According To Hoyt

My husband has been in the working world, as a professional, for 30 some years.  I’ve been in this weird ghetto of the working world called publishing for 20 this fall.

And what we’ve found, and which is being brought home rather strongly by some friends’ experiences, is that most workplaces, work fields, work environments, are crab buckets.  Most people don’t get much done, and they don’t want anyone else to.

Husband is in a good place right now, because it’s a small office, with congenial co-workers, and I… well, there’s always indie, right.  But for most people, it’s impossible to escape the crab bucket.

This is another of those unfortunate consequences of humans being built from the clay of the earth, aka on the frame of a great ape.

Great apes are social animals, and belonging to the band, preserving your position in the band and climbing the hierarchy is ALWAYS more important than whatever the avowed goal of the band.  Which is why most work places consist of “If I just take the big monkey down, I’ll be chief.” even if that destroys your actual productivity or the money your company might make.

Our government works the same way, btw, which makes it all make so much sense, right?  Pulling power plays is way more important than the good of the nation for any and all of those apes.

Frankly, having seen how the sausage is made, the miracle is that anything gets done at all, and we’re not all still in the Savannah knapping flint.

Thing is, sometimes, for some blessed amount of time, in some places that seem like they were touched with special grace, you get people who work together at least minimally well, and don’t put blocks in each other’s way.  People who put the task first.

It’s very rare.  It didn’t even really happen at the constitutional convention, which is why slavery survived, unfortunately.

But it happened SOMEWHAT and that’s enough to make it The Miracle at Philadelphia.

And when it happens, here and there, occasionally, in offices and workplaces throughout the land, miracles occur.  Suddenly, work gets done at a rate that should be impossible, things get accomplished that should not be possible.

It falls apart.  Of course it does.  The Monkey Games resume.

Honestly, even working with myself, the monkey brain will get in the way of the writing, mostly by telling me things are impossible.  If I can shut it down just a few minutes, I can get great stuff done.  (Maybe not on prednisone, but.)

So… try to minimize your monkey.  When friction arises in work, examine whether it is real or the sort of “oneupmanship simian games humans play.  If it’s the later, try to control it, at least if you give a hang about the results.  Because those games rarely have anything to do with the actual issue, the actual product, the actual work.  They’re monkey dominance games.

But what if you’re the one being played games on, and you can’t get them to stop — as is so often the case with Odds? — what do you do?

If you can, leave.  If you can’t then remember you can accomplish most things so long as you don’t care who gets the credit.

Make your goal to get the job done.  Make your goal to accomplish as much as you possibly can towards the goal.  If that fails, just  find another place/another way to work and keep on going.

It’s rather horrible that as humans try to do anything they’re hampered by their monkey brain, but then the attempt to be like onto angels, knowing good from evil didn’t work any too well.  And if we could do that, maybe we’d lose task of what humans are and need (you could say that Darkships is an exploration of this.)

Right now, right where we stand, though, we have a culture to rebuild which is being torn apart not only but also because some young monkeys feel the need to symbolically kill their elders to claim dominance.  Hence all the putting down of past greats by untried, unblooded people.  And the ridiculous listening “to the children.”

The crabs pulling us back into the bucket, until we can all be boiled together are many.  And all we can do is FIDO (F**K it, Drive on — as Brian Holcomb keeps telling me.)

There are things we can do.  One thing we MUST do is remove funnels (Yeah, I just got the new Microsoft terms of service.  Regulating speech, really?  These are my middle fingers, boyos.)  There are way too many monopolies on the net, and as always happens the boss monkeys are trying to absolute control.

And then when monkeys start monkeying with the important stuff?  Just move on.  Throwing poo in their faces is optional.  (But highly recommended if they’re politicians.)

Go do things.  Ignore the naysayers, even the ones in your brain.  FIDO.

 

*It’s been a very weird morning, combined with the fact I’m on “something a little stronger than prednisone” which is giving me one-minute-attention-span.  I’m so sorry, I meant to write  a post, but this will have to do for now. – SAH*

The Bombs Bursting in Air

Sarah A. Hoyt

The holo board on the side of the road read “Emergency. All Vehicles and persons, please turn on the next right and wait for inspection.”

I had just flown in to Sea York, dropped from long-distance altitude to local altitude, and was cruising maybe two feet above the glistening ceramite surface of Queens, the main road from the coast into the heart of the seacity.

The billboard’s words made my fingers start for the control panel of my flyer. And then I stopped.

What was the emergency, precisely, and what would the inspection entail?

Since at least the twentieth century this sort of impromptu search of the general public had been used for everything, from terrorist threats, to interdiction of illegal substances to stopping kidnappings.

This one might mean everything or nothing.

I felt the back of my neck prickle, and despite the controlled climate in my flyer, felt a trickle of sweat trail down my back, under the plain, white work shirt I’d donned for the occasion.

The inspection could be for the same reason as my mission. And if it was for the same reason as my mission, it could paradoxically impair what I had to do. The Usaians were not stupid. They were a great many things, yes, but not stupid. Were they stupid, they wouldn’t have all the security apparatus of Earth on high alert for years. Were they stupid, they wouldn’t be illegal. If they were stupid, I’d be out of a job.

Not being stupid and having an inspection attempting to prevent their planned show of force before the vote of the legislature of Sea York tomorrow, they would be extra suspicious of anyone in their midst.

I spotted an alley on the left, before the next turn right, and took it, keeping my eyes peeled for anyone following me. But all the other flyers, in the sparsely traveled road seemed to be staying on the main throughfare and following instructions.

No surprise about it, either. The alley I’d ducked into was so narrow that my flyer, one of the cheaper sports models, designed to appeal to bachelors and young couples, almost scraped on both sides, and it took some finessing and maneuvering, to keep from doing so.

At the end of the alley, randomly, I turned to the right into a slightly larger road, one that was lined with the semi-spherical pink homes built in a hurry at the turn of the century to accommodate immigration to the seacity, and now mostly occupied by the working class and called by the derogatory name of mushrooms.

The street was quiet. Too quiet. I realized that there were no kids playing outside, always a bad sign in this neighborhood, and the prickle at the back of my neck increased.

Something was wrong.

My mission was supposed to be simple. I was supposed to spy on the Usaians. Not infiltrate them exactly. Security services from all over the world have tried to infiltrate them, and, technically speaking, it should be easy.

I mean, they were a secretive religion but one that was created from so many disparate strands, and involved so many different people, and so many sects that it should have been easy for a relative stranger to claim to be a recent convert.

The problem was that the vast majority of Usaians were just believers. They knew nothing of their agenda, their covert actions. And those who were leaders or close to the leaders, from whom the directives of the movement emanated were not stupid.

We’d never fully been able to understand how infiltrators were spotted. Back at headquarters we had data gem upon data gem full of case studies, though, and it was hard to deny they had been spotted and either committed suicide – sometimes in ways that required acrobatic ability – or simply vanished. The vanished ones were more worrisome. At least they worried those considering taking up the mission.

It hadn’t worried my older brother, Paul, but then it could be said that Paul had always been overconfident. He’d disappeared while on mission 5 years ago, never to be heard from again. It was suspected he’d become a victim of the Sons of Liberty, the terroristic branch of the Usaians, but the fact no one knew for sure that the Sons of Liberty existed made the whole thing a nightmare of suspicion and implication.

Thinking of Paul made me clamp my jaw together hard, to stop the itch in my eyes. My father had died in the year since Paul had gone missing, died without knowing what had become of his first born, died without even the consolation of a funeral for his son. And I was not going to cry.

I might be a woman, but that didn’t mean that I could cry in public. Father had been a member of the International Alliance of Peacekeepers and Paul and I had been raised in the traditions of the force, and eventually joined. Keeping the peace, protecting order and sustaining established authority was our mission. It left very little room for private sorrow. Paul had died in the service of order and peace. Dad had lived for that service. And now it was my turn.

What I was going to do was come to Sea York ahead of what the Usaians were calling “a show of presence” designed to intimidate the legislature into not outlawing them.

I was going to find out how they got their orders, which would lead to their central authorities. Once those were found, the legitimate governments of the world should be able to prove that this worship of a long-vanished system of government was not a religion but a dangerous political movement, one that intended to take over the whole world.

Once we discovered who their top men were, and who was giving orders, downward, we would be able to dispel their crazy notion of individual power, or individual action. We should be able to defang the poisonous idea that the authority to govern should rightly reside in the hands of the governed.

And now there was someone on my tail, I realized. Or at least a battered, small, red flyer was following me through the silent neighborhood.

I took three turns at random and it followed, on my tail.

It was either really inefficient at tracking, or it wanted me to know I was being followed. The sweat down my back was now a river. I bit my lower lip while I tried to reason it through.

It could be a Usaian, of course. I had established an identity for this mission, of course: Natasha Borodin someone who had been flitting for years on the outskirts of Usaian circles without fully converting, at least that anyone knew. The id this flyer broadcasted was tied pretty strongly to that identity. It might be that they considered me enough one of them to try to protect me. Or it could be they suspected me enough to want to verify what I was up to.

Or, given my supposed sympathies, it was entirely possible that the constituted authorities were following me, perhaps – the idea made me smile – because they suspected me of being one of the secret leaders of the Usaians.

I kept an eye on the flyer behind me as I turned to a slightly larger suburban neighborhood, this one with houses that looked like they could have been built in the 21^st century, save that the slight sheen of ceramite and dimatough gave away that they weren’t wood and stucco.   And stopped, suddenly.

In the middle of the road was a barricade. It took me only a second to realize that it was an official barricade. The seal of Sea York occupied the center of the barricade, an eagle with the bar sinister. And everyone behind it wore the bright orange uniforms of Sea York peace keepers.

I had a split second to make a decision. If they were looking for drugs, kidnapped children or weapons, I could go through. Natasha Borodin had no guns. The ones I did have were behind the panel, where no one could ever find them, or at least no one who wasn’t a member of the Inties. Those who worked on international peacekeeping shared that kind of secret across the various nations, protectorates and territories.

Too late I realized I hadn’t had the local broadcast on, and that it could have told me what the search was about. I tweaked the control panel and heard “believed to be dangerous elements” and also “subvert the order” but the words in the middle were garbled, and while my flyer, having stopped, came to rest gently on the pavement, three men had come out from behind the barricade, burners at the ready.

The little battered red flyer had vanished.

Subvert the order and dangerous elements had to refer to a public movement, not to drugs or kidnapping. Which meant –

I punched the take off button and shot straight up, amid the trees that lined the peaceful street. Branches scraped the side of the flyer, and there was an explosive sound. An alarm sounded from my controls. A quick glance told me I’d been shot and that something was seriously wrong with the electrical systems.

Sea York Peacekeepers shouldn’t be that quick on the trigger. They were a corporate territory, still controlled by a board of directors. They had a voting assembly, in which those who owned shares could have their say. Because of that, they were loathe to either offend investors or scare away potentially skilled migrants.

It was part of the reason they were lousy with Usaians.

Which meant they were spooked, and the only thing that could have spooked them was the proposed “demonstration of presence” of the Usaians. No one knew exactly what that was supposed to mean, except that a press release from someone claiming to belong to the Daughters of Liberty had said it would show how large their numbers were in Sea York and show their nature as productive, integral members of a thriving society.

And of course, my evading their barricade. But a search of the flyer would have revealed my supposed Usaian sympathies, and if they were that spooked I’d at the very least have spent a night in jail and been unable to complete my mission.

Or I’d have to reveal myself and trust the discretion of local cops.

I snorted, even as I started looking for a place to land. The control panel was beeping distressingly, and I was going to go down hard and fast either way. Better choose where to go.

The only place I could think of to aim for was a private beach on the edge of the seacity away from all roads. While the peacekeepers were bound to follow me, I would probably be able to find a pathway from that beach that would be hard for a flyer to follow.

So I guided my flyer, losing altitude at an appalling rate, over to the little expanse of black sand, bordering the sea. The sand was black in most seacities, since it was the worn away grains of the dimatough used to build the original island. But before I landed I knew I’d made the wrong choice. The beach was maybe fifty feet long by twenty feet deep, and, what was worse, it was bordered on all sides by high, shining, black dimatough walls.

A frantic finger on the controls failed to get the flyer to lift. All I could do was land as gently as I could.

