We are losing a generation of kids and have not long to fix it.

The "Long Winter" of lockdowns and Pandemic deaths has been followed by the worst Cold Spell since the 1980s - at least here in Missouri. This is exposing a horrible mistake. Once the infrastructure for "Online School" was in place educators now have a new option ready for days of inclement weather or whatever. My district calls these "A.M.I." days, Alternative Means of Instruction. 

 Whatever this means in theory, in practice it is this: 1) At 5:44 a.m. Parents get an email that their child will not be in school. Parents are also supposed to not just ensure their child is clothed/fed/sheltered but will need to take on the full time task of aiding their student with assignments and policing their student to get their assignments done. 2) Instead of instruction, the teacher will send a link to a video or a text to read and perhaps a quiz that the student is supposed to self-instruct themselves on. This is, of course, not adequate for instruction and this is the very reason why teachers and schools exist. 3) The teachers will then grade/judge the untaught/unsupported student's work as a failure and perhaps report the parent to some kind of secret police list or whatever happens when your child fails. 

 This allows the school to not take a "Snow Day" and not add a day to the school year in the Summer and all it costs is the loss of a day of the child's developmental success and the mental health of the working parents. Snow days were fine - they were better - we need to return to this as soon as possible. An email saying "Read this chapter" is not the same thing as an hour in class. It is not a substitute or even an acceptable facsimile. This is my new crusade and I am reaching out to my school district ASAP. An entire Generation of children are being failed by the horrible idea that interacting with a glowing rectangle can be a full substitute for the entire community of people that make a child's education. We made this policy, we can unmake it. We need to.

Childhood, Meaning, Reality and Cyberpunk

Warning:  Rambling without much insight ahead

It's early 2021 and I am in a short gap between managing technology and people for the Decennial Census and supporting tax software for Intuit helping as a large number of people want to make sure stimulus is properly accounted for or claimed (if it wasn't processed).  My wife is about to fly off to the East Coast to help with critical care during the pandemic for a month and it's very clear that the current events of the world impact our lives.   I'm glad I can work from home as my boys are still in some modified pandemic schedule for school, even if working with financial software isn't some aspirational goal. Sometimes it's easy to feel like we are adrift on bigger currents - not the masters of our own ships. 

I have had some time to do more - but the pandemic makes doing more with other people irresponsible.  The local health department states getting a vaccine for the general population isn't likely in Missouri until May.... so here we are, entertaining ourselves at home.

I've started reading fiction again and gaming again and two things from 2020 I am enjoying are Cyberpunk 2077 and Ready Player Two.  These have both been in the works for some time and show signs of a work that had its vision change as the thing came to be.  Ready Player Two is a sequel to a novel written in 2011 and Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development since 2013.  Both have some kind of theme of returning to childhood, the meaning of those memories in how they shape who we are and how we interpret the world.  

I'm writing this after reading about how the Ready Player Two's protagonist is perplexed by the idea that despite living in ridiculous luxury and comfort he feels the need to re-create his childhood of sleeping in a laundry room in the impoverished conditions he came from, how he needs to memorialize the little places of respite he had carved out in his harsh world.  I'm writing this after a Cyberpunk side character takes you underwater to her childhood town where she was raised in humble conditions by her grandparents in some little community with one diner, one school, etc... and she has this moment where she describes local burgers as too greasy, too big... but to childhood me it was the best thing I had ever eaten and these sentiments are resonating with me.

My childhood had... swings... moments of plenty and comfort and moments where the adults in my life took efforts to keep me from worrying about how uncertain things were. There were times where you knew all the adults around you wanted you in their lives and times where some of them clearly did not. I had great parents who made good, if tough, choices 90% of the time and grandparents who were a blessing for any child to have in their lives.  I spent a Summer with my grandmother in the Ozarks in a home that was essentially one big room, I lived in one of the most dangerous zip codes in America in the 90s, and I also spend much of the 80s in what one of my friends called "A mansion".  My parents each were/weren't in parts of my life growing up a and I would like to thing this has given me a more complete view of being human than I could have had. 

A ridiculously happy memory for me is playing "no equipment" tackle football in a fenced in yard with glass bottles and wrappers on Cypress and Kensington with about 8 kids from the neighborhood and just not caring about much in the world.

Cyberpunk does a great job of visiting critical memories (there is a great McGuffin/Plot Device that makes this possible and necessary) and making you spend a moment to think about how essential some of these have on who we become and the world you live in.  It's weird because I can remember the room where I opened my first P.C. to add RAM, where I first wrote a batch file save to a floppy drive and changed a BIOS setting to have the system boot to play DOOM on a 486SX25 processor.  I remember the garage my dad and I set up a punching bag and weight set in.  That was the same home I dove in the world of paper and dice RPGs, D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Werewolf, Vampire, Mage.... but most of all Shadowrun.  In a weird Meta way, this experience - seeing these plots and themes revisited but not as some little niche product but with multi-million dollar budgets and talented professional staff working for years... it is like visiting that world we imagined back then.  A friend of mine (A cop holed up with the Covid-19 until it runs it's course who finds himself with time again) told me it reminds him of what he pictured in his head during the Shadowrun game sessions we had as kids.

