A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud ￼

A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud

March 20, 2022 By David Griesing 2 Comments

It’s hard when you’ve been through a difficult time (like we all have since the coronovirus landed), finally feel that you’re coming out of it, and then discover that the promised relief has suddenly been snatched away. That’s how the last three months has felt: with the lull in vaccinations, the resurgence of the virus, and the lingering impact on schools, work and the ability to keep your chin up.

I’m writing this on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, and the recaps around that day have been everywhere. I mostly stopped paying attention after the wake-up-call of one of them, Frontline’s review of the terrorist attack and the fear and disasters that followed (right down to the botched evacuation from Kabul’s airport two weeks ago). Their documentary, America After 9/11, made this passage of time feel “all of a piece,” twenty years when I’ve felt that we’ve mostly spiraled downward as a country, both here at home and out in the wider world.

It only made the cloud that was pressing down already feel that much heavier.

In thinking about recent debacles, I often “follow the money” as I look for the culprits in a saga like these post 9/11 years have been: the sheer, staggering cost to all of us (in dollars) and for more than a few of us (in post-traumatic stress, dismemberment, addiction, and lives lost on the battlefield or to suicide).  For example, I realize that my daughter has known almost nothing other than these sad 20 years.

Perhaps numbed by these human costs, my alarm only escalated when I saw (as you saw) America leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars of vehicles, weapons, equipment, uniforms, indeed whole military bases when we departed from Afghanistan and nobody, nobody seemed to have made a list of it all so those of us who had paid for it knew we’d left behind, what it had cost us, and why we thought it was “Ok” to just pass it on to the Taliban.

Trillions of dollars were apparently spent in our foreign wars since 9/11. What does that level of spending even mean? It numbs the mind until you start breaking it down and realize that the cost of a single Humvee could support a family down the street (wherever you live “in our homeland”) for a year or more. No one seems to want the public of you and me to know the specifics beyond these unfathomable cost estimates—because then, presumably, someone would have to be held accountable, like you would a thief who’s gotten into your house (or shop or school) and is made to empty his pockets, one item at a time.

It’s a convenient slight of hand—this vaporous expense—because the industry behind the war machine we’ve abandoned near Kabul stands to become even richer if we “ditch the old stuff” and get to make a newer, shinier, even more expensive war machine the next time around.  Because after all, when we’re confronted with some new threat, we’ll say, as Americans always seem to say when we’re afraid: “Of course. Buy it. We’ll worry about whether we can afford it later.”

The cloud that presses down continues to grow as I appreciate how little discussion there’s been about this aspect of the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, indeed our abandonment of all our post 9/11 nation-building and democracy-exporting efforts. The cloud further discombobulates when I realize that we’ll do it all over again if we don’t pause, re-think and ultimately re-group very differently as a result of these misadventures.

Of all people, it was Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and U.S. president during much of the 1950’s—this man who helmed our last great war—who said it most eloquently, perhaps because more than almost anyone he knew what he was talking about and had the gumption and stature to speak the truth. Something brand new had come out of WWII, a military-industrial complex, that was bigger and more worrisome than any commander-in-chief or even government could control. If we’re not mindful (Eisenhower warned), this new war machine will jeopardize the health of our country and its brightest prospects in the future.

Eisenhower put his warning into his farewell address to the nation at the end of his term—literally his last important words to us as president, and surely his most prophetic.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society….
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Over the past 60 years, Eisenhower’s worst fears have largely been realized, their frightful impacts “economic, political, [and] even spiritual.”

Moreover, it bears noting that the military-industrial-complex has grown beyond the companies, consultants and influence peddlers that had already joined forces by the 1960s. For example, attempts are increasingly being made to integrate the Silicon Valley tech companies more closely into governmental functions like data capture, surveillance, cyber-security and cyber-warfare. (See “As Google, Microsoft and Amazon Seek Bigger Defense Role, Some are Leery,” an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday of last week.)

Of course, there are several reasons for the alarming rise of disruptive, profit-oriented “power centers” like this and similar ones that seem to always want to slow dance with our government. There are also reasons we never get around to pushing them away. The same pharmaceutical industry that rips the public off in most years comes to our rescue with a revolutionary vaccine—so it can’t be that bad. The military-industrial-complex (or MIC) that gorges itself on billion-dollar defense budgets saves us from more terrorist attacks after 9/11, so it too can’t be that bad.