Not gently enough. I lost power entirely and dropped the last six feet, with a force that jarred pain through my head and made my teeth hurt.

Before the pain subsided, I was unbuckled, and kneeling on the floor, searching for the spot that would open the compartment where I kept my weapons. If I was very lucky, they’d merely fired on me out of panic, and they wouldn’t pursue me.

I didn’t believe in luck. Most people who did were dead. Like Paul.

Finding the slightly raised combination pad by touch – something impossible if I hadn’t known it was there – I tapped my combination and the secret compartment on the side of my seat slid open. I dove in, coughing against the smoke suddenly filling the flyer cabin, and found two burners, by touch, before my brain informed me that the smoke must be due to the electrical trouble in the flyer, and that if I stayed around to look for the long distance weapons I was going to either choke or roast.

So, instead, staying low – smoke rises – I crawled to the control panel and punched the emergency door opening button. The door slid open partway, the smoke poured out of the flyer, clouding my view of the outside, and I thought if I just walked out and there was anyone ambushing me, I would likely get shot.

So, instead, I threw myself out at ground level, and landed in a roll that took me to the side, and partly under the flyer, burner in hand.

Before I’d stopped rolling I knew I’d made the right decision, as a burner ray flew by above me, probably in response to indistinct movement in the smoke.

Which meant not only had I been followed, but my pursuers had anticipated my movements and “followed ahead”. Not exactly difficult, since I’d been maneuvering on a crippled flyer, but also not precisely easy, since I’d got here as soon as I could.

That type of precision and organization seemed to speak of an official organization, the sort that governments could put in play. On the other hand the Usaians had managed to survive despite being outlawed in ninety percent of places around the world.

I scooted further into the shadow of my flyer, and located three spots where, even through the spoke, the light shone unnaturally, probably on the surface of flyers. Three of them, damn it. And me alone and with a winged flyer.

When all else fails, try razzle dazzle. Razzle dazzle, followed by sufficiently fast firepower can sometimes work.

So I spoke loudly, trying to keep my voice to “young woman” and “Confused” and using as close as I could to the broad Sea York accent on Glaish, “Who are you? Why have you shot my flyer?”

Right after I spoke, I rolled sideways, and predictably, a burner ray shone through where I’d been. Whoever was after me was serious, and cared very little for whether they’d be pursued for killing me. So – the Usaians?

But a throat was cleared near one of the shining areas, and a voice said, “Claire Briand, do you wish to surrender?”

My real name shocked me for a moment. Who could have my real name? My identity as Natasha Borodin had been laid so deep, I doubted even local authorities could have gotten it, much less the Usaians.

The only people who could know it were—

My own people, the Internationals, or as we called ourselves, the inties. And if my own people were after me–

I started to open my mouth to say I’d done nothing that I needed to surrender or be punished for, and then stopped. If they’d come to arrest me, lawfully and normally, they’d have shouted what I was supposed to have done, and my name, and asked me to surrender, before shooting at me.

If they had come at me with killing force, what I’d done or hadn’t done were of no consequence. Someone wanted me dead.

I crawled forward a little, careful to keep in the shadow and the smoke. Right now, in a place this size, surrounded by hostiles, I had basically chance zero at surviving. Unless, of course, I managed to make the smoke far more intense, which would give me cover to—

I wasn’t sure to what, since right then my only options seemed to be to swim out to sea and drown. From my mental map of the place before landing, those straight dimatough walls extended on either side of the little cove and my chances of being able to swim the couple of miles before the next island before my arms gave out were next to none.

There were rumors that back in the twenty first great great great great grandad had been bio-enhanced by his parents. But I suspected if he’d been enhanced at all, it had been for intelligence and maybe for some physical coordination and ability, since he’d been a policeman, like everyone in the family time out of memory. I very much doubted he’d been enhanced for long distance swimming, and I certainly hadn’t.

But right then, I needed smoke so I could have a chance of not getting shot while I decided whether to die by drowning.

Unfortunately I was a peacekeeper, not a flyer mechanic. I had no idea why my flyer was smoking. According to regulations, all the stuff in there was supposed to be non-flammable, from the circuits to the inner furnishings.

Well, the circuits certainly weren’t, I told myself. I had a brief, mad idea of shooting the power-pack, but that was followed by the certainty if I got past the housing I’d cause an explosion that would wipe out all life on this cove. So, it remained…

I could shoot the other flyers in the same place as mine, but supposing that they weren’t made of the same sadly flammable, and probably illegal materials nothing would happen. And supposing they were, all that would happen would be stranding enemies here with me. Oh, and pissing them off.

Damn it, what I needed was cover, and then a way out of here. In desperation, I realized I’d crawled almost all the way back to my front door. I doubted I was visible where I was, in the shadow of the flyer, but I could see the two nearest flyers, one on the right, and one to the left of me, each of them official vehicles, designed to carry more than one person. There were four men near one, and two near the other. Right.

I shot an arm up into the open door of my flyer, and fired on hot and wide dispersal. As I rolled back behind my flyer, two shots found places where I’d been, and I cursed because I’d exposed myself for nothing, and the flyer’s interior turned out to be regulation non flammable.

Then there was a sound like “fwoosh” and a series of crackles, and thick, acrid smoke poured out of the interior of my flyer.

There were coughs and the sound of people scurrying.

One of the coughs came from near me. Very near. Almost touching. On my right. I pointed my burner at it, at the same time I looked.

There was a man crawling on the ground, near me, and at my turning to him, he lifted both hands, to show he was disarmed. “I’m here to help,” he whispered.

I couldn’t see much of him through the smoke, save that he was dark haired, and that there was something like amusement in his eyes. The kind of man who’d be amused with a burner pointed at him would be … like my brother. A little crazy, a lot daring, and not knowing when he was in trouble.

I hesitated, which was stupid, because in such situations hesitation is death.

He said, rapidly, “I was told to tell you Grind and Luck.”

This stopped me cold. Grind and luck were the two things that dad said were needed for success. By grind he meant study and he’d said it so often it had become a sort of family joke. I blinked at the man, and said, “Paul?” I knew he wasn’t Paul, of course. My brother’s hair, like mine, was light brown, not that black shock of hair visible through the smoke. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who would have known the family’s saying.

He shook his head. “Not here. Will you trust me?”

Two seconds to decide. Anyone who had interrogated Paul before his untimely demise might have got that out of him, even if it was a weird thing to get in interrogation. Then again, shoot someone full of babble juice and you get the strangest stuff.

On the other hand, even if he were someone who had done away with my brother, or someone in contact with those who had, he was just one man. As opposed to the six out there.

I lowered my burner and nodded. He nodded in turn. He’d been speaking in the almost soundless whisper that seemed to have gone unnoticed amid all the coughing and movement on the other side, but of course even whispers were dangerous.

He motioned for me to follow and stood enough to run half crouched through the smoke. I followed, more by detecting motion than by seeing him. At least once a burner ray barely missed me, passing close enough to singe my hair, which told me that the motion had also been detected by my pursuers.

I almost hit a flyer, at a dead run, but the man was there, stopping me, and sticking his finger in the flyer’s genlock. It was the battered vehicle that had followed me. The red one.

As the door slid open, my friend or captor pulled me up. He smelled of sweat and soap and was strong enough to lift me into the flyer without seeming effort. I took a deep breath, and he was already at the control panel.

“They’ll shoot us as we take off, I’m afraid,” he said. “So I’ll have to take off fast enough they won’t hit us.”

The take off tossed me to the floor, and as soon as we gained altitude and stabilized, I came up again. He hadn’t taken my burners, which was either a sign that he was not hostile, or a sign that he was stupid. I had my burners pointed at him as I said, “Sons of Liberty?”

I expected shock or fear or something, but he looked around over his shoulder. He had olive skin, an aquiline nose, and dark brown eyes under heavy, straight eyebrows. His teeth, when he flashed me a smile, were white and very straight. “Let’s discuss your predicament, instead,” he said, not seeming to notice the burner pointed at his head. “Who do you think betrayed you?”

“What?”

“Who do you think told the authorities of Sea York that you were a dangerous Usaian subversive, in charge of the demonstration of presence tonight, and that you were coming to organize Usaians?”

I blinked stupidly at him. “No one. The people who knew of my mission—” My mouth felt suddenly dry. “The people who knew—” The people who knew included my boss Mark Vanel who had been trying to make our association less than professional, despite the fact that he was married and I was not interested. Had he been upset enough by my refusal to lay a trap for me, and get me murdered by the police of Sea York? Surely no one could be that angry at a refusal?

And then I though perhaps not angry, but scared I’d make it an official matter. But still– “Why would the authorities of Sea York shoot at a suspected Usaian?” I said. “They haven’t been made illegal yet. The assembly doesn’t vote until tomorrow. That’s what the dmonstra—”

“They would if they received a message coded through trusty channels that said that this person about to enter their city was a turncoat peace keeper and was bringing bombs for the Usaians to set off at various locations.”

“Bombs?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This could be made worse if someone cracked usaian code for the occasion tonight and got the code name.”

“Code—”

“For the event tonight. It’s coded “bombs bursting in air.””

“They’re going to bomb Sea York.”

“No,” he said. He’d turned back to the control panel and his hands were flying madly. “No, we’re not. We’re not that stupid. But it’s easy to get hold of just enough information to make it plausible.”

I’d caught the shift. I still had the burner pointed at him. “You’re a Usaian.”

“My name,” he said. “Well, my name of record is Juan Remy. I was named for my grandfather who was chased out of his home in the dead of night, when he was a child. My real name is John Adams Remy. Now if you excuse me a moment, I need to take some evasive maneuvers, or we’ll have busies up our nostrils before we even land.”

“I could shoot you,” I said.

“You could,” he said calmly. “But if I thought you were stupid enough to do so, without realizing it would crash land you, I would have disarmed you.”

I bit back the “you and whose army?” that rose to my lips, and instead said, “You killed my brother.”

“Your– Paul? Paul Briand? No.”

The denial was flat and had the ring of truth. I still kept a burner in each hand. If Juan hadn’t killed him, someone else had. Someone in the Sons of Liberty. And they might very well be at the end of this flight. Or at least that’s what I thought as we dove down and into an underground parking garage.

The ceiling closed behind us, and we were in a small space that looked like a private garage. There were a mop and a broom against one wall, and a pile of tools against the other. But as I stepped out of the vehicle, by the light from the ceiling I noticed the flyer was green.

Juan saw me looking and grinned. “It’s a compound in the paint. We have had it for years. Allows us to escape pursuit.”

“As you bring disorder and perform acts of terrorism?” I said.

He blinked at me. “Not normally.”

“Do you know who killed my brother?”

“What?”

The “What” had not come from Juan and it was in a very well known voice. I turned to see my brother standing by a door, the light shining behind him, and making his blond hair brighter. He was older, I thought, and not just by the five years he’d been missing. What I mean is he stood straighter, and he looked more… grownup.

He was wearing blue pants and a white shirt, and looking at us with the expression of someone who had come out of greater light into a dimmer place.

“Claire!” he said, at the same time Juan said, “I got her, see.”

My brother crossed the garage in three steps to squeeze me in a bear hug. “Claire, damn it, so long, and we were so afraid you’d be dead before we could get you.”

“I don’t understand– I thought Juan– I thought the sons of liberty had kill— I thought you were dead.”

Paul let go of me, “Meet my brother in law, Juan Remy. Come in, come in. We have to get the kids fed and everything ready for the demonstration tonight.”

“Kids?”

I put my burners in their holsters, as I stumbled into a tidy home, presided over by a dark haired woman and seemingly full of children. Seemingly because once the noise and confusion subsided the apparently multitude of kids resolved themselves into two boys, Paul Revere Briand and Charles Carroll Briand aged 4 and 3 and a little girl Elizabeth Hamilton Briand, aged two.

“I converted, you see,” Paul said, shoveling apple sauce into his daughter’s mouth, while his wife, Martha, tended to the boys, seemingly ignoring their movement and screams, and managing to make sure food made it into them and not onto their hair and clothes. Mostly.

“I don’t see,” I said. “By their insistence in taking down all government and promotion of anarchy the Usaians are a force for criminality and disruption in the world. If they took over, in the chaos, their leaders would end up in charge, and everyone else under their heel.”

