The Elderly and Assumptions

When I taught freshman English at the University of Hawaii, I used to give the students a newspaper headline and asked them to tell me what they supposed the story was about. The headline was "Elderly Couple in Freeway Accident."

Most of them told me it would be about why more restrictions were needed for senior drivers since they were sure the senior driver was at fault. The wisest among them said they didn't know enough to form a conclusion, but that didn't stop the majority from forming opinions based, as they later admitted, on their own thoughts on the subject of who might be called "elderly."

The use of the word "elderly" is interesting because it's another one of those terms that are defined subjectively. AARP has snagged the word "senior" which they define as anyone over 55, to the great displeasure of those under 65 who wish to defer being called that. In fact, some "seniors" say they are offended when the first AARP magazine arrives in their mailboxes. I admit to being a little shocked myself, but I soon balanced it by realizing that all that had happened was I had entered the market demographic that AARP likes to target: those of us, it would seem, who have little to do except become "active seniors" on our way to choosing our pre-need burial sites and caskets.

I think my students learned something that day when I began to give them further details about the accident. I told them that the other driver involved was a teenager. I asked then what they assumed. They said the teen probably had other teens in the car and was texting and/or speeding. Boy--they were tough on their fellow teens.

Then I gave them the actual story, which involved a run-away truck that had clipped the teens' car and pushed them into the elderly couple's sedan, putting the couple into the hospital with serious injuries. My student's were chastened and I thought it was a great exercise in assumptions. Not to be beaten down, though, they became indignant over what they said was the newspaper misleading them. "Sorry, Chums," I said, "you can't blame it all on the media. You were there too."

I was thinking about this other day when I was reading an impassioned article in the Arizona paper about how politicians are "not listening" to the people. Well, I wanted to say, maybe it's because the people aren't worth listening to. If my students had been in charge, there would have been even more restrictions on drivers over 65 and on drivers under twenty, neither one of which would have made any difference to the accident as it happened. All the legislative mayhem and protests that might have followed would have been caused by jumping to conclusions and not taking the time to look at all the details.

I think this happens a great deal of the time. In my more cynical moments, I suspect the media do this in order to generate controversy and have something to report. I will say H1N1 and rest my case, although I could also point to the most famous case of all: Orson Welles and the radio broadcast about alien invasion. People died in the panic caused by that program.

Finding out what really matters takes time and most people, it seems, would prefer the comfort of unexamined assumptions that sound good on the surface and flatter whatever it is they think they already know, or at least fear. This tendency does not give me comfort when I consider it drives political forces in most democracies. My late husband used to say, "Every head a vote, no matter how empty."

I have my own assumptions about things, I will admit. I try to control them because I know better, but that doesn't stop me from assuming that politicans are for sale, that unregulated corporations and financial institutions will gamble with the national capital if it makes them short-term rewards, and that laws are fashionable rather than just (the latter opinion, expressed on a jury selection questionaire, made me the first potential jurist both defense and prosecution eliminated from the pool).

Maybe what we all need is good dose of distrust in what we are told and what we read.

Liberals, Conservatives and All That Jazz

I just finished reading Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, in which he tells the history of statistics and shows how we are inclined to find (and trust) patterns where there are none. Our illusions about significance, he says, blind us to how much chance rules our lives. In his crosshairs are, among other things, polls, wine ratings, sports scores, and the stock market.

This is the kind of book I love: rational, demonstrable, skeptical, and amused at the human ability to willingly delude ourselves into meaning where there is none.

While I enjoyed all the statistical blunders he describes (including the OJ trial), one of the founders of the field of statistics he discusses particularly interested me for another reason. This is one Thomas Buckle who wrote two volumes of a planned trilogy on European civilization from a statistical point of view. The third never materialized because he caught typhus in Damascus and died in 1841. This might be unexceptional except a doctor offered to treat him, an offer Buckle declined because the man was French. Therefore, as Mlodinow points out, Buckle died.

British xenophobia aside, I find myself imagining a modern counterpart: Mr. Buckle as a Republican choosing death over being treated by a Democrat.

While we may dismiss my musing as merely playful, I wonder if that’s not what has been happening in our politics. Rather than solve anything together, both parties would prefer to see the patient die while pointing the finger at one another and calling one another names.

This leads me to another musing: why has the word liberal become so vilified when the word conservative is just as culpable. Both words describe the outer edges of the bell curve Mlodinow describes. Statistically neither side of the statistical deviation has any claim to moral majority, liberals and conservative claim about 30% on each end, with the rest of us clumped somewhere in the middle. Yet the conservative deviation has set itself up to be the middle.