These periodic reprieves make us (and our elected representatives) seem to forget all the bad stuff for a while and we never find the will to do all the post-mortems that we (and they) should also be conducting–like why prescription drugs are orders-of-magnitude cheaper in Canada or Mexico, or why the entire American government seemed to be hoodwinked into the Iraq war by “weapons of mass destruction.” Any impetus for reigning in these industries seems to be undermined by their occasional but far-too-expensive star-turns as “national saviors.”

Moreover, a megadon like the MIC operates in and provides high-paying jobs in every US city, state and territory. Because it’s a manufacturing and job machine too, it makes regular and generous campaign contributions to every elected official where it operates as “a cost of doing business,” or, more accurately, as “a cost to keep the business coming.”  Since most elected officials easily spend as much time fund-raising as governing, there are powerful financial incentives to refrain from “biting the hand that feeds them” and even cutting the MIC back down to where it already was when Eisenhower rang his alarm bell.

The difficulties of “oversight and management” of the MIC are further compounded by two other factors, locked without end into their own, counterproductive back-and-forth.

Millions of Americans work in companies that contribute to our seemingly perpetual war efforts (indeed, a few of you might be reading this now). Once again, it feels like “biting the hand that feeds you” to question the implications of your work, at least until your son comes home from war with traumatic brain injuries or you’re shocked into wondering “how it was all worth it” while watching something like our sad retreat from Kabul two weeks ago.

But even then, even with personal or citizen-based horror about the MIC’s impacts, the impetus to do something about it, to complain or protest, to agitate for a different way of conducting America’s affaris, is undermined (somewhat) by self-interest—it’s my paycheck, after all—but even more so by fear:  fear that if “I” want our country to spend less, do less, dismantle the-worst-of-the-MIC, then when the next national security threat appears (because of course it will, and of course we won’t be ready for it), “I’ll” be blamed for wanting us to cut back on our so-called “defensive and offensive capabilities”—like failing to manage a winning football team effectively. This vague concern about complicity silences the better angels that tell us: surely, there are higher motivations than fear that WE COULD AND SHOULD be responding to as individuals, as communities and as a country.

It all seems too big to do much more than stew about. But isn’t awareness that you’re a drunk or an addict (with the MIC as your fear-reducing drug) the first step towards a cure?

Despite new news cycles about virus patients triaged in Idaho hospitals or our kids being afraid to go back to school, I’ve been trying to linger over the SYSTEMIC imbalances (I think the word is right when used here) that the military-industrial-complex has introduced into my life and work because it seems to me that much of my life and work would have been different (and better) these past 20 (or more) years if we’d been working to achieve different priorities as a country—priorities with aspirations like the moon-landing a few years after Eisenhower spoke—instead of whatever shell-game we’ve been playing ever since.

Awareness of how our national treasure and bandwidth are being spent is, I think, the first step towards choosing to spend these scarce commodities more judiciously.

For example, some of us want to de-fund the police to allocate energy and resources to other community priorities. I think it’s far more complicated than that because police departments are (among many other things) just the tip of the MIC iceberg.  All you need to prove it is to see local police departments like ours in Pennsylvania taking to the streets with military grade equipment that they’ve gotten as surplus from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we’re fighting, and shouldn’t be fighting, is all around us.

_{Pennsylvania police departments have received more than $6 millionin military ordinance over the past few years.}

I’m writing about this particular cloud today because, eventually, we’ll learn how to manage Covid-19 more effectively and because our 24/7 news cycles suddenly stopped covering the incompetent way that we just evacuated ourselves out of our country’s longest war. Our whole, sad, 20-year experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, from beginning to bitter end, merits enough of our attention to reach at least the beginnings of a judgment—and maybe, several judgments about it.

I think our experience requires following the money and wondering whether the priorities we’ve been financing are really worth as much as we’ve been paying (economically, politically and even spiritually) for them: because in a world of limits, if you’re paying for one thing you’re NOT paying for some thing else—and bearing the opportunity costs.

As I sat down to write to you yesterday, on 9/11, my plan was to acknowledge the cloud I’ve been operating under (that maybe you have been operating under too) for the past month or so and point in a more optimistic direction. I wanted to look back with you from 2050 and glimpse the world that even now we’re beginning to create to meet the demands of a healthier, more sustainable planet. (Instead, I’ll do that next Sunday, in a Part 2-post.) But as you’re suspecting from my shift from the objectives of a military-industrial-complex to those of a carbon-reduced environment, our priorities will need to change as we stumble towards a different and more necessary future.