Paul wiped his daughter’s mouth and picked her up. Elizabeth peered at me suspiciously, and I wondered what I was going to do about this. Nothing, of course. The Usaians weren’t illegal in Sea York. At least not yet. And even if Paul was technically a deserter, I wasn’t about to denounce my own brother. I also was having trouble with the idea that Paul could have converted to an evil philosophy. He was happy-go-lucky and far too self confident, but that didn’t mean he was hungry for power or willing to cause anarchy.

“Ah, no,” he said. “That’s what the Good Men and their functionaries say. To say otherwise would mean admitting that the Usaian system, while in use, created more prosperity more widespread than any other in history. And admitting too that what the Usaians wanted was a smaller government, one that took account individual freedoms.”

Elizabeth was peering at me through her fingers, and looking like she’d smile if I just smiled first.

“You see,” Paul said. “I was betrayed, from inside, as you were. I have no idea who betrayed you or why, but in my case it was someone who wanted my place. Anyway, I ended up in prison in Syracuse, suspected of being a Usaian, which since I’d tried to infiltrate– Well, the Usaians saved me. Mind you they saved me to get information from me, but then Juan and I hit it off, and then I realized that under our system, in the international police, under all the systems in the domains of the Good Men, we have no defense against this sort of maneuver. And in the process I’d found that in the old US, in the system my captors believed in, there was a thing called innocent until proven guilty. There were… protections.”

“It must mean a lot of bad people went free,” I said. “In fact we learned that the country was sunk in chaos.”

He shrugged. “Only at the end, and by that time, they’d given up on their beliefs and system. Yeah, some guilty people probably escaped, but more importantly, innocent people weren’t condemned. There was… some protection for the individual. All of the laws were geared to keep the individual safe from an oppressive state.”

“But anarchy—”

“I didn’t say no state, hon. I said that the state had to be kept in check. They understood the need for a government, but that it should be kept in check.”

He looked across at his wife, who was making some sign. “Now?” he asked.

“Now, she said. “Let me have Ellie. You and the boys set them off.”

“Them?” I said.

Paul grinned at me. “Operation Bombs Bursting In Air.”

I couldn’t believe my brother would speak that cavalierly about killing people, but I didn’t know what he could be speaking of, either. I followed him and two excited little boys out onto the terrace just outside the room where we’d been. It was a round little space, much like others all around, at the top of the house, used – by the look of the abandoned toys – as a play area.

Paul swept the toys aside, and started setting up cylinders. Juan had come out, as well, and was keeping the two boys back.

“Let them light the fuses,” he said, as Paul was finishing up his incomprehensible preparations. “They’ll remember it forever.”

Paul nodded. He brought out a lighter, and took both his sons forward, and had them both hold the lighter, near a fuse on the ground near the line of cylinders.

Martha had come out, with Ellie. Juan was doing something or other behind us.

“Now,” Martha said, looking at a watch. “Now.”

Paul guided the boys’ hands towards the fuse. The fire caught. There was a fzz sound.

And suddenly the cylinders exploded in red, white and blue light, in a conflagration so violent I jumped back. And bumped into Juan who laughed, and steadied me, before he stood, unfurling and holding aloft a banner in broad red stripes and stars.

Around us, terraces were exploding in light, all over the seacity. There were even some up at the top, from the garden of the chairman of the ruling corporation.

And voices were singing, out of sync, something about “can you see.” Juan was singing behind me, and his voice was joined by Paul’s and Martha’s on “the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

I couldn’t believe the number of … fireworks? Or the number of flags flying. It must mean fully two thirds of Sea York were Usaians. The corporation couldn’t vote to outlaw them, not matter what the pressure brought by the Good Men. If they did, they’d lose all of their productive citizens. Or most of them.

In the dark, I found Paul had put a hand on my shoulder, “You see,” he said. “We’re not violent. We just want to live according to our beliefs.”

“But this belief in… in the power and … and sacredness of the individual is dangerous.”

“So it is. For those who want power over other humans. For the rest… well, it’s not a simple, easy and clean cut idea, but by its very nature… It’s much harder to be a tyrant over those who believe each person is sacred.”

“But a central governor, a good one, can create order and—”

“Order,” he said. “And stagnation. And injustice. Is order the most important thing?”

“You used to be a policeman,” I said. “You cared about order.”

“I’m still a policeman,” he said. “Here. I care about justice. Order can mean only that a criminal is keeping everyone else under control. Graves are very orderly. Justice is different. It means everyone has equal value under the law, and that no one will be allowed to create order at other’s expense.” He laughed a little, as though at himself. “Well, that’s the theory at least. We try.”

“You didn’t come to see father before he died,” I said.

Paul sighed. “I tried to contact him. I tried to contact you. I couldn’t come see him. We are illegal in Liberte, and people there know I’ve converted. People in the inties know I’ve converted. My attempts to contact you and dad were intercepted.”

“They– Dad died thinking you were dead. They wouldn’t let you contact us?”

“No,” he said. There was a bitter laugh. “It wasn’t orderly. It would create confusion. I named little Charles after dad.” He paused. “Well, not the middle name.”

Fireworks were still going on from every terrace, and Juan had affixed the flag to the edge of the terrace, and was setting up a second round.

“They said you were going to do a demonstration of power,” I told Paul. “That things would explode.”

“Well,” he said. “To be fair they have.” He looked around at the fireworks, with a smile on his lips, but there were tracks of tears down his face. “Even I didn’t know it would be these many people. One problem with tyranny is that it isolates you. You’re never sure if you’re alone. We passed word, to people we trusted. We didn’t know how far it reached. Well, I don’t think we’ll be outlawed come tomorrow.”

“No,” I said.

“You can go back, you know,” he said. “If you wish.”

I thought of going back. I’d been betrayed and lied to. That didn’t hurt as much as knowing they’d prevented dad from knowing his son was alive and well, or from knowing he had grandchildren. That, that betrayed a lack of concern for … for people, and for what was right and just that meant, to my mind that everyone of these people could at any minute become Mark Vanel. Because all that counted to them was power, and people in positions of power, not the vast masses they had power over. If you weren’t important to them, you didn’t matter. To anyone.

I cleared my throat. “This… individual thing… I mean…”

“What?” Juan asked. “Everyone being entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

“That,” I said. “Sounds good. And implausible.”

“It is,” he said. “Both. But we have… I mean… if you want to study how good and implausible it is…”

“There are classes, and ways to learn,” Paul cut in. “And you shouldn’t trust Juan. He has three wives and fifteen children in different seacities.”

“Liar. It’s only two wives and five children,” Juan said, in a tone that meant it was no wives or children. He grinned, just as he had when I’d pointed my burner at him. I had a feeling he could be dangerous and not because of multiple wives.

Paul bent and lit the fuse and set off a fresh round of red, white and blue stars. The little boys shrieked and clapped.

Through the haze of smoke and exploding fireworks, the terraces nearby showed fluttering flags, the striking and strange stars and stripes: the symbol of an alien philosophy that might or might not be as crazy as it had been painted.

But my brother wasn’t crazy. And I doubted his family was.

I squinted at the waving flags. Tomorrow, I’d learn more.

—————————————-

And here’s the link to the inimitable Alma Boykin’s story:  https://almatcboykin.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/excerpt-pattersons-war-the-new-founders-war/

During the weekend, while doing my normal weekly cleaning (usually a running affair lasting 4 hours and starting at around 9 am, involving dusting, vacuuming and making wet-areas (kitchen and bathrooms) sanitary, yes a little easier now that I’ve been keeping things more … organized) I listened to Tunnel in the Sky.

I learned my Heinlein upside down as most juveniles either weren’t published in Portuguese by the time I got married, or didn’t fall into my hands. So I’d read Podkayne and Space suit but none of the others.  Think of it, though, I had a treasure trove of Heinleins to explore in my twenties.

Anyway, Tunnel in the Sky, for those who haven’t read it (look to the people on either side of you.  If they haven’t read it, throw them out.  [Yes, I’m joking, it’s from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, also Heinlein.]) is a book about space gates.  At some point, when I have time I must analyze it, because I’d always assumed the gate and its apparatus was on Earth, but I realized yesterday the gates were on the moon and Earth and the other planets are merely terminus points.  I’m fairly sure people reading it when it was published were mostly jarred — in the opening — by all the “world gates” and the fact that it made Arizona a suburb of NYC.

This is also, of course, because Heinlein was positing a massively overpopulated world.  It was what “everybody knows” in his day and age, and if he had posited OUR world he’d probably have been laughed out of the field.

But for me as I was listening to it, and more so for younger people who grew up here, I think, the most shocking thing as I was reading it was when the main character is watching the space gates, that a little girl from a wagon-train ready to go out to colonize, strays.  When she’s tracked down by a red cross employee, and brought back to her family (who would otherwise probably leave without her, because they had invested their entire savings on equipment and fees, and the gate would only be open minutes.  Also, given the premises of this book, they probably had other kids and would have more.) her mom takes her up, ups her skirt and paddles her.

I’m sure for many people today that’s the moment they stop reading.

For decades now, we’ve been bombarded with “never hurt a child, never ever ever” and “spanking them only teaches them to be violent.”

Actually so far as we’re seeing, not spanking just teaches them to be savages… but that’s neither here nor there.

This theory of “present supremacy” in which our ancestors, in the long, long history of the race (note to inevitable idiot: the HUMAN race) are all inferior to us, in sensibility and yeah, sense to and intelligence and every other quality that makes us human, is not only unproven, it’s preposterous.  Judging by achievements, alone, we’re the spoiled and lazy scions of a rich family, living off our ancestors accumulated wealth.  It’s not only ridiculous for us to assume superiority over our ancestors, it’s unseemly and it should stop.

And yes I know it’s the fruits of “popular Darwinism” (Note not the original theory which posited “higher” forms as being more adapted to life not, somehow, morally superior) and Marxism (according to whose believers the future comes with an arrow pointing in the direction they want to go, which is why the people who long for the conditions and political structure of the 1930s call themselves progressives.  Go figure.)

But in no other application is it as stupid as in child discipline.

Let me point out here that I’m not and have never been a proponent of the “beat them to the ground” philosophy.  “Minimum force necessary” is the imperative here.  RES for instance says he could discipline daughter with boring lectures.  We couldn’t do that.  From he time older son could argue with us, that lecture would have become untenable.  Or he’d take from it the stupidest thing possible, and apply that.  His brother, OTOH, would listen to us with an angelic smile, and completely ignore it.

Even with our two children, the discipline was completely different.  #1 son was bullheaded from birth (I swear) and even as an infant the “distract him with another object” never worked.  You had to physically remove him from the area (kicking and screaming) or lightly swat his hands (to stop him from eating dead flies on the windowsill of the house we were renting.  The windows were large enough and faced south and there were always dead flies on the sill.  He liked them.  He insisted they were raisins.  Ew.)

As he got older, sometimes you needed to swat his butt JUST to get his attention.  (This is the same kid who forced us to do diaper changes en-passant.  As in, as he ran babbling past us, we’d smell something, grab him, take him to changing table, change him, return him to the floor, and he’d return to running around the coffee table as though we hadn’t stopped him.  I THINK if I understood his game at the time, he was playing at being an ambulance.  You see, we lived on a main street and #1 son’s first heroes were cars and trucks.)

#2 son had a completely different temperament.  He smiled a lot, and sat a lot building fantastic things (I still have a duck mecha made of legos, with special oggles and weapons built in to both hands, which is amazing since he was using house/and/car lego sets.)  Sometimes he built whole cities, then played long involved stories with his lego people (Before that with the waffle blocks and egg people from little tykes) long before he could speak.

To discipline him the way we disciplined his brother (swat to the behind, or very light hand swats) would be totally uneeded and also cruel.  And you could distract him with an object.  I.e. “Get away from the heater, honey, here’s your Winnie the Pooh doll.”  And he WOULD stop and come to you.  I often say that if I’d had #2 son first, #1 son would have been a horrible surprise.

The only time force was needed with #2 son was to prevent him killing his brother who outweighed him by double at any given time before 10, or to drag him away from machinery.  (He once set the room-wide automatic rack in a garment store in Portugal spinning.  He closed the doors at the grocery store when we’d turned our backs for ten seconds.  If it had a button or gears, he was on it.)  So he got maybe five swats in his entire childhood all when it was a life-threatening “I want to impress that upon you” moment.

