect: will this just make people angry, turning them off from really caring about the (important) cause?

And, of course, there are concerns about legitimacy: were the protesters just entitled white people? Did they truly have the buy in and support of Black Lives Matter? Were black people and people of color disproportionally negatively effected by being stuck in traffic? Did they lose wages? Did they lose their jobs? Did the protesters wildly misunderstand their target by calling Medford/Somerville “predominantly white, wealthy suburbs”?

These are all good questions.

There are, of course, rebuttals to all these points. One blogger, for example, argues: Boston is notorious for its traffic coming to a complete standstill on major thoroughfares. During baseball season, ambulances are routinely prevented from reaching major Boston hospitals in an efficient manner. I wonder whether the people who are attempting to discredit the #BlackLivesMatter protest also speak out against the Red Sox and their fans for blocking traffic?

Those into history can revisit three weeks in 1981 when firefighters, police officers, and others regularly blocked rush hour traffic to protest layoffs – and there were no arrests. Like a Blue Mass Group blogger you might ask: Is it possible that there were no arrests because the police, although charged with trying to keep the roadways open, were basically in sympathy with the protesters? Or have policies regarding when to arrest protesters changed over the years?

These are also good questions.

Everybody has good questions, but but no one has good answers. It’s not that surprising, I suppose – if anyone had designed the “perfect protest” I’m sure we’d all have heard about it by now.

But there is no ideal protest formula, no way of know exactly what is best. Protests are messy, they’re complicated, and most of all, they are controversial.

And that is truly the crux of the matter. The debate isn’t really about how many ambulances were effected, or how this traffic compares to regular terrible traffic.

The real question is: are disruptive tactics good? Do they generate change in ways that other tactics cannot?

I don’t know the answer to that question – no one does – and it’s a great, interesting, rich topic of debate.

Personally, I tend to be conflict-avoidant: I can’t honestly say that I’m prepared to take part in any action which will lead to being arrested. But I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Perhaps I am wise, perhaps I am a coward. I couldn’t say for sure.

But I will say this: I’m not prepared to judge anyone else for participating in the actions they think are most likely to bring about the change they want to see.

Let’s talk about strategy. Let’s talk about tactics. Let’s discuss what works and what doesn’t work, let’s debate what actions and reactions are most meaningful. But at the end of the day, yes – I stand by the Boston protesters.

I am proud they had the courage to stand up for what they believe. If only each of us could say the same.

Honesty and Social Clues

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

There’s this quintessential moral dilemma: someone asks for your opinion on something and your honest feedback is…less than positive. Do you give positive feedback out of a sense of compassion, or give negative feedback out of a commitment to honesty?

It’s a question open to great debate.

But it may be primarily a debate of theory – when asked for feedback on someone’s hideous new outfit, for example, it’s possible that the most common reaction is neither lie nor truth – it’s paralysis and, possibly, fear.

Nobody knows what to say.

It’s not just a problem of moral paralysis, it is a problem of social paralysis. What is the “right” thing to say? Asks both about what is moral and what is socially optimal – and the later is definitely context dependent.

If someone is bristling with excitement over the outfit they just dropped a small fortune on you may not want to respond in the same you would to someone who is trying to decide how they feel about their newest hand-me-down.

What’s particularly interesting is that in many of these conversations you – the person beading with sweat trying to figure out how to respond – are really just a spectator to another person’s inner dialogue.

When someone asks what you think, it doesn’t always mean they care what you think.

Perhaps they are looking for validation or confirmation of what they’ve already decided. You can give it or not, but either way it’s not really about you. You’re just a mirror for what they want to see.

The real social challenge is that generally we don’t know what’s in the other person’s head. Do they really want feedback? Do they just want a reinforcement of their view? If that’s the case, what is their view and what kind of reinforcement can be provided?

These are the types of thoughts that run through my head as I stare panic-stricken at my interrogator.

So I think, actually, the best response to stall for information. Ask questions, make non-committal statements, see how they play their hand.

My favorite response is what I call the air-suck, that is, the noise you make when someone asks for feedback and you respond with, “Well….<air-suck>.” It may be the universal sign that you’re not comfortable providing your honest feedback.

And it provides your questioner with an important opportunity – they can create a space for honest dialogue or they can finish the thought for you. In that case, you didn’t lie – though you didn’t tell the truth – but you did serve as a mirror, which is all that was really asked of you anyway.

And, of course, if someone is genuinely interested in your honest, open feedback, the solution is simple – give it.

Nothing is true/Everything is beautiful

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche recounts the so-called assassins creed – the secret motto of “that unconquered Order of Assassins, that free-spirited order par excellence.”

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

“Well now,” Nietzsche writes, “That was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled.”

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

One might find cause to worry at those words – even if the phrase weren’t attributed to a secret order of assassins, a group of men whose morals almost certainly fall outside my own.

“Nothing is true,” is nearly damning in itself, but the haunting corollary “Everything is permitted,” seems a dreadful fate. It invokes, perhaps, a world of chaos and anarchy. Where men do as they please and where “as they please” is almost never pleasant.

Everything is permitted allows the worst of humanity the freedom to reign.

