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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America," by John McWhorter.

I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t. 

Many will nevertheless see me as traitorous in writing this book as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that this book is calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also know: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they are written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book. 

A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd. But frankly, they won’t really mean it, and anyone who gets through the book will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or being ashamed of being black is not one of them. And we shall move on.

The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous. The Elect do not ban people out of temper; they do it calmly, between sips of coffee as they surf Twitter, because they consider it a higher wisdom to burn witches. 

Not literally, but the sentiment is the same. The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not just someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution. They are not to be among us. As Andrew Sullivan noted about his having to leave his post at New York magazine in 2020, it had gotten to the point that the Elect staffers found his very presence unbearable: 

They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. 

A sad amount of ink has been spilled over the idea that such people must stop being so delicate, that they are fragile creatures deformed by helicopter parenting. The truth is that this is not real fragility, but a pose. The Elect do not feel frightened, much less physically injured, by columns, tweets, syllabi, symbols, and verbal expressions. They are posing as injured in order to demonstrate the “violence” of the views with which they disagree and thus prove that those views are evil. This use of the concept of violence takes a page from, first, the writings of Michel Foucault and, second, intelligent discussions among radical feminists in the 1980s and ’90s. But it retools them as a way of enforcing what earlier human societies knew as taboo. 

People who find working at the same organization as a thinker like Sullivan intolerable—and this was not in a physical office pool but in a largely virtual space during the quarantine!—are recapitulating those who expel the heretic by making a cross with their fingers. The religious fervor is absolutist, complete with a Manichaean sense of good versus evil.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Uncle Toms' Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

"But, Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right, dear, and interesting, and I love you for them; but, then, dear, we mustn't suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment; you must consider it's a matter of private feeling,--there are great public interests involved,--there is such a state of public agitation rising, that we must put aside our private feelings."

"Now, John, I don't know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow."

"But in cases where your doing so would involve a great public evil--"

"Obeying God never brings on public evils. I know it can't. It's always safest, all round, to do as He bids us."

There stood the two children representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil and vice!

"Humph! pious, to be sure. So, what's yer name,—you belong to the church, eh?"

"Yes, Mas'r," said Tom, firmly.

"Well, I'll soon have that out of you. I have none o' yer bawling, praying, singing ni**ers on my place; so remember. Now, mind yourself," he said, with a stamp and a fierce glance of his gray eye, directed at Tom, "I'm your church now! You understand,—you've got to be as I say."

Something within the silent black man answered No! and, as if repeated by an invisible voice, came the words of an old prophetic scroll, as Eva had often read them to him,—"Fear not! for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by my name. Thou art mine!"

But Simon Legree heard no voice. That voice is one he never shall hear. He only glared for a moment on the downcast face of Tom, and walked off. 

Who can speak the blessedness of that first day of freedom? Is not the _sense_ of liberty a higher and a finer one than any of the five? To move, speak and breathe,--go out and come in unwatched, and free from danger! Who can speak the blessings of that rest which comes down on the free man's pillow, under laws which insure to him the rights that God has given to man? How fair and precious to that mother was that sleeping child's face, endeared by the memory of a thousand dangers! How impossible was it to sleep, in the exuberant possession of such blessedness! And yet, these two had not one acre of ground,--not a roof that they could call their own,--they had spent their all, to the last dollar. They had nothing more than the birds of the air, or the flowers of the field,--yet they could not sleep for joy. "O, ye who take freedom from man, with what words shall ye answer it to God?"

Legree drew in a long breath; and, suppressing his rage, took Tom by the arm, and, approaching his face almost to his, said, in a terrible voice, "Hark 'e, Tom! - ye think, 'cause I've let you off before, I don't mean what I say; but, this time, I've made up my mind, and counted the cost. You've always stood it out again' me: now, I'll conquer ye, or kill ye! - one or t' other. I'll count every drop of blood there is in you, and take 'em, one by one, till ye give up!"

Tom looked up to his master, and answered, "Mas'r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I'd give ye my heart's blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I'd give 'em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O, Mas'r! don't bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than 't will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles'll be over soon; but, if ye don't repent, yours won't never end!"

