Ah, the dinner party.

It’s that staple of human culture whose roots go back to the Holocene. With the discovery of fire came community, and at the dawn of humanity neaderthals crouched in circles to cook the meat of some kind of ungulate and tear its meat from the bone with their teeth. Grunts of approval echoed off of painted cave walls and above the crackle of Prometheus’s greatest gift.

Fast forward 10,000 years and not much has changed. Every once in a while we pay tribute to this prehistoric ceremony and invite friends and family to dinner. We share in the fermented juice of fruits and grains, sear meat and simmer the roots of plants. We carry on the oral history of our tribes, telling and retelling the same stories and jokes, until they take on a life of their own and the feats of our youth are truly Herculean.

The night is grand. The dinner party is a great success. The evening wanes and friends move gaily toward the kitchen, rosy cheeked and high in spirits, to help ferry the dishes to the sink where they can be put off until tomorrow. Inevitably they ask where to leave the empty beer bottles, and inevitably are appalled when I answer.

“You can just throw those in the trash.”

OH! What indigation ensues. “You can recycle those at Hippy WalMart,” they insist (Missoula has no infrastructure to recycle glass, but the denizens at Hippy WalMart advertise that they will ship our glass in empty trucks to Spokane, where it can be ground to rubble before being discarded). And then the evening can’t help but to close on an awkward note after I insist that recycling is bullshit.

There are a few reasons that recycling is a scam. For starters, the vast majority of those so-called recyclable goods that you painstakingly sort, or buy those blue bags for, wind up in the landfill. Plastic that can be recycled at all can usually only be re-purposed once, glass just goes straight to the landfill, and even minor grease spots on a newspaper render the whole bundle to trash.

The only really effective recycling infrastructure is, not surprisingly, the one with an economic incentive to the consumer; aluminum can be reused ad infinitum with significant cost and energy savings over producing the raw material.

But the biggest issue with recycling is one that it shares with the Toyota Prius and other well meaning improvements to our global impact: it completely misses the point. It’s easy for me to go about my happy liberal life without changing my behavior, and carrying the warm, smug, glow of knowing that I’m saving the world because I threw my 12 oz. Dasani bottle into the blue trash can instead of the black one with all the bees around it. With this warm fuzzy feeling it’s easy to forget that recycling should be the last resort, and that in order to make any kind of meaningful change we really just need to consume much, much less.

Recycling is an emotional palliative to otherwise well meaning people, and it keeps them from accepting responsibility or effecting actual change. Driving your Prius a mile to work on a nice day is still driving a mile to work on a nice day. Don’t like that your town doesn’t recycle glass? Fill a growler, instead. And rather than furtively making plastic bottles disappear from the public eye one tidy blue bag at a time, I encourage you to throw them on the ground. Litter them with every chance you get, until they’re so ugly, and so pervasive that there’s a pelican or a squirrel or something choking on every street corner in America.

Maybe then people will stop buying plastic bottles of water in the first place.

Like

This is Part 4 of a series. Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!

The secret to world peace is not as complicated as we make it out to be. Quite simply, the world would be a much better place if we all traded our cars for scooters. And by scooter I don’t mean motorcycle. If your knees can’t touch, you’re not on a scooter.

The mechanism of peace through scooters is twofold, even before getting into the macro-economic and geopolitical implications of a billion people dramatically reducing their carbon footprint. It’s simpler than that.

1. It’s pretty much impossible to be in a bad mood on a scooter. And when you’re in a good mood, you’re more likely to be nice to people. And when you’re nice to people it puts them in a better mood. So on, and so forth, until everyone goes home a little bit happier and we can stop reading about stuff like this, and more stories like this.

2. Exposure to danger induces behavior that looks like empathy (if not empathy itself). Everyone should have a little skin in the game.

And that’s it.

There are basically two arguments for driving a large car, SUV, or truck. On the one hand, you’ve got the increased safety provided by the larger vehicle, and then the honest people who are just like, “WOOOOOOOOOOO!” That second group can be hard to reason with.

But the first group tends to be reasonably well meaning. They’re interested in safety for themselves and their loved ones, after all, which is hard to fault. Never mind that SUVs aren’t actually all that much safer than passenger cars. The taller, heavier vehicles are much more prone to rollover accidents, which carry a high rate of fatality.

