20×2 Chicago: “Are You Ready? – July 8th, 2023

Scott Smith at 20x2Chicago on July 8, 2023
Photo: James Allenspach

20×2 Chicago is a storytelling/performance series hosted by Andrew Huff. In it, 20 people answer one question in two minutes. This edition’s question was “Are You Ready?” and I was one of the 20 to answer it.

This show is deceptively difficult. Two minutes is no time at all to get across an idea or performance. Your piece has to be tight. More than once when writing something for 20×2, I’ve left funny bits or lines I love in the cut section of the doc because I needed the time back for stuff that was essential.

Many performers include some kind of visual element or audience participation. One time someone did a stage dive. On Saturday night, one of the pieces involved the entire audience trying to throw ping-pong balls into a bucket onstage and ended in Andrew doing a shot of tequila. I am not that clever so I wrote something and this is it.


This will only be two minutes but I’m going to give you the “too long, didn’t listen” version anyway. The answer is “no, but do it anyway.”

Are you ready? No, you never are. Not truly, not in the ways you think you need to be.

At best, you can name the thing. And if you can name the thing, you can know it, defeat it, or demonstrate superiority over it.

“Are you ready?” is the least helpful question in these moments. You may find yourself needing to ask yourself other questions. Like what’s next or what am I doing or what the fuck?

I don’t say this because I think you won’t fail. In fact, you will. Not in big ways, perhaps, but in small ones.

I’ve not been ready plenty of times.

At least twice in my life, I’ve had jobs I wasn’t ready for.

I was once in a marriage I wasn’t ready for.

These are some of the biggest failures one can experience.

But guess what? I did it anyway. And I’m still fucking here. You will be, too.

I’m 48 years old. Your mileage may vary but around 45 I entered my “don’t give a fuck” years.

Here’s what I do instead: Stay inquisitive. Be ready to learn something new. Get challenged. Defend the point of view you spent all this time honing. Hang on to what you’ve earned through experience.

This is not to say you shouldn’t keep your mind and heart open to the needs and concerns of others. This is not about ignoring other people, it’s about ignoring the you that doubts you, the you that worries if it’s not perfect, the you that tells you you aren’t ready.

That’s not your best self.

The one that does it anyway? That’s your best you.

The line between being ready vs. not ready is razor-thin. One moment you’re not, the next you are.

And that moment is now.

Photo: James Allenspach, Flickr

What’s next after elections

The overlook at Galien County River Park
The following is a slight re-working of something I read at “The Word on 103rd,” a local storytelling showcase at Made Artisan Collective in Beverly. If you think some of this sounds familiar, it is. It’s taking ideas from this post and this one and re-contextualizing them around our recent mayoral election. It seemed to strike a nerve with folks so I’m posting it here.

Maybe you voted for Brandon Johnson. Maybe you didn’t.

Either way, you will at some point in his administration find yourself tempted by cynicism. There are many, many people who will benefit from telling you that Brandon Johnson is some kind of fraud. They will want to create a narrative around his actions or his administration that tells you Brandon Johnson the Mayor is not like Brandon Johnson the campaigner. They will want to paint his inevitable need for compromise as a failure or a lie.

But that’s because campaigns are about possibilities. Governing is about limits. Campaigns are about speaking to specific people. Governing is about the best possible solution for everyone. And that means disappointing some people.

Cynicism is comforting, but it poisons you a little. And that poison numbs you just enough to keep you from being disappointed because you never allow yourself to be hopeful. But cynicism also keeps you from trying. Cynicism is a self-created obstacle we put in our own way when we elevate a candidate above ourselves and they turn out to be unworthy of the pedestal we put them on.

We have to stop falling in love with candidates and learn to be their partners.

Ta-Nehisi Coates said this thing I think about all the time:

“We have this idea of elections as this kind of sacred ritual that one is undertaking, that you should be inspired and in love with the candidate. But I often think people need to think about it more like taking out the trash. It’s a thing that you should do. Brushing your teeth is hygiene. So when I think of who to vote for, the question isn’t how much of my own personal politics do I see in this person so much as how much do I think this person can actually be influenced by my politics or the politics of the people around me.”

You can substitute the word “elections” or “vote” with the phrase “doing politics” in the above paragraphs and it still works. And sums up my own philosophy.

Look, I love civic life. But it is neither meant to be a March Madness bracket nor an Aaron Sorkin production. Most days, there is no “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” speech to be heard. It is supposed to be boring in the way your refrigerator should be boring: no scary noises; no rotted food; just a quiet, dependable hum in the background. It’s not inspiring, but it provides comfort, care, and calm.

Are you inspired by brushing your teeth? No, but you do it. Because otherwise a very meaningful part of your life will decay, rot, and die. We have to normalize thinking about voting as brushing our teeth even if we’re not inspired by our toothbrushes.

And just like you brush your teeth every day (and my god if you’re not doing that please start) we have to find ways to do politics every day. Some people call this activism. I prefer to call it the exercise of your individual power. Because to quote the title of a book by Eitan Hersh: “Politics Is For Power.” It is not posting articles on social media that you’re mad about or listening to bros on podcasts or even watching that nerdy guy in the khakis and his big-ass map.

The real work of inspirational politics doesn’t happen in the voting booth or in talking about politics at parties. It takes action that happens long before we step in the voting booth and long after. And on this point – Lord help me – I find myself quoting fucking Noam Chomsky which is not a thing I would expect to be doing:

“The left position has always been: You’re working all the time, and every once in a while there’s an event called an election. This should take you away from real politics for 10 or 15 minutes. Then you go back to work.”

As the saying goes, just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. So if you’re looking for ways to keep yourself engaged, start with the smallest unit of government in your life.