Like a strange snatch of heavenly music, heard in the lull of a tempest, this burst of feeling made a moment's blank pause. Legree stood aghast, and looked at Tom; and there was such a silence, that the tick of the old clock could be heard, measuring, with silent touch, the last moments of mercy and probation to that hardened heart.

It was but a moment. There was one hesitating pause, - one irresolute, relenting thrill, - and the spirit of evil came back, with seven-fold vehemence; and Legree, foaming with rage, smote his victim to the ground.

"The old satan!" said George, in his indignation. "It's a comfort to think the devil will pay him for this, some of these days!"

"O, don't!, - oh, ye mustn't!" said Tom, grasping his hand; "he's a poor mis'able critter! it's awful to think on 't! Oh, if he only could repent, the Lord would forgive him now; but I'm 'feared he never will!"

"I hope he won't!" said George; "I never want to see him in heaven!"

"Hush, Mas'r George! - it worries me! Don't feel so! He an't done me no real harm, - only opened the gate of the kingdom for me; that's all!"

At this moment, the sudden flush of strength which the joy of meeting his young master had infused into the dying man gave way. A sudden sinking fell upon him; he closed his eyes; and that mysterious and sublime change passed over his face, that told the approach of other worlds.

He began to draw his breath with long, deep inspirations; and his broad chest rose and fell, heavily. The expression of his face was that of a conqueror.

"Who, - who, - who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" he said, in a voice that contended with mortal weakness; and, with a smile, he fell asleep.

George sat fixed with solemn awe. It seemed to him that the place was holy; and, as he closed the lifeless eyes, and rose up from the dead, only one thought possessed him, - that expressed by his simple old friend, - "What a thing it is to be a Christian!"

"One thing more," said George, as he stopped the congratulations of the throng; "you all remember our good old Uncle Tom?"

George here gave a short narration of the scene of his death, and of his loving farewell to all on the place, and added,

"It was on his grave, my friends, that I resolved, before God, that I would never own another slave, while it was possible to free him; that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation, as he died. So, when you rejoice in your freedom, think that you owe it to that good old soul, and pay it back in kindness to his wife and children. Think of your freedom, every time you see Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was."

Changing Weather Pattern

 

I have a confession to make, which would puzzle the childhood version of me and which will infuriate half of my neighbors in the region, but which I want to fess up to anyway: I have become a fair-weather fan.

The term is spoken as an epithet around these parts. It is an iron-clad law that you root for the home team, you live and die by their outcomes, and you pass the burden onto your progeny.

One is given some grace as a transplant, to the extent that you are not looked down as lesser than for not growing up around here, to divide loyalties between the home teams and the teams where you grew up, so long as the groups are not bitter rivals, which if so then you'd better choose wisely. Otherwise, it's "ride or die" with the team that owns your heart and soul.

I subscribed to this belief as a kid. I ached with joy and pain with every high and low experienced by the Bay Area teams I grew up rooting for, namely the Oakland A's baseball team, the Oakland Raiders football team, and the Golden State Warriors basketball team. Being superstitious, I not only watched games in real time with bated breath, but would contort my body in an attempt to will the players to success (and then froze such poses lest any movement break the spell of their hot streaks).

But then I left home to go to college, and I was too busy to follow either my boyhood teams or the Philadelphia teams, and that lack of sports in my life continued well into the early parts of my career, which my childhood self would have been stunned and upset to learn, but it was the sacrifices I made to prioritize other things at that stage of my life.

But I left California to go to school some 35+ years ago, and have lived in Philadelphia that whole time, and two of the three Bay Area teams I used to root hard for have moved away from the Bay Area (the Raiders now play in Vegas while the A's play, well, I'm not exactly sure nowadays as it's complicated, but I know for sure it's not in Oakland anymore). So my childhood allegiances have faded. Meanwhile, my ties to Philly teams has grown simply from proximity to news coverage and local fans. It's fun to get caught up in the excitement of an entire region cheering the home team onto victory after victory. And, as someone who desires our local economy to be strong, there's a clear correlation between sports success and commercial activity, as deeper playoff runs mean more out-of-town visitors as well as happier local fans with looser wallets.