In fact, the main case for claiming that an SUV is safer than a Honda Fit, or better yet, a Honda Ruckus, comes from frontal crash test ratings. If we remember from high school physics class that momentum is conserved, it should be no surprise that the larger, heavier vehicle fares better in a head on collision.

But that’s also a pretty fucked up way to approach safety.

By driving a Ford Expedition in the name of safety, I am saying that my well being is more important than your well being. That I am more important than you are. The only way a truck makes you safer is at the expense of another person. That kind of narcissistic decision making trickles down to our behavior, as well. I’m much more likely to drive aggressively or flip you off from the confines of a rolling, 5,500 lb. safety cage.

Taking us all from our cars and placing us in the relative danger of a 49cc fun machine will not make anyone more empathetic.  Sure, humans can learn to be empathetic, but let’s be real: that sounds like a lot of work. Instead, exposure to risk induces behavior that appears empathetic.

You’ll be much less likely to drive like a dickhead if rather than simply saying “I’m sorry” and getting some body work done (because apparently in the US you can avoid the consequences of killing a fellow human with your car with the proper application of puppy eyes and a heartfelt apology), you’re confronted with leaving most of your skin on the pavement in a crash.

The problem with driving is that we don’t think twice about doing it. It’s one of the most dangerous things that we all do, but we hop in, turn up the music, and start scrolling through Instagram. If every time we had to drive somewhere we were a bit more afraid that we wouldn’t make it, we’d pay a lot more attention on our way across town, and we’d be in a better mood when we got there.

 

Like

This is Part 3 of a series. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2!

My parents are both artists, and have always considered creative expression worthwhile. When I started to take writing more seriously, my mother sent me Anne Lamott’s great book on the writing process, “Bird By Bird.” It’s filled with advice to new writers on getting past some of the internal hurdles to composing honest, meaningful work. “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life,” she said. And reminds us that “you own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

“Write”, she says, “like your parents are dead.”

My mother will be aghast, I expect, to learn that I contorted that last bit of writing advice to justify buying a motorcycle.

Lamott meant that in order to relate to an audience, a writer needs to appeal to their readers on a very personal level. To cast light on the things we share in secret but that make us feel alone. Many of those things are shameful, and  imply behavior not exactly in the spirit of how our parents hoped we were raised. In order to succeed as an artist, a writer needs to leave behind concerns of what his parents might think of him.

It’s the same way with how we live our lives, and I realized a few months ago that my greatest fear in getting a motorcycle was not of dying on it (a reasonable thing to be afraid of), but of what my mother would think when I bought one in the first place (an unreasonable thing to be afraid of).

We can’t live in the shadow of others. If the spectre of disappointment or failure haunts our decision making, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to thrive. Our loved ones’ goals, after all, are for our safety and comfort, even if it’s at odds with our real well being.

Discomfort, after all is not so different from pain. It’s unpleasant and we’re conditioned to avoid it. But we’ve gone too far. Americans cling to comfort compulsively, but like pain there’s a level of discomfort that should be expected in our lives.

When an opioid dependency advances sufficiently, the physiological threshold for what is felt as pain decreases. If it progresses too far, the electrical impulses of basic neurological communication eventually register as searing pain.

The incessant pursuit of comfort is no different. And as we remove ourselves more and more from legitimately stressful and dangerous situations our comfort zone creeps closer to home until we’re forlorn over objectively menial inconveniences. To the heroin addict the pain of withdrawal is very real.

We call them first world problems, which is a funny thing to say. But we’re a society so sedated by convenience that when the guy in front of you in the grocery check out loses his shit because the store is out of cilantro, the scariest part is that to him the turmoil is real.

And like with opiate addiction, our dependency on comfort is difficult to cure. Once the baseline moves, it’s hard to replace it. The best thing you can do is to lay off the oxycodone in the first place.

Too often, we change our behavior for the wrong reasons. Out of fear of the wrong things. For fear of losing a steady paycheck despite a toxic work environment. For fear of starting a race you’re not sure you can finish. For fear of disappointing our parents to take a chance on a passion.

If it’s been too long since your heart beat fast, the best thing you can do might just be to roll on the throttle and hold on tight.

 

Like

This is Part 2 of a series. Be sure to check out Part 1!