Conservatives, of course, are (primarily although not exclusively) Republicans who disapprove of the party and wish to distance themselves from policy decisions that are unpopular or difficult to defend. They claim it was Republicans (not conservatives) who allowed themselves to be bought and sold by corporate interests thus bringing on the corporate bailout; it was Republicans (not conservatives) who took the country to war on the basis of a flimsy excuse; and it was Republicans (not conservatives) who racked up a massive budget deficit.

Conservatives like to cherry pick the ideals of the party. They argue they are fiscally prudent, flag waving patriots, free enterprise supporters, and believers in free enterprise and American predominance in the world. Their banner holders are the new populists who promise to listen to the people (until corporate money starts pouring in). You must forgive my cynicism here as, being senior, I have seen so many protestations of political virtue dashed upon the rocks of opportunity.

I must admit I am no fan of liberals either when they display the same absolute behavior (and they do). That I find the moralistic posturing of the conservative right more annoying is really my own problem. My particular wrath is reserved for the invisible hand (and not Adam Smith's) that runs the government and country.

That invisible hand is not the marketplace but Big Business and Big Finance. I've talked before in this blog about how corporations are not governments and I am discouraged how many segments of the population simply cannot see the larger picture any more than they can see how their own behavior contributed to our meltdown.

Our gullible media (itself a corporation) does from time to time expose the corporate benefit behind the Middle East wars, yet the same people raising hell over lapel pins can find nowhere near the same anger against the financial manipulations that have robbed us of pensions and home values; in fact, they seem poised to vote back in the very same people who allowed the mayhem in the first place. I am confounded.

Corporate America will support conservative candidates because they will be less likely to regulate the financial markets; it does not take much to predict where they make the major contributions in their own interest. The recent Supreme Court decision means they have no limitations on their donations to political campaigns, so there will not be even the pretence of covert funding. Conservative candidates can be expected to reap a funding bonanza.

Given all this, I don’t understand why anyone would want to be called conservative, let alone choose that name for themselves, when it implies being a stooge for big money. Liberal is bad enough—but to be called conservative? I’d be pretty upset if someone tried to call me that.

Tea Parties and The Holy Land Experience

The sociologist in me is fascinated by the emergence of rival tea party factions in the midst of what pundits are calling a grassroots reform movement in the US. I'd love to believe that but I despair when I hear that the "rival" groups are actually being managed by an organization paid to consult for the Republican party and the two supposed factions are managed by offices next door to one another.

The cynic in me is really my own personal bullshit meter but now and then it is capable of becoming un-cynical (for want of a better word) until it finds evidence yet again of the inconsistency, corruption, and moral vacuity of a large part of the world. I'd love to believe that tea party people are really thinking for themselves, but I think it more likely that a bunch of people operating on enthusiams and unexamined assumptions about how the world should be are being manipulated yet again for somebody's profit.

Let me state here that I have nothing against the founding principles of the Reublican party. What I object to is how this party allows itself to be bought by corporations who have no interest in anything other than themselves and to be directed by a bunch of religious nuts. I could probably live with the corporations. They at least are not hyprocritical--they've made it clear from the start that all they're interested in is profit, which at least creates jobs. I cannot live with the religious mentality that goes to the Holy Land Adventure exhibit in Orlando and weeps at the reenactment of the crucifixion, complete with rock singers dressed in Arab clothing. "Come thrill to the Crucifixion, real blood!, talk to the Virgin Mary."

Yes, you must be saying, she watched Bill Maher's Reliculous. I did. It's slanted, it's no respector of unexamined belief, and it hits on the the most bizarre nonsense associated with all the world's major religions. I laughed. I looked on in horror. And I realized that we need to do more of what I call choosing to believe, with emphasis on the choosing rather falling down in awe before so-called authority. We don't need graven images these days when we have televised evangelicalism.

Those of you who have heard me hold forth on the subject of religion know I am not anti-religious if you define religion as spirituality. I am anti organized-religion where hypocritical hucksters create laws and ideas not in any Bible (as if a bunch of nomads living in the desert long before technology are really that authoritative), and use these phoney ideas to leech money from their followers. If humans are made in the image of their creator, surely they have enough sense to judge for themselves what they believe in. Are we so poverty stricken that we cannot accept our own spirituality unless someone is giving us the latest made-up laws to get into whatever we define as heaven.