In the meantime, we’ll start to confront our financial limits, how much we can put on the credit card without a pay-off, what we can and cannot afford. Even in a fear-inducing world, a free society can only afford so much security—and, after all is said and done, HOW MUCH MORE SECURE DO YOU FEEL in the wake of our government’s flushing trillions of your dollars away? If we’re serious about healing our home-planet, we’ll have to “right-size” the military-industrial-complex that purports to protect our corner of it.

There’s simply no alternative.

It will be a messy, polarizing discussion, two steps forward and one back, with gridlock for years at a time (because that’s what a democracy does), but a debate about our biggest most expensive priorities may already have begun at the Kabul airport—and the more voices that join in that debate the better.

Follow where the money’s been spent and where new dollars are going. Priorities are realized with budgets and by those with the wisdom to guide those budgets into accountable actions.

The debate that we’ve been needing to have for at least 60 years may finally be getting started.

(By the way, the illustration up top of a human under a cloud, was created by Simone Golob.)

This post was adapted from my September 12, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

For the Birds

January 5, 2022 By David Griesing 3 Comments

I’d be lying if I told you that the first sounds I hear when I take Wally out in the morning are bird sounds. Instead, it’s the soft roll of tires on one of the streets that crisscross my neighborhood or urban beats booming louder than seems possible behind the windows of a passing car. But especially when it’s early enough, those sound-trails tend to fade into a quiet distance before too long, and the next things I usually hear are the local birds.

This time of year it can be the urgent squawking of Canadian geese, formed in a vee directly above us, after leaving the reservoir nearby and heading north by north-east in their annual migration. Or the tittering sparrows and wrens. But it can also be our talkative crows. They live in social groupings that have been called “murders” for as long as anyone can remember. While many explanations have been given, it seems that their name originated in folklore when many animal groups were described for dramatic effect by their characteristics, like an ostentation of peacocks, a parliament of owls, a knot of frogs, or a skulk of foxes.

Crows are highly social, mate for life, protect one another (including unfamiliar crows that are looking for help), and vocalize by using upwards of 250 different calls. This last character trait may actually go some distance towards explaining why crows are called a “murder” when they start chattering. Informal English has always accused the lower classes of “murdering” the common tongue.

Until a huge tree fell from an old neighbor’s yard and onto the new one’s next door, the resident murder would roost in its canopy and converse for hours. Wally would bark back at them when he was out and I’d also say “hello” if I thought of it. I’ve come to appreciate that our crows know exactly who we are and that we’re in some kind of conversation with them too.

Since they’ve been particularly noisy this week, their chatter made me take a second look at a book I read and reviewed here this time last year: Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, a word that means an object or, in this instance a story. with an infinite number of sides. McCann’s book is about the endless conversations, memories and illuminations that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, how those relevancies and asides add dimension to a dialogue between two real-life fathers (one Israeli, one Palestinian) who has each lost a daughter to the murderous violence and struggles to transcend his loss. In the jumble of images, fables and impressions that he assembles, McCann continuously returns to the birds who also live in this elemental place, or pass through it on their annual migrations. “Our” crows made me want to re-revisit their stories-within-stories.

For example, this is the third of “the thousand-and-one” (or endless) digressions and reflections that make up Apeirogon:

Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.
It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels of sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.
Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, by-pass roads.
Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.
At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.
Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremian monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, traveling in their talkative lanes.
They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers.

You see, the birds also get caught up in the violence that inflicts this corner of the Levant, one of the birthplaces of the human world. But at the same time, they give wing to the aspirations that can also emerge from the grief of many of those who live there today.

_{Two bird masks that I bought, several years ago, from a couple of backpackers who had set up shop in an Upper-West Side parking lot, just back from Latin America and financing their return to life in NYC.}

It’a probably not “five hundred million birds” in Apeirogon‘s migrating sky anymore. While the enormous bio-diversity loss is not what preoccupies me most about birds this morning (it’s more their soaring possibility), the decline in their numbers is still alarming.

For example, in 1970 there were nearly 3 billion more birds in North America than there are today, a decline of nearly a third. It’s impossible to wrap one’s head around a number like that, easier to simply notice how many fewer birds you’re hearing or seeing wherever you are today. They’re another of our dwindling resources.