The smaller the unit of government, the more immediately responsive it can be, both in terms of your ability to exert influence on it and the likelihood of you getting a response to your email, phone call, or letter. This could be your alderman, your local school council, your park supervisor, your County Commissioner, or your state rep.

As you think about where to spend your time, think about those who have it worse than you right now.

Broadly speaking, the answer to this question is pretty simple: Those at risk are the people whose point of view is least represented when decisions are getting made.

Who’s dealing with food insecurity? Who feels the most alone? Whose health is most at risk? Who is least likely to receive a just outcome in the criminal justice system? Who feels the least safe?

We could get overwhelmed by the bigness of some of these questions and the problems they reveal. So let’s reduce this to the smallest unit of assistance you can provide each day.

When you’re in a room where a decision is being made ask yourself some questions: How will this affect those who have less access to money and services than I do? Who’s being left out of this conversation? Are you able to speak from a place of knowledge that can guide this decision to a more equitable outcome for that group? If not, can you bring someone into the room who can? Or ask to defer the decision until that point of view is heard? Then do that.

That’s politics.

When you start thinking about all the trouble in your world there’s a tendency to get overwhelmed or to feel like you need to learn how to do a million new things to make a difference.

Learning new things is great! But more than likely, the thing you can do better than other people might be the skill that a non-profit or community organization needs the most from its volunteers.

Can you write? Can you manage projects? Do you have a technical skill? A certain kind of way with design, spreadsheets, or budgeting? The more niche the skill, the more expensive the hire and the bigger the obstacle it is for most organizations. You’re going to be their favorite volunteer.

When it comes to donating money, think small(er). I love the ACLU, too, but if you Google “immigration legal rights,” “environmental justice” or some other cause plus the name of your city, town, or state you’ll find an organization doing the work that needs the money more than a place with built-in name recognition. And this goes double for the do-gooder no one has heard of running for an elected office in your district. That person needs your money a lot more than someone ten states away who is running for the House of Representatives against Mitch McConnell and on MSNBC three times a week.

Finally, look for the people already doing this work. There is a tendency among…well, white dudes, to imagine they have the solution others lack. But for their brilliant insight, the problem would be solved.

My dudes: do not be the person that offers help that isn’t needed. Instead, amplify what others are already doing. These folks do not need your vision or your strategy. They don’t need leadership, they need followship. Allies are fine, but accomplices are better.
You may feel uncomfortable. Doing this work on behalf of others may bring to light things about you or people you’re close to that you would have preferred to keep in the darkness.

The good news is short-term loss will become long-term gains over time – for you and everyone else.

It’s really easy to slip into cynicism. But hope is a much harder drug, if you’re up for it. See, hope is not a fuzzy, rainbow-covered alternative to the facts on the ground. It is a collection of sparks that need oxygen. Cynicism douses the sparks before they become flames. Hope is a vision of a path that begins in your immediate vicinity.

Hope is the ability to clear the path as it gets harder to see. Cynicism pretends that but for all these excuses and the actions of others, we would be in a better place. It’s an imaginary future that means we never have to compromise or accept disappointment.

Hope is the acceptance of our current moment and all its disappointments coupled with the knowledge that we can do better.

Hope is not waiting for someone to save us. Hope is saving ourselves.

The words of Martin Luther King we won’t see on social media this year

“Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco June 30 1964” by geoconklin2001 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco June 30 1964” by geoconklin2001 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Originally written in January 2022; updated in January 2023

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Martin Luther King quote today:

And the final thing that I would like to say to you this morning is that the world doesn’t like people like Gandhi. That’s strange, isn’t it? They don’t like people like Christ. They don’t like people like Abraham Lincoln. They kill them.

It’s from his Palm Sunday sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi, delivered on March 22, 1959.

The world did not like people like Martin Luther King. They killed him.


Here’s a fun game you can play on Martin Luther King’s birthday:

For every politician who posts one of MLK’s quotes on social media — it’s probably going to be the one about his kids being judged by their character, not their skin color — scroll back through their recent social media posts and look for the last still-living Black leader they took a photo with, quoted, or praised.

Award one point for every post that qualifies. Five points awarded if that Black leader has been involved in a recent protest movement. Ten points if he or she said “Black Lives Matter.”

Here’s another one: If a United States senator posts an MLK quote, ask them if they’ll vote for comprehensive voting rights legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act or the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Without saying as much, Heather Cox Richardson points out that those who oppose the expansion or protection of the right to vote would have been the same people who opposed the Voting Rights Act back in 1965, three years before King was killed by an assassin.

To put it another way: it’s very easy to support people and concepts that are in the past, but the real measure of a person’s dedication to justice is whether they support it today.


The river of irony formed by, say, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin using a King quote to defend a ban on the possibility of kids learning about how race and history intersect is so deep and wide that it’s impossible to cross.

Youngkin isn’t alone here. The cuddly, stuffed-animal version of Martin Luther King is now used to sell everything from mattresses to the sincerity of people who say they “don’t see color.”

In this Saturday morning cartoon rendering of the man who was shot for his beliefs, we have sanded off the rough edges of King’s crusades against capitalism, poverty, and war; these are the same edges King used to force America into a state of discomfort over its failure to “be true to what you said on paper.”

The rough-edged King is where we should seek our inspiration. In words written in the final chapter of his final book, Where Do We Go From Here, he said:

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

The following all come from speeches, essays, and articles written by Martin Luther King and collected in The Radical King, edited by Dr. Cornel West.

In the introduction, West quotes King from 1967: “I am nevertheless greatly saddened … that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.”

West compares King’s de-radicalized image to the way Nelson Mandela was painted later in life, describing them both as “Santa Claus-fied…into non-threatening and smiling old men with toys in their bags and forgiveness in their hearts.”

In the collection of pieces in The Radical King, the lie is put to that image and it provides us with timeless wisdom for this moment.

“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.”