America, Reublicans, Religionists, let's for heaven's sake get over this absolutism that has taken us by the necks and look at ourselves in the mirror. Your unexamined belief and willingness to wallow in a bath of emotion is paying off for someone or it would be promoted and enforced.

There are no answers. No one can give you the laws for living except in the most day to day forms. No one can promise you a heaven of your preference. You aren't going to get raptured up to heaven--no one is that lucky. If this world is destroyed it is not the creator who does it--it will be us.

A Pair of Recluses in Arizona

It’s been six months now since we made the decision to bring the travel trailer down to Phoenix, site it permanently in an RV resort, and turn ourselves into part-time snowbirds. During those six months, much has happened, including an offer to publish my second novel from a commercial publisher, and the end of the on and off decision making process by which I decided not to sell the Denver house just yet. But far and above has been the learning curve involved with becoming semi-gypsies.

I must admit that some of the learning curve was anticipated—living small and spare is different from living in a large suburban house with basement and crawl space into which to stuff things that have dubious immediate purpose and only a “maybe” future ahead of them. Storing the unnecessary in an RV is undesirable if not impossible, so what is not obviously essential finds its way to the well-stocked local thrift shop. I have six hangers in my little bedside closet and that—as they say—is that.

The more important learning curve has, however, has involved something more profound since it touches on who we are and, more definitely, who we are not.

When we started this adventure, we were open (for us) to breaking out of our conventions of social behavior. In other words, we started conversations with fellow campers and looked forward to participating in planned resort activities. There was a morning coffee group of older gents that suggested Sid would not be always looking at me as he drank his; there was a hiking group we both could join; and there were planned social events such as potluck dinners and breakfasts.

While we were happily imagining this world of social contacts, however, we forgot a basic component of the whole equation. We forgot that we were us.

The old gents coffee klatch turned out to be a morning bitch about politics (liberal, black president)and things that go wrong with RVs. A large percentage of the park residents turned out to be blue collar or retired small business owners with McCain-Palin stickers on their trucks. We were fortunate in finding the only other couple (we believe) who are middle of the road like us. They were classier than us—daring to have an Obama-Biden sticker on their truck—but the message to us is clear: Arizona is a red state, the RV is a red zone, and we don’t fit in.

The hiking group turned out to be a group of “getting to altitude and staying there” extreme hikers (extreme for a group of supposedly over 55 anyway). We went with them on the first hike, a fairly simple walk in Lost Dutchmen Park. Ordinarily this park has some of the most mellow walks in Apache Junction, but the group went at a fast clip and ostentatiously stopped for the stragglers (us) to catch up to them. We were holding them back and let us know it. We decided to go off on our own in future. Last time I looked, they went hiking on Picacho Peak south of Phoenix, which has a fixed rope because of the steepness, a trail so narrow around an outcropping that is has a wire cage to catch anyone sliding off, and a reputation for having “no mercy” on hikers. OK—glad we passed on that.

The social events were a study in insanity. No matter how early one arrived, the best tables were marked with post-its as being reserved. This practice was apparently approved since many of the attendees were returners and wanted to sit with friends made over a number of years. Same time next year has real meaning in the park.

Reserving tables ahead of time meant that newcomers without these associations were relegated to the left-over seats around the perimeter with no chance at meeting people. At New Year’s, we got there early only to crushed so tightly against a wall people had to get up to let us out, Even though we’d bought tickets, we left without eating.

The worst evening as far as I was concerned was the so-called Hawaiian night. It was potluck so I cooked a ten pound pork butt, haole kalua-pig style. It made a mound of shredded meat so huge I thought I’d have left-overs to bring home. I don’t know what the others thought was Hawaiian food (one lady brought a small bowl of hominy???) but whatever it was there wasn’t enough. The food ran out before the diners did, something that would never have happened in Hawaii because of the custom of generous sharing.

Then to make matters worse they had “Hawaiian entertainment,” consisting of clowning around in Dollar Store raffia skirts. I was so offended I gave a short demonstration of the few steps I knew to the song they were jumping around to. There’s a picture of me on the web now in which I look a complete and overweight idiot. To me what they were doing was as bad as making whooping sounds and claiming it to be American Indian.

So, we’re now back to being our usual socially reclusive selves. We’re enjoying the weather, the park is safe and convenient, and we’re doing what we want at our own speed but except for Bob and Lynda, we are by ourselves.

And we’re finding it quite all right.