I just took out my two loving dogs at sunrise and watched them play next to the trees, swing set, garden, and bushes in the back yard of my quite sizeable house.  This isn't bragging, just a setup that the life I live is the life I thought I was supposed to strive for - some kind of end prize for hard work and saving.

I also own a quite nice VR headset - Pandemic 2020 was a good year for VR - and can set up a "Home"
area where you load and interface with program and so on - they have luxury apartments and ski lodges and moon colonies as choices.... and what do I use?  A grungy setup with graffiti and alleys that reminds me of the most austere years of my childhood.  If I had a therapist, I would want to get some feedback on how strange it is to feel that need to return to our childhood - even if our present is objectively better.

The lure of nostalgia trap, which many readers and critics missed, was the whole theme of Ready Player One - that given limitless potential to create from the well of our imaginations we often end up limiting ourselves to recreate the nostalgia of youth and that growth requires moving beyond that.  Don't live in the memories of the past while you can still be making a present wonderful enough for forging new memories.

My grandparents, my parents... only my mother remains alive.  My father asked me to repeat back some memories he had shared with me - quitting smoking, starting to live better - of being the same age as Elvis and having a son later in life and learning, while his youngest son was being born, that Elvis had just died in his 40s... it made my father reconsider how he was treating his body and his obligation to take care of himself and live...  but I don't remember all of the details right.   This distressed him, his memories, his life story - from being a child of the Great Depression, his high school pole vaulting, his time in the Infantry and overseas, his decades in the steel mill, his building a business, his time as a husband and father... all of those were going to fade away with his old frail body.  He had shared some things with me but, of course, it could only be a fraction -  most of which would also fade away in time.

And finally, that sad inevitable realization that who we are, what we are is so much a collection of moments and memories that live on mostly in ourselves... and that they will fade... that was a big part of one of the first seminal Cyberpunk works - Blade Runner - a film written by two men in their early forties, a common age to realize that truth that we are impermanent and will fade... has a character use an artificially shortened life span to come to his own realization about this after struggling with it for two hours:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die".

 So it goes, the need to celebrate and learn from the past and grow into the future... I am cautiously optimistic at the moment - we are coming out of the pandemic's dark winter and have the opportunity for better things ahead.  I want to share an article from the right now - a list of fairly well thought out things that should give us all reason to be at least a little hopeful:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90591674/21-reasons-to-hope-in-2021

The storm before the calm.

 I had been anxious building up to last week and my specific anxiety proved prescient: 

Anxious on Jan 4th

We are on our way to moving forward - moving forward past family members in charge of important rollouts, past TV personalities in charge of agencies, past governing-by-conspiracy-theory and a dozen other things specific to the last few years that have diminished our lives.

But there is at least one last gasp left in the movement that tried to decapitate the government of our United States on the 6th.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump is going to speak at the Alamo in Texas.  The choice of sending a message by picking a venue is clear.  The Alamo isn't remembered for "Peaceful Transitions of Power".  

The same people who were smart enough to cancel conventions and have as many of their folks work from home as possible when the Pandemic began are smart enough to see the emerging threat now.  Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Google.... all of these have made some effort to slow down the coordination of planned violence in the United States.

Violent Coups, Civil Wars, Theocracies, and permanent minority rule are all bad for business. Big Tech has acted accordingly. 

Even people who don't follow the news closely can almost feel "something".  The shelves were clear of many staple items as I stocked up for a family of four.  We are a nation of soft targets, a shooter or bomber convinces of some online idiocy could hurt a lot of people in some city or community he or she decides is "evil".  

The Pandemic is at it's peak here and not slowing down because we chose this particular moment to get extra stupid and belligerent.  The emergency rooms would be in dire straights to treat mass casualties and Covid-19 in most places.

If you lean towards Trump, and you hear me or anyone else dissuade you from joining in the ruckus, please, please.  Don't.  People are losing family, friends, careers, and lives over this and this particular man is - without ANY doubt - not worth it. 

The Anxiety Continues

January 4th and the election concern continues:

I know the Georgia Senate election is tomorrow and the Electoral College results go to Congress and there are bloggers and journalists and analysts and such who are telling me not to worry it is all wrapped up... BUT....

I've had my share of talking heads tell me that Trump wouldn't get elected... or that he wouldn't attack our institutions successfully... or that the world order wouldn't change much... or that Iraq would be all wrapped up in six months....

The point is that I don't take consensus conventional wisdom as a cure for anxiety.