If we’d raised #1 the same way, he’d have — by now — set fire to some major city or worse.

Mind you, not only are they both decent human beings, but both of them, from the age of five or so on needed no real punishment.  (Oh, okay, sometimes we took younger son’s computer cord away for a day or two, but that wasn’t even really punishment, as the fact he’d become obsessed with certain games and do nothing else, and sometimes needed a re-direct to know there was still a real world and things he must do in it.)  Also, complete strangers would call us to tell us how wonderful our sons’ and their manners were, from elementary school on.

Now, up to about age five there were the occasional swats, and I won’t deny that was partly because we were doing the raising solo (sometimes just me, for long periods, because Dan was a programmer which meant month-long jags of 18 hour days weren’t unusual in the nineties)  and there was absolutely no way to pass them off to a grandmother for a few hours.  I suspect if we had we’d have spanked less, as I’d have had help and not needed to make them “trained and low maintenance” by the time they outweighed me (for Robert that was around 10.  I was smaller then, too.  Hypothyroidism hadn’t set in.)  There was this idea I had to train them so I could trust them out of sight, no matter what the public opinion of swats-on-the-behind was.

Mind you, being still me and Weird Libertarian MomTM, from the time they could reason and bargain, we went to paid incentives.  This horrified my SIL who is a teacher, and who said the kids should have to do some things just because they were part of the family, and they should get an allowance just to teach them to “handle money.”

But two things I can’t abide: money for nothing, and being forced to have onerous (several hours a week is that, for a kid) obligations you didn’t sign up for.  No, I’m not preaching you have to do this.  This was me and my personal moral scruples.  So, from the time older son was 5, I’d tell him what he could do and the price.  (Dusting a floor of the house was $5 I think.  He didn’t do it very well, mind you, and sometimes I had to re-do, but there was a minimum satisfaction before I paid, after inspection.) By the time younger was 8 and older 12, I had a big blackboard in the kitchen.  These were years I was writing 5 to 6 books a year (many of them work for hire or ghost writing and incredibly badly paid, but you know, kids needed shoes.  At the rate of three pairs a year at that time.)  I simply had no time for housekeeping.  Cooking took long enough (though sometimes older son did that.)  So on the board went everything, from bathroom cleaning, to collecting, shelving and alphabetizing the scattered books. Which is how they both ended up with substantial-ish bank accounts by their early teens.

BUT you can’t coerce cooperation from a tiny, non-verbal child, and you can’t entice it with some children.  And the world is full of danger for children, even in our society (Oldest-son-by-adoption, (fandom adoption, mind, as an adult) calls the years before 3 “the happy suicidal years” when referring to my practice grandkids.)

If you’re not going to be driven insane, and make them incredibly dependent on you, you CAN’T just not train them.  (It has other consequences too, later on, because humans are great apes, creatures of the band and hierarchy.  Growing up with neither hierarchy nor structure makes for very dysfunctional apes.  And humans.)  Particularly if you are, as so many of us are now, a single person coping with one or more kids, with no nearby help.  You must establish a structure. And when they’re really tiny “I can’t scream all night, because it makes my parents ill” doesn’t work.  What works is “Ow, I scream I get swat and then ignored.  Not good idea.  That’s a rule, I guess.”

Now, imagine the world as it was for your grandparents and before.  Or the world of Heinlein’s pioneers, who would be in an untamed world, with some unknown dangers, even after initial exploration.

Those people who think that the past was an idyllic place with fewer dangers need their heads examined.

There were as many dangers from people as there are now — rare, but even the village had its psychos, and the parent who doesn’t teach his kids about stranger danger is known as an ex-parent one way or another — even if less publicized.  (Less investigated too.  I can only imagine how much easier it would be to get away with kidnap and murder of children in the age where “go ten miles away it’s another world.”  I mean, think about it.  Timmy doesn’t come home from gathering wood, you might do a search, but you don’t find him, and you assume he was eaten by a wild beast (which is true in a way) and go on with life.  There is a reason for stories like Ansel and Gretel, you know.)  But there were other dangers too.  Only people who never grew up on a farm (much less a farm of past centuries, with the livestock in CLOSE UP proximity) can think of it as a safe and idyllic place.  Even without machinery, a cow can step on you, a horse can kick you, you can fall in the washing tank, you can fall in the cesspit and drown, you can eat some substance that poisons you, etc. (I had kids within five years of me in the village either succumb to all of those, or get very ill.)

Heck, I didn’t precisely grow up on a farm (though we grew most produce we used) but I remember the day I ran out the front door and almost INTO a pig that had escaped its pen and wasn’t a nice person.  The swat on the butt stopped me, before I ran TOWARDS him, and the injunction to never run out the door without looking first prevented other run ins with escaped livestock in the future.  Same with my one attempt to run across the street without looking.  (A car came down our street once every ten minutes, but as it happened, I almost ran under the wheels of one.)  For that matter ox carts can run you down too.  (Long story and not my fault.  I had to crouch down, though, because the driver was so close the wall he’d have decapitated me otherwise.  I still don’t know if it was because he was a shockingly bad driver, or he hated kids.  I was out alone at that time, at about 11.)

In an environment even more dangerous for children than ours (almost all of them, historically) and in which people have more children (which we’re going to have to do here, real soon, if the human race is to survive) than one or two, relatively harsh, immediate discipline is the only way to give your kids half a chance of survival (unless of course, you have one of the rare “easy kids” like number 2 son, who btw, from about ten on made up for it with his ability to slide out from under.  He was the son who says “Sure, I’ll do it” then ignore it in the parable of the vineyard.  Not anymore, but that was a difficult one to combat).

Yes, we all heard Victorians went overboard and tortured their children, or spanked them continuously, but frankly, lately, I’ve come to doubt anything popular culture says the Victorians did.  I’m sure there were evil abusive parents.  There are those in every century. What I’m not convinced of is that there were more of those then than now.  And, in general, children grew up with more structure.

The paddling scene in Tunnel in the Sky shocked me, though, because I don’t even think you could publish that now (in fact I wonder if newer editions have it!) But it made perfect sense, both from the culture of when it was written and for the world building.

Only barbarians and children believe that their opinions and ideas of how to live apply to every world and time, no matter how different.

I often call our crop of leftists “unspanked babies” not because I believe you should spank a baby, but because they were never spanked (and by this understand I can also mean “given any discipline or structure” because some kids don’t NEED or respond well to even mild physical punishment, and I’m not someone who believes one size fits all, in the infinite variety of humanity) and therefore remain babies in adult bodies.

I remember when older son was being terrorized by a fourth grader, when he was in kindergarten (the depths of stupidity were astounding there, since son was bigger than the fourth grader.)  The kid kept following my kid around the playground and pushing him, and throwing sticks at him.  I stood in front of the fourth grader and told him, very firmly “No.”  He looked shocked. I said “No, you don’t get to do that.  Because he’s going to get mad and push you, and you’ll get hurt.  Stop that.  That’s being a bad boy.”

The expression on his face told me that he’d never ever ever heard no.  Never had his impulses curbed.  Which explained why at ten, his main form of entertainment was bullying younger kids.  It’s an instinctive behavior, but one that doesn’t make you functional in the adult world.

In fact, refusing to discipline and set boundaries for kids creates amoral adrift people who don’t know what to make of themselves.  Humans are creatures of the band.  We need a hierarchy.  We need to know where we stand in that hierarchy, and we need rules.

The alternative is to create people who think they’re at the top of the heap, since they can do whatever they want, and who react with unspeakable violence and evil when told they can’t have what they want, because that’s how apes keep their position on top of the hill.

I’m sure I don’t need to give examples.

Do your children and those children in your purvey a favor: train them in the rules and structure needed to succeed in the world.

A child who has been raised with no discipline and no frustrations is an unhappy animal, who makes lives around him miserable. The only way to curb him, as an adult, is extreme violence and fear.  And it’s, in most cases, too late to make him or her functional.

And who, in sufficient numbers, can destroy civilizations.

For some reason today I don’t have a writing prompt word.  This is distressing, of course, but not insurmountable.  I’m posting a picture and letting you guys have fun.

 

 

And now for eine kleines book promo:

JOHN M. JEFFERSON: The Nothing’s Child.

Zack, Zack Goldman, pleased to meet you. I’m a runner. I know you don’t know what that is. It’s better if I just show you.

See this wire? Yeah, this one here coming out of my arm. This is my connection to the net. You probably don’t know that one either. I’ll get to that.

There was a time when wireless was the way to go. Everything connected in what they used to call clouds. The world was easier then.

Then we found true virtual reality. Jammed that shit straight into our brains. Wireless wasn’t fast enough. We’re talking full on change in perception of worlds here. The MMOs that people used to play were immersive, you were part of their world. Kid’s play.

The net changed all that. World Dynamics created the first neural net. A virtual world built in the user’s mind. Sure, it was electronic, and computers were a key component. Hell, you have to have a deck as part of your interface. But when you are logged into the net, the physical world is the world your programming creates.

Sure, it’s all still data, nothing but 1s and 0s. It’s your user interface that sets the stage and builds the world you see. Like I said, I’m a runner. In the old world they might have called me a hacker. I specialize in data retrieval.

And I’m late. So, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.

JP MEDVED: Justice Inc.

Tough, brash, and resourceful, former Army Ranger Eric Ikenna is the CEO of the powerful, private military corporation, Justice Incorporated.

But when his company successfully topples the government of South Sudanese dictator and international war criminal Ahmed al-Bashir, Eric and his operators suddenly become public enemy number one for a very deadly, very secretive branch of the United States government. Because what Eric doesn’t realize is that the world order is surprisingly fragile, and there are those who would kill to maintain it.

The ensuing struggle, from the marble halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the bleak waters of the North Atlantic and the tropical savannas of South Sudan, will force Justice, Inc. to use every tool and weapon at its disposal, and will test Eric to the breaking point.

And as advanced as it is, even Justice, Inc.’s high-tech arsenal of bio-ceramic body armor, semi-autonomous drones, and invisible, stratospheric artillery may be no use against an enemy just as sophisticated, and much more ruthless.

With time running out and the international balance of power at stake, Eric must decide between his principles, and the lives of his friends and employees.

Combining bleeding-edge technology from tomorrow’s wars with heart-pounding, nonstop action, Justice, Inc. is a geo-political military thriller and the first novel in the Justice Incorporated series.

Gaming, Inclusivity and Condemning History – by Amanda S. Green

Anyone who is familiar with video games knows there’s been a movement for the last few years by major developers to be more “inclusive”. That inclusivity appears in a number of different ways: disclaimers at the beginning of a game touting how the game was developed by people of all different races, religions, creeds and sexual orientations; additions of non-heterosexual romantic plots and characters, both playable and non-playable. We’ve seen outrage when those characters aren’t given large enough roles or when the main character isn’t customizable enough to meet every single player’s demands. Amid all this, all too often we lose quality. It may be quality of design (yes, I’m looking at you Bioware and your debacle that was Mass Effect: Andromeda) or quality of story (Ubisoft and some of the Assassin’s Creed games). But what really started me thinking about this was Ubisoft’s latest game – Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

For years, Ubisoft has opened every Assassin’s Creed game with a disclaimer. Here is the first disclaimer:

Inspired by historical events and characters.

This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs.

Nothing wrong there. I’m not sure it’s really necessary except to virtue signal. However, it wasn’t enough to bother me.

Along about 2015 or so, the disclaimer changed.

Inspired by historical events and characters, this work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities.

This change occurred in the disclaimer for Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, the first of the AC games to include a transgender NPC. Why did it occur? For no reason I can see except to silence – er, satisfy – a small but very vocal segment of the gaming community. Honestly, most gamers don’t give a flying frig what religion, sex, or gender belief the people are who design the games we play. What we want are well-designed games with plots (or at least effects) that will keep us engaged. That is especially true for games like Mass Effect or Assassin’s Creed.

Does having this disclaimer at the beginning of the game “ruin” it? No. But it does remind me every time I fire up the game that the company is busy virtue signaling and it makes me on a subconscious level start looking for that signaling within the game. In other words, it is a distraction, one that doesn’t have to be there.