When Bay Area teams have had success during this time, it literally and figuratively felt distant to me. I rarely consumed coverage due to the time zone differences, and championship parades were faint news stories rather than experienced in person. Conversely, in the span of my being a parent, I've been able to take each kid to a championship parade on Broad Street: Phillies in '08 with Jada, Eagles in '18 with Aaron, and Eagles again in '25 with Asher. And so, over the course of an entire adult life, I've come to follow, root for, and experience euphoria and heartbreak with the Philadelphia professional teams. 

But lately, I seem to be back to a season in which I am deprioritizing following sports. Part of it is that my life is full with other obligations and pursuits: career, parenting, golf, friends. But part of it, and this is the "fair weather" aspect, is that I'm simply not interested in going on an emotional roller-coaster with any of the teams. 

The thing about watching sports in real time is, you don't know the outcome until the end. It could be a satisfying rout, an exhilarating nail-biter, a crushing defeat, or a lopsided loss. And at this stage of my life, I'm not interested in investing 3+ hours in an activity only to leave it disappointed, heartbroken, or angry. And I'm certainly not interested in revisiting the agitation the day after through news coverage and talk radio.

Now, should any of the local teams get hot at the right time and run the table towards a championship, you'll find me back to paying attention and cheering the players on. That's another part of being a fair-weather, is not just being uninterested when things are going poorly but jumping onto the excitement train when things are going well. And perhaps that is blasphemy around these parts, but it's just where I am at this stage in my life. Call it shallowness, call it self-preservation, call it an efficient use of my scarce time: whatever you want to call it, it's where I am now.

Changing the Course of History

 

In my previous job, I had two parallel cases of doing research on something where I was able to look up something that happened in the past, including reading what people were saying about it at the time, and then speak to those same people in the present. (Apologies for having to blur the details for confidentiality's sake.)

In one situation, the past event took place decades ago, and the news coverage at the time presented people feeling very conflicted about the event, for there were some things that made them happy and other things that made them sad. But, when I was able to flag them down in the present, their recollection of the event was that they were 100 percent against it back then and 110 percent against it now. 

In the other situation, the past event took place just a few years back, and certain people were quoted as being for the thing, but those same people in the present had changed their mind and realized that they were now against the thing and wished they'd known then what they knew now, because if they did then they wouldn't have been for the thing back then.

In the second case, somebody changed their mind. They believed one thing before, and a different thing now. That happens all the time, or should: we learn new things, or our realization of a matter becomes clearer over time, and we decide that something we once liked we now have a completely different opinion on.

In the first case, somebody changed their mind also, but they were unwilling to accept that their position on something was now different, so they rewrote history by saying that whatever they're feeling about something now, they felt the same back then. This too happens all the time, but is less commendable: the value of being honest of our changing our mind is, in such cases, lower than the value of being seen as having consistently been on whatever is thought to be the "right side of history" all along.

History, as it was once explained to me, is not a recording of the past, but rather is "someone's" recording of the past. It is not always accurate to the facts, and it is not always immutable. Historians have great power to codify what was the accepted take on a matter, and we have great power to accept their take or scrutinize it. "Narrative" is powerful, as is simplicity. In fact, reality is often far more complex and messy. Take care!

The Purpose of Money

 

There's a post making the rounds on social media to the effect of complaining that we live in a capitalist society when what would be much better is if we simply did things to take care of each other. Though I am pretty extreme on the "cold-blooded capitalist" continuum, I acknowledge capitalism has its flaws, and it is a legit exercise by citizens and governments alike to figure out how best to manage the economy, avoid massive inequality, and protect our most vulnerable.

But, lack of awareness of how a capitalist system actually works makes such discussions hard to have in constructive ways. Take money for example. It is absolutely true, literally in the Bible, that money is fraught, and that excessive money can ruin people. But money as a form of exchange is quite literally one of the great human inventions of all time.

Bartering, even at a very small scale, while fun and cozy, is incredibly inefficient, in ways that leave all of us poorer in time and money. There is nothing in our lives that wouldn't become incredibly difficult absent the concept of currency as a form of holding value. 

Let's say I want to make bacon and eggs for breakfast for my kids. All of the ingredients and supplies for this simple task will need to be obtained from people who produce them, in exchange for something of equal value that I can offer them. And we have to consummate that trade in real time. That's an awful lot of energy expended just to take money out of the equation.