“Who do you think is the enemy?” our family friend, Fabian*, asked me around a camp fire a few years ago. I think it was 2006, a year before President Bush would declare victory in Iraq, and while military operations in Afghanistan were beginning to crescendo. Fabian spent his career in the State Department, and at the time was stationed in the embassy in Kabul. “Pakistan,” I answered. The porous border between the countries and refuge for Taliban fighters didn’t seem in the spirit of international cooperation to me.

“Nah,” he said, and adjusted his seat by the fire. “It’s the Department of Defense.”

The ramifications of that are huge, especially in this conversation we’re having about the role that public fear plays in American foreign policy, and it really comes down to money. DoD funding increases with our level of crisis. It doubled in the year after the 9/11 attacks, and it follows that the subset of the government that derives its funding from our being at a state of war has very little incentive to end that state of war.

Little incentive, of course, except that at some point the public will tire of it and replace the government. But the very private sector, the profit driven military industrial complex? That’s a $250 Billion per year industry that’s going to do just fine regardless of who’s in office, and you can bet they’ve got a marketing budget. Today CNN, Fox, and MSNBC find themselves scrambling to fill a 24 hour daily stream of breaking news, and nothing sells better than adding the word “terror” to a headline. We’re looking at a national economy of fear, where the demand of the United States military is met with the supply from news media who benefit from more and more sensational headlines.

It’s working. Fear in the emotional landscape of Americans is disjointed from the reality of the risks. Gallup reports that over the last ten years Americans have grown increasingly afraid of walking home alone at night, in spite of a precipitous two decade drop in violent crime. Fear of terror attacks wildly outweigh their probability, to a level that rests somewhere between a phobia and bona fide paranoia.

The actual terrorist threat to you, right now, is basically 0. And yet there is a mammoth effort to convince you of your imminent doom at the hands of a knife wielding jihadi.

Now, at this point I realize that I’m probably starting to come off a little bit like a paranoid conspiracy blogger, and you might guess that the next several paragraphs will increase in fervor until I’m typing in call caps and submitting FOIA requests for the real 9/11 Commission Report. So I decided to scrape together some credibility and reached out to Dr. Louis Hayes, professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Montana. He’s spent significant time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other current conflict areas, and spent much of his career thinking about Civil Violence. He literally wrote the definition of the word “terrorism.”

“The terrorist threat is a fraction of what it is portrayed to be by those who derive an income from the phenomenon,” he told me, and hinted that the fear campaign is as effective as it is today because of the immediacy of news delivery. “Hundreds of years ago people would have read about [an attack] in the newspaper” if at all, he said. But now video footage of bombs detonating in Boston can be shown on repeat for days on end. We’ve all seen video of the plane striking Tower 2 hundreds of times.

The reality of the risk of terror attacks is better illustrated by how infrequently it actually happens. “Terrorist opportunities are everywhere” Hayes explained. “I used to play golf where there was a gasoline pipeline crossing a river with only a chain link fence protecting it.  I could have thrown a homemade bomb and made a statement.” We’re a nation of low hanging fruit, and yet . . . crickets.

The relationship between a television news media that survives on sensational news breaks and a defense industry that relies on a relatively high baseline of generalized anxiety is increasingly murky. “9/11 was a turning point,” says Hayes. “Before then there were maybe half a dozen specialists in civil violence. Now every news agency has its own civil violence division.” The reality is that your being afraid is good for business. Whether it’s for CNN chasing unique views and click-throughs, or allowing the NSA to maintain a surveillance state that would make Aldous Huxley blush, there is a significant investment in inflating your fear.

Your fear of what? Terrorism is fine for now, but it doesn’t really matter.

After World War II we had the Soviets. We were afraid the Cubans and the North Vietnamese. We had a domestic communist threat and wild theories about Latin American countries falling to Soviet influence like dominoes. After the wall came down there was lingering turmoil in the western hemisphere and a new power vaccuum in eastern Europe, and over the last three decades the ax hovering above our heads has shifted from a communist threat to that of Islamic militants.

The actual risk to your safety is basically nil. The most dangerous thing you can do is not exercise, but that fact doesn’t boost cable news ratings or elect Lindsey Graham. There are trillions of dollars invested in our nation’s persistent economy of war, and drama and fear speak much more loudly than statistics.

 

 

*As long as we’re making up names, why not?

Like