Where this virtue signaling did become too much in your face to ignore is with the Discovery Tour Ubisoft released for Assassin’s Creed: Origins not long ago. The tour is a big departure from the game. It is exactly what it says – a tour. There’s no fighting, no arguing and no interaction with other characters. You choose one of a number of characters, some of them playable characters from the main game and others NPCs from the game. Then you tour Egypt. Along the way, you interact with your surroundings and hear short “lessons” about what you’re seeing. Think about it as being similar to a guided tour of a museum exhibit. There is a lot of interesting information, including info about mummies and the pyramids, life in that time, etc.

However, Ubisoft takes liberties with history as well. You see it at the very beginning of the tour. Nude statues from the main game now have “the naughty bits” covered with shells or other items. That seemed odd in a game that’s rated “M”, especially since there are nude statues in the main game. So why did they do it? The explanation, and one I find more than a bit odd, is so the tour could be used for “educational purposes”.

Wait. What?

Picture it. Little Johnny comes home from school and, as he eats his afterschool snack, Mom asks what he studied in school that day.

“We learned about mummies and the pyramids, Mommy.”

“That’s nice, Johnny. Did you get to see a movie about it?”

“Yep. It was a really good movie too, Mommy. We got to see them take the brain out of a person so they could become a mummy and we got to see the inside of the pyramids.” Johnny pauses and eats a bit more of his snack. “Mommy, did you know Cleopatra married her brother? Does that mean you can marry Uncle Tommy?”

That choking sound you hear is Johnny’s mom trying to figure out how to answer that question. Then the conversation continues until Johnny’s mom asks the name of the movie they were watching and he tells her it was Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

Riiiight. No problem there.

But there is something else that bothered me about the Discovery Tour beyond the covering up of the statues and it goes hand-in-hand with their “education” explanation. There are several times, iirc, in the tour where the narrator pauses the historical description of the place or event to note that the game designers have taken the liberty of deviating from history to basically avoid perpetuating something (like segregated classes based on sex) that isn’t acceptable today.

But they want the tour to be used for education purposes.

Can you say “indoctrination”?

This smacks of trying to erase the Civil War from history because of slavery. How many monuments have been removed or parks, streets and buildings renamed because they were named after someone who fought on the “wrong side” of the conflict? In Dallas, we’re facing that issue right now. There are those who don’t care what other accomplishments someone might have made in their lives or how they might have helped the community after the Civil War. The mere fact they supported the CSA is reason enough to relegate them to backrooms and to remove them from the city history.

This whitewashing, if you’ll pardon the term, of what life was really like in ancient Egypt serves much the same purpose. I find it ironic at a time when there is a growing movement to have classes once again segregated by sex to avoid certain distractions that a major game developer sees it necessary to point out how wrong it was for the Egyptians at the time of Cleopatra to do the same.

The fact it is not the appropriate medium to do so doesn’t seem to matter to Ubisoft either. I can’t speak for anyone else but when my son was the age of those youngsters this “lesson” is aimed at, I didn’t let him play games rated “M”. Even so, I was already teaching him not only how to be a gentleman but how to respect women. By the time he was old enough to play those games, the lessons were already well-learned. So, assuming I’m not the only parent raising children that way, what is Ubisoft’s motivation?

The answer is really very simple. It is trying to show how inclusive and “enlightened” it is to stop the complaints from a small but vocal group. Fortunately for the company, Assassin’s Creed: Origins is a good game, a really good game on the whole. But there should be no place in it for narrator intrusion such as there is in the Discovery Tour. That, to me, was like watching a show and suddenly having a character – or member of the orchestra – stand up and lecture on why something that is happening on stage is wrong by today’s standard. It throws me out of the narrative and makes me wonder if I dare continue watching.

I game to unwind and have fun. I don’t game to be lectured to or to have history rewritten because something about it is now “inconvenient”. If it doesn’t have anything to do with the plot of the game, don’t do it.

Hmm, sort of like how I like my movies and my books.

In other words, if you feel the need to preach, be subtle about it. If you are heavy-handed enough to throw me out of the narrative, you will find me second-guessing if I need to buy that next bit of DLC or that next game.

Recently I’ve fallen victim to two “systems”.  This is all the weirder because I’m not a person of systems, certainly not of systems designed by someone else.  Which is the problem.

Okay, let’s back track.  I have a group of friends who is trying very hard to convince me I’m an artist.  I find this a bit bizarre because, honestly I’ve never thought of myself as one.  Only as a sort of craftswoman.  To quote Agatha Christie, I treat this like any other craft, like embroidering pillows or arranging flowers.

Only it’s not exactly true.  It’s more that I’m like the women in the village who painted cosmetic boxes to help feed their families, or mom making wardrobes for soccer players’ wives, because that brought in most of the income for the family.  It’s a craft I know, I do, and it provides part of the income for the family, and right now it helps with younger son’s tuition, etc.

However, it started with this video by Peterson.  Of course it did.  I’ve read Paterson’s book, and I’m not particularly taken with the underpinnings of the philosophy, but I’m taken with “he just makes sense.”

You know the whole “antidote to chaos” thing?

I used to look forward like crazy to the summer vacations, partly because, well… School was hell, as it is to most gifted people.  (There’s a belief among “normal”  people that “gifted” people love school.  It’s not true.  By and large, we love learning, but we hate school.)  Partly because it gave me a chance to study and learn and do other things.

But what I found is that I needed a structure to summer vacation, or I was tired of it in a week.  (And due to the times I lived in, it was 3 months, sometimes 4, sometimes 5 depending on how governments were changing and who was in charge in the ministry of education.  One year it didn’t start until November because something went wrong with the sewage pipes at school.)

I was fortunate that my mom came with ONE built in structuring the device.  NO ONE, not even Himself up there, could convince that woman that mornings SHOULD NOT be devoted to house work.  So in the morning, in summer, I cleaned.  We dusted and dust-mopped every day, even if we couldn’t see dust (it helped with allergies, too.) We did dishes from breakfast.  We washed clothes (by hand.) and we ironed.

In the afternoon, I learned to give myself courses of study, or other things I wanted to do (like draw and make stuffed animals.)

Turned out as much as I hated school and its regimented “now do this” time, I needed at least loose structure to do anything.

But I didn’t internalize that as a lesson, and I kept falling into the opposite every time I lost my external structure.

The last time has been the last six years, and my work has suffered.  The structure I lost: the kids’ predictable school schedule, when Marsh graduated from high school.

I’ve only realized that’s what I need (a structure) this month.

Part of the problem is walling off time to write, and all the things that keep interrupting.  If I am a artist, it explains the tendency to chaos, because sometimes you just have to write/whatever, and it sends everything out of kilter.

OTOH I know I benefit from order.  Most creative people do.  “This is the place I work” and “this is the time I work” really seem to help.  We just don’t have it naturally.

I’ve been trying to combat chaos since I read the twelve rules.  Then Dorothy Grant pointed me at Flylady.net.  It’s silly (complete with stuffed dolls) but it’s helping too.  I know I tried housekeeping systems before.  They didn’t work, because they played into my natural tendency which is binge/do nothing.  So I cleaned like a dervish twice a year and kind of cleaned once a week.  It’s not been working, so I’m trying the FlyLady which is “A little bit every day”.

So far my kitchen is staying clean, but I need to deal with the other stuff.

The truth is, we, the children of the children of WWII might have had order imposed externaly, but few of us had a internal “system”.  There was no “Early to bed and early to rise” except maybe as a joke.  There was no “This is how people of our class keep our houses.”

I know that people grow appalled by how people keep their houses now, but the mess and dust isn’t even the big thing (well, it’s for me, because auto-immune and asthma.)  It’s the lack of order.  It’s needing something and losing hours searching through piles.  It’s buying three of the left handed phillips head screw drivers because you can’t find the first or second you bought.

It’s the fact that external chaos causes internal chaos and increases stress.

I don’t know if this will work long-term.  As you see this blog post is very late, because… well, mostly because I took benadryl, because my auto-immune is kicking up.

I might have more to gain/lose from order than the rest of you.  I need to keep stress under control or the auto-immune will kill me.

Right now I’ve managed to keep the kitchen clean and I’m working on getting better with laundry.  (Part of this is I need a place to stow the ironables, other than the foot of my bed, and do the ironing more regularly than once every three months.)

I’m working on it, okay?  Part of this is throwing a lot of stuff away (or donating it.)  The lady who packed us to move time before last told me something interesting: have one set of sheets on the bed, and a spare one.  No more.  When one gets holes, replace it.

My mother tends to have sheets all over, and she gave us alot, but it was filling every space in the house, and most of them weren’t even a size I could use, which is why the lady told me that. (Didn’t throw them out but stored a lot of them, long-term, in the garage.  If nothing else, they’re nice fabric.)

Other thing is, I’m getting rid of clothes that don’t fit, both up and down.  I buy clothes form thrift stores.  A full set is… $100.  I can afford to change if I finally lose weight. (Or, heaven forbid, gain.)  I keep a couple of things for sentimental value, but ONLY a couple of things.

But I think it is important to combat chaos, both external and internal. And to do it, you need to start with what you CAN control.

Chaos is the unmaking, the destruction of order and civilization.  We sort of need to do the opposite, both in our lives and the world.

Start with our spaces/our lives.  Let it propagate outwards, to our words and thoughts.  Order, not chaos.  Light, not darkness.

Go clean your room.

 

It’s Not All Rooted in Slavery

Black Rednecks and White Liberals Pt. 4

By Amanda S. Green

Thomas Sowell has never been one to mince words. Nor has he shied away from hard topics or hot button issues. That is very apparent in his essay, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” This essay, the foundation document in the book, Black Rednecks & White Liberals: Hope, Mercy, Justice and Autonomy in the American Health Care System, doesn’t disappoint.

Sowell points out that “redneck culture” has historically been a less achieving culture. It doesn’t matter if the person is white or black. However, that culture has impacted a much higher proportion of blacks than whites. Why? Because “only about one-third of all whites lived in the antebellum South, while nine-tenths of all blacks did.” (BRAWL, p. 33) That origination in the antebellum South is, according to Sowell, key.

There are caveats to this, however, and Sowell is quick to point them out. “Contemporary black ghetto culture in the United States is not, however, a simple linear extrapolation from the culture of Southern whites.” (BRAWL, p. 33)

• Most black Americans are no longer part of the ghetto culture.
• Aside from influences peculiar to the circumstances of blacks, profound changes in the larger American society around them have also had an influence, both positive and negative.

Even so, the culture has continued and, in some instances, thrived. Why? That’s the question we all need to ask. The answer isn’t one many in our country will admit, much less accept.

The burgeoning of the American welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century and the declining effectiveness of the American criminal justice system at the same time allowed borrowed and counterproductive cultural traits to continue and flourish among those blacks who had not yet moved beyond that culture, thereby prolonging the life of a chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous, and self-destructive subculture in many urban ghettos. (BRAWL, pp 33-34)

 

There’s so much truth in that one short paragraph. Truth that applies not only to the “black rednecks” but to whites as well. The welfare system might be based in good intentions, but you know the old adage. The path to Hell is paved with good intentions. The system should not be such that it carries through generations of a family. It should be there to help those who need it but not in such a way they have no impetus to get off the system

Some years ago, Michigan (if I remember correctly) had a system in place where a person could only receive state welfare benefits for two years. There were exceptions, of course, for those who were medically unable to work. But the able-bodied had a time limit. However, the state also tried to help get them off the dole. There were programs in place to help them find a job. There were training programs available and, again if I am remembering correctly, child care provisions.

So what happened? The answer is very simple. The white liberals. They felt the requirements of the program were too onerous. What if someone couldn’t finish the programs and find a job by the end of two years? It was cruel and evil to just cut them off. The program died an ignominious death and, well, we know what sort of situation Michigan is in now.

Then we have the justice system. Part of me wants to laugh hysterically and another part, the part that still holds some belief in that system weeps. Why? Because the system is broken. There are few who have paid any attention to it over the years who can deny it. Our prisons are overcrowded. Laws, especially sentencing laws, are outmoded and both too random and too rigid at the same time. (I know, that doesn’t make sense. Except it does. Mandatory sentencing guidelines are too rigid because they don’t allow the judge and/or jury to take into account all the factors that should be considered in rendering sentencing after a guilty verdict. They are also too random because someone convicted of a lower felony theft charge or drug charge can wind up serving more time than someone convicted of murder. It makes no sense.)