You might argue, well we can just owe each other, or even better let's forget about keeping accounts and simply freely offer what we make to others. The former is literally what money does - I pay you for your eggs so that instead of something I give you in return I give you something that has inherent value that you can then use for something you need later. The latter, well, this is something that friends and family can do, so if you want to live in a society that is at such a micro scale that you only deal with people at that level of intimacy then go on ahead, but the rest of us interact with hundreds of strangers daily and millions of others who touch something that touches our lives.

We can argue about whether capitalism inherently exploits workers, ruins the environment, and concentrates resources in an unjust way. That is absolutely a good debate to sink our collective teeth into. But let's not be too far away from just how essential certain components of capitalism are to the healthy functioning of our daily lives. 

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "John Adams," by David McCullough.

  

When the door opened, they proceeded, Adams, as instructed, making three bows, or "reverences," one on entering, another halfway, a third before "the presence."

"The United States of America have appointed me their Minister Plenipotentiary to your Majesty," Adams began, nearly overcome by emotion.

"I felt more than I did or could express," he later wrote. Before him, in the flesh, was the "tyrant" who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, had plundered American seas and burned American towns, the monarch "unfit to be the ruler of a free people," while to the King, he himself, Adams knew, could only be a despised traitor fit for the hangman's noose.

"The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty’s Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America," he continued.

"I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem myself the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.

I beg your Majesty’s permission to add that although I have some time before been entrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself."  

He perceived life as a stirring drama like that of the theater, but with significant differences, as he wrote to a classmate, Charles Cushing:

"Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value."

She saw what latent abilities and strengths were in her ardent suitor and was deeply in love. Where others might see a stout, bluff little man, she saw a giant of great heart, and so it was ever to be.

As it was, Philadelphia manufacturers and artisans produced more goods than in any city in America—boots, wigs, hardware, fancy carriages, Franklin stoves, mirror glass, and no end of bricks for a city where nearly everything was built of brick. Thomas Affleck produced furniture as fine as any made in the colonies, all in the fashionable style of the English cabinetmaker Chippendale. John Behrent on Third Street advertised what may have been the first piano made in America, “a just finished extraordinary instrument by the name of a pianoforte, made of mahogany, being of the nature of a harpsichord.”

With twenty-three printing establishments and, by 1776, seven newspapers—more newspapers even than in London—Philadelphia was the publishing capital of the colonies. It was not only that Franklin's immensely popular Poor Richard's Almanack emanated from Philadelphia, but political pamphlets of such far-reaching influence as John Dickinson's Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, Thomas Jefferson's spirited Summary View of the Rights of British America, and now, Common Sense, which was selling faster than anything ever published in America.

Shops in nearly every street offered an array of goods and enticements such as most delegates to Congress could never find at home, everything from French brandy and Strasburg snuff to fancy chamber pots, artificial teeth, or ordinary pins of the kind John Adams purchased in “great heaps” to send home to Abigail. John Sparhawk, proprietor of the London Bookstore on Second Street, in addition to volumes on medicine and law, sold scientific instruments, swords, spurs, and backgammon tables.

There were as many as thirty bookshops and twice the number of taverns and coffeehouses, with names like Blue Anchor, Bunch of Grapes, Tun Tavern, Conestoga Wagon, Rising Sun, Half Moon, and each had its own clientele. The Free Masons convened at the staid old Indian King on Market Street. The London Coffee House, at the southwest corner of Front and Market, in the commercial center, was the favorite of the leading merchants and sea captains, indeed the place where much of the city's business was transacted, while the new, larger City Tavern on the west side of Second Street, between Walnut and Chestnut, had become the great gathering place for members of Congress. Adams, recording his first arrival in Philadelphia in August 1774, had written that “dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were, we could not resist the importunity to go to the [City] Tavern,” which, he decided, must be the most genteel place of its kind in all the colonies. It was there, at the City Tavern, a few days later, that Adams had first met George Washington.

Distilleries and breweries were thriving. Adams found the local beer so much to his liking that he temporarily abandoned his usual hard cider. “I drink no cider, but feast on Philadelphia beer,” he acknowledged to Abigail.