Perhaps.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut offers what feels like the next breath in the thought:

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

As far as I know, these two lines have never appeared together, yet they fit for me like two lines from the same stanza.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

Vonnegut’s words appear on a tombstone, indicating, perhaps, the freedom of non-existence which comes with death. Oblivion, it seems, is not all that bad. It comes, at least, with a release from pain and an awe-inspiring awareness of the beauty of mere existence.

Profoundly tragic and sublime, Vonnegut’s vision of the void seems to offer…peace, if that rough word can do this idea justice.

But what does this have to do with a world where all is permitted? Where men run wild and loose their will upon the world?…

It is commonly assumed that a dissolution of truth will necessarily descend into despair. That men would go mad should they stare into the void, that all would be lost if they dare believe for a moment that nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Perhaps, like a number of townspeople in Albert Camus’ The Plague, they would spend their days boozing, whoring, or simply doing nothing…unable to face the death that seemed certain to destroy them. Or perhaps, like Rieux, Tarrou, or Grand, they would find new meaning through their lives in the doomed town of Oran.

Everything is beautiful.

There is beauty in the void. There is something positive, hopeful, numinous – none of our English words seem to do it justice. But that awe is there.

Nothing is true is not synonymous with all is lost. It’s an expression of freedom.

Everything is beautiful.

Everything is permitted is not an entitlement to carte blanche, it’s a commitment of profound responsibility.

And nothing hurt.

No Enemies

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

Years ago I ran across a poem by Charles Mackay. Finding it was entirely incidental – I was in grade school, I think, and it happened to be photocopied from the same page as Invicitus; the poem we were actually studying.

Nonetheless, the poem stuck with me:

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

Non-Violence

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

It is easy to speak of non-violence when you have nothing at risk.

But what does it mean to truly embrace non-violence? To commit to love even when you have everything at risk?

Mohandas Gandhi, who is so rightly revered for his own commitment to non-violence, famously offered this reflection:

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

By committing to non-violence, by voluntarily seeking their own death, Gandhi believed the massacre of the Jewish people “could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.”

That is what a commitment to non-violence looks like.

I don’t mean to argue here that one shouldn’t have a commitment to non-violence. I have been fortunate enough to never have truly tested my mettle in this regard, so I honestly don’t know what is right. What I do know is that while non-violence certainly sounds good, it is not a devotion one should take on lightly.

Non-violence is a bold commitment.

A commitment to the power of love over the power of hate. A commitment to the rightness of peace over the corruptness of brutality. It is a willingness to sacrifice yourself – to sacrifice everything – in the name of a greater cause.

It is more than a commitment to peaceful protests or uplifting words. A true commitment to non-violence takes a great leap of faith, a belief that love – just love – has the greatest power of positive transformation.

It is greeting your killer with love in your heart.

In “Loving Your Enemies,” the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

Perhaps more of us should do that. Perhaps more of us should put our faith in the power of love. Perhaps more of us should be willing to risk everything in embracing the transformative power of love.

But let’s not pretend that it is easy.

Let’s not pretend that it is obvious. And let’s not sit back in the comfort of our own homes and judge those who might turn to violence in the face of despair.

It is easy to speak of non-violence when you have nothing on the line.

Election Spin and the Voice of The People

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

There’s nothing quite like the post-election spin and hype machine, a 24-hour media scramble to interpret the Voice of the People.

CNN reports that “a Republican tide ripped the Senate away from Democrats.” And everyone seems to be jockeying to promote their preferred answer to the question of whether the election was a referendum on the President, the Democrats, or the political system in general.

The people have spoken and our political pundits are here to tell us what they’re saying.

It is times like this when I most appreciate the words of Walter Lippmann, “In this deadly conflict between [the Founding Father's] ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of god.”

We are taught that the essence of a democracy is to revere the voice of the people as, indeed, the voice of God. As the highest form of Truth. And when every election rolls around, we look hopefully to the polls, desperate to understand what The People are trying to tell us.

But, alas, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That is not to say that people, as individuals, are idiots. Lippmann’s view was far more nuanced than that. His disdain for the The People or The Masses should not be confused with a disdain for people.

The challenge, you see, is that, “We have been taught to think of society as a body, with a mind, a soul and a purpose, not as a collection of men, women and children whose minds, souls and purposes are variously related.”

The voice of The People is nonsense, not because the people are nonsensical, but because The People is not a coherent whole.

Individual people do individual things for individual reasons. Perhaps there is some meaning we can gather from their collective data, but…a referendum on a person, a party, or an institution?

No. Individual people can declare opposition to those things. The People cannot.

Is There an Obligation to Vote?

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

Voting is often referred to as a civic duty, yet there is no shortage of Americans who choose not to vote.

People give all sorts of reasons for not voting. The most common reasons are being too busy/having conflicting work or that they were not interested/felt my vote would not count. Illness or disability is also not an uncommon reason for not voting.

Frankly, I don’t put much stock in people’s self-reported reasons for doing or not doing anything. As marketer Clotaire Rapaille – who developed the marketing vision for Hummer – will tell you, people commonly make an instinctual decision then come up with rationalizations to explain it.

