America, December 31st, 2021

[Editorial Note: I wanted to risk trying something unusual for this blog. This poem was written as my submission for Lomez's excellent Passage Prize, which I ordered, and you should too. It made the short list for the finals (yay!), but not the final prizes (boo!), nor the second round selections for the print edition (double boo!). So you might describe this as being among the worst of the worst of the best, which sounds about right to me.

The following was my introduction to the submission, which I'm not sure if I should get straight to the point and delete, but while I am a confident essayist, I am a nervous poet, so forgive the endless self-effacement:

"Hey Curtis,

Let me begin with an apology of sorts - it has been twenty years since I last wrote a poem, and I never really understood free verse. I kind of think of poetry as divided into either a) regular forms with rhyme and meter, or b) unusually personal imagery-heavy essays broken up to look visually appealing and emphasize certain pauses. I don't know if the latter is your view of free verse, however. To write the following in regular poetic form is probably outside my skill level, would take a very long time and probably would end up worse. Hence the result below. When you describe the meter of your poems, it mostly doesn't register with me, as I just breeze past this and read the sentences, which I really like. All of which is to say – I’m not sure whether this should be a poem at all, or an essay. But it doesn't seem to fit the prompt for the literary non-fiction version. So I figured I'd submit it anyway, if for no other reason than that I very much enjoyed the writing prompt to write something personal that risked being cringe." ]


America, December 31st, 2021

America, that land

That drew me in so long ago,

Is caught, pincer-like,

Between the two great forces

Of decaying empires.

The Scylla,

Of the great deal of ruin in a nation,

And the Charybdis,

That that which cannot continue, will cease.

 

I remember, when I first arrived,

Having occasion to observe,

With some regularity,

That this was a great country.

At billboards advertising

"Twenty Chicken McNuggets for $6.99".

Partly in jest, but mostly serious,

I used to remark:

"These should have the national anthem

Blaring on repeat,

Flag flying in the breeze.

This country believes in value!".

At redneck engineering videos,

Of homemade trebuchets.

At old universities,

Taking classes for free,

With famous and brilliant professors.

At the wonder that every band I loved,

Would just turn up in my town,

And play live every year or so.

At college girls that would find

My accent just cute enough,

For that 5-10% boost,

To come back to my apartment.

 

America, you have been very good to me.

 

I had one such moment recently,

At seeing the winning entries,

In a giant pumpkin contest,

At a small-town country fair.

A two-thousand-pound pumpkin!

Grown simply for the je ne sais quois!

There is still greatness,

Wonder and weirdness,

In odd corners you can stumble on.

But the next thought I had

Was realizing

Just how many years it was

Since last I had that thought.

Partly, the desensitization

Of repeated exposure.

Partly, the ingrate foreigner,

Now successful and dismissive,

Of those that helped him.

But partly, I think,

The decline that is all around us.

 

I used to joke that America

Seemed to be experiencing

The Soviet time-line in reverse,

Except it was crumbling, not strengthening.

Then some mental reflex noted

The multiplying number of epicycles,

And I wondered how sure I was,

That things didn't better match,

To the Roman empire,

Or the Roman republic,

Or the French revolution,

Or the Byzantines,

Or to many others

Of which I knew less.

(The amateur historian,

Confident in his theory,

Would do well to count

How many Chinese dynasties

He can name at all,

Then exclude those where

The mental association maps

Only to a diad,

With a name, and a phrase

Like "vase" or "pottery army".)

The confusing pattern-matching,

Where every peg is a meteorite,

Fractally weird and irregular,

And endlessly able to be rotated,

And every hole is an impact crater,

Blasted into the earth,

Chaos where a neat outline should be.

Beware the advice

Of the reactionary

Who only knows one history

Of decline and fall.

 

Decline, in one form or another,

Is on the lips of almost

Everyone these days.

A Democrat-voting work friend

Asks me if I plan

To home-school my children,

With "Yes" his obvious answer.

I responded that,

I had thought about this, and

Concluded that if there

Is not a nearby school,

Either public or private,

That I would trust to

Educate my child,

Is this actually still

The country I should be living in?