Confronted by murder on this scale, I always want to go beyond noticing and “do” something about it. But as I learned (and reported here) after listening to a couple of wildlife experts, the next time I come upon, say, a baby bird who’s out of its nest, it’s better, almost every single time, to assume that it’s fine, that mom knows exactly where it is, and that it will be happier and far less afraid without my “help.” Usually, the better lesson is to simply notice, or to double-down on what I’m already noticing about the world I’m trying to inhabit: like how much it’s worth to me knowing that the birds I’m encountering already know about good parenting and that maybe what I need to do most “in order to save them” is to understand them better and appreciate them enough.

Which is why I wanted to share with you a groundbreaking tool that, for the first time, enables us to identify the birds that are still around us by their songs and other forms of vocalizing. A bird-song identifier that’s as accurate as this one has never been generally available before.

Over the summer, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology released its Merlin Bird ID app, which enables its users to identify some 400 North American birds (and counting) by the sounds that they make. According to one armchair reviewer, the app doesn’t claim to be 100% accurate, but “it comes very close.” It’s developers relied on a crowd-sourcing initiative that continues to draw upon a database of notes and recordings contributed by tens of thousands of citizen scientists through the Lab’s eBird Initiative. In what Fast Company called “a Shazam for bird songs,” the Merlin app turns a Babel of voices into one-on-one concerts that tell you exactly who’s playing a particular instrument.

I couldn’t agree more with that armchair reviewer when she wrote: “Love can’t save the environment, but when enough voters fall in love [with pieces of it like this], they can surely shift the political winds….”

We can’t fall in love with what we’re unaware of, or know almost nothing about.

_{When I was 3 or 4, I took this book with me on the first vacation I can remember, beginning with our drive from Connecticut to Florida. Along the way, I tried to match the birds I was seeing outside our car with the pictures in the book, but I still remember how hard it was to never know (except for the robins and the crows) whether I had gotten it right.}

While falling in love with birds again or for the first time are two of “the why’s” behind the Merlin app, here are some other things that are worth knowing about it.

You can find out more about the app, including where to download it for use with your smart phone, here.

You’ll need to be outside when using it. After opening the app, once you hear a bird talking or singing, choose “Sound ID” in the menu and hit the microphone button. You will immediately begin to see a “spectrogram” of sound waves scrolling across your phone screen, effectively “taking a picture” of its vocalizing. By using its algorithms to compare that picture with others in its database, the app will provide you with the bird’s identity. Clicking “This is my bird” after recording the date and their geographical location will save the sighting and share its specifics with the underlying database to improve the app’s future performance—effectively turning all app users into data gatherers and collaborators.

Using another feature in the app called the Bird ID Wizard comes at bird identification more incrementally. It asks you three questions about the bird you’re hearing (and hopefully seeing) before narrowing the likely possibilities: what size is it, what are its principal colors, and where did you see it (e.g. at a birdfeeder, on the ground, soaring or flying?). The app then provides you with a list of possible matches, which you can narrow further by using Sound ID or by taking and uploading a picture of the bird you’re seeing. The Wizard feature expands on the specifics you notice along the way to your identification and introduces you to other birds making similar sounds, adding more layers to your appreciation and to the thousand-and-one stories that you’re telling yourself about the birds around you.

Finally, if all of this listening and looking has peaked your interest even further, there is ebird, an inter-related app that feeds and utilizes the same database of bird sounds. With ebird, it’s possible to share your most unexpected sightings with an extensive community of birdwatchers as well as to track the sightings that others have had of particular birds you’ve become interested in.

This last adjunct to bird song ID reminds me that as winter approaches, neighbors of mine will be conducting their annual bird census. They ask people with birdfeeders like me whether they can observe what’s happening in my yard and whether I’ve been seeing any unusual visitors this year. These are the folks who came long before the Merlin app but are likely a part of its data gathering now. They’re invested in noticing as much as they can about the birds around here during a barren time when leaving seeds for them brings them closer, makes them more visible, and encourages them to keep us company.

Particularly as the days get shorter and colder and the overall muck of daily life starts to pull you down. it may be as good a time as any to let the wing’d updrafts and cacophony of bird sounds help to lift you up too.

This post was adapted from my October 24, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Having a Plan Turns Bystanders into Helpers

October 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“If those around him had known how to intervene to stop him, it would never have gotten to this point,” someone might have said about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently.

