A little over 10 years ago, an off duty police officer shot and killed my brother’s best friend, Aaron. The officer was moonlighting as a security guard at the IHOP where Aaron and his friends went for a late night breakfast.

The officer fired at the car as Aaron and his friends drove out of the parking lot. Aaron was in the back seat, behind the driver. He was shot through the heart and died almost immediately.

Aaron was a truly sweet young man, a talented musician, and a good friend to my family. Aaron was going to the local community college. He was still in town with the same circle of friends that he shared with my brother. My brother was away at school. Things could easily have been very different.

There is no satisfying end to the story, just a dead young man and a family and community wracked with grief.

Things are terribly, terribly wrong in our society. We need to address the adversarial relationship between the police and those they protect. We need to address the epidemic of guns that can only escalate violence into more violence. We need to address imbalance, unfairness, and lack of opportunity at the root. We must address biases of race, gender, economics, sexuality, and religion.

Through all this, we must not lose sight of the fact that in every single death, without exception, no matter the story: There is a life snuffed out and a family and community wracked with grief. This is true regardless of race, regardless of who did the killing, regardless of what they claimed as their motives.

This will be the work of more than a generation. We should start today.

Five years ago this evening, my mother died unexpectedly. I got one of the phone calls that you never want to get, and joined what my sister now calls “the club that nobody wants to be in.” At the time, I wrote a bunch of blog posts about it. That turns out to have been a good thing. Those memories aren’t really available to me except by reference. I remember the images. I remember the flow of events, but those crisp recollections have faded. I’ve told the stories enough times that those stories have become the memories. If, over time, I’ve changed the stories, I suspect that I have also adjusted the memories to fit them.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot. When I pay attention, I can see myself constructing and adjusting memories around photographs or stories that we share year over year. It’s funny to feel my experience of reality deforming around my perceptions and expectations. It’s not a deliberate thing. It’s merely how the mind works. We create little trails through our consciousness. The trails where you run your mind most frequently are the ones where it’s easiest to walk. It’s a self reinforcing pattern. What we see when we look at the world, unless we are incredibly careful, is mostly what we expected to see. Without massive effort, you’ll probably believe tomorrow what you happened to believe today.

A subtle and similar thing has happened with memories of my mom. For the first few years there was a palpable and personal ache there. A feeling of her being a person, a person who was missing from every occasion. Like when a dinner date stands you up and you eat alone. Today, while I certainly wish that I could share this year’s stories with her – bemoan Kid Rock and Eminem’s fade into soft, fuzzy hipsterism – I feel like the “person” space she occupied in my consciousness has been freed up. I’m not lonely for her anymore, really. That makes me sad and happy at the same time. I have good memories, but it’s like a story hasn’t been told in too long, rather than an empty seat at the table. Like seeing weeds growing over one of my favorite walking trails, rather than missing the person with whom I used to walk them.

I guess that means that the grieving has wrapped up. It also feels like she’s really “gone” at some slightly deeper level than merely never getting to have a new conversation with her again.

I was talking with a friend this week whose mother will almost certainly die soon. By talking I mean that for once in my ever talkative existence I tried to shut up for a bit and listen to him. Something I learned five years ago is that merely being present is the best thing you can do for a friend experiencing that kind of loss. Simply showing up is everything. It’s hard to see a friend who is going to hurt, in ways he doesn’t yet understand, and to try to merely tell him that you know – without wasting his time.

These feelings don’t fit into words, per se. You can see that someone else has or has not experienced them – and with time you realize that’s neither good nor bad. It’s just dumb luck whether you’re the live or the dead one. Whether you get to say goodbye over weeks and months or get the horrible phone call – it’s just a roll of the dice.

I’m glad that the last thing my mother and I talked about was how much we liked each other. Her death was a sudden and massive blow to my personality, one that changed me permanently. Most of my beliefs remained intact. Some shattered like so much sheet ice hitting a stone floor. I’m glad that we hadn’t ended on some stupid beef about something trivial. I’m glad that I don’t have to regret it when I think of the last time we talked.