 

The answer, unspoken, lingers in the air.

 

The obvious follow-on question,

Also unspoken, is:

"If not here, then where?"

This one has no easy answer,

As everywhere turns into America.

 

But we have sailed

Very close to Charybdis,

And fail to tack towards

Scylla at our peril.

Is it really about to collapse?

Or is this just

The Twitter talking?

The outrage-bait machine,

Using my brain as

A meat puppet?

The glowing square is

Hypnotic and smooth,

And out of it pours

Misery and anxiety.

The view out my window

Is the same as ever.

 

The conditional is easy to tell.

Fussell understood it well,

Describing the prospect of death

For a soldier in wartime.

If the porridge hits the propeller:

"It is going to happen to me,

And only my not being here

Will prevent it."

This realization,

Fussell thought,

Was what drove them mad.

 

As a foreigner, I can tell you,

Woodrow Wilson was right

About us hyphenated-Americans

(For the first generation at least).

The man who would leave

His wife for a mistress,

Will abandon her, too, in turn,

When the deal's gone sour.

When it is your country,

You will fight.

When you are a stranger,

You will leave.

That is, if you can

Figure it out in time.

 

One day, just like

Niall Ferguson's bond investors,

On the eve of WW1,

You may wake up and find out

That the great deal

Of ruin in a nation

Has finally been exhausted.

 

It is not going to happen, probably,

This week, month, or year, though.

The mean decline is still slow.

The variance is alarming.

 

The young man who once left

His home, carelessly,

Not even really sure

Quite what the plan was,

Finds this an overwhelming question

Now in middle age.

 

So what to do in the meantime?

If now is not, in fact, the right time?

 

Relative to the Soviets,

Our mangled and mismatched metaphor,

We have one great advantage.

We also have an NKVD,

But no one is in charge of it.

Its ad hoc structure gives

Only loose coordination,

And since the only payoff comes

In the debased coin of status,

Our own era's commissars

Simply cannot wait

To announce themselves publicly.

"In this house we believe..."

Solzhenitsyn would have dreamed

Of foes this blatant.

 

I suspect that as things get

Inexorably worse,

The skill that soon,

Will matter most

Is knowing whom to trust,

And whom you can

Speak freely to.

 

I have found just two

Rules of thumb worth relaying.

If you have a

Sense of humor,

And if you can

Debate a point

And not take it personally,

I can likely talk about

Almost anything with you,

If I choose my words correctly.

At least today.

Maybe one day,

The backwards-winding clock

Will strike 1937,

And then everyone will be,

Guilty of something.

 

Wish as we might,

We cannot live

In any era but our own.

One must always try

To avoid the uselessness

And self-pity in

"The whining, the pleas of a coward".

 

So, what can you do with all this?

 

Propaganda succeeds, in part,

When those who disagree with it,

Are afraid to say so.

 

Dissenting openly and publicly,

Especially in the written word,

Is courting great trouble.

It is for the bold,

If you have a heart and spirit,

As firm as Solzhenitsyn,

An old testament prophet,

In this post testament world.

 

But speaking up in private,

To those you can trust,

Builds camaraderie and friendship,

The basis of all bonds that form

Incipient organizations,

Upon which revival may depend.

 

Perhaps this adds

Small brick on brick,

To the start of something new,

The Empire that grows,

From the ashes of the Republic.

 

Perhaps it serves only,

As the intellectual companionship,

Of knowing one is not alone,

In these dispirited times.

That the Soviet mental asylum,

We dissidents are placed in,

Is actually filled with the sane.

 

I may not live boldly

In many things,

But I believe in backing one's judgment

In estimations of character.

Learn how to read people,

Judiciously and carefully,

To figure out whom you can trust.

 

But to let them know

That they can trust you,

To break the higher order uncertainty,

Someone generally has to have

The courage to say something

Out of sync with modernity.

 

Might you get it wrong?

Of course you might get it wrong!

I have got it badly wrong

Exactly three times, so far.