I wasn’t expecting to write about bystander interventions today, but was jarred (as many were) by the longstanding accommodation of Cuomo’s harassment. His temper, directed at everyone in his orbit, was a common secret. Like Churchill once said about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Cuomo was apparently another “bull who brings his own china shop with him.” But in addition to the tolerance that those around him had for his temper tantrums, Cuomo’s groping and touching were also common knowledge. Many around him knew he was grabby with women, but none of them intervened to stop him (or protect him from himself), so apparently it became “the way that things were for years” if you were in the Governor of New York’s orbit.

The longstanding tolerance for Cuomo’s conduct reminds me of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long run of predatory behavior in Hollywood. Like Cuomo, those in Weinstein’s sphere of influence were afraid of crossing him because they relied on the power of his support and feared the wrath that might jeopardize it. Too many came to feel that accepting Weinstein’s abuse was the price of admission. And because (like Cuomo) the power disparities between Weinstein and almost everyone else were so profound, “the way he acted” became an open secret, widely known and effectively normalized, while he continued to groom his prey and damage more lives.

Because so many in the entertainment business “knew about Harvey,” those who were “in on the joke” regularly got to have an uncomfortable laugh when somebody (usually a comedian) had the gumption to drag the stinking truth onstage.

As reported by one outlet after his first accusers got press coverage, the finger pointing had been ongoing in mainstream comedy for years. For example, Weinstein’s behavior was a punchline in the TV show “30 Rock,” where the character played by Jane Krakowski says in one episode: “I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions out of five.” And while announcing actress nominees for an Oscar in 2013, comedian and comedy writer Seth MacFarlane joked in front of Weinstein himself, the rest of those in the “live” audience, and the 40 million people viewing on TV: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” As time goes on, we’ll probably hear about the jokes that staffers and favor-seekers in Albany were telling one another about Cuomo too, instead of doing anything more than laugh among themselves about it or cringing in a corner as he headed their way.

Part of what was so compelling here was the high visibility of Weinstein’s and Cuomo’s misconduct. After all, they were acting out their dark fantasies in Hollywood and the Empire State, with their wall-to-wall press coverage, enterprising scoop-hunters, and hangers-on with blackmailing agendas. Yet for both of them, it took years and a long trail of victims before collective action started to puncture their skeevy underbellies.

Clearly, some basic checks and balances were missing in the workshops that Weinstein and Cuomo once dominated.

Clearly, far too few at their stratified elevations knew how to inoculate their workplaces from the diseases that undermined them, along with every individual who worked with these two and tacitly permitted their misconduct.

Clearly, Weinstein/Cuomo/comedians Bill Cosby and Louis CK/artist Chuck Close/ former House Speaker Dennis Hastert/former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick/former Olympic gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nassar/all those victimizers in the American military who continue to act with impunity towards their subordinates: each of them was or is enabled by others in their reigns of terror, and it was more than their closest victims that lost something of value by not having healthier places to work before “what almost everybody seemed to know already” finally became unacceptable.

In the wake of the report about Governor Cuomo by New York’s attorney general in early August, there was a brief interview with an employment law professor named Marcia McCormick about redesigning employee training and reporting systems to fight sexual harassment in the workplace. What caught my attention was the interview’s focus on “activating bystanders” who already knew about the harassment so they could join in the fight against it.

This angle in the discussion could be traced back to a 2016 report by the EEOC (or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) which insisted that victims were not the only ones who needed to know the rules about workplace harassment and discrimination; every employee needs to be empowered to challenge both perpetrators and their fellow employees to drive predatory conduct out of the workplace. Said Professor McCormick:

[B]ystander training in particular is very effective, to allow co-workers [of the person being harassed or discriminated against] to intervene in ways that are not [as] risky to them…[W]hen people complain about discrimination against themselves…they are perceived to be whiners. Their complaints are sometimes not taken seriously…[but] when a person advocates on behalf of another, that usually doesn’t happen…[R]eporting by a bystander doesn’t trigger the same kind of psychological backlash and potential for retaliation that the person who experiences it might.

Moreover, when all employees are trained to recognize, intervene and demonstrate their solidarity with targets of illegal behavior, they are better able to disrupt new overtures before they happen and help victims to report and gain more backing from fellow workers afterwards.