Donald Trump dismissed our Pandemic Taskforce and a not small number of my friends and family legitimately believe all the worlds scientists, doctors, and nations... as well as a million dead... all conspired with a fictional disease to make their Game Show President look bad.  That is some STRONG bullshit right there.  

A man all hopped up on Internet Bullshit suicide bombed Tennessee....  a man all hopped up on Internet Bullshit sabotaged a batch of vaccines... a woman all hopped up on Internet Bullshit kidnapped her child out of care....

A president all hopped up on Internet Bullshit just asked an official to create false votes for him... 

It wasn't long ago I witnessed the U.S. Senate heard a sitting President ask a foreign leader who was asking for American Arms to fight Russian Aggressors "For a favor, though" and that favor was to announce an investigations into his political rival.... and that Senate could not conclude that was an abuse of power.

If that isn't an abuse of power, what is?

So I have no confidence that those Senators will all respect the constitution, or the will of the people, or their oath of office or whatever. I no longer rest safe on their honor.

So I'm worried about the next 14 days.  I'm worried about the pandemic, I'm worried about jobs and work and opportunity and a million other things and I'm most worried that our addiction to Internet Bullshit is throwing a wrench or several in every single serious undertaking that needs to be done to keep the wheels spinning, the lights on, the mouths fed, and so on.

Let us see

Surprisingly calm post. 11/3/2020 at 8:20pm

I'm managing election night anxiety fairly well.  I've canvassed and messaged and donated and put up the signs and tried to educate folks on deceptive ballot measures (Ammendment 3), even supported legal groups who fought to keep voting legal and possible for as many Americans as possible, even went around trying to help any folks with issues getting to a poll or waiting in line.  No shortage of volunteers for that tonight.

I'm nervous, but not impossibly so.

Lots of good news in the last 72 hours, a family member has a kidney donor, my mother tested negative for Covid-19, my wife went horseback riding, my son did great on an exam with a subject he was really struggling with and my little on me has his first loose baby tooth and I pulled through a recent thing with work.  Things could have been much worse around here.

No stories in the Metro of folks shooting up a polling place or ramming folks with a truck.  A few yelled Racial slurs and belligerent folks... but that isn't as bad as it could have been.

Settled in, cooking for the family and ready to watch this thing through.

Labor Day 2020

The months since my last post have been, to say the least, eventful. The pandemic has changed our lives. Teleworking went from a rare privilege to mandatory. Home, school, travel, entertainment, dining, and, of course, work have changed. 

 With this post is an image of my father's 25 years with the same company certificate. 25 years in the same steel mill. It's almost unimaginable. I took my son there this weekend, the old steel mill is an auto salvage place and service vehicle storage now.  My father would be happy to know the place is in use again.

 I've been working a project for Umcle Sam since February and it's long hours but the pay is good and I'm finally putting my brain to some good use. I don't know what my father would think of the work I do now. It's necessary and it's honest work, but it isn't as exciting to hear about as soldiering or firefighting. 

 When I think about the comfortable life my family has, I have an almost religious epiphany thinking of all the hours of labor it takes to make something like clean running water, air conditioning, broadband and things like reliable emergency services happen. Most of us work and do our part and when we get our share of bread and roses it's pretty nice. 

 I love that there is a day to take time to thank the millions of calloused hands, sore feet and furrowed brows that go into making the multitude of things that make our modern world nice.

Our weird relationship with 9/11 on the day it turns 18

Today, 9/11/2019 is certainly someone's 18th Birthday and is also a weekday. There is a very good, near certain, chance that some kid who was being born on 9/11/2001 is taking the Oath of Enlistment today. We have now passed that point where a non-zero number of soldiers fighting the vague "Global War on Terror" or training to do so were not born before the day that brought that conflict to the front and center of our military efforts.

I remember I was working at a tech center and I was getting into day trading and noticed I couldn't get online to check the markets that day and then, curiously, checked the news and - well - there it was. Tower one was hit, then tower two, then the Pentagon was hit, then one tower fell, then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, then another tower fell, then ANOTHER tower fell. Airspace was shut down, the National Guard was mobilized, eventually our leadership emerged, we donated blood or volunteered and eventually a story emerged about hijackings and training camps and so on.

I started to train my body to enlist, and raised my hand in front of that flag some months later - shipped out some time after that. This act of terrorism would be the defining image of the "Enemy" that has been the primary adversary of our deployed armed forces since that time. A soldier with Army Special Forces was killed in Afghanistan already this September in 2019, along with a Romanian and many of the Afghans around them. The war continues, a few thousand of our nation's of hundreds of millions are doing all the bleeding, but the war continues.

I had this silly notion that after 9/11 the ENTIRE nation would have been mobilized. Draft Cards and Victory Gardens, Balls to the Wall, everyone do their part, roll up your sleeves, "Let's get this done!" kind of a fight.