None were fatal, thankfully.

Did you really think that there

Was some option, in this morass,

That didn't come with risk?

 

Reader, you would go

A fair way towards

Being conditionally trusted,

Knowing not much more

Than that you stumbled across this poem. 

Some Thoughts Occasioned Upon Recent Fatherhood

Friends, I’m very happy to report that my daughter and firstborn child recently arrived into this world. The acute feelings of anxiety and then great relief at the birth itself slowly become replaced with the pleasant slight haze of the everyday. But since this journal is as much for myself as for my readers, I wanted to write down the thoughts I recall before they slip away.

Most people are more alike than they think. This is part of the reason why most heartfelt sentiments - whether joy at birth, sadness at the death of a loved one, celebration of someone’s birthday, and many others – end up sounding like clichés. The more important something is, oddly the more likely your feelings are similar to everyone else’s. Because of this, sometimes the repeated forms are okay for the important sentiments. As a friend’s priest said about Christmas sermons – if you’re hearing anything genuinely new in it, it’s probably heresy.

I learned this the hard way when emailing friends about the birth. I said something about how she’d been sleeping well and eating a lot so far, and joked that one could obviously extrapolate this out indefinitely. From one or two slightly snarky responses, I realized too late that, even in jest, this is a little like the newborn equivalent of those ghastly “My child is on the honor roll at XYZ Elementary” bumper stickers, but for a much more emotionally fraught subject. (Which painful door would you rather open? “I’m a bad parent” or “My beloved child is just difficult, and experiencing misery that I can do nothing about”? Por que no los dos!) I’ve refrained from bring up the subject since then, and just instead reflect on the ancient Greek observation that no man should be declared happy until he is dead. You have a well-behaved child once they’re married with children of their own. 

Nonetheless, there was one part about my wife’s period of late pregnancy and birth that was quite striking, in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

There is a certain level of narcissism and egocentrism that is inherent to everybody. The way the Last Psychiatrist put it is quite memorable:

“The essence, the defining characteristic of narcissism is the isolated worldview, the one in which everyone else is not fully real, only part a person, and only the part the impacts you.”

I, like a lot of people, always wake up in my dreams just as I’m about to die. There is some fundamental stumbling block that cannot quite comprehend a world without me in it. If the only part of everything else that is real is the part that interacts with you, then your death is literally the end of the universe.

This much gets commented on quite a lot. One can intellectualise death, and imagine the world going on without you. But one cannot really feel it. It just doesn’t compute.

But the strange part, that I hadn’t really  appreciated, is that something similar happens (at least to me) at the early end too.

Having my own child was literally the first time I’d been forced to contemplate in concrete detail what my parents’ life might have been like around the time I and my siblings were first born. The standard way this is described is that until one has children oneself, one doesn’t quite realise how much thankless work goes into changing thousands of nappies and not sleeping properly for months on end.

But at least for me, it’s more than that. I just hadn’t given much thought to the subject. I have images of my parents’ life before me, pieced together from photographs, and stories they’d tell with my uncle sitting around the dining room table after dinner. But these tended to mostly focus on the period when they first met, before they got married. There were some stories after that, about their lives, living with my grandmother, buying a small shack in the countryside and planting trees there, and things like that. But then there was a large gap, a chunk of the map shrouded in cloud, of what it might have actually felt like when we children were first born.

And I think part of the reason for this (at least with me) is the narcissistic tendency. People are only real to the extent they interact with you. And the part of you that counts is the part you can remember. In my case, the earlies memories are from around age 3. When I’m forced to contemplate it, I simply have no empathetic concept of me before that time. To consider myself as a one-year old, or as a newborn breast-feeding, or while in the womb, is every bit as alien to the actual narcissistic self-conception as to think of myself as being dead. I can imagine it. But there is simply no capacity to relate. Without memory and capacity for self-conception, the chain of "I"-ness gets broken. 