A 2018 article in Harvard Business Review acknowledges that empowering an entire workforce like this is a lengthy and difficult task (far more so than having “a canned training session” and an employer’s checking “the legal liability box” afterwards) but when executed properly, empowerment training almost immediately begins to deter likely perpetrators, from the boss’s office on down. This is how one expert described the root problem that needs confronting to the article’s author:

Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in bystander interventions, told me about an all-too-familiar scenario: Say there’s a lecherous guy in the office — someone who makes off-color jokes, watches porn at his cubicle, or hits on younger workers. Everyone knows who he is. But no one says anything. Co-workers may laugh uncomfortably at his jokes, or ignore them. Maybe they’ll warn a new employee to stay away from him. Maybe not. ‘Everybody’s watching, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So the message the perpetrator gets is, My behavior is normal and natural,’ Stapleton said. ‘No one’s telling him, I don’t think you should do that.’ Instead, they’re telling the new intern, ‘Don’t go into the copy room with him.’ It’s all about risk aversion — which we know through decades of research on rape prevention, does not stop perpetrators from perpetrating.

Once again, when the bystanders aren’t empowered to act, harassing and discriminatory behavior is “normalized” in the same way that rape or child abuse is normalized when the family where it’s happening pretends that it’s not.

Enabling bystanders, the author writes, “is leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

_{A still from the 1985 movie, Witness}

Because I’m sometimes unable to act on my best (or even better) impulses when confronted with something that seems wrong, I spent a lot of ink in early book drafts considering how any of us might do a better job of it.

From behavioral studies that delved into the mechanics of helpful intervention, it seems that the cure for bystander inertia comes in two doses: already having a better plan in mind before the unacceptable happens and seizing the occasions to act on your plan when it does.

The deeper I dug, the more I appreciated how visualizing the path we want to take before being called up to act almost always improves our responses. It’s the difference between being ready when the time comes versus having to make up what you’ll do (or far more commonly, refrain from doing) on the spot. But this requires preparation. You have to want to act in a certain way—like treating others in the same compassionate way that you hope they’d treat you in similar circumstances—so you’ll make the effort to devise a plan that you’ll already have it in your pocket when the need arises.

If it’s really as simple as that, why weren’t more people in Weinstein’s or Cuomo’s or other predatory orbits—and why aren’t more onlookers of “bad stuff” generally—able to follow their better angels and intervene to stop (or at least help in stopping) the damage that they’re witnessing?

In my case, I’ve usually been delusional enough to imagine that “I’ll be as brave as my best hopes” when I’m called upon by circumstance to right some wrong, or stand up for somebody who needs my help. Unfortunately, whenever I’m surprised by the need to intervene in a bad situation, I usually find it easier to fret about my skill set, whether I want to get involved or have enough time, or if someone else is in a better position than I am to step in and make a difference. In other words, my hoped-for better self usually never shows up and I end up making lame excuses to explain to whomever’s listening why I failed to do much of anything at all.

In research I did at the time, I learned that it doesn’t have to be this way, that even considering my thoughts and feelings more deeply in advance of witnessing, say, sexual harassment at work or one stranger being tormented by another, would likely have enabled far better responses on my part.

One study I found had some of the study participants attend a lecture on the ethics around rescue and the bystander effect (where they’d presumably imagined their own responses to various situations) and other study participants who missed that lecture, before all of them encountered a stranger who’d actually fallen and couldn’t get up outside the lecture hall. While the scenario was staged by the study’s authors, its findings were not: 43% of those who’d just attended the lecture ended up coming to the victim’s aid, while only 25% of bystanders in the study who’d missed the lecture stopped to offer their help. It’s a resonant statistical difference between those who already knew something about overcoming bystander reluctance and those who never may have thought about it at all. (Notwithstanding these findings, I still recall being surprised and disappointed by the fact that only 43% of the lecture goers actually stopped to apply what they’d just supposedly learned!)

Another study revealed that even taking a relatively minor step “in the right direction” (beyond just learning more about it and imaging how you might act beforehand) makes an additional difference in determining how you’ll act or fail to act going forward. This tendency was demonstrated by an experiment in which some teenagers pledged to remain virgins until marriage while others in the study were never given the option to make such a pledge. Given teenage hormones, It doesn’t seem like much of a commitment, but this study found that those who took the pledge had sex much less often than the non-pledgers. Indeed, even the non-pledgers who said in advance that they supported abstinence before marriage ended up having sex far more frequently than their pledge-taking peers. In other words, even as small an act as making a verbal commitment tended to reinforce attitudes and lead to behavior that was consistent with one’s helpful intentions going forward.

To test this behavioral guidance system—and to pay-it-forward on behalf of all who had came to my assistance over the years when my car has broken down on a busy road—I did some of my own committing in advance. The next time I saw a car broken down in traffic, its driver in distress and I could pull over safely to help, I promised do so. I rehearsed the likely scene in my mind, and a couple of months later the opportunity presented itself.

