Author: Benjamin

Now after yesterday’s piece you have to admit I’m on something of a roll. It’s sort of weirdly self-referential to assert that these pieces in which I assert that I’m doing really great work (I mean the best work, work that everyone agrees is really terrific work) are themselves the best work. But they are. Millions of people are reading them right now. And I mean right now. Right now, as you are reading this, there are like a million other people reading these pieces as well. Can you feel the resonance of your minds, working together? It’s pretty intense, when you think about it. All these people around the world reading these words at the same time you are and, exactly as you are, agreeing that this is really terrific writing. The best writing. And the best website in the whole world. Everyone reading this right now agrees.

I’m doing such good work right now. Really good work. The best work. Everyone agrees. You should see my drafts! “Damn!” you’d say. “This is really the best work!”

Yesterday’s piece got, like, a billion hits. The most hits. Servers totally unrelated to the one(s) that host my site crashed from the load. Servers in different states. Different dimensions, even. Because I’m doing such good work and everyone recognizes it.

We’re in the final week of season eight of the Free Refills project. A week from today will mark the two-year anniversary of the project’s true beginning. How about that, eh? Things have been changing around here for a while now–you’ve noticed, I assume–but the pace of that change will be accelerating.

If you’re a longtime reader, you have seen me at times suggest that maybe what I’m writing isn’t for everyone. More accurately, you’ve seen me say that like it’s a problem.

Well let me first of all say that no writer’s work appeals to everybody. I’ve seen writers whom I admire disparage publicly the work of the guy whose writing flipped the switch inside my heart that made me say, “I want to try to do that.” A benefit of excellent writers feeling inspired to flip the metaphorical bird at someone who literally altered the course of my life is that the pressure is surely off me. That guy was a fucking genius, and some very smart people hate his work. Lord knows I don’t have to try to please everybody.

So I’m done worrying about it. If my work speaks to you, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine.

I have a voice, and I have something to say with it. The universe doesn’t play tricks on us. If you’re called to speak, the universe will bring ears to listen.

Observation 4: There’s a growing awareness that something is deeply amiss, that our problems run deeper than just who’s currently in office.

It was this observation that really drove Jerry and me to shift the focus of TTW from exploring using energetics and flow in the realm of sports to connecting with what we were witnessing happen in the political realm and throughout our society as a whole. We did not and do not see what happened in 2016 as just another election. The cultural currents at play are far deeper and more powerful.

I strive to be as non-partisan as I am able in these writings, so I apologize if this alienates you, but what Trump supported and stood for was problematic. He displayed deeply sexist tendencies. His immigration policies were built, at best, on deep xenophobia, if not outright racism. His “drain the swamp” rhetoric spoke, perhaps not unreasonably, to voters who felt that the problems we face are inherent in Washington itself, but in extending that rhetoric to attacks on the press, he inhabits a space usually held by despots and dictators. There’s a reason freedom of the press is contained in the First Amendment: a free press is a core value of our country.

Some of Trump’s support came from people who felt empowered by his uglier side. But I maintain that the vast majority of people are decent, and decent people who voted for Trump surely did so with substantial reservations. But for the many Trump voters who feel that the system is no longer working, the choice to vote for someone so hostile to the system itself was sort of a last-gasp attempt to force the system to change, instead of having to throw the whole thing away and start over.

But as we witness the chaos of Trump’s first seven weeks in office, it’s clear that the jolt Trump delivered to the system can only ever serve a negative purpose. By identifying and speaking to the problems driving populist revolt, he found himself in the White House. But he offers no positive answers. He’s a destroyer, not a creator. (Don’t think so? Consider that what he’s most famous for as a celebrity is nothing he created but rather his catchphrase: “You’re fired.”)

The collapse of the system is only accelerating. But I get the sense that few Trump voters are regretting choosing him instead of Clinton. They threw up a hail-mary in the hopes that the system’s dysfunction could be arrested. It’s not working and it’s not going to work. So if the answer to the question, “Which of the candidates could fix the system?” is “None of them,” then we’re forced to ask, “Where to from here?”

I’ll offer an answer. At the far side of this crisis–which, granted, may be decades away–I predict a reconstitution of our political structures. At some point we’ll finally see endless acrimony and conflict for the dead ends that they are. When that happens, we’re going to have to re-agree that we’re united in certain core values, and that though we may disagree about particular issues, we choose to have faith in the essential goodness of people, and build our new system on a lived foundation of mutual respect.