Take away this inherent interest and understanding, and the parts of the characters immediately before I mentally appear on the scene simply don’t quite register. The stories my parents explicitly told me register, and those I feel warmly about. And indeed, I can think about times before I was even an idea, what my parents were like as children or teenagers. But the part that interacts with me, in the period where “me” is not something I instinctively empathise with, tends to be a strange and glaring gap.

Until my own child arrives. Then, I'm forced concretely to imagine all sorts of things I didn’t really consider. The scene of sea and sky suddenly inverts to a dizzying new perspective - one in which my parents are fully real, but I am only partially real, and only the part that interacts with them (since the part that is "me" doesn't yet exist). And one sees the whole path of the same scene repeating again and again. My daughter, currently totally helpless, having not the vaguest clue of what my wife and I do to keep her alive, and no real sense of gratitude or even contemplation, until one day, several decades hence, when (hopefully!) her own time comes to pay it forward with her own children, and the cycle repeats.

Thank you, Mum and Dad. At last, just a teensy bit, I understand. I suspect you knew this already.

Welcome to the world, little one. We’re so glad to have you.

Ave Atque Vale - Grandma Holmes, 1916-2019

Every day, the rolls of the dead expand, never to be shrunk again.

I am fortunate to have gone as long as I have knowing personally only a few such entries. My friend from childhood who got killed in a nightclub. My family friend who died in a diving accident. My other grandma, twenty years ago. My uncle, whom I only saw every few years, because he and my Dad didn't really get along.

And now, alas, you.

The world must be a strange place when you get sufficiently old. Every friend you had from childhood is dead. All your peers from work and school are dead. In fact, the only people still alive that you spent any sizable fraction of your life with are necessarily at least a generation removed from you. How many people form lifelong friendships with those twenty to thirty years their junior? Not very many. So who's going to still come calling?

In other words, all that is left is family.

One of the great joys of talking to you in your later years was you being the repository of all family news and lore. I could find out immediately by talking to you the latest news from my cousins, or aunt, or even my parents. It was wonderful. You'd always have endless questions about how my life was going, and what I was up to. But not just in a general "tell me some stuff" sense. Rather, it was specific questions about the details of my recent life events that you'd heard about from Mum or my brother or someone else, and you wanted to know more about how they were unfolding. It was very touching, and made me feel embarrassed at my conversational tendency to just tell stories and grandstand during conversation, rather than interestedly just ask people about their lives and listen to an answer. I tend to treat this phase as a prelude to "let's exchange some great and fun stories and witticisms". Talking with you made me realize how self-centered this must come across as.

Getting old is somewhat like getting drunk, or perhaps like being a small child. You find out that the ability and willingness to mask and master one's impulses in order to achieve social ends in fact requires quite large cognitive resources. When people get old, they lose a lot of their inhibitions. Whatever they have in them just tends to come out. Some people become lecherous old people. Some people become angry, or pontificating. And some people just become endlessly sweet and easy-going. You were in the last category. Everyone loved you deeply. I literally don't remember anyone saying a bad word about you, which is true for very few people I know.

Modernity being what it is, when someone is described as being "a product of their time", this is usually meant in a pejorative sense. It mostly means that they failed to be on board with the latest particular societal preoccupations. But you were truly a product of your time in a way that's much less remarked on, and reflects poorly on our utterly narcissistic modern world. Namely, there was a strong sense that one shouldn't complain or be an imposition on those around you, because life wasn't just about you. Naturally, this made everyone around you want to look after you and provide for you as much as they could. The closest I ever heard to you complaining was recently when recounting a heart attack a few days earlier. "It was very distressing," you remarked, when asked about the specific incident. This made me realize how bad it was, that this was the only indication you gave that you genuinely thought you were dying. But a few days later when I saw you again, you were doing well, in your account. It made me think about the writings of Theodore Dalrymple:

No culture changes suddenly, and the elderly often retained the attitudes of their youth. I remember working for a short time in a general practice in a small country town where an old man called me to his house. I found him very weak from chronic blood loss, unable to rise from his bed, and asked him why he had not called me earlier. “I didn’t like to disturb you, Doctor,” he said. “I know you are a very busy man.”