As Sowell points out, crime and violence are part of the redneck culture that have been artificially prolonged. “Prior to the 1960s, while black males had a higher murder rate than other males, their murder rate was also declining more sharply than the general murder rate. Subsequently, the general murder rate in the United States and the murder rate for black males both reversed and began rising sharply—that of black males more sharply than others. (BRAWL, p. 34) This has nothing to do with the need for more gun control, despite what the anti-2^nd Amendment advocates will say. It has everything to do with a change in attitude and, as Sowell says, with the intellectuals of the time.

“Nowhere was the effect of the white liberalism of the 1960s on the social evolution of black culture more devastating than in the disintegration of the black family.” (BRAWL, p 34) To support this position, Sowell notes the 20% decline in the number of black women between the ages of 15 – 44 who were married and living with their husbands (down to 31% in 1980). By 1994, 56% of black women in this age bracket had never been married and only 25% were married and living with their husbands. An even more telling number, according to Sowell, is that 22% of black children were born to unmarried women in 1960 while, by 1994, 70% were.

White liberals, instead of comparing what has happened to the black family since the liberal welfare state policies of the 1960s were put into practice, compare black families to white families and conclude that the higher rates of broken homes and unwed motherhood among blacks are due to “a legacy of slavery.” But why the large-scale disintegration of the black family should have begun a hundred years after slavery is left unexplained. Whatever the situation of the black family relative to the white family, in the past or the present, it is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century or at the beginning of that century—even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery. (BRAWL, pp 34-35)

This problem with white liberal thinking is not one that is going away. In fact, we see it every day. It is much easier to blame the sins of the past for today’s problems than to look in the mirror and admit they might be part of the problem. So, instead of overhauling the welfare system, instead of working to rebuild the family unit, they concentrate on removing Civil War statues that honor Confederate “heroes”. They willingly spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars – or more – to remove those statues or rename buildings and parks and streets because they don’t want to remember a part of history that stands for something they don’t agree with. (For the record, slavery is abhorrent but not every person who supported the CSA was evil or doesn’t deserve to be remembered for other contributions they made to history.)

Don’t get Sowell wrong. He is quick to point out that not all blacks come from this redneck culture of the South. Teachers and missionaries from New England went into the South and brought a new culture to some of those living there. According to E. Franklin Frazier, a noted black scholar, “ ‘The missionaries from New England who founded the first schools for Negroes in the South left the imprint of their Puritan background upon Negro education.’ In addition to strict morality, these missionaries ‘taught the Yankee virtues of industry and thrift.’ ” (BRAWL, pg 36) This was a deliberate effort on the part of the missionaries to supplant the culture of the South these young blacks had been brought up in. To help with this, they created enclaves in the South where they moved the young blacks to help reinforce their teachings.

In short, however divergent the different schools of thought were on educational philosophy, as between the Hampton-Tuskegee approach and the approach of the founders of other institutions for blacks, they were agreed that what was most needed for the advancement of blacks in the post-bellum South was the replacement of the culture prevailing around them and among them by a new imported culture. However, the greatest obstacle to creating this new culture was the existing black redneck culture. (BRAWL, pg 37)

Why is it the problem of culture was recognized more than a century ago and yet, today, is almost completely ignored? As Sowell states, “Today, the culture that is celebrated in much of the media and in the schools is not the culture that succeeded, but the culture that has failed—the black redneck culture.” (BRAWL, pg 40)

Again, why? And what do we need to do to overcome this tendency?

Those questions are at the very core of what Sowell writes about.

One of my favorite Sun Tzu quotes goes something like this, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

This is something white liberals have excelled at. We, as conservatives and libertarians, need to remember the quote and figure out why liberals have worked so hard to perpetuate the welfare state. We need to figure out why – and how best to combat it – those who have become perpetual beneficiaries have accepted their role as what so many view as “second-class citizens”. Most of all, we need to figure out how to help them rise out of that system and become less a part of the “redneck culture” and more a part of an overall successful culture, a culture of achievement and responsibility to themselves, their families and society as a whole.

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here –  Also, she has a new book: Light Magic, under her Ellie Ferguson pen name. SAH]

 

When I talk about growing up being hard to do in our time and in our place, I’m not just engaging in the fun pastime of preaching to the millenials, like St. Francis preaching at the fish.

I assume at least the pastime is fun, because so many people do it.  I just don’t think it has any more effect than preaching at fishes, and I think it suffers from… shall we say? … a lack of understanding of the creatures preached to.  Maybe also of the creatures doing the preaching.

I’m highly amused that the boomers, possibly the most media-stereotyped generation in history, where the decent members keep telling us they’re not like the lunatics who protested, shut down universities and joined sex communes to share medieval-like diseases from never bathing, are the ones most stereotyping the millenials, according to how the media portrays the millenials.

As some millenial readers here have said, and as I know from my circle, most millenials aren’t like the lazy, game addicted creatures who preach socialism at everyone that the media shows you. Most millenials I know were raised under the spur of boomer teachers who — sorry guys — really are stereotypical in “challenge all authority except mine!

Yes a lot of millenialss got lost along the way, and yes, I know my share of millenials drifting through life with no aim, no job, no training, nothing.

But do consider these kids were assured from their youngest age that they were surplus (there are too many humans.  I mean they tried to force both of my kids to sign a no-reproduction agreement); that there is nothing they can do (capitalism is inherently unjust, and we’re all ruled by corporations and big, shadowy forces); that no one cares about them (blood for oil; the only reason guns aren’t banned is because people want you to get shot); that their future is poorer and any children they have will be condemned to hell on Earth (we’re running out of oil, water (according to my kids’ teachers), glass (also according to my kids’ teachers) and anything else you can think of, (including some things you can’t.), there is no future for humanity (global warming is going to kill us all.)

The amazing thing is not that some millenials drift through life with no aim and no plan.  Who cares, if it’s all going to end, anyway.

I’m fairly sure they resemble nothing so much as the generation that grew up in the shadow of the year 1000, except without the religious portion, since the prophecies that depress them pretend not to be religious.  And yet, anyone who has seen a millenial white male talk about how he’s guilty of all the evils in the world and how he will never be clean of white privilege knows EXACTLY what the flagellants looked like.

Put yourself in their place.  The kids who swallowed the gospel of human guilt for everything and in particular the gospel that the West is particularly evil and that the end is nigh and inevitable aren’t getting up and building.  I’m shocked, aren’t you shocked?

The brighter they are, too, the easier it is for them to swallow that gospel, because it’s easier for smart people to become attracted by internally consistent systems even if (particularly if) they have no contact with the outside world.

Again, these aren’t all the millenials, just like the toking, commune dwelling lot weren’t all of the boomers.

But they are a significant portion, and in some way they might be the portion that would have been most dedicated/creative.

So, what can be done?

Well, my upbringing wasn’t much different from theirs.  Partly because Europe is advanced in derp.  I took learned all the faults of “capitalism.”  I too learned we were going to run out of everything.  I too learned the Earth was so overpopulated my kids were going to need to ask the next door neighbor for permission to inhale.  And that was if I had children, which I shouldn’t have, because there were too many people, people were a blight on society and anyway, we were all going to freeze to death because of pollution.

Turns out, of course, the fear-mongers were wrong.  But the young didn’t know that.

And as much of a contrary cuss as I was, I swallowed the inevitable doom too, until someone sent me a Reason subscription in 92.  I have no idea who did it.  What I know is that article after article, reason dismantled the idea we were doomed.  Even if they’d done nothing else, it was worth it.  They threw open the prison gates.  They stopped the obsessive fear that consumed so many brain-cycles.  They showed me that we had as much of a future as every other generation, if we worked for it.

It’s perhaps no coincidence I sold my first short story two years later.  Panic and doom are not conducive to achievement.

We live in the richest, best time to be alive.  A little work and commitment can see us off this rock.  Our resources are not unlimited HERE, but they’re endless in space.  And they’re effectively endless here, since our technology changes to avoid shortages and problems.  Obsessing over a future (maybe.  I think we have now proven enough for 300 years) oil shortage, or any nonsense like that is akin to obsessing over a hay for horses shortage at the end of the 19th century.  It won’t come to pass, and it won’t matter if it does.

The world is infinite and prosperity is infinite and limited only by our minds and the work we’re willing to do.

And once you learn that, once you learn that you were lied to, that the preachers of doom played you, they can’t get you back ever, ever ever again.

Sometimes the prison door needs to be opened gradually.  People who’ve lived long in the dark will resist light.

But it can be done.  And once you get that door partly open, the prisoners of depression themselves will help you.

Learn what they’re teaching your kids at school.  Don’t let them become prisoners of despondency.  And reach out to those older kids who are imprisoned in that bleak vision of the world.  Search on line.  Present them with facts that contradict the fears they learned.  Start with things that aren’t so close to the center of their fears.  Stuff like, people in Africa are living better now.  Start slowly before you present them with science fiction stories from 1986 saying that by now the world would be a scorched desert.

Don’t preach, just show them how long this doom-saying has been going on, and not once right.  Paul Ehrlich is a great one for this.  If the one about California sliding into the sea won’t make them snort, nothing will.

Explaining to them that fear-mongering is an attempt to control them won’t hurt, after they’ve seen they were being played.  Or it might not be needed.  The young aren’t stupid.  Only young.

The world is beautiful and prosperous.  Don’t leave the kids locked in that scary, cold place where they can do nothing.

A mind enslaved should be set free.

Go open prison doors.

*Sorry to be so late.  I couldn’t get into the back areas of my blog for over two hours, at which point writing a whole new post was out of the question.  This seems to continue yesterday’s theme, anyway – SAH*

Belonging — The Great Divorce a Blast from the Past From September 2015

To begin with let’s get something out of the way.  I know the popular idea of the libertarian out there on the public airwaves is the lone wolf, surviving by him/herself and needing no one.

That I know of that’s not true of any human unless he/she is actually insane — as in profoundly damaged to a level that can’t be retrieved.  Humans, whatever else we are, are social animals.  Okay, perhaps we’re not precisely animals.  Perhaps there is a greater animating spirit, an anima, if you will, there.

But rationality, no matter how shiny and glittery doesn’t overcome instincts laid so deep that they aren’t verbalized most of the time and we’re not even aware of it most of the time.

Whether we were made or just growed, what we came out of is a social animal base, and beneath the speech and the math, beneath the rocks we’ve gotten so good at piling together in sky-high caves, the social animal’s impulses and instincts remain.

Social animals — for our sins — have a need of belonging, and a need for the comfort of the band.  If I were a psychologist, instead of just reading a sh*tton about psychology and behavior (and yeah, I read about everything.  Wanna take issue with that?) I’d say it was perhaps worse in humans than in other apes because of our prolonged childhood which not only gives us the idea of a “golden age” when the group protects us, but also on the other side of it as an instinctive need to protect our kin, our kith, our tribe.

I’ve said before that tribalism is one of the greatest evils of the human condition.  In so far as it is exclusionary, it leads not just to racism and all the other isms that break humanity into bits, but also to things like voting for a president because he’s “our people.”  (And that’s not just a matter of race.  How many Catholics, whether they admitted it or not, do you think rushed to vote for Kennedy because he was “one of ours”?  If the bios I read are any indication, most of them.) Or refusing to listen to someone because he’s NOT our people.

The thing is tribalism is also one of the greatest goods of the human condition.  which of us has never had a group of people — friends, family, co-workers — that was just right and to whom we belonged?  Which of us doesn’t remember when you all gather together and everything works just right, with this sort of warm golden glow?

All those stories of large families, of kin groups, of villages that work harmoniously — why do you think they’re so successful?

It’s never quite right, of course.  There’s always one person who is an annoyance (I think lately at MGC that has been me, with all the late posting and stuff) and one person who is out of step, but it’s worth enduring it all for the golden glow of belonging.

There is a reason solitary confinement is a horrible punishment and few people emerge from it sane particularly if it takes a long time.

Which brings us to various evils of belonging, such as the instinctive ranking of people and positions, which brings us to “bling-radicalism” or “radical chic” which makes horrors like communism a positional good in certain (alas creative and academic above all) circles.

That will be dealt with in a later part of this.  Right now I want to talk about the groups that do not and cannot belong harmoniously to the whole, and the problem of their attraction for dictatorial regimes.