— “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, 1958”

In a chapter of his book “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” King speaks of his experiences as a teen in Atlanta when he had “come perilously close to resenting all white people.”

“I had passed spots where Negroes had been savagely lynched, and had watched the Ku Klux Klan on its rides at night. I had seen police brutality with my own eyes and watched Negroes receive tragic injustice in the courts.”

It’s not hard to read these words and envision khaki-clad, ersatz Nazis marching in Charlottesville or the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers storming the Capitol to hijack democracy. Or the “not guilty” verdicts handed down in the deaths of Trayvon Martin or the lack of charges against those who killed Tamir Rice.

Later, King talks about his work in a factory “that hired both Negroes and whites…and [I] realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.”

He critiques capitalism as a failure “to see the truth in collective enterprise” and communism / Marxism as a failure “to see the truth in individual enterprise.”

“Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself,” King warns as a bulwark against depriving a man of freedom. “Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.”

Something to think about as we consider the real meanings behind The Great Resignation.

“The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world should not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe.”

— Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, 1958

In the same essay, King reminds us what nonviolent resistance really means. This exploration is a key wedge between the true King and the sepia-toned example he’s often described as.

Non-violence as a tactic was not about asking nicely, staying off the streets, and keeping the status quo. It was about acting as a true societal disrupter and pouring sand in the gears.

It was also about strength.

“True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power…it is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it.”

A hard value to live up to and not an easy road to walk. Can we meet the challenge of this the next time we are faced with those who want to create a two-tiered system of justice?

“All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself.”

“He revealed that far from the tragic era white historians described, it was the only period in which democracy existed in the South.”

— On DuBois’s book Black Reconstruction, from a speech printed in the journal “Black Titan.”

King on DuBois is full of love and praise while embracing our country’s full and unruly history of race. One line seems to foretell the lazy dangers of Twitter-based discourse:

“Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for emotional release and then to retire in smug passive satisfaction.”

He goes on to say:

“History had taught [DuBois] that it is not enough for people to be angry — the supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”

King also has some words for those who would remove the history of race from the history of our country:

“When they corrupted Negro history, they corrupted American history because Negroes are too big a part of the building of this nation to be written out of it without destroying scientific history.”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to the ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action; who paternally believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…”

— “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

The entire unedited “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is still so urgent, relevant, and fiery. It is as much a warning for now as it was then.

“There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.”

— “Where Do We Go From Here,” King’s final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967

Described by West as “his last and most radical SCLC presidential address,” the speech denounces capitalism as an end, embraces a guaranteed national income, and takes aim at poverty.

Ever the writer, King notes the hypocrisy of Western language.

“There are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence.”

Woven throughout is a reminder of how the power of nonviolence is truly power, a power rooted in love.

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

He goes on to discuss the Watts riots, his equal critiques of capitalism and communism, and provides the compass for the rest of King’s mission had he lived:

“The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

“When there is massive unemployment in the Black community, it’s called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression. With the Black man, it’s ‘welfare,’ with the whites it’s called ‘subsidies.’ This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

— “The Other America”

King would later put an even finer point on this critique of inequality.

In a March 1968 speech, King spoke to Local 1199 in New York City, which West describes as “a union consisting largely of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other people of color.”

“People are always talking about menial labor. But if you’re getting a good wage…that isn’t menial labor. What makes it menial, is the income, the wages.”

“The riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has not heard? … It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, humanity, and equality, and it is still true.”

“If they are America’s angry children today, the anger is not congenital. It is a response to the feeling that a real solution is hopelessly distant, because of the inconsistencies, resistance, and faintheartedness, of those in power.”

— Black Power, “Where Do We Go From Here,” 1967

If there’s anything in King’s final book that speaks to what he would think of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s this chapter that reflects on the Black Power movement of the late 1960s.

So often we hear disingenuous concern trolling about the current young Black leaders in America and how they ought to be more like the false, sanitized King. Yet King notes “many of the young people proclaiming Black Power today were but yesterday the devotees of Black-white cooperation and nonviolent direct action.”

Still, while he understood their rage, he also returned to his themes of power and love and how they should be a means to a political end.

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.”

“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

“In his struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power. One of the most obvious sources of this power is political.”

“When they look around and see that the only people who do not share in the abundance of Western technology are colored people, it is an almost inescapable conclusion that their condition and their exploitation are somehow related to their color and the racism of the white Western world.”

— “Where Do We Go From Here,” 1967

In the final chapter of his last book, King speaks of apartheid around the world, in economic and cultural terms, throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He cautions against prejudice turned into institutional racism, warning that:

“One cannot hope to keep people locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health, and happiness. Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow the structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals.”

As we face the inequity of everything from food to vaccines across the world, it’s worth noting this chapter is in the section of The Radical King titled “Prophetic Vision.”

“Money devoid of genuine empathy is like salt devoid of savor, good for nothing except to be trodden under the foot of men.”

Yet hope is never far from King’s mind as in this line…

“One of the best proofs that reality hinges on moral foundations is the fact that when men and women and governments work devotedly for the good of others, they achieve their own enrichment in the process.”

And in this brief summation of an almost Buddhist philosophy…

“‘I’ cannot reach fulfillment without ‘thou.’ The self cannot be self without other selves. Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean.”

Another relevant passage to our current moment — especially the opposition to a new voting rights act — is King’s tweaking of “right-wing slogans on ‘government control’ and ‘creeping socialism’” which he says are “as meaningless as the Chinese Red Guard slogans against ‘bourgeois revisionism.’”

King also returns to the strength of nonviolence:

“True nonviolence is more than the absence of violence. It is the persistent and determined application of peaceable power to offenses against the community — in this case, the world community.”

“Peaceable power” could be read many ways, but it’s hard not to read it as the power of voting rights. A ringing endorsement of his own legacy, carried on by John Lewis, and in the words of a bill bearing his name.