From a rational point of view, this was absurd. What could I possibly need to do that was more important than attending to such an ill man? But I found his self-effacement deeply moving. It was not the product of a lack of self-esteem, that psychological notion used to justify rampant egotism; nor was it the result of having been downtrodden by a tyrannical government that accorded no worth to its citizens. It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important.

I experienced other instances of this modesty. I used to pass the time of day with the husband of an elderly patient of mine who would accompany her to the hospital. One day, I found him so jaundiced that he was almost orange. At his age, it was overwhelmingly likely to mean one thing: inoperable cancer. He was dying. He knew it and I knew it; he knew that I knew it. I asked him how he was. “Not very well,” he said. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “Well,” he said quietly, and with a slight smile, “we shall just have to do the best we can, won’t we?” Two weeks later, he was dead.

I often remember the nobility of this quite ordinary man’s conduct and words. He wanted an appropriate, but only an appropriate, degree of commiseration from me; in his view, which was that of his generation and culture, it was a moral requirement that emotion and sentiment should be expressed proportionately, and not in an exaggerated or self-absorbed way. My acquaintance with him was slight; therefore my regret, while genuine, should be slight. (Oddly enough, my regret has grown over the years, with the memory.) Further, he considered it important that he should not embarrass me with any displays of emotion that might discomfit me. A man has to think of others, even when he is dying.

As Mum noted, you always said you wanted to pass away in your sleep, so as to not be a burden on those around you. You got your wish, with your daughter sleeping in the next room.

We shall miss you very much. This has been a salutary lesson in humility. One fancies oneself that years of Buddhist reading and contemplation of impermanence will make one calmly accept the mortality of loved ones with equanimity and contemplation. And then one finds out that, after all, one is more like everyone else than one suspected.

But Buddhism is indeed consolation. In times like these, I often reflect on the Maha-parinibbana Sutta, recounting the last days of the Buddha. The incomparable teacher had told all the monks three months ahead of time that he would soon pass away and achieve his final parinibbana. To make matters worse, the Buddha had not appointed any successor to take over in his stead. The uncertainty and misery surrounding their future must have been extraordinary. Not only were they losing a beloved teacher, but also all sense of certainty as to what would happen to the Sangha, the order of monks. How ought one go on, in such a time?

And the Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus, saying: "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!"

This was the last word of the Tathagata.

...

Then, when the Blessed One had passed away, some bhikkhus, not yet freed from passion, lifted up their arms and wept; and some, flinging themselves on the ground, rolled from side to side and wept, lamenting: "Too soon has the Blessed One come to his Parinibbana! Too soon has the Happy One come to his Parinibbana! Too soon has the Eye of the World vanished from sight!"

But the bhikkhus who were freed from passion, mindful and clearly comprehending, reflected in this way: "Impermanent are all compounded things. How could this be otherwise?"

Indeed, how could it be otherwise?

The purgatory of eternal twilight

In the strange no man's land between sleep and wakefulness, I sat on the plane. I had only gotten four hours of sleep the night before, but, unusually for me, sleep would not come now. I turned on my laptop, felt tired, turned it off again, but still couldn’t sleep.

And as my mind eventually turned to introspection on my situation, a meandering thought drifted towards a strange meeting I had last week.

It was an office visit, with a casual work friend at another company. I hadn’t seen him in perhaps a year or so. When I got to the door, he seemed scattered and disheveled. He was dressed in an unusually casual manner – an oversized army jacket that didn’t fit properly, and a black t-shirt advertising some business or other. The man who had escorted me there commented that it looked like my friend had just woken up. “I had, actually”, my friend replied. When our escort left, my friend still seemed out of sorts, fiddling with his phone, rubbing his eyes, looking in odd directions.

I expected him to regain his composure and for us to talk business, but he still seemed distracted after a minute or two. His conversation had odd extended pauses, halting as if he were constantly losing his train of thought in mid-sentence, and he didn't make much eye contact.