First I will give my cred for this.  Someone (ah — maybe more than someone, though in one body) on twitter was going on about how Brad and I were not real geeks/nerds and how we didn’t know the pain of not belonging.  (Rolls eyes.)

I don’t know what real nerds/geeks are.  There has been some intimation it’s tied to high IQ, but as a fan of mine who is a psychologist pointed out, we’ve got really good at measuring IQ.  We know it’s a consistent measurement.  We know what it does and how to test it.  What we don’t, in fact, know is what it’s good for.  Beyond that there are people of extraordinary intelligence who suck at testing.  Testing is really bad, for instance, when it comes to measuring kinetic intelligence.  There are tests that will do it, but not the normally applied ones.

I have reason to know this because there are indications both younger son and I (though doing well enough academically) are best at learning through our fingers.  What I mean is, I can figure out how to build something better by manipulating the pieces than by looking at the instructions, either drawn or written out.  And younger son, I swear, learned to read by learning to write, which sounds inane, but it’s what he did.

Anyway, so it all brings us to “what are nerds/geeks”?  Right now it’s hard to tell since so much geekdom has gone mainstream, but at its roots, and starting with us or our parents, you could substitute for both terms “odd” or even “excluded.”

And who are the excluded ones?

There are certain things that are almost constant about us. We usually have some things in common, like a tendency to overthink things, to have to do by thought what others seem to get instinctively, a tendency to like to take refuge in imaginary worlds and stories, and often (though not always) a tendency to create, whether machines or paintings.

Yes, I am aware that what I describe above sounds like “autistic spectrum” but there are some odds — me, for instance — who can read people quite well, thank you, and understand emotions perhaps a bit too well.

There is a phenomenon that my friend Dave Freer, who is a biologist and used to live in Africa, described to me.  Apparently ape bands have “odds” too.  He calls them “outliers.”  They’re apes whose behavior doesn’t quite mesh with others, and who often become the target of aggression.  The thing is they’re also usually the creative ones who figure out how to break the seed to get at the interior, or that a particular berry can be eaten if thoroughly rinsed, or whatever.

This brings us to the fact I think the medicalization of oddness, as well as the marginalization of it might be a factor of our mass culture.  With the advent of industrialization that required large scale machines, investment and labor, the concept of “normal” set in.  Since I grew up in a very weird place and time, I can still, sort of, see not so much through it as around it.

I’m not talking about “normal” as in “can look after self” but “normal” as in “does the expected.”

For instance, while dragging my kids behinds to school every day at the same time, and trying to get them to turn in homework, I became acutely aware that I’d have failed elementary school in the US. You see, the village hadn’t yet got the standardization thing and since my family was known to be — well — odd, but okay with all the learning stuff, the teacher didn’t bat an eye if I showed up at 9 or 8 or 10 or 11 or whenever mom persuaded me to go dragging into school.  And as for homework, well, the teacher proved willing to accept, in lieu of essays on “my favorite holiday” short stories about colonizing a planet.  Because standardization hadn’t hit.

But modern life and standardization have little room for outliers, which is why we medicalize it and treat it as an abnormality.

Recently (!) a friendly acquaintance in the field was lamenting that his son was “autistic” but the symptoms he gave was that the other kids wouldn’t play with him, and that he still couldn’t ride a bike or jump rope.

Well, by that definition, my entire paternal line is autistic.  When my brother was a star handball player, and part of the training involved rope-jumping, mom tried to teach him (and me.)  It couldn’t be done.  Brother never learned to ride a bike, even though it was the normal mode of transport over somewhat longer distances.  I’ve learned three times… and forgotten each time (and I was never great at it.)  And while mom used to go all over the surrounding areas on a bike as a young woman, I don’t think dad ever learned to ride, because all his stories are of WALKING everywhere, including high school which was hours away on foot.

As for getting along…

We might not know what Odds/Geeks/Nerds are, but normal people do.  They tend to be the rejected kids, hanging out, solitary, often with a book (I suppose these days with a tablet) in a corner of the playground.

In my family we usually figured it out and could “ape” normality enough to have a social life by the end of elementary/middle school. Some of us were so good at it that we got a little lost, and the suppressed oddness came out with a vengeance in old age.

But anyway, I know what it is like not to belong.  My normal number of close friends is three or four.  I was “popular” in college but the acting and constant watching yourself in public made it difficult.  And even then I was only popular as the “Weird friend.”

So while I can’t point and say “I was a different color/gender/orientation and that’s why I was excluded” I can say I was an odd and an outlier, and I know what it is like to be outside.  (And in point of fact, at least in high school and college, I was a different social strata and a provincial — even though the village was only ten kilometers from the city, it’s a long distance when your transportation is mostly public buses — and my gestures/dress/speech showed it.)

Now I know, I understand, the desire and need to belong, and how, like a mirage, it recedes the more within your reach you think it is.  Short of denying who you really are you can’t “fit”.  It’s just not there.  And particularly for kids, this is very painful.  You don’t expect no to belong.  And when you don’t it comes as a shock and anger.

I think this explains why racial, orientation and gender minorities both tend to resent the regime they live under, particularly if it’s more or less free, and wish for a more top-down system.

Our first experience of belonging (or not, for some) is of a family.  And even in dysfunctional families, the parental authority, if it’s worth anything enforces the “he/she is weird, but he/she is ours.” In school, also, for the truly odd kid, the teacher and the supervising assistant, or whatever, are the ones who intervene to stop abuse by peers.

So at the back of the mind of a lot of oddlings — no matter how or what makes you odd — is the idea that a benevolent dictator could MAKE others accept you.  That you could fit in.

I completely understand the radicalization of minorities.

But I submit to you it also comes from a total lack of knowledge/acceptance of history.

There is a reason in my revolution-against-a-suffocating regime I had a gay couple as heroes.

I know that in many places, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia, Odds, including racial and sexual minorities, were part of the supporters that brought the regime to power and were also the effective target of those regimes, sometimes to the death.

I know that in no dictatorial/oppressive regime is ANY minority free to express itself.  It might be tolerated as long as it stays hidden.  And that definitely includes those undefinable individuals who are “merely” odd.

This is because cohesiveness is the greatest tool of an oppressive regime.  You can’t kill all dissidents, but if you create the impression “we’re all this way” you stop a lot of rebellion before it happens.  Hence minorities must become invisible in the whole, or perish.

In the Soviet Union (refer to Nicki’s essay yesterday) racial/ethnic minorities were excluded/treated like second class citizens/encouraged to hide themselves.  Sexual minorities…

I invite you to tell me in which communist or otherwise dictatorial regime homosexuality is free to express itself.  In China, apparently, there’s a concerted effort to deny that Chinese CAN be homosexual (and sexuality as a whole is considered a sort of downfall unless it’s married sexuality in its proper place.)  And we all remember Iammadjihad assuring us there were no homosexuals in Iran.

What else?  Cuba? Ah.  Even in Russia in his gathering, non-doctrinal dictatorship, Putin very much wants to exclude any sexual minorities.  I confess I have no idea what he’s up to with racial minorities, but I’d warrant it’s not good.

As for the other “Odds”, those of us who just don’t fit in and aren’t sure why, (And I’m aware some of you are double odds, yes, both an excluded, obvious minority and one you don’t know why you’re excluded, sometimes by your own subgroup) we also don’t do so well.  You see that “creative” and “doesn’t do what is expected” makes us the bane of dictators, who want both predictable and stable societies.  The stable is sort of how they sell themselves to normal people.  “You won’t be rich, but you’ll know exactly how poor you’ll be tomorrow.”

It seems to be part of the social destiny of the odds that in striving for inclusion and fighting against the regime we grow up in and which seems to exclude us (which if it’s a free regime is not exactly true.  We are excluded by structures remaining from mass industrialization and from the habit of “normal” in our schooling and society) we end up installing a regime that denies us/kills us.

On the other hand, the era of standardization, mass industrialization and “normalization” is passing.  The coming era of fractured production and industry and more importantly the coming era of communication long distance, allows each oddling to find his/her group and to belong without sacrificing all of oneself.

Which is something that will produce, hopefully, creativity without the pain of not belonging.

Even if the remnants of the mass-industrial-art complex are still doing their best to pound us square pegs into round holes.

It doesn’t matter.  Theirs is a time that is passing.  Ours is the time that is coming.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Ca Ira.

Last night we went out for dinner with the idea that since older son was getting home too late for dinner, we’d meet him half way out somewhere and have a family meal, anyway.

Those of you who are from Colorado or know Colorado will know what comes next: we got slammed with a surprise-blizzard and crept back home at 20 miles per hour on the expressway.

Needless to say, this threw the night/evening off.  Though the reason we came home instead of going across the street to an hotel for the night is that son wished to do the next chapter of the fantasy novel he’s been making progress on. So we all risked our lives so he could put down another few thousand words on a work in progress.

This is relevant in the same way it is relevant that when I wen to bed I fell asleep to husband and older son debating how to measure the snow fall, because the weather site was wrong, wrong, wrong.  Earlier on they’d had a civil argument over the theory of prime numbers which started by older son saying mathematicians are as mad as poets.

It was relatively civil and quiet, because younger son didn’t make it up from the Springs.  If he had, it would have been louder and more vehement, because once you add three of Us you know what it gets like.

So what is “Us”?  Who are “We”?

We know each other, if not on sight, not far off.  Some of us are harder to tell because we’ve learned to fake it better.  I could pass off fairly well when I was young, aided by the fact that I was not only attractive, but liked to dress well and fashionably, which is an odd characteristic for Us and camouflaged a multitude of sins, allowing me to date fairly normal people (it’s not worth it.)

The other day we were sitting around with a group of friends talking and we decided the best way to identify Us, other than assiduous participation in the comments at According to Hoyt (apparently) is to go to an elementary school and find Us in embryo.  The kid walking forlornly along a ledge, back and forth, during recess is probably one of us.  Depending on the grade, he or she might also be hiding in a recess somewhere reading.

IQ tests are so-so at identifying us.

I was reading a defense of IQ testing yesterday, and they are right and it is defensible… for one thing: predicting success in college or in a narrow range of intellectual professions.

The person writing the article seemed to think it was a measure of superiority though, and that’s where the wheels came off.  Reassuring comments like “People who don’t perform well on tests and don’t qualify for higher education might still lead fulfilling lives” made me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out.

We have somewhere, and plan to frame it once he achieves something, younger son’s first IQ test, given by the school in kindergarten.

The disaster starts with the fact that the kid didn’t realize there was more questions in the back or maybe decided he was bored and didn’t answer them.  It continues with the fact that has sensory issues (as I suspect does all of my family in the paternal line.  None of us was ever able to jump rope or ride a bicycle (a problem for dad in a time when that was the best way to get around at least for a young man of no wealth) we’re INCREDIBLY slow at writing till about 14 for girls and 19 for boys (but fast at typing, if we can get a typewriter) and our handwriting has driven teachers to despair.  We usually read fairly fast, but only by dint of getting bored and only having that as an escape.  Sometimes we have speech issues.) which in kindergarten means he could write in a line or fill in the right square to save his life.  To make things even more disastrous, younger son had a rather bizarre approach to answering questions, in that he assumed the people asking him things were doing so for nefarious purposes.  When he took a test on the Great Lakes at 10, for instance, he refused to answer because if the teacher wanted to know those things, she could study as he had.  Only when he told me this did a lot of his tests throughout his school career make sense.

Anyway, that test gave him an IQ of either 65 or 70 (can’t remember precisely.  I really should find it) and the results letter assured us with care and patience he might learn up to a 50 word vocabulary, and be able to look after himself in semi-independent living some day.  Even at the time I couldn’t be alarmed by this, considering this was the child who, the year before had gone mute at his pre-school teacher for six months because she “patronized” him (his word) by treating him like an infant.  Same child who pulled out Shakespeare quotes for every occasion, even if he had to fit them in with a shovel.  I knew his vocabulary was probably bigger than his teacher’s, he could make explosives that made craters in the backyard (with common household chemicals, too), had made a bizarre contraption of lego, k’nex and wood pieces so he could turn his room light from his bedside (we were in a Victorian then and only switch was by the door) when he got tired of reading my mystery collection (which I only knew he was reading because he both shelved them not alphabetically (he didn’t know the alphabet, being a self-taught reader) and because I’d found them under his mattress.  Why he thought reading mysteries was something to hide from me, I don’t know.)