If the leaders quoting Martin Luther King truly believe in his words today, they’ll propose new legislation that brings them into the present.

Reading, listening, liking: NYE ’22 edition

Lydia Loveless at Golden Dagger in Chicago on January 30, 2022
Lydia Loveless at Golden Dagger in Chicago on December 30, 2022

A selection of things I enjoyed this month:

This paragraph from Grey Horse’s newsletter, written by fellow OG Chicago Twitter person Kate Gardiner:

It’s easy to look away from potential wrongdoing when you want to believe an optimistic story. The temptation is even greater if you want to emulate the protagonist. “I could be like him,” the thinking goes — and that thinking gets complicated when you take into account that getting to be like him might take some dirty work.

Yes, it’s about SBF but it’s also about why knowing your values can keep you from making mistakes.

Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra: I’ve been enjoying this for months, but it recently wrapped in a satisfying, if cautionary, way. It poses the question “how do you fight fascism in America when it’s supported by a professional PR campaign and reaches the highest levels of government?” It’s a complicated answer best summed up as “it takes all of us doing our part.” I found comfort in the idea that we have been here before and we know the way out, but also discomfort from knowing it’s a cycle. Our form of government allows fascism to rest beneath the surface. We are threatened by an invasive species we can’t ever truly kill because the roots are impossible to dig out of the soil. We can stop its growth if we have the resolve.

This 2012 oral history of Rainbo Club: A ten-year-old profile from Eater Chicago of the legendary Wicker Park bar told through stories from some of the artists who lived, worked, and created there in the 1990s (Dmitry Samarov, Tim Kinsella, Liz Phair, and others).

Nikki Morgan at Golden Dagger in Chicago on December 30, 2022

Lydia Loveless and Nikki Morgan: Last night, I saw both of these women perform at a sold-out show at Golden Dagger (fka Tonic Room), a tiny, warm room with good beer, great cocktails, and a stage just barely big enough to hold the flames coming off Loveless and Morgan (who opened). Lydia Loveless is from Columbus, Ohio with some Chicago DNA due to her complicated, former time spent on Bloodshot Records. Straddling the lines between alt-country, indie punk, and wry humor, she sets fire to sadness, death, and danger. Nikki Morgan describes herself as a girl from North Carolina, but says Chicago made her the woman and artist she is today – someone who mixes soulful vocals and Southern swamp. Lately, something new has often signaled heartache. But in last night’s show, both artists felt comfortable enough in the intimate venue to share new songs, which portended something more hopeful for 2023.

NASA’s Mars InSight probe goes quiet: Do you like to feel sad about anthropomorphized space vehicles? Well then this story (and the related Twitter account) is for you.

A thread of life advice from former Chicago Tribune writer/editor Kevin Williams: Unlike most “what I’ve learned” threads like this, which are often about showing how wise, clever, and interesting the poster is, Kevin’s is about how to improve the lives of others, starting with yours. He’s apparently moving to Portugal, which is good for him but bad for Chicago.

Oppenheimer and the moral weight of technology

Robert Oppenheimer – American theoretical physicist, known as "father of the atomic bomb" in Israel in 1966.
Boris Carmi /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection / CC BY 4.0

I know it’s Christmas Eve but you’ll have to forgive me for going deep on the notion of science and moral responsibility.

The Biden administration has reversed a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist called the father of the atomic bomb for his leading role in World War II’s Manhattan Project.

In stripping Oppenheimer of his clearance, the Atomic Energy Commission did not allege that he had revealed or mishandled classified information, nor was his loyalty to the country questioned, according to Granholm’s order. The commission, however, concluded there were “fundamental defects” in his character.

Oppenheimer wrongly stripped of security clearance, US says

In hindsight, it’s hard to divorce the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance from his complicated views on his role as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Especially when you look at how that revocation has been used in the past: to punish those who spoke out against the use of the power of the state to bring violence.

It’s tempting to see the revocation of Oppenheimer’s clearance as punishment for speaking out, and the restoration as an endorsement of his views.

In this case, it’s too simple a formulation. Oppenheimer never apologized for his part in the creation of man’s most horrific weapon, nor did he regret its use in the war. He did, however, take responsibility for all it unleashed and the death it wrought. But he also saw scientific knowledge as an end worth pursuing, no matter the costs.

It’s a complicated legacy and worth revisiting.

Oppenheimer’s most famous quote comes from a 1965 documentary about the atomic bomb. In it, he intones a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu book: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This BBVA OpenMind piece delves into the quote’s original context within Gita and within Oppenheimer’s supposed pacifism:

Vishnu wants to convince Prince Arjuna that he must go to war, something that he refuses because it would involve killing his own relatives and friends. But Vishnu convinces him that he cannot shun that duty greater than he—it is his obligation, and it is not in his hand to choose. In the end, Arjuna goes to war.

Oppenheimer, Hijiya concluded, did not see himself as Vishnu. He did not arrogate the role of a god. He was Arjuna, the prince destined to fulfill that unavoidable duty, a terrible test for a pacifist who had always been one, both before and after the bomb.

Alex Wellerstein at the Nuclear Security Blog (linked in the article above) goes deeper on the context of Gita and speculates on Oppenheimer’s place in the atomic age:

Oppenheimer is not Krishna/Vishnu, not the terrible god, not the “destroyer of worlds” — he is Arjuna, the human prince! He is the one who didn’t really want to kill his brothers, his fellow people. But he has been enjoined to battle by something bigger than himself — physics, fission, the atomic bomb, World War II, what have you — and only at the moment when it truly reveals its nature, the Trinity test, does he fully see why he, a man who hates war, is compelled to battle. It is the bomb that is here for destruction. Oppenheimer is merely the man who is witnessing it. 