At some point, he said ‘I actually have an alarm that requires me to answer arithmetic puzzles before it turns off’. He showed it to me. I cheerfully made conversation by asking him if he used the snooze button, and he said he did. ‘I found that I actually had a lot of success by giving it up altogether’, I continued. ‘Once you get into the habit of always getting up immediately at the first alarm, it becomes almost a Pavlovian response, no matter how tired you are.’

As if my words only partially registered, he rambled about how a friend of his had an alarm clock that would walk around when it went off, and you had to get up to switch it off. ‘The effect’, he said, ‘was that he just got really adept at picking up objects and throwing them at the alarm.’ The motion he made while he did this was to dramatically pick up his keys and turn towards the wall, pretending to throw them. It was the only display of alertness the whole time, and jarring in contrast to the general struggle and sluggishness he had displayed otherwise.

By this point, the conversation had started to go on past the point where we would have been expecting to move on to substantive matters, but instead we had been on a single topic of smalltalk the whole time, which had started to feel like it had lingered too long. ‘I really wanted to come in and meet you, even though I was really tired. I’ve only gotten about 12 hours of sleep this week.’

It was Thursday.

And suddenly, the penny dropped. He was suffering from crippling insomnia.

I felt absurd, wishing to take back my self-satisfied stories about the benefits of willpower in avoiding the snooze button. My friend was drowning, for lack of sleep. He talked about it so much, for the reason that old war memoirs talk about food much more than fighting – because they were starving and wretched, and it was the only pleasure they sought in life. At a certain point of hunger, getting food becomes all consuming, and mere prospect of getting a bullet at some stage in the future becomes much more distant.

Embarrassed at myself, I heard him talk more. ‘Things got a bit worse when my wife got a job in a distant town, which means she has to get up at around 6. I’ll try to get up to give her a kiss before she goes, and…’

I don’t actually remember the way that sentence drifted off, but I was struck with an immense sadness. Suddenly the enormity of the problem became apparent. I could see him, struggling to maintain a functioning relationship with his wife in his zombie-like state, and tenderly giving up precious minutes of rest to show her affection. His work must surely be suffering too. We were halfway through our meeting time and hadn’t even begun to talk business. I cannot imagine that things got better without me there.

At last, as he started to slowly become more coherent, the conversation finally turned more towards our main productive endeavors, and he seemed to slowly approach proper functioning. When we first walked in, it was as if he were literally drunk. By this point, he seemed to be merely tipsy, slowly sobering up.

I found my eye drawn towards the odd shape of his car keys. The top of the remote was all covered with a strange uneven rubbery plastic substance, leaving only a small hole for the button. As events started to make sense, I wondered if he had dropped them a lot in his haze.

As I write these words, I wonder if he himself was the “friend” in the story with the walking alarm. The keys were quite possibly broken from being thrown in exactly the manner that he pretended. He had developed a Pavlovian response, alright. It was a visceral rage at whatever was denying him the thing his body wanted most in the world.

I wanted to say something about his plight, but as is the introvert’s curse when dealing with unfamiliar situations, the words didn’t come. His life looked like it was falling apart from tiredness, and to comment on it, even if wholeheartedly sympathetically, would risk emphasizing just how obvious that was. The only consolation was that he was probably so distracted that this might not register. I was struck by a very strange urge to give him a hug, not because it would have made things better, but out of a primal desire to offer some sort of comfort, even if wholly ineffectual, even if wholly inappropriate.

As I write these words, I can think of what I should have said. “I’m sorry to hear you’re not sleeping well, mate. I really appreciate you coming in just to see me today, given it seems tough right now.” The sympathy of the staircase, so to speak.

Sometimes, the cross that the unafflicted must bear is seeing the pain of those whose welfare one desires, knowing there’s nothing one can do.

Sometimes, even the standard consolations for this don’t work. There is no one to get angry at. There is no constructive solution you can offer. There is no hope of even finding a remotely satisfying explanation for why things are the way they are.

And in this suffering, one can only console oneself with the fact that one’s own reflected misery is a tiny problem to bear by comparison, and one should strive for compassion for others in this unsatisfactory world.