To anyone unaccustomed to city life, the crowds and noise seemed overwhelming, and worst were market days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, when German-speaking country people came rolling into town in huge farm wagons loaded with produce, live chickens, pigs, and cattle. The “thundering of coaches, chariots, chaises, wagons, drays and the whole fraternity of noise almost continually assails our ears,” complained a visiting physician. Delegate Stephen Hopkins from Rhode Island one day counted seventy farm wagons on Market Street.

Swarms of people moved up and down the sidewalks and spilled into the streets. At no point on the American continent could so many human beings be seen in such close proximity or in such variety. Sailors, tradesmen, mechanics in long leather aprons, journeymen printers, house-painters, sail-makers, indentured servants, black slave women, their heads wrapped in bright bandannas, free black stevedores and draymen, mixed together with Quaker merchants and the elegants of the city in their finery, everyone busy about something, and everyone, it seemed to visitors, unexpectedly friendly and polite.

It was the paradox of their lives that, as much as his public role kept them apart, he always needed to be with Abigail and she with him. They would never become accustomed to being separated. “I can do nothing without you,” he was to tell her one way or another, time and again, and always from the heart. She would have him no other way than he was; she believed fervently in what he was doing, encouraged him in the role, and wished no other for him; she wanted him to be where he was doing his utmost for the country. And still she desperately wanted him with her. Each worried incessantly about the other’s health and well-being, at times to the point of making themselves ill.

For every sailor in the British navy killed in action or who died of wounds in the era of the American Revolution, seventeen died of disease.

As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

Abigail had a melancholy sense of life slipping away before she and John had had a chance to enjoy it. She had turned thirty-nine; the face in the mirror was sa young woman no longer. And where, she asked in one especially plaintive letter, was that young "untitled" John Adams she had fallen in love with.

"I recollect the untitled man to whom I gave my heart and in the agony of recollection, when time and distance present themselves together, wish he had never been any other. Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall? How dearly have I paid for a titled husband."

Hearing he might be appointed ambassador to the British Court, she begged him to refuse. She had no desire to live in England, no wish for the "parade and nonsense" of a public role. She was too inclined to wear her heart on her countenance, she reminded him. "I am sure I would make an awkward figure. And then it would mortify my pride if I should be thought to disgrace you." Her health was poor. She tired easily and suffered from headaches. "Neither of us appear built for duration," she wrote. "Would to heaven the few remaining days allotted to us might be enjoyed together.

Brief as it was, he got through the speech only with difficulty, his voice at times quaking, and the King, too, was greatly moved. "The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion," Adams would report to Foreign Secretary John Jay. "Whether it was in the nature of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I cannot say. But he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with."

"The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurances of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest, but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do, by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power."  

The extravagance of the ruling class was notorious. At such exclusive clubs as Brooks or Boodles on St. James Street, fortunes were reputedly cambled away at the turn of a card, and, nightly, young men drank themselves into a stupor. This was not quite true, but the stories would never die, and the clothes, carriages, the sheer weight of gold braid on the livery of servants, left little doubt as to how vast was the wealth of the wealthiest. Yet, as the Adamses found, one could hardly go anywhere without encountering such spectacles of poverty and misery as to tear at the heart - people in tatters, hunger and suffering in their faces, as Abigail wrote. And who was to answer for the wretched victims "who are weekly sacrificed on the gallows in numbers sufficient to astonish a civilized people?" Compounding her sorrow was the realization that every night and in all weather abandoned children by the hundreds slept beneath the bushes and trees of nearby Hyde Park.

It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform. Adams felt as he had when he first appeared before George III – as if he were on stage playing a part. It was, he later told Abigail, “the most affecting and overpowering scene I ever acted in.”

The Alien Acts included a Naturalization Act, which increased the required period of residence to qualify for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the Alien Act, which granted the President the legal right to expel any foreigner he considered “dangerous.” In the view of the Vice President, the Alien Act was something worthy of the ninth century. Jefferson and others imagined a tempestuous John Adams expelling foreigners by the shipload. As it was, they need not have worried. Adams never invoked the law and this despite the urging of Secretary of State Pickering, who did indeed favor massive deportations.