What I find strange and somewhat abhorrent in Oppenheimer is his laissez-faire point of view on what comes next. Personally, I’ve always been more of a Malcolmist in my views.

At the risk of seeming like I’m putting words in Oppenheimer’s mouth, here he is in his farewell speech to Los Alamos in 1945 – the year the bomb dropped:

If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.

Later in the speech, Oppenheimer addresses the common occurrence of technology’s creation moving faster than our ability to reckon with it:

There was a period immediately after the first use of the bomb when it seemed most natural that a clear statement of policy, and the initial steps of implementing it, should have been made; and it would be wrong for me not to admit that something may have been lost, and that there may be tragedy in that loss. But I think the plain fact is that in the actual world, and with the actual people in it, it has taken time, and it may take longer, to understand what this is all about.

We have not yet solved for our inability to reckon with the uses of new technology before its consequences are unleashed. This is true whether we are speaking of drugs, social media, or crypto. Some tools contain inherent harm, some are merely harmful when abused.

Oppenheimer wrote this piece for The Atlantic in 1949, four years after he wrote the above, and five years before his security clearance was stripped. It’s a beautiful piece of philosophy and a meditation on the use of the unimaginable power of the state to create or destroy. In it, Oppenheimer somewhat fulfills his call for the consideration of this technology after the fact and begins to reckon with it:

In foreign affairs, we are not unfamiliar with either the use or the need of power. Yet we are stubbornly distrustful of it. We seem to know, and seem to come back again and again to this knowledge, that the purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion.

[SNIP]

It is true that one may hear arguments that the mere existence of our power, quite apart from its exercise, may turn the world to the ways of openness and of peace. But we have today no clear, no formulated, no in some measure credible account of how this may come about. We have chosen to read, and perhaps we have correctly read, our past as a lesson that a policy of weakness has failed us. But we have not read the future as an intelligible lesson that a policy of strength can save us.

Back to 1965 and the Gita. In another clip, Oppenheimer suggests the hope that the mere existence of atomic bomb would mean it would not need to be used and would bring an end to the war.

Oppenheimer and the scientists he worked with may indeed be Arjuna. But in their conversation with Vishnu, with technology’s most terrible form come to life, how could they look upon it and not reckon more with its use before unleashing it on the world?

There are no simple answers here. But if science is separated from philosophy then we are at the mercy of its effects. That’s Oppenheimer’s legacy.

I’m blogging again.

This is an updated version of something I wrote for this site’s Public Notebook last month. Since then, Dan Sinker wrote that he’s thinking similarly. And things have gotten worse on Twitter (W. Kamau Bell called it a “low-rent James Bond villain basement”) after Elmo started banning journalists for…talking about him? So I’m largely going read-only there for the foreseeable future.

I’ll use the Public Notebook embedded in this blog as a sort of link dump/thought starter/scratch pad. But “real” blog posts will go on the main page of this site. You can get them via email by subscribing here.

Recently, Andrew and I were taking part in that late 2022 discussion of “where are we going to go after Twitter dies/gets overrun by Nazis?” We briefly debated Mastodon vs. Hive vs. Post and eventually landed on Tumblr and/or Actual Blogging being the better options.

And then Whet said something similar in response to a tweet referencing a Substack post referencing a Scalzi blog post which started as a tweet and…I dunno: what if the Internet we wanted to go back to was with / inside us all along?

Everybody’s like “where should we go now that this place is closing?” like we’re at a 2am bar that has gone full shitshow and have once again forgotten our only options are places worse than this one.

Good luck at Mastodon, the Tai’s Til 4 of the Internet.*

I’m Tumblr-curious again. Visiting my dashboard now is a bit like going to a bar or club I used to frequent when the interior has changed and the menu is different, but it still sort of smells the same. To extend the metaphor, I haven’t ordered a drink yet but I’m looking over the menu. But it’s also really quiet there and I don’t think I’ll stay long.

(After I wrote the above, I realized I wrote a whole “Why I’m quitting Tumblr” thing which is just hilarious and quaint. Especially the update at the bottom.)

Last month, I started messing around with this site again, but purposely walled it off. These “public notebook” posts don’t show up on the main page and aren’t search engine-able. (But I think they show up in the RSS feed?) Not impossible to find, but not easy. Maybe I occasionally post a link back here via Twitter or Instagram something. It’s a pirate radio station from a long-dormant satellite that only people who are still occasionally checking the frequency can hear. It’s less important to me now that a lot of people see this and more important that it’s like that Joel Hogsdon quote about Mystery Science Theater 3000: “the right people will get it.”

It’s public, but it’s somewhat in shadow. A Dark Public space, maybe.

Some of this is particular to me, but I think it’s also reflective of what social media became.


Part of my desire for a Dark Public space is what happens when you exist online now.

For all the hosannas Gawker received when it folded, few of us reckoned with how it was a stake through the heart of Being Weird Online. Their approach meant everyone with any kind of public self was fair game for attack. The “Gawker Stalker” approach made quick leaps from Lindsay Lohan to Julia Allison to random people on the street. One tweet suffering from context collapse gets signal boosted onto a Gawker offshoot and you lose your livelihood, your life, and your name becomes a shockwave of think pieces and cautionary tales.

Like Ronson, I was once a believer in the idea that the field of battle was waged in an online marketplace of ideas. But at some point we have to reckon with the fact that Twitter is maybe 10 percent of real life. If you want to fix shit, you have to go offline and wrestle with the very complicated notion that ideas are nice, but unless you can reckon with the world as it is you’ll never make them a reality. 

L’affaire de Justine is perhaps a too-fraught example. But that’s the gist. I know I’m not the only one of my Web 2.0 era who longs for … a quieter web? But also the one that was supposed to be about nuance, complexity, and the voices that often were drowned out by power.