A woman outside of her car was being confronted by an angry truck driver during rush hour on North Broad Street in Philadelphia after an apparent collision. I could and did pull over and offered her my assistance which, after some initial surprise (who is this white guy in a suit offering to help me?), she ended up being visibly grateful for.

Without an action plan, I would likely have found a dozen excuses for not stopping. Once I acted, I knew even better what I’d do the next time, the likely range of emotions I’d feel while intervening, and the best part, how I’d feel afterwards—which was genuinely enabled. On the other hand, without a plan of action beforehand, my hopes alone about being a helper would likely have left me at the bystanding sidelines.

When we want to, it’s not so hard to empower ourselves towards helpful action.

It’s not so hard to train ourselves to help confront the Weinsteins and Cuomos who can end up dominating our worklives by finding ways to move in a constructive way beyond the “common secrets” and “inside jokes” about the boss or “that guy over there” or the touchy-feely holiday party.

It’s learning about the bystander inertia that naturally holds us back by plotting our ways to helping when the need arises.

Maybe when more of us make this commitment, there will be enough people in every workplace who are ready, willing and able to intervene on behalf of victims who will almost never be vindicated when standing alone.

This post was adapted from my August 8, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do

August 17, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve always wondered: how did somebody I meet end up doing the job (or jobs) that they’re doing? After many of these exchanges, the most telling answers always seem to involve early preferences that they’d chosen to act upon.

It’s what you preferred to do when you were bored, where you turned “to make something” when inspired, or the ways you reacted when you’re put in an uncomfortable spot. These decisions reveal almost instinctual affinities, the pull of your strongest magnets. Almost always, they’re more intuitive than rational and you end up trusting them enough to turn them into springboards.

Recent evidence has helped to confirm this hypothesis.

Some family members and friends of Bo Burnham repeatedly made fun of him as a kid. They were amused that he acted “kind of gay” and, by way of response, he proclaimed some of his work-defining preferences not by starting a diversity workshop on his front porch (signaling his flowering desire for a career in HR) or by researching “conversion camps” he might attend (sensing the power of immersive experiences to improve himself and the gravitational pull of maybe working for an investment bank or a major law firm one day). No, Burnham didn’t respond by doing either of these things.

Instead, he reacted to the hurt or alarm he felt by leaning into his family member’s and friends’ conformist attitudes and spoofing them (along with his role in triggering their intolerance) in videos he made in his childhood bedroom, posting them on YouTube, and writing the first chapter of what was to become his viral success story.

Burnham’s early-and-often preference for turning uncomfortable situations into comedy—and then sharing his unexpected point of view as widely as possible—had a kind of apotheosis two weeks ago when his Netflix special called Bo Burnham: Inside (about his discomfort at having to relieve his isolation during the pandemic through the screens of his devices) received 6 Emmy Award nominations only six weeks after it was first released (which on top of everything else has to be some kind of record) however terrific it frequently was.

I didn’t know Burnham before watching his comedy special but almost immediately wanted to know how he first set sail for the strangely hilarious harbor he was sharing with us. Still in his early teens, filming his reactions to other people’s judgments in his bedroom, and then wanting to get his response to as many people as possible—Burnham had been drawn to blaring situational comedy like a moth to a flame before he could probably explain it. And when he was pulled in that direction, he proceeded to act upon “what that little inside voice” was telling him to do. Now that voice had been given what some might call The Ultimate Amplification.

Because at least half of my work today is writing about work, I often ask people I encounter “how they happened to get into…,” and not infrequently, I hear stories about childhood affinities and the aptitudes that helped to further them. Discounting the occasional savvy marketer who has built an “engaging origin story” around his or her subsequent success, there plainly seems to be more than mere coincidence in the “follow-your-early- preferences” Theory of Workplace Fit. In addition to everyone else that I’ve heard from, it surely applies to my career choices, including what family members and random observers told me “I should do when I grow up” once they had a sense of where I was telling them (subliminally of course) that I was headed.

So on Friday morning, after I’d listened to an interview with a neuroscientist who’d wanted to be either a professional dancer or a scientist as a kid—and then heard him say that the same brain circuits which enable the birds he studies to vocalize may also enable both humans and birds to dance—I knew that I’d be writing to you today about his preference-driven origin story.