Jefferson had been absent for six months, during which he had raised no voice as head of the Republican party, but had kept extremely busy, writing letters and secretly drafting a set of resolutions to be introduced in the legislature of Kentucky. Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's Kentucky resolutions declared that each State had a 'natural right' to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional. The states were thus to be the arbiters of federal authority. At the same time, James Madison undertook a version of his own resolutions for Virginia.

The Kentucky Resolutions, which had passed in November, where an open challenge to the authority of the central government and a measure both of Jefferson's revulsion over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the seriousness with which he regarded states' rights. Possibly he failed to see the dire threat to the union embodied in what he had written, but a letter he wrote to Madison strongly suggests otherwise. He was confident, Jefferson said, that the American people with their 'good sense' would 'rally with us round the true principles of the federal compact,' but, he wrote in chilling conclusion, he was 'determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.'

What was surprising—and would largely be forgotten as time went on—was how well Adams had done. Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count. With a difference of only 250 votes in New York City, Adams would have won with an electoral count of 71 to 61. So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.

Adams wrote to Rush to report the new state of affairs. “Your dream is out.... You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at war,” he said, happy about the news but choosing to make light of it, as if no one was supposed ever to think there had been any serious differences between him and the man he had earlier told Rush was a consummate intriguer. Apparently, Adams was ready now both to forgive and to forget.

Rush was exultant. Nothing could have pleased him more, as he wrote immediately to Adams.

I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson. I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.

With 1826 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it was not long into the new year when Adams and Jefferson were being asked to attend a variety of celebrations planned to commemorate the historic event on the Fourth of July. Invitations poured into Quincy and Charlottesville from Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The two former presidents were, with eighty-eight-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, the last signers of the Declaration still alive. Further, as everyone knew, Jefferson was its author and Adams had been its chief advocate on the floor of Congress. One was “the pen,” the other “the voice,” of independence, and the presence of either at any Independence Day celebration, large or small, would give it significance as nothing else could.

But the time was past when either Adams or Jefferson could leave home. Adams was ninety, Jefferson would be eighty-three in April, and each grew steadily more feeble. After calling on Adams that spring, Benjamin Waterhouse wrote to John Quincy, “To the eyes of a physician your father appeared to me much nearer to the bottom of the hill.”

Still, the old mind prevailed, the brave old heart hung on. As once he had been determined to drive a declaration of independence through Congress, or to cross the Pyrenees in winter, so Adams was determined now to live to see one last Fourth of July.

In March, knowing he had little time left, Jefferson drew his last will. Suffering from bouts of diarrhea and a chronic disorder of the urinary tract, caused apparently by an enlargement of the prostate gland, he depended for relief on large doses of laudanum. Besides, he was beset by troubles at his university—disappointing enrollment, unruly students—and by now suffered such personal financial distress that, in desperation, he had agreed to a proposal that the Virginia legislature create a special lottery to save him from ruin.

But then Jefferson, too, was resolved to hang on until the Fourth.

Those Jobs are Gone

 

This podcast of Ezra Klein interviewing Bill Gates is making the rounds in my social feeds. Gates is a trusted authority on technology, and he sounds an ominous warning on the disruption continued advances in artificial intelligence will wreak on our economy. "Those jobs are gone" is as existential as it gets, given that the vast majority of us are not independently wealthy so count on gainful employment to provide for our families and give us dignity. 

If we go back in time, the steady march of technology can be opposed but never successfully for too long. We really can't put the genie back in the bottle no more how hard we want to or try to. And, with that progress has come wrenching adjustments that often imperil the most vulnerable in our society. Industrialization widened the gap between the have's and have-not's, the advent of the Internet similarly led to a "digital divide," and the accelerating pace of AI sophistication may swallow entire industries whole.

Throughout history, jobs that used to employ millions became defunct over time, which has its cons but also its pros. Mankind collectively once exerted a large proportion of its existence to back-breaking work on farms and then on factories, and now the production of food and goods is largely automated so that things have gotten way cheaper and way more accessible. But it has also meant that those who worked those farms and factories have needed to repurpose their time and skills to the jobs that remained or risk being left behind. Easier said than done in many cases.

We'll leave for another day just what kinds of skills and experiences will survive the AI wave. The point I want to make is that the jobs have always gone away. The question is what comes after and how can we get there in ways that lift all boats.