I remain very much Team Consequences for Your Actions, but not Team Horrific Consequences if Your Actions Affected No One. Or Team Matching Consquences To Actions. We haven’t figured that out yet. Especially when the alleged harm is claimed by those who haven’t experienced it. Or how bad-faith actors leverage the incentives of social discourse to obscure and eradicate the real harm.

Back in 2008, I remember thinking an internet that was fueled by primary sources who could speak directly to the audience was Going To Be Good. At the time, gatekeepers were watering down the message, allowing power structures to dictate the discourse, and keeping minority opinions, voices, and people at the back. In its best form, the idea was to stand for a broader coalition that could become the best of our ideals. It was a very Gen X mindset if we consider Gen X as the weird geeks and dweebs in the class and not the sportos and dickheads we were sitting next to.

That all worked out terribly because now we have Nazis again. And anti-vaxxers. We forgot the very American way the pendulum swings back against any progress. Start with Reconstruction, make a quick stop at the rise of American fascism in the 1940s as a response to FDR, and watch history rhyme rather than repeat. (Thankfully, Gen Z is building on what the geeks and dweebs started.)


Anyway, that all happened.

I spent a good portion of 2004-2014 writing online with a lot of anxiety but not a lot of fear. Some of it evolved into occasional live storytelling, offline organizing, and even a professional gig that felt like the perfect combination of writing and action, for a time.

Much of it was aimed at improving civic life (or aspired to be). And then I got a gig that was all about that. Though I haven’t completely left behind the persona of someone who weaves together Chicago, humor, and social critique, it still looks different these days.

All the incentives for leaving a digital trail seemed bad. I started deleting tweets in 2018. I took a year off of Twitter in 2019 (remind me to tell you that story sometime) and this site has (like the platforms of many of my Web 2.0 cohorts) become a bit of an abandoned mining town.

I’d stake out some territory through the occasional essay, but mostly I’ve spent the last decade or so trying to figure out my “why” of writing online. And the what. For obvious reasons, Chicago civic life is not a thing I can easily opine on when I’m in the middle of it. I’ve chosen a life aimed at the inside game, rather than an outside one. No regrets about that, but I miss writing with impact.

(Also there’s parenting. And partnering.)

A couple years ago a bunch of us thought newsletters were going to be the answer to getting back to a Dark Public web. And then wouldn’t ya know, the Substack guys turned out to be sportos and dickheads, too.

But I tried it in 2020. Notes From Your Dad was an experiment, for me, in a different type of writing and I found it just wasn’t my thing. Substack throwing money at certain types of folks and pretending that didn’t make them publishers? It was a factor too. I stopped posting in October 2020 and despite a couple promises of starting it again, I’m ready to walk away from it. Someone called it “your pandemic sourdough starter” and I think that’s right.

That’s a lot about me, but based on conversations I’ve been having with others lately, I think we all have a version of this.

With Venture Capital Lyle Lanley buying Twitter, it seems like the last place to still experiment online is disappearing, but it’s not. Like the Web 1.0, when you encounter an error you route around it. Tumblr still exists. Blogs still exist. RSS is still there.

All the bad incentives are still out there but we can route around it. It starts with getting away from something “doing numbers.” Scale is for suckers. Quality of audience beats quantity every time. Twitter was the best when it was you and 50 people you “knew.”

Go back into the warehouse where you’ve kept the old machine under a tarp and start it up again.

Just don’t tell anybody about it.

Or just tell the right people.

* Yes, this is me re-using a tweet but honestly this just confirms the above thesis. Both in terms of blogging again but also returning to 2008-era-mindsets.

Toward a better 2022

I have various projects under various rooves. One of these days, I’ll create a better way to bring them all under one.

In the meantime, I wrote this thing on Medium about where we are at the end of the 2nd year of a pandemic. It has some advice and clears the deck for what I hope is a better year ahead.

A few excerpts:

Since we have self-driving cars, robot vacuums, video calls, and holograms, it has occurred to me that we are in a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Or, at the very least, a shitty version of The Jetsons.

COVID-19 was the fertilizer that spread inequities throughout our societal garden. Instead of flowers, we got weeds. The old weeds multiplied while new ones pushed up through the dirt.

What an era we are living in! An era of boiling, impotent rage from within the unending doom of the world’s worst group project.

Some of the folks we elected to fix all this are still working from an old playbook. The playbook got us here. The playbook is bad.

Why are we prioritizing the needs of people who don’t believe in community over those who truly want to be a part of it?

We have to continue to want things to be better and take steps to make it so. Hope begets justice only when fed by wisdom and resolve.

Go read the rest and I’ll see you in 2022.

The intersection of the Dan Ryan and Chicago segregation

When I think about racism, segregation and the systems put in place to reinforce them, the Dan Ryan Expressway comes to mind. In part because of the complexity of it.

The Dan Ryan runs eleven miles, from 95th Street on the Far South Side to what’s now known as the Jane Byrne Interchange – the point where the Dan Ryan, the Eisenhower and the Kennedy meet.

As you drive north on the Dan Ryan, you see the skyscrapers of downtown rising up like Oz at the end of the yellow brick road. Fourteen lanes of traffic serve 300,000 people a day by one count. It’s either packed with cars during rush hour or, in off-peak times, Mario Kart come to life.

The Dan Ryan is not for the faint of heart or student drivers.

Growing up, the Dan Ryan was Chicago for me. A fearsome, muscular roadway that also sported a 75-foot-long, 40-foot high set of flashing red lips. Schools, businesses, and culture lined it. The Dan Ryan’s road signs tantalized with exciting places to visit if you took this exit or that one. Two versions of Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, have towered over it at 35th Street.

American Pharoah notes the Dan Ryan Expressway was one of three expressway systems built under Mayor Richard J. Daley – the Stevenson and the Kennedy are the other two. Its construction was made possible through the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.