So on this, my personal little holiday: If you’re reading these words – reach out to someone you love. Tell them you care. If you have a stupid spat going on? Cut the other person some slack. Walk away from that fight.

Over the long term? If you’re lucky enough to get to see five years from now? You’ll thank yourself.

Back in the day, I had a Livejournal blog where I kept in touch with a few dozen friends and acquaintances. I used it to push out updates that I thought people might find interesting, when they had the time to read. I used to post about once a day. Reading back through those posts gives a decent feel for where I was and what I was doing at the time. The signal to noise ratio was decently high. Compare with the triviality of facebook and the raw static of Twitter. Sure, there were plenty of posts about what I had for lunch – but I can also piece together a lot of my life during those years.

Having a standalone blog like this one is different. There’s no community – and if there was a community it would be all about me and my posts. People would be checking on me in particular rather than checking in on what “the crew” was doing*. I think that’s why I feel no particular urgency to put anything here at all. The crew is gone.

I’m sort of sad that the world has moved on and I’m no longer living a documented life. I’m in a mood to get all retrospective, and I lack the tools.

Or more loosely:

You may ask yourself, what is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?
You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

*: Yes, I’m aware of RSS feeds. I offer them. The point stands.

I lost a bet recently, thought you might like to know about it.

This all started back on March 20, when in a fit of pique I posted on facebook: "Bay leaves are a lie. They do nothing."

My friend Dan jumped in: "I cannot let pass this culinary heresy, Chris. Bay leaves, when fresh and used sparingly, impart a full-bodied, earthy undertone to a dish. Think of them as the Italian version of cumin(Mexican, Mediterranean) or tamarind(Indian). Overdo them and they'll render the dish inedible, which is why only one or two is advisable."

I’m not sure what I was thinking, exactly, when I responded: "You are all sadly deceived. Agreed that cumin imparts the distinctive flavor of Mexican cooking. Tamarind does the same for Indian. Bay leaves add, at most, a bitter and inedible chunk of roughage in an otherwise pleasant dish."

Dan: "You insult the bay leaf, Chris. This will not stand."

Me: "Honor demands that we settle this like men: I hereby offer my kitchen and cooking services to prepare bay leaf enabled and bay leaf free versions of an identical recipe of your choice. I would ask you to provide the best bay leaves that you can find in the Boston area. I'll bring the beer."

Dan: "Beer? Now I see the problem. I will accept this challenge. Prepare your kitchen dutifully, Chris. I will do as you ask and requisition the leaves. There can be no "beer", however. It must be a light red wine. Not a merlot or a malbec. Those are my terms.

Me: "I would suggest Mark Stock as an educated and impartial expert. We can leverage his impressive knowledge of both wine and flavors. Let us ask him to select a suitable wine for the occasion. He will bring a wine bound to enhance what I assure you will be two indistinguishable dishes."

Mark: "A Cote du Rhone will be acquired."

Me: "I would propose an additional small term: a guest post on the loser's blog, to be authored by the winner, on the topic of the pointless leaf."

Dan: "Mark, a Cote du Rhone is a wise choice. Chris, you propose a post of shame. A pillory to herbal ignorance. Grave terms. Let us discuss the punishment offline along with a date for this embarassment."

Me: "I propose nothing more or less than honor demands. In the end the loser will eat the bitterest gall: his words."

Dan: "If what you propose is a Facebook post of shame, then I accept. Long live the bay leaf."

In the interest of space, I’ve omitted the hoots and catcalls of a quickly gathering crowd of friends and family, eager to see what all the fuss was about.

On March 22, I posted a picture of myself chewing on a bay leaf in an honest effort to figure out what they taste like. So far as I can tell, they taste something like pine trees smell.

On March 26, I posted a picture of my new stove. It really was totally unrelated. I was planning to buy a new stove anyway, but the timing was good. That same hooting crowd gathered … and a few more taunts were exchanged.