Midlife Crisis Intervention

 

It is often said that when you are young you have time and health but fewer resources, when you are middle-aged you have health and resources but less time, and when you are elderly you have time and resources but diminished health. As I am squarely in that second category and have spent a lot of contemplative time looking back at the first category and looking ahead to the third category, this is a reality I grapple with.

Specifically, whereas one's youth perspective is shaped by the fact that you have your whole life ahead of you, middle age is a realization that there is likely less life ahead of you than behind you. Which is not the same thing as feeling you are running out of time, but it can lend some urgency to how you spend your time. Especially if your weekly schedule feels like there isn't much room in it, while juggling a full plate of work responsibilities and family obligations (young kids, aging parents, domestic to-do's), it is easy to be overcome with a sense of anxiety or discontentment or resignation about it all.

Whether your "bucket list" consists of noble things (start a business, raise a family, render public service) or more frivolous things (dream travel destinations, getting better at golf), middle age is a time to consider whether and how to go for those things, and/or recalibrate your expectations about achieving them. It seems to me, or at least I'll say that for myself if for no one else (and with an assist from Gemini which I use for many things including profound life questions and personal therapy), that there are multiple, not mutually exclusive ways forward:

1. Small bites rather than a sumptuous meal. The bigger the ambition, the more intention is required to carve out the time and mental load to go for it. There are only so many of these we realistically have room for in our maxed out lives. Are there ways to micro-dose the itch, like 3 day trips over the summer over a 3-week vacation, or a monthly service project over starting a new non-profit? 

2. Quality enjoyment over clinical efficiency. This is the hardest one for me, as a naturally driven person, is that an impossibly long bucket list whose existence is solely to brute force plow through it from start to end is a formula for inevitable failure. Isn't it better to savor one amazing European jaunt per year over sweating over doing six to just race through?

3. Don't be ashamed to trade money for time. Some of us have childhood upbringings or personal blocks where we feel guilty if we don't cook our own meals and clean our own house rather than outsourcing that function. But if you have enough money and your greatest scarcity is time, and if there is a deep pool of people and organizations eager to do what they do well in exchange for your money, then why not?

4. Health is precious, worth investing in and being grateful for. "Old" is definitely relative; when I was in my 20s, I would've consider someone who is currently my age (53) to be old. But I feel great now, albeit creakier than when I was in my 20s. The fact is that we would (gladly and correctly) trade just about anything for good health. So invest real resources to safeguard it: work out, eat right, make room for sleep, see your doctor, get help where you need it. And be thankful for the health you do have now; if I could go back in time I would tell my 20s version to enjoy his youth, just like my 80s version would tell me the same now.

5. Embrace the limitations of aging. Getting older can be fought, albeit unsuccessfully. We will all experience diminished physical and mental faculties; we will all come to grips with the fact that we have less and less life in front of us. It is natural for this unassailable realities to be met with sadness or rage. We should allow ourselves to feel those feels. We should also take heart that people who do age well report unprecedented happiness, as they make peace with their state and embrace the good parts of it. That gives me hope that, with the right attitude, I too have better days ahead.

I hope these thoughts are helpful in your journey. I welcome other insights from folks who have, directly or vicariously through others, discovered good and bad ways of working through the middle ages and learned the secret to aging well. 

The Power of Reconciliation

 

I have been reading "John Adams" by David McCullough and I came across a powerful exchange between Adams and the King of England, the first time they met after the end of the Revolutionary War. Here is what Adams is recorded to have said, with great emotion:

"Sir, The United States of America have appointed me their Minister Plenipotentiary to your Majesty...It is in obedience to their express commands that I have the honor to assure your Majesty of their unanimous disposition and desire to cultivate the most friendly and liberal intercourse between your Majesty’s subjects and their citizens...The appointment of a Minister from the United States to your Majesty’s Court will form an epocha in the history of England and of America. I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem myself the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence...I beg your Majesty’s permission to add, that although I have sometimes before been entrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself."  