The book also argues that it reinforced what had up until then had been a historical dividing line between Black and white Chicago neighborhoods.

The original plans for the Dan Ryan called for it to cross the Chicago River almost directly north of Lowe Avenue, Daley’s own street, and then to jag several blocks, at which point it would turn again and proceed south. But when the final plans were announced the Dan Ryan had been “realigned” several blocks eastward so it would instead head south along Wentworth Avenue. It was a less direct route, and it required the road to make two sharp curves in a short space, but the new route turned the Dan Ryan into a classic barrier between the black and white south sides.

Langston Hughes was beaten up for crossing Wentworth Avenue, an unofficial dividing line between Chicago’s Black Belt and the white neighborhoods of the South Side. This included Bridgeport where Daley grew up. It was a line defended with violence by the Hamburg Athletic Club, of which Daley was a member in his youth, during the period of the 1919 race riots. “Athletic clubs” or “youth clubs” in this time were often covers for white gang activity or political power – or both.

The Dan Ryan’s 14 lanes of traffic would make it much harder to cross Wentworth Avenue by creating a significant obstacle in access to it from the east.

Pharoah also notes the construction of the Dan Ryan was announced less than a month after the City Council approved the building of the Robert Taylor Homes. The Robert Taylor project would be built in the State Street Corridor where other large public housing was already located: the Harold Ickes Homes, Dearborn Homes, and Stateway Gardens.

The overwhelming majority of the people in these communities were Black and lacked access to higher-income jobs, in large part because of the warehousing approach Chicago and other large cities used to provide housing that clustered Black people in parts of the city that separated them from white people.

The State Street housing projects, almost all of which are now long gone, were located just east of the Dan Ryan, which was just east of Wentworth Avenue. The violence that occurred in the 1919 riots, often from whites going into Black neighborhoods, was concentrated in a few places, particularly along State Street, decades before the Dan Ryan was contemplated.

The construction of the Dan Ryan in close proximity to the housing projects of the South Side did not increase the access of their residents to the opportunities of jobs, commerce, and attractions. If anything, it reinforced the lack of access. A 1998 New York Times article quotes one resident of the Robert Taylor Homes describing the projects as a “public aid penitentiary.”

It’s hard to find a more obvious metaphor for Chicago segregation. But the way the story plays out is more complicated than it would seem.

The racial makeup of many South Side neighborhoods changed significantly in the years following the construction of the Dan Ryan with many previously white neighborhoods becoming majority Black. According to a June 2020 report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Bridgeport itself is now 39% Asian, 33% white, 23% Latino, and 2% Black.

As a WBEZ Curious City segment points out, the Dan Ryan didn’t create the segregation in this part of the city. The story notes author Dominic Pacyga’s Chicago: A Biography says that “political power, street gangs, railroad viaducts, and railyards — posed greater obstacles to blacks’ expansion into white neighborhoods.”

Another source in this piece says the Dan Ryan “helped expedite the exodus of the white community from the Southwest Side.”

It’s an inescapable fact that Chicago’s built environment often reinforced or exacerbated segregation. And that’s before you get into the history of redlining and other ways in which racism and real estate intersected.

For instance, in the map for the WBEZ segment, the proposed and final routes of the Dan Ryan are shown. The final route meant more Black-owned homes that white homes would be eliminated to make way for the expressway.

When you consider how Black families have more of their assets and wealth concentrated in their homes than white families you see the institutional effects of racism are often complex and indirect.

Now, none of us built the Dan Ryan Expressway; it opened in 1961 – years before many of us were born. We weren’t consulted about the route. But the 300,00 people who use it each day benefit from its convenience and speed. We can’t ignore that.

Should we tear up the Dan Ryan Expressway and rebuild it completely? No. Nobody’s arguing that.

We should still recognize that the construction of it reinforced a desire on the part of those who built it to keep Black people and white people separated.

Besides, it’s not like the use of the Dan Ryan Expressway is killing black motorists at a higher rate than white motorists.

Or the tools and training given to the staff of the Illinois Department of Transportation put them in a position where they have to choose between their lives or the people using the road.

Or we have to hold fundraisers because we aren’t equipping them with enough fluorescent vests to wear when they are in harm’s way.

Or the people who work at IDOT are committing suicide at a higher rate than the national average.

If that were happening, we’d definitely need to think about a complete rebuild because it’s harming everyone involved.

All of it

It’s Daunte Wright.

It’s Adam Toledo.

It’s George Floyd.

It’s more than just them and how they died.

It’s about how a Black female police officer in Buffalo, NY tried to stop a fellow officer from putting someone in a chokehold and was fired for it. And how it took until yesterday – 15 years later – for a judge to finally say she shouldn’t have been.

It’s Ahmaud Arbery who was just trying to go for a jog.

It’s not about cops, it’s about policing and power and who gets to exercise it and what the consequences are and whether those consequences include death.

It’s eight Asian women who were at work in Atlanta, and an elderly Asian woman kicked on the ground in New York, after a year of escalating, targeted harassment and violence against people who share Asian-American / Pacific Islander backgrounds.

It’s about how someone could think “he had a bad day” was a reasonable explanation and it had nothing to do with race or misogyny.

It’s about an insurrection and a coup based on a Big Lie, fueled by mostly white men brazenly feeding it and groping at power. It’s about how that insurrection can kill a cop, but the people who powered it went back to work in the House and Senate.

It’s Jim Crow. It’s internment camps.

It’s the three-fifths compromise. It’s the 13th amendment.

It’s how we talk about “earning” the right to vote and not “losing” the right to vote.

It’s a system, linked together through chains visible and invisible, and written down on parchment.

It’s how it infects everything, including the way Black and Latino hospitalizations and death are 2-3 times higher from COVID-19.