Most of the world had moved on to Representative Governments with legitimacy derived from the governed and so on, but a stretch of the world "Middle East North Africa" as we call it had only a few regions of stable democracy and instead were led by Archaic and Authoritarian Kings, Emirs, Military Dictators, Warlords, Ayatollahs... of COURSE this region grew misery and exported it - eventually to even our largest city and capital. We were no longer able to ignore that part of the world never was brought into the global consensus or the end of history or whatever we were calling it.

The task was huge, but I lived in a nation that had taken on huge tasks before. Once upon a time the Emperor of Japan was considered a living god, and after an astounding defeat he was transformed into a human constitutional figurehead. The Nazis believed they were destined to lead a thousand year Reich of Aryan Supremacy and were rebuilt into one of the most open and progressive societies on Earth. There is not that much Americans can't do when properly motivated. I thought this was the natural next step in our fight, a full mobilization of the United States, from Privates to Politicians to Brass to CEOs all throwing in to drag this holdout of barbarism kicking and screaming into the modern world.

I was wrong.

Before the embers of the fire were out people were planning on how to turn this tragedy into enacting their personal goals. Saudi Royals were being flown home on specially authorized flights, stories that would both cover up incompetence and fuel two decades of conspiracy theories were being formulated, maps of oil fields were being drawn up, contracts were being written. Previously suppressed ideas about rendition, surveillance, even torture were being elevated. Think pieces were being written about how dissent about any of this was unamerican. The folks that build mansions for Defense Contractors and Lobbyists have had a good 18 years. Now, the five highest income counties in the US are Louden and Fairfax in VA, Howard in MD, and Falls Church and Arlington in VA. those ring-around-DC places up next to Pentagon, NSA Headquarters, Langley, Dulles... the forever war is good for business. The Middle East is still full of Kings and Ayatollahs. A couple of the Military Dictators fell.

There was some unity. NATO mobilized against a common enemy after the U.S., a member state, was attacked. We served along Brits and Australians and Poles and Estonians and Italians and Georgians and a coalition so broad you would have to look up the flag that guy and the checkpoint was wearing later on down the line. Our enemy shifted from "Al Qaeda" who remained kind of global and vague and amorphous to "The Taliban" who had a territory and leaders and so on and that became the fight that we are still fighting today.

By the time my training was complete, Ft. Leonard Wood, Ft. Bragg, Monterrey... there would be a war in Iraq. I would end up spending four years in that place. I never went to Afghanistan. The "Authorization of Military Force" that was passed to fight Al Qaeda was broad enough to see American Forces deployed in combat in Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Syria, and eventually enough nations that members of the Senate Armed Services committee admitted they did not know how many countries American Forces had combat operations in. This has become the new normal.

The world kept moving. On 9/11/2001 there was no iPhone, no Gmail, no Android, no Youtube, no Facebook, no Tesla, No Segways (remember them?), No Xbox, no Trump University, no AirBnB, no "Marvel Cinematic Universe", and no Cracked.com, or a hundred other things we would notice as missing if we returned to that day.

I have always felt a certain hesitancy to join the "Never Forget" crowd. I don't know what that means, but the folks who say it sure know what it means. It is often used to tell critics of the forever war to quit trying to explore the idea that maybe our children and grandchildren shouldn't fight the same war. "Don't you remember that day?" as we fight people less and less related to the Al Qaeda that attacked our nation.

Germany and Japan became our allies. We never "Forgot" but we were allowed to accept a surrender and accept that things had changed and bring our boys home. Eventually those WWII era folks moved on and built that post-war prosperity America and enacted the Marshall Plan and led the civil rights movement and created Spider Man and went to the moon and built the world's coolest cars and so on. The world kept moving and that was OK.

Bin Laden was killed in 2011, Osama's son in 2015, Mullar Omar in 2013 (look him up), Saddam was hung in a basement before that back in 2006. Ayman Al-Zawahiri just released a statement today asking his remaining followers to kill Americans on the 18th Anniversary of 9/11 but Al Qaeda is so degraded that isn't front page news anywhere. The "Islamic State" fighters in the region are the children and grandchildren of these original folks. Many of their children want to have nothing to do with the fight of their parents. Do they want to move on too?

18 years. Kids old enough to vote have lived their whole lives in the post-9/11 world. Bombs dropped on live targets somewhere every single month of their lives. So common it isn't even news. Dog bites man. US forces dropped 40 tons of bombs on an "ISIS Island" this week and it's just another day. Further down my news feed below "E-Cigarette Crackdown". Hard to explain to my boys that there used to be stretches of American History where this wasn't always the case. Wars ended.

Mourn the dead, revere the heroes, respect the sacrifices, remember the history, but we can't keep doing this. No one wants their memorial to be a war that never ends.

We all remember 9/11, but how do we get to a world where it is history and not the present?