King George III was himself overcome with emotion. His response was: 

"Sir, The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurances of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very thankful to the Almighty that he has spared my life, and support[ed] my health, to see the present day...I wish you, Sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest, but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do, by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power. The moment I see such sentiments and language as yours prevail, and a disposition to give this country the preference, that moment I shall say let the circumstances of language, religion and blood have their natural and full effect."  

Recall that the whole point of America's fight for independence was to be free from this very king's tyranny. And yet here is the first representative of the new country making nice with that very king. And so it is that, centuries later, two great nations have such a close and intimate relationship despite the fact that they literally fought a multi-year war when one side decided they wanted to be free from the other side.

Reconciliation is powerful. But it can feel wrong, because it usually involves one or both sides extending forgiveness for wrongs done. To be sure, there can be restitution for those wrongs - repayment or penance or healing, for example. But even then, true reconciliation is not merely transactional, as if I incurred a debt from you and then repaid it, but rather there was harm and breach and now we are moving past it.

Different faith traditions hold different paths to how we humans are able to "move past." However you get there, I hope that wherever you need reconciliation you are able to find it. And, if it is up to you to say gracious words like John Adams and King George did, that you are able to say them with authenticity and emotion.

Course Correction

 

They say that how you do one thing is how you do everything. I'm not sure that's true. But I do know that how you play golf is a pretty good window into who you really are. Which means faithfully representing your most prominent traits, amplifying good and bad characteristics, and/or bring to the surface your true colors which you may try to hide during your more refined moments.

It is becoming a favorite ice breaker discussion of mine, when I am introduced to someone new by a friend on the golf course and then have the opportunity to meet them down the road and off the course. Which is to let them know what favorable first impressions they made on me when I observed them playing, and in turn to ask what they saw in me. 

I've tried this enough to hear a consensus about what about my playing tells me about me. Which I agree with, and if you know me you too would agree, which tends to be three things:

1. I'm methodical and data-oriented, which on the course means measuring a shot before swinging and recording my results after, and which off the course means keeping a detailed schedule and creating spreadsheets for everything I need to keep track of in my life.

2. Self-improvement is important to me, which golf is the kind of activity that I'll be chasing getting better for the rest of my life, and life is like that too in that there's always something to learn and always something we can get better at.

3. I'm hard on myself to a fault, which can be a positive trait for feeding self-improvement (see above) but is decidedly negative in impairing my ability to be in the moment (because I'm dwelling on past mistakes) and celebrate the good things that I've done.

What a wonderful and terrifying thought, that this thing called golf can be such a stark window into your true self. But, let me pivot now and say it is also a platform for practicing the kind of person you want to be, even if that is very different than the person you are by default.

For example, while I don't allow myself much of a temper, I know it's in there because when I first started playing golf I had a pretty bad attitude much of the time, and it still comes out on occasion. Which is to say that activities can be windows into our souls, but they can also be platforms to bend ourselves away from our worst traits and towards a better version of ourselves. Which is why I love golf so much, for my own self-awareness and also as a way to get to know those I care about in a setting that is conducive to going deeper.

Be Pervious

 

In the planning profession, there is something called "pervious" versus "impervious," with the former representing things like gardens that absorb rainwater and the latter representing things like parking lots that run them off. From this perspective, "pervious" is often held in higher regard than "impervious," because the run-off from impervious surfaces can overwhelm public stormwater systems leading to flooding, whereas the absorption function pervious surfaces mitigates against those strains.

But, in our lives, there can be a sense in which what is considered positive and negative is reversed. Being metaphorically impervious means holding your shape when the storms come, while being metaphorically pervious means being washed away when the storms come. Think of the side-by-side imagery of, in a torrent, a resolute marble statue versus a ransacked bed of flowers.

Perhaps to be counter-intuitive, I would like to propose the opposite. That which is impervious may be unaffected by the floods, but it is also unchanged. That which is pervious may seem exposed to ruin by the floods, but in nature we observe that what looks like destruction at first is actually the first act of a process that leads to rebirth. The impervious surface will never be more than what it is now. The pervious surface may rise from the ashes to contribute something new and beautiful.

I will leave to you what are your metaphoric torrential rains, and what possible new thing may grow out of seeming ruin. I just invite you to consider allowing yourself to be a bit pervious, even at risk of being vulnerable to being washed away. Who knows what wonderful new thing blossoms next?