When he was 12 we had to have him extensively tested by a psychologist because of issues in school (which had a lot to do with depression) and they estimated his IQ in the mid 180s.  Estimated because above 165 it’s all meaningless, more or less, and also because he’d hit his head on the top of every test they threw at him.

But other than that rather specialized test, his tests that denote IQ aren’t particularly shattering.  Mostly probably for the reasons that kindergarten test was bizarrely low, only less so because he’s learned why he must answer questions.  But he still gets bored, or gets strange ideas or whatever.  The IQ tests are not calibrated for him.

He’s not alone.  I know any number of Us who have so so (or disastrous) academic careers and many who bounce between failing and top grades depending on how interested they are. Then you throw in test anxiety and some of us can achieve bizarrely low scores, while not fooling anyone they’re actually stupid when talking about a subject.

IQ tests might be good predictors of college.  Or not.  If the schools are administering them you run into a lot of things, like how the “set” is selected.

Older son ran into this in first grade.  His teacher apparently had a history of picking on a child a year, a child she perceived as “miscegenated.”  We didn’t know this, and if we had we probably would not have thought about it, since it didn’t dawn on me till a decade or so later that people not only perceived me as Latin but often added their prejudices to it, to the point of imagining I spoke with a Spanish accent (no, seriously!) or looked Mexican.  (Honestly, in Portugal they’re more likely to peg my husband as a native than me.  They will approach us and speak TO HIM in Portuguese.)  So we missed that until we talked to other people about her, years later.  And I’ll confess we had it way easier than the parents of Robert’s first crush, a young woman who was Black/Cherokee/Irish.  This teacher called her parents every other day to tell them she was mentally retarded and they should put her in an institution.  (She was almost certainly of Us, and not at all slow.)  Oh, the teacher was very left, to no one’s surprise, I’m sure.

Well, this teacher decided Robert was slow, couldn’t read, would never learn to read, and must be put in special ed.  … Our son whom I’d found out could read when he was forty pages into a biography of Julius Caesar written for scholars, at 3.

Without telling us the school had him tested, and called me to inform me he was dull-normal (107 IQ) and we had to have a staffing meeting for him, to decide what we could do to ensure, yes, that he could lead a semi normal life.

This was just before Christmas, and the meeting was set for the start of Spring semester.  We spent $500 we didn’t have to have him tested (difficult, because to be valid we had to use a different test from the school’s.)  We were fortunate because he shocked the socks off them, so they gave him another battery of tests wholly free, including one that was entirely musical, and one that was all math.

He was diagnosed as profoundly gifted (and I use diagnosed advisedly.  It’s as hard to get the schools to do a good job with that as with profoundly mentally retarded. — yeah, I know politically incorrect terminology, but it was the one used 20 years ago by psychologists) with an IQ around 165.

All of which mans that, yes, he does relatively well in school, at least if he’s studying something he’s interested in, and is fully engaged.

But the point is, in the course of the would-be staffing meeting, which did NOT go the way the school expected, we found out that the psychologist was the teacher’s best friend, and also that they have to pick what set they used for testing, and she’d picked the one that MAXED at 107, because her friend had told her our son wasn’t smart enough to ever learn to read.

What I’m trying to say is that IQ tests are very useful, to an extent, but they’re not, as the writer of that article seemed to think, the be-all end-all of prediction for how well people will do, or even of a certain type of mind.

For instance, I test nearly mentally-retarded on visual reasoning, math depends on the day, but verbal and auditory is through the roof, which compensates, given strategies.  At some point, at a test for other purposes I was told I was a visual thinker with impairment (i.e. being very premature and a couple of concussions damaged my visual area, but I was designed to be a visual thinker.  Which would make sense, since both boys are.  Also, my illustrators always say I’m a very visual writer.  You couldn’t tell it by IQ tests, though, because damaged.)

I have relatives who just test really badly.  Yes, it’s predictive of school work, because they test badly at any tests.  Tests are such an horrendous stress they shut down.  You could give them a test for eating candy and they’d fail it.

So…. what makes Us is not exactly IQ, it’s something else.

My friend Dave Freer who is a biologist and knows a bit about primate populations says that we’re “outliers” or perhaps “goats.”  In every band of primates there’s some who don’t fit, who see other things, who act differently.  Primates (and we’re that) whose thinking/acting ranges from “I see the box, but why are you thinking inside it?” to “What box?  There are no boxes?”

Depending on how stressed the band is, these are either known as “dead” or “the primates who find a new berry to eat, or who learn to pull up ants with a stick, while everyone else is starving because the berry we ate went extinct in this region.”

That “dead” part is still mostly how normal people react to us.  There are evolutionary reasons for that.  You get too many strange offspring in a band, and soon the entire band is strange, i.e. not of the species.  Remember most mutations are harmful.  So normal creatures are trained to resent and eliminate, most of all, weird ones of their kind.  It’s some kind of uncanny valley, pink-monkey effect.

Don’t judge the other primates too harshly.  First of all a band all of Us would be funny.  “Hunt?  But I found these interesting reeds and wanted to weave baskets.  What do you mean starve?  I don’t care.  You’re not the boss of me.”  multiplied by a hundred or so.  There is a reason most of Us have small friend groups, many of us have rocky marriages, and a not irrelevant portion of us has problems with extended family.

At any rate, humans do it too.  They cut out the goats quite neatly, particularly before any kind of higher processing/reasoning sets in.  There’s a reason for most of us the early years of schooling were hell on Earth.  (Yes, I hated them too, though I coped by being a one-girl avenger who beat bullies and protected the helpless… most of them Us.)  And even those of us who could fake it into the “cool kids” at some point (for me it took till college) we never felt like we fit, and weren’t particularly well liked.

What I mean is, IQ tests are lousy ways of figuring out who we are.  (And to an extent lousy ways to organize schooling, unless you retest every three years, have far more complex tests than the schools administer and learn to observe for things like “bored out of gourd.” Schools are very bad at this too.  Most people they identify as “gifted” are high-normal highly compliant kids.)

But we know who we are, an can usually identify each other on sight or shortly after.

We’re people who go out in the middle of a blizzard to measure the snow on the trash can lid.  We’re people who can have knock-out drag out fights about prime numbers.  We’re people who can get hot under the collar discussing Roman monopoly laws at the breakfast table.  We’re people who read everything.  Yes, even the stuff everyone tells us is trashy.  Yes, even the high brow stuff that’s actually good.  We’re the people who can pursue an interest exhaustively for three months, then put it aside as if it had never been.

Conversations between two of us might range all over creation and back.  Most of us aren’t rich because a) we could never get that worked up about money b) have never figured out what we wanted to be when we grew up, and bounce over professions and interests like loons for most of our lives c) had to spend all our money to learn something obscure that no one else could figure out why we cared about.

We’re lifelong learners, you can say that.  Mostly because we can’t figure out how not to play with our minds. But the way we learn and what we want to learn might be the despair of any and all teachers.

We bore easily.  Two days ago I had to rinse hair dye, set my alarm, and found out that I don’t do well for even 20 minutes without story or movement or SOMETHING.  I swear it was subjective hours. Hell for us is having to sit (or stand) and do nothing for more than about five minutes.  Purgatory is doing some boring, repetitive physical thing for a day.  (Usually I use this time to plot, but there are nuances.  If I can leave the task, I’ll just walk off.  Without audio books, my house would NEVER get cleaned.)

The internet is very bad for us.  We can spend hours going down rabbit holes, reading about things that are only loosely related and that no one else not a specialist would give two minutes thought to.  (Lately?  Reconstruction of historical skulls.  Sigh.  I’ve become aware after a while it’s for a novel.  Time travel mystery/romance.  How am I going to find the time?)

Those of us who have a “true vocation” (sometimes for strange things.  I’m fairly sure younger son was born to be an engineer) can become amazingly good at whatever our field is.  The only issue is that we often can’t complete a college degree on it (not younger son, thank heavens) because we get sidetracked by amazingly weird sides of the subject that interests us.  Also, we don’t do well with group/group paced instruction.  (Some of us.  Others excel at it.)  And if we are in the popular entertainment business the best we can aspire to (unless we’re very, very good and also good at publicity, and you know exactly which of my friends I’m talking about.  There are half a dozen of them, the lucky bastages, who understand publicity and all) is high-mid-list because we are just a little too weird, and also we tend to jump around instead of doing one series and staying on it, locked for life.  (Mind you in indie, high mid list, or even mid list can feed you quite well.  I need to go more indie, in my copious spare time.)

Also, no matter what we do, and unless we find ourselves inexplicably, by random chance, in a workgroup of Us (my husband had that for ten years. They were miracle workers.) we’ll find that some people inexplicably really hate us (even though we weren’t even aware they existed before they brought themselves to our attention by trying to sabotage us.)  Like older son’s first grade teacher, some people hate our guts.  Though it might have side-lights of her being a rotten racist, the truth is that every kid I knew of she went after was also Us.  Which leads me to believe those were the ones she talked herself into actually acting on.  Because we annoyed the living daylights out of her.  I’m sure most of you have met with this in jobs and gone “WHY does this person hate me?”  The more paranoid of those not-of-us not only hate us but are convinced we’re conniving master minds and have it out for them.  (Even though, again, we might never have noticed them.)  I think it’s because these are manipulative people who live and die on manipulating others, and they can’t read Us, which identifies Us as threats.  (Oh, btw, we couldn’t master mind our way out of a wet paper bag, since the only people we can sort of read are Us, too.)

And possibly worst of all is having strangers identify us as “so smart” (or total morons, nothing in between) and decide we MUST be rich and also need no help at ANYTHING including learning things we’ve never done.

So, how can you tell Us?  We’re the goats, the outliers, the Odds.  Those no one understands but some others of us.  Those most people consider a threat, though to be honest we’re mostly threats to our own confused selves.

We’re the nail that sticks up and most of society snags on us, and devote themselves to pounding us down to match people not like us.

America, to an extent, more than other countries, has a tolerance for Us.  This post is already way too long, but there are reasons for that including probably genetics (people who live or get thrown out their birthplace are not usually conformists), the automobile causing the spreading-out and mobility of people, so that you’re probably not near “tribe” of the genetic kind, some more innate flexibility than in older societies.

This is why the future, by and large comes from America.  Because our Odds invent it, and people put it to use.  It’s also why Europe is stagnating.  They’ve been kicking out or losing their Odds for a long time.  It’s also why our vast normal population (they’re still way in the majority, even here.  Or as my mom puts it of younger son “the world will never be built for him.”) envies Europe so much.  They instinctively feel Europe has way fewer goats to deal with, and those they do have keep under deeper cover. (Bah!)

The truth is that without us, the human race stagnates.

Sure, most of our brilliance often translates into wearing our underpants on our heads, forming incredibly bizarre cults, (Yeah, guys, sorry, Marx was probably Us.  He had the stigmata. Including being absolutely convinced he understood economics, without actually bothering to learn them), creating the strangest theories of everything (and mustard), and generally being godflies.

But when the berry bush the band depends on dries up, if there’s an chance of finding an alternate food source (there often isn’t) the one who finds it will be a goat.  Metaphorically speaking, world without end.

You’re smart, though probably not in the conventional way, you’re creative, though you might devote half your time to sculpting belly lint, you’re insatiably curious, though you might spend your time reading up on a planet you know never existed and become the world’s foremost expert on belly lint sculptors.

I don’t think it’s possible to cut out the weird and concentrate on the useful.  That’s not who We are.  But if we apply ourselves even half-way to the useful, we transform the world.

Yeah, kids in school picked on you.  Ignore them.  It’s not that none of them are smart enough to understand you.  It’s that they’re boring.  You get back in touch twenty years later, and they’re doing exactly what you knew they’d do in elementary.

Build under, build over, build around.  Be yourself, underpants on head and all.  Shine on you crazy diamond.  The continuance of the species will probably depend on one of you when things go pear shaped.  And if not that, the survival of the group, the village, the profession, probably will at some time or another.

Learn, build, be.  Be not ashamed. Question.  Ask them who is going to make us?  Them and whose army.  Go build that weird reed basket when everyone else goes hunting.  You might find out it’s pretty good for catching fish in, and have supper ready when they come back empty handed because the mammoth moved on.

Say it loud, say it clear, and never be afraid of saying it: Bah!