Existence is suffering, as the sage put it.

Ponder this, and wisely reflect.

Failure

There is an odd camaraderie among those who have failed.

I’ve been finding this out recently (which is the reason for the paucity of recent posts).

I used to be fairly insouciant about the prospect of getting fired. Then I got fired, and I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for people who seemed to be quite upset for a period afterwards. Like so many misfortunes in life, it’s easy to be glib about it until it happens to you. But when it does, you remember it.

Life does indeed go on, and I’m in a good position employment-wise. I initially decided that stoicism was the way forward, and asserted (part aspirationally) that everything was fine. ‘Whine less’ was already the motto of 2016, inspired by Epictetus's 'Discourses'. I stand by that motto, incidentally. But after a few days of hassling around emailing people and getting a good mix of polite but awkward refusals (along with some interest), I finally was a bit down. Now I’m actually getting towards the point I claimed to be at initially.

In the process of emailing work friends about the prospect of getting a job, when I explained the circumstances of my departure I got a surprising number of quite heartfelt responses. When I went through the list of who wrote back like this, I realised that a lot of them had gone through the same thing at one point. ‘I know how it feels’, one wrote. He wasn’t lying.

The last time I remember this happening was years ago when I was about 20, and working at my Dad’s office. There was an early 30’s guy there whom I got along with well, and looked up to in the way of young men who engage on somewhat jovial mockery and discussion. On a Saturday afternoon, when I was leaving the office, I told him that I was off to break up with my girlfriend. I expected him to make a joke, or some sort of bonhomie about the prospective fun of being single again. But his response was nothing of the sort. ‘That sucks man, I’m really sorry’, was his reply. Having not had a serious breakup before then, I found it a little unexpected, but didn’t think too much of it. 3 hours of break-up conversation later, I understood the kindness of his response a lot more.

The whole recent experience has made me want to be kinder to the people around me.

I think that’s a good addition to the 2016 motto as well, actually.

At the Rescue Mission

Poverty, to an economist, is mostly an abstract matter. Just like GDP is a number and unemployment is a number, the poverty rate is also mostly thought of as a number. It’s a very important number, and one that we work hard to try to reduce. But the essential nature of the task is mostly thought of as a technical problem to be solved, like a constrained optimisation – consider the variable to be minimised and the policy variables that can be altered to achieve this, check that the Lagrange multipliers on all the constraints are satisfied, check the second order condition to make sure you haven’t found a maximum instead of a minimum etc. Out comes optimal policy.

But real poverty, when you see it up close and in the flesh, is raw and visceral.  It is shocking, in fact. This may sound melodramatic, but bear with me. Like anyone living in a large US city, I see poverty mostly in the form of the shambling figures of the homeless walking around downtown areas. But they tend to feature as the Banquo’s Ghost at the fringes of whatever otherwise pleasant social function I’m attending, or the nice area of town I’m walking around in. They are, in other words, an aberration – the puzzling exceptions left behind in the sea of prosperity.

No, to actually see what abject indigence looks like at the coal face, one must venture to where poverty is not the exception, but the norm. I was at a homeless rescue mission the other day, with an out of town friend of mine. His family was dropping off a large order of dinner for Thanksgiving and helping out in the serving. If I had not been spending the day with him, I would never in a million years have headed there.

They say that one of the important things that you are taught in the Marines is to overcome one’s instinct to run away from the sound of gunfire. Everyone has this instinct, but to an army, it is disastrous. A soldier must run towards the gunfire. In a less dramatic way, driving into the really poor part of town is like that. The onset of tent cities and strung out hoboes on the street is mostly experienced in life as a sensation that a) one has wandered into the wrong part of town, b) one should change routes, if possible, and c) a back of the mind feeling of hoping one’s car does not break down. Driving to the mission, in this metaphor, is the equivalent of having left the greenzone altogether and heading for the Fallujah of poverty. Of course, everyone else in the car has done this before and is relatively at ease – it’s only me seeing it for the first time.