It’s about how we created a system meant to enforce a set of values. It’s about how the values were more important than what happened to the person the gun was pointed at or even the person holding the gun. It’s about fear used to preserve power for some at the expense of many.

It’s about grappling with the fundamental truth about who we have been as a country. It’s about how the phrase “this is not who we are” is so often an unwitting lie because of how our failures have outpaced our ideals. And how all of that prevents us from stopping the higher rate of Black death.

It’s watching certain political leaders in this country double down on disenfranchising Black and Latino voters even as the results of that centuries-old strategy are played out as murder in video after video, month after month. And how that’s a trauma on top of a trauma.

It’s about not being able to sort out which injustice you’re angry about today.

It’s about barely having time to mourn and grieve the mass murder of South Asian women at the hands of a misogynist fueled by his own supremacy before we’re plunged into another exercise in shared trauma.

It’s an endless parade of garbage excuses and narratives that try to tell us that unless you are middle class and white and working the right sort of job and usually a man then you deserve what you got because you didn’t act / look / raise yourself right.

It’s poverty, it’s white supremacy, it’s misogyny, and it’s violence as a means of allowing all of it.

It’s to preserve power over others, those whom our founding documents called less than.

It’s being tired of (as a Black woman I know put it yesterday) “performative sadness.”

It’s about finally acknowledging that anything less than a complete overhaul is a failure.

It’s about being already exhausted and not knowing where to start.

Repairing the cracks in our democratic foundations

What a year this week has been.

Our lives have been shaped by an almost daily shattering of norms. So much so that we can barely comprehend or contextualize what happened this week. The never-ending cycle of justifiable shock and outrage conditions us to set aside the physical and mental stress as quickly as we can, as a means of self-preservation.

As such, we have little reserve for facing an event of such consequence. We’re so relieved to see the storm has passed we can’t fully appreciate the damage it’s left in its wake or how it formed.

To put it another way, the foundations are still in place. We see the cracks but we’re content to note their existence for now because it’s all we can do. Fixing them seems like a task for another day.

I think about the people who say they support America, but co-signed, attended, or dog-whistled their support for a ground strike at its very heart: keyboard warriors in Facebook groups, local business leaders, even the very people we elected to uphold our democracy.

If you claim to love your country’s flag, how can you cheer (or raise your first in a salute!) for those who wish to disrupt the peaceful transition of power? Cherish the symbol, yes, but it means nothing if you don’t preserve the ideals for which it stands. There is no patriotism when your supposed defense of liberty and justice is carried out under a flag that stands for one man, not one nation.

Where is the support for “Blue Lives” when those men and women put their lives on the line to protect democracy? The silence of those who expressed anger at the broken windows of a shopping mall is conspicuous right now as the windows of the Capitol are shattered. Opposing the defunding of police, but supporting violence against them is merely support for extremism and disorder.

One lie follows another as so many try to cover their tracks with cries of “leftists!” or “Antifa!” as the “real” cause of this insurrection. So is it a true uprising in defense of a stolen election or is it a false flag operation? It can’t be both.

The chasm between their beliefs and their actions is wide and I wonder what bridge can be built to cross it.

I think about the number of people who’ve genuinely felt lost this past year, who have felt so helpless that they found comfort in convenient, but false narratives. It’s unimaginable that our federal government abdicated its role as protector, leaving it to states and cities to fight a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Yet it’s shaken our faith in leadership so much that we’ll believe anything that explains it. We want to feel better about our own yearning for escape or uncertainty.

“Ah ha! See? Our governor is…and our mayor is…how do I know? Well I saw this tweet…”

Lies now travel around the world three times and are made into memes before the truth gets its pants on.

All because our country has never lived up to the ideals of our sacred texts. Or that the power to decide how those ideals would live in the world was held within the powerful fists of a few as they crushed optimism and the franchise under their polished heels.

Real, meaningful change in people’s lives that they can see, feel, and experience only comes with power. It’s how we get past surface prejudice and polarization.

That’s the bridge.

I know we’re tired. We want things to be less fraught and frenzied. You deserve several days of a good night’s rest, a glass of ice water, and a healthy meal.

Because the cracks remain and we’re going to need your help to repair them when your reserves are replenished.

As I said last month:

We have to acknowledge that Trump was not the cause of our polarization and division. Like COVID-19, he took advantage of an environment starved for answers—one filled with mistrust, and prejudice. A divided society lacking a shared set of facts, beliefs, resources and goals. No common project.

The cracks were there, but Trump made them wider and deeper. He’ll soon be gone from the White House, but the cracks will remain.

Here’s the thing about cracks: the worst ones don’t start where you can see them. They start underground and weaken the foundations beneath us. Once we can see them, it’s too late.

What we saw this week were the cracks bursting through the ground. In a time when our national politics seems impossible to reconcile, our local politics goes on.

Real, meaningful change starts locally. Right now, there are people gearing up for local races in 2022 and 2023. They want to run against those who would turn a blind eye to power grabs. They want to fix the leaks that pour water in the cracks of our foundations.

Look no further than the question of who will be Speaker of the Illinois statehouse for an example of why we need to pay attention to state reps and senators, township boards, aldermen, and village mayoral races. All this consolidated power affects the redrawing of legislative districts, the effects of which ripple up and down the ballot. In Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County, those down-ballot races lead to a centralization of power for those who decide whether we get years of a status quo built on corruption or a new day.

Despite the efforts of some this week, we’ve given the Presidency, the House, and the Senate to people who want to fix the cracks in the foundation. Strengthening the norms in our local institutions builds support for these national efforts.

Get some sleep. Then take the energy you’ve spent paying attention to races happening on the other side of the country and bring it home. You may find it restores your faith in the power of government to help people. And your neighbors’ faith, too.

Image: “Cracked wall” by árticotropical is licensed under CC BY 2.0