You are riding in a car that is coasting down the highway at 70-ish miles per hour, and slowing. You watch what remains of the engine, smoking on the side of the road, recede in your side-view mirror. The driver continues driving. Let him. Wind resistance and friction will bring this thing to a stop soon enough.

So look around. What do you see?

Ahead of you, a car stopped in the passing lane, hazard lights flashing. It appears to be resting on its undercarriage. As you approach you can see deep gouges in the pavement–the car appears to have slid to a stop because the wheels fell off.

The driver in your car steers you around it. Soon you come up on another car. Flames pour out from the seams between the hood and the body. The paint on the hood blisters and blackens. Smoke billows. It seems the engine is on fire. You catch the driver’s eye as you pass. You roll down the window and point. “There’s no scientific consensus that anything is wrong,” you hear him call out over the wind noise. “It’s possible this is just a natural cycle,” he says.

Further ahead, a man pedals a bike along the shoulder of the highway. Poor guy, forced to ride a bicycle. You pass him and wave. He waves back. As the distance between you grows–for now, anyway–you notice two things as you glance at him in the side-view. He’s actually keeping a pretty steady pace. And he’s smiling.

What if everyone had the best intentions? What if there was no malfeasance? What if no one was lazy? Someone made an error–because sometimes we make errors–and the error went unnoticed.

But what if, instead, there was a sense that something was wrong?

A question one must ask when facing a broken system:

What is reparable and what can only be replaced?

A system breaks down for one of several reasons. It can break because of bad engineering. It can break because of shoddy construction. It can break because of poor maintenance. And sometimes it can break because of pure dumb luck.

Proposition 3: A clear manifestation of this blockage is that our system is no longer capable of bringing about outcomes that are for the good of the majority of Americans. More accurately and more strongly: only a small minority of Americans are benefiting from the system as it is operating now.

(Yes, I changed the word from observation to proposition.)

While debate about what led to Trump’s victory will rage on, and while no single factor fully explains the outcome, it’s undeniable that in the general election Trump was the only candidate speaking to the sense of decline felt by many Americans, a sense that they’ve been left behind. While it was easy to hear within Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” his supporters’ anxiety about a world in which the previously dominant power structure (white, straight, patriarchal) is being superseded by something more inclusive of cultural, racial, and sexual minorities, it’s undeniable that many of the economic changes over the last couple of generations have taken away the opportunities that once allowed the working class a path to middle class comfort and a concomitant dignity.

While Trump’s protectionist stances were widely derided by the intelligentsia on both sides of the aisle–Didn’t he get the memo that globalization is an unqualified success? seemed to be the general sense–it’s worth remembering that the promise of deals like NAFTA was that free trade would benefit all people. And while it’s true that the ability of capital to move manufacturing to the places where costs are lowest has meant that Americans get cheap TVs and cell phones, what’s gone along with that is the disappearance of the sorts of jobs that a high-school-educated person could have relied on 40 years ago to be a safe ticket to the middle class, and millions of part-time jobs at Starbucks and Walmart aren’t filling the gap.

Or let’s consider the costs and benefits of the most significant and of course most controversial piece of legislation during the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act. In my piece from two weeks ago, I defended the ACA as better than the system we had before, because it has given many millions of Americans access to health care who previously lacked it. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the law is a far cry from an unqualified success. Is it better for the majority of Americans? Possibly. But a more salient question is, Do a majority of Americans believe it to be better? Republican electoral success since the 2010 midterms would suggest not.

Another useful measuring stick of the blockage I’m speaking of is the distribution of income and wealth in our country. Coinciding with the rise of supply-side, trickle-down economics, which hold that tax cuts for the wealthiest lead to benefits for all, an orthodoxy essentially unchallenged since the Reagan era, we’ve seen income and wealth inequality increase for almost forty years. The rich have gotten much richer, while the rest have seen stagnation, even decline.

When you consider the policy proposals at the heart of the Trump/Republican plans for governance–immigration crackdowns, repealing the ACA (without, it seems, the vaguest ideas of how to replace it with something better), increased military spending, and tax cuts (offered as a good unto themselves); and when you consider that the Democrats offered little more than the status quo, one has to ask, Is this the best we can do? Either the status quo of the last eight years or else a doubling down of the policies of the Reagan and Bush (I and II) administrations?

Sadly, by all appearances, this is exactly the case: this is the best we can do. And if the best we can do is to continue to run a system that will not and cannot benefit most of the people whom it is supposed to serve, then it has become time to change that system.

One moral, of several:

Just because certain aspects of a system function does not mean that the system isn’t broken.