But irregardless, many people don’t vote and have stated reasons for not voting. Perhaps some of those people – such as those with illness or disability – literally don’t have the logistic support to vote. But certainly, the majority of non-voters could vote if they tried.

Yet none of this answers the question – is there an obligation to vote?

In many ways voting is irrational. From what I know, I have never been the deciding vote in an election. Given my ideological similarity with those in my ward, city, and state, I am unlikely to ever cast the deciding vote in an election. So, really, in many accurate ways, my vote does not matter.

Of course, if nobody voted that would be a problem. And if no one of my demographic profile – my supposed “voter blocker” – voted that would be a problem, too.

But none of that changes that my own, individual decision to vote is, essentially, irrational. Just as I dismissed people’s reasons for not voting, one could easily dismiss people’s reasons for voting. We have a behavior and we rationalize it afterwards. Perhaps we just invoke terms like civic duty and obligation to make us feel better about this random little deed.

And, still, none of this answers the question – is there an obligation to vote?

I’d like to push this question even further, asking, is there an obligation to be an informed voter? Having an obligation to show up in a cramped room and mindlessly check a few boxes doesn’t seem particularly compelling.

But asking for informed voting is an even greater burden for the individual involved. If I was too busy to vote before, I’m certainly not going to have time to become informed. This demand also raises important questions about what it means to be informed – is the word of a trusted friend enough? What about inferring from party affiliation? What about learning from candidate ads or from the ads of PACs with agendas?

Are you informed if your information is biased?

The answers are entirely unclear.

But does one have an obligation to vote?

Perhaps the question is too narrow. An obligation to show up on designated days and draw some lines? That is uninspiring.

But the doesn’t mean we have no obligation. Anyone who is part of a community benefits from their membership in that community, and anyone who benefits from a community has an obligation to participate in that community.

For me, voting is an essential part of that participation. Even when I’m uninspired by candidates or feel that the system is stuck in a broken status quo. I keep irrationally voting because it is one of many things I do to participate.

I can imagine a society of corruption and rigged elections where refusing to vote could be a more powerful statement than lending legitimacy to the system. But, complain as I might, we don’t seem to be that far gone.

Refusing to vote is not a powerful statement. It is a silent assent. A willingness to be ignored. It is a triumph for those in power, with even less impact than my paltry ballot.

Is there an obligation to vote? Maybe not. But there is an obligation to participate. From inside the system and from outside it. You can do both, and you can do both simultaneously.

And right here, right now, a vote may be a tiny tick in the universe but it is a piece of the larger puzzle, and a piece a good citizen ought to participate in.

Morality for the Broken

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Sarah Shugars

I often call myself broken.

I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It’s just a part of who I am. To be honest, I suspect we are all broken. All not quite right. All wounded and scarred from our past, present, or future.

So forgive me if I use that word cavalierly. I use it to refer to any person – or, perhaps, a given moment – where we aren’t quite the person we want to be. Where the traumas of our past impact the realities of the present.

Perhaps you aren’t good at opening up to people. Perhaps you over share. Perhaps you are terrified by loud noises, inexplicably moved to tears, overcome by violent anger, controlled by addictions, paralyzed by fear.

I don’t know how you are broken, but I suspect you probably are.

I know I am.

Mental health issues are serious, and we should take them seriously.

But to remove the stigma of mental health, we also need to normalize mental health issues. We need to give morality back to the broken. Or perhaps we broken need to take morality back.

And make no mistake, there is a moral component to mental health. Michel Foucault traces this well in his work. Sanitoriums were places where the mentally ill were incarcerated with criminals – eventually separated for the protection of criminals, who were seen as morally superior to the mad.

The mentally ill were left exposed in the cold and put out on display for entertainment. The mentally ill were less than human, and the perceived causes of their madness were inextricably linked to the morality of the day.

Perhaps our modern sensibilities have refined since then, but this implication of immorality has not yet faded from view.

There is nothing wrong with you if you are broken. There is nothing wrong about you.

Friedrich Nietzsche argues that aristocrats invented morality. That they created “the good” to be synonymous with their tastes. Eventually, this paradigm shifted, with those who came to power from lower social rungs declaring blessed are the meek.

But if the moral path is consistently reinvented by those in power, who will speak for the broken? Who will define morality for us?

Guilt as a personal check can be good. Guilt as a crippling response seems unhelpful. Grief can be a healthy process, but depression can be devastatingly paralyzing. Anger, too, has value, but undirected rage can be dangerous.

Who is to tell us what feelings are Right?

I am not prepared to be judged immoral for any of my many faults, nor would I presume to judge others for theirs. And yet, giving everyone a pass to determine what is best for them seems dangerous – perhaps there are some deeds we really ought not to condone.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know this – there is a morality for the broken, one that embraces us for who we are and accepts our many flaws. A morality that doesn’t judge how our brokenness manifests, but which understands that it does. A morality that questions what is Right without damning us for our flaws.

A morality for the broken. And we are all of us broken.

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Category Archives: Unpopular Opinions

What Can be Done?

Protest Strategies

Nothing is true/Everything is beautiful

No Enemies

Non-Violence