Both in the car, and when I arrived inside the mission, we are the exception. Dysfunction is the norm, and the norm is all around us. To someone who generally associates homelessness with either drug use and/or mental illness, it is initially quite disconcerting to experience the sensation of being vastly outnumbered by the homeless. The instinct for self-preservation battles with the obvious cowardice and shame that such feelings generate. This is not a hostile army, and everyone here ought to be an object of pity. But the law of large numbers holds nonetheless – how many unstable people can one have in a room before the left tail of outcomes becomes dangerous? And yet here is this 5’4 blonde lady smiling and greeting me, seemingly unconcerned.

And, of course, it isn’t actually that bad, just unfamiliar. When we ascend the levels to meet people who have successfully gone through the programs to get their lives back on track, they seem relatively normal. We meet a man who is studying for a computer degree, and tells us he’s now been clean for 15 months. It’s really quite heartening. A lot of the people at the mission will only be in and out of the ‘emergency food’ section, where assistance is given without any questions. But for the ones that are trying to get their life back on track, I’m very glad to see that there are programs ready to help them.

The other fact that becomes very apparent is the reason the whole enterprise exists, evident from the signs on the walls and the people helping out at the center. The rescue mission is not staffed by economists or government social workers. It is staffed by Christian volunteers, as the various posters on the wall and the Chaplain in charge indicate. I am not a Christian, but I am glad they are there, toiling away at this kind of thankless task. If one ever needed a reminder that Christianity is not the problem with America, this was one. It motivates genuine selfless charity in a way that the default of consumerist secular humanism simply does not achieve. Of course, even the selfless often have personal reasons for being there. My friend’s brother in law ended up becoming very involved in the mission and donating a lot of money there after his own brother, who had been a drug addict, went through their program. The homeless live at the outskirts of society, and are easy to just look past, unless you have a particular reason to seek them out.

I drive back in the car, having mostly just been a silent observer during my time there. Going from the relative function of the program graduates back to the chaos of the tent cities outside, blending back into relieving normal society, reinforces the scope of the problem. How did all this happen? And was it always thus? George Orwell wrote of the tramps in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, and Dickens wrote of it even earlier. From talking with my friend’s sister, my preconception that a lot of the problem was mental illness is apparently overstated – a lot more of it, according to her, is just substance abuse. Some of the people who seem crazy actually just need to dry out, and they’re hallucinating at the moment.

It is tempting to see tent cities seem like an enormous failure of governance, and there is definitely a decent amount of truth to this. Whether the failure is a lack of money and support or a lack of police presence is a matter upon which people will disagree wildly, but the unsatisfactory nature of the status quo is hard to ignore.

Unfortunately, the narcissism of our age mistakes the feeling that ‘something ought to be done’ for the belief that as long as we vote for the right person (whoever that is) the problem will resolve itself. But does anyone really know how you deal with whatever it is that makes people start taking meth? Especially when they took it up even after seeing other meth addicts losing their teeth and turning into barely living skeletons (and then non-living corpses).

The lazy but satisfying response is outrage – substitute the feeling of pity and disgust for one of anger at some political force that is deemed to be responsible. Insufficient money. Lack of institutionalization of the mentally ill. Greater funding for substance abuse treatment. Stronger police action against vagrancy. Pick your chosen policy. They all make great soundbites and feel satisfying, but when you drive past the tent cities outside the rescue mission (and not for lack of space at the missions, either), it becomes apparent that there are a large number of real people in front of you who cannot find a reason in their life to stop taking self-destructive quantities of mind-altering substances, and this is actually an extraordinarily difficult problem to solve.

After all the policies are proposed, and some are even tried, few people today will tell you what was once considered received wisdom – the poor you will always have with you. When society as a whole was poorer, it used to be easier to convince ourselves that economic growth would take care of the problem. But it turns out the Biblical observation was wiser than we knew. If only the problem were just money. Money, we have now have substantial amounts of. What we do not have is a way to give purpose to the lives of those at the bottom of society. And if we have gotten any closer to solving the problem in the past few decades of growth, it is hard to see it.