Was it a coincidence, or something far deeper, that brought him to a career fork between “obviously dissimilar” jobs early on, but found him discovering, at mid-career, that he’s always been interested in (and his preferences had always somehow involved) investigating the mechanics that make both of these jobs possible?

_{Illustration by Maiken Scott for the Bird Song episode of her podcast.}

The interview with Erich Jarvis (who is a professor at Rockefeller University studying the neurobiology of vocal learning) was on a podcast called The Pulse. The tagline for the pod describes it as “an adventure into unexpected corners of the health and science world,” and since I listen fairly often, I can report that in terms of “adventure” and “unexpected” it often delivers, and certainly did this week.

Jarvis concentrates his research on how birds produce song with the broader aim of finding solutions to human speech disorders in the ways that certain song birds, including parrots and hummingbirds, learn how to sing by imitating other birds and the real world sounds that they encounter. As he delves into the brain circuitry that enables these birds to “learn” their speech patterns, he hopes to find ways that can enable similar circuits (or molecular pathways) in the human brain to fire again as intended once they’ve broken down.

As the interview unfolded, I learned that Jarvis grew up in New York City. His mom was a gospel singer and his dad a musician with a deep curiosity about science. Encouraged by their artistic inclinations, he became a dance major at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City, leading to internships at the Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Alley Dance Company. Notwithstanding his talent as a dancer, Jarvis recalled his deepening fascination with science, which he took from both his father and a high school biology course. On the eve of college, he wondered if he might make more of a difference to others as a scientist than as a dancer. He chose the path of science of course but made a point of mentioning that he still dances as much as he can, including in the studio that he maintained in his apartment during the pandemic-related shutdowns in New York.

Elaborating on his research, Jarvis mentioned a couple of widely-viewed video clips featuring performing birds on line. He told us that one of them, featuring a parakeet named Disco, illustrated how birds can learn to mimic surprisingly complex speech patterns. As with all birds and animals that have learned how to mimic, they do so by storing sounds they have heard in their auditory memories, transferring these sound cards through a motor pathway to their voice boxes (a syrinx in birds, a larynx in humans), hearing themselves vocalize, and then practicing until their memories and their voices are aligned—in a sensory feedback loop. When I got to check it out, I had to admit that Disco’s feedback loop was, indeed, pretty amazing.

But then Jarvis made his own surprising disclosure: “Only species that can learn how to imitate sound can learn how to dance.” Apparently, in Jarvis’s corner of of the scientific community, interest in this possible overlap was only piqued after a cockatoo named Snowball was seen by millions dancing to the Backstreet Boys and revealing, among many other things, how clickbait can have entirely unintended consequences once it finds its own feedback loop.

During the scientific debate that Snowball triggered, Jarvis said that he began to extrapolate from what he had already learned about the neurocircuitry of vocalizing animals and humans.

Are there specialized connections that take sound from the ears and integrate them into the brain circuits that control the muscles of the body, [stimulating not only the vocal cords in animals and birds, but also other responses in their bodies]? If those specialized connections and genes that control those connections are the same ones that gave rise to the spoken language circuit…it would suggest that the mechanism of learning how to dance [actually] came from language. What’s interesting about this is that some cultures don’t distinguish dance from music.

Jarvis’s podcast interview never direcly linked this hypothesis to his own career fork in high school, or to the fact that the same mind-body connections might be integral to both of them. Instead, the coincidence (or congruence) just floated about in the ether for a few seconds before his interview ended.

I tend to think there is something behind most coincidences, in this instance how genes and environmental factors may have embedded the career preferences that Jarvis had in high school far more deeply than he ever could have known for sure.

I think the good work of his life—as prefigured by his early preferences for dance and science—may have always been about the drive to discover how his mind, was telling his body, what it should do.

The image up top is of a 2006 painting by David Hockney called “Wheat Field Beyond the Tunnel,” one of many paintings he’s done of paths in rural England and what lies beyond them.

This post was adapted from my July 25, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Giving Part of Taking Other People’s Pictures

June 14, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.

I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.

In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?

What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?

(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)

Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?

Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.

A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.

My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.

Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

*_{A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007}*

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers. While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:

Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?

Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied.

Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.

As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.

What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses. As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea.

For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera?

My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.

In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras.

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation,

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

*_{Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.”}*

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”

Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity.

Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

_{Here’s a gentleman I’d just purchased something from at the annual flea market.}

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week?

Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?

Yes, probably.

But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.

Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.

It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one.

+ + +

(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.