On April 13, Dan received his bay leaves from Penzy’s spices and instructed me to “prepare my blog post of shame.”

Finally, on Saturday, six of us converged on my house to settle the matter.

I prepared a tomato sauce in my usual style. I started with onions, caramelized them in olive oil, then added celery, pepper, garlic, and salt. I stirred in tomato paste and let it cook until it looked right. When the tomato paste looks “sweaty” that you’re good to go. Then I added chunked tomato (both preserved and fresh), minced oregano, and red wine.

I split the sauce into three pans. To one, I added a couple of bay leaves. To another I added a double handful of bay. That was the “Over Bay,” or “OB” sample. The goal was to discern whether bay has a discernable taste. I covered the saucepans and let them simmer for about 10 minutes.

Along the way, I made a salad and some green beans with sautéed garlic. A friend brought some bread that had risen at home and baked it in the oven. I cooked about a pound of whole wheat pasta. Somewhere along the way, we opened the wine and put out some cheese and olives.

Once I declared the sauce ready, I dished the three samples into identical bowls, labelled on the bottom. I left the room and Dan marked on the sides of the bowls, “A”, “B”, and “OB”. We sat and ate. There were many rounds of toasts, with bold declamations on each side, sadly lost to history.

Finally each person took notes. When we were done with dinner, we read the notes aloud.

There was no need for math or analysis: Every single person correctly identified all three dishes. There was broad consensus that bay does indeed add a certain richness and depth of flavor to the sauce.

I admit that I was wrong, bay leaves do have a place in the kitchen.

I work with computers for a living. Here are some of the tools that I use all the time:

Macbook Pro: I’ve used a Macbook Pro as my primary workstation since they were introduced, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve had one significant hardware issue in all that time, and Apple fixed it for me at no charge. As JWZ says: I don’t buy computers based on how fast they are, I buy them based on how easy it is to get things done with them, and Apple is the hands-down winner on this pretty much across the board. OS X is not Linux and it is not Windows. If you really want to run Linux or Windows, I advise you to run the OS you actually want to be using.

That said, OS X appears to be devolving into an OS designed primarily for use on a phone with a sidebar of workstation features. If that slide continues, I’ll probably jump back to Linux. And cry, because Linux productivity software still really sucks.

Postbox is a commercial email reader. Given that reading mail is one of the first use cases of the internet I would have expected a good, free solution to be out there. No, Pine does not cut it. Postbox is commercial software, but so worth it. I don’t even use 75% of the features (integration with social media, RSS aggregation, etc). All I want out of a mail reader is “many IMAP accounts with really good sorting functionality and not too crashy.” Apple‘s Mail.app used to be a pretty solid piece of code, but I gave up on it as of about 2010.

Chrome: Web browsers are sort of a sore point for me because so many websites are designed to fail. At this point the cardinal sin in a web browser is blocking me or stalling my computer. When I want google, I want it NOW NOW NOW so I can get a fact without hitting a context switch in my brain. Chrome is fast and not very crashy. When it fails to render some particular site, I don’t struggle, I just pop open another browser. In order of “likelihood to work,” I go: Firefox, Opera, and finally Safari. The obvious exception is when I’m looking at Apple’s movie trailer site, which only works in Safari.

Microsoft Office 2011: I do not use productivity software as a political statement. I do not use document editors merely to write things that only I will read (that’s what VI is for). In terms of getting by in the workplace of 2012, I cannot sacrifice a couple of minutes fighting with my word processor every time I try to add comments to a document that somebody else wrote.

OmniGraffle: For making pictures. So very much superior to PowerPoint. Then I dump the pictures into PowerPoint.

Google Docs: The above notwithstanding, Google Docs got it exactly right in terms of collaborative editing. I run a small consulting group based on a few google spreadsheets.

Google Reader: Great RSS aggregator. I think Postbox does this too – but all my links are in Google already.

Fax Zero: Sometimes you’re dealing with someone whose business process is stuck in 1996 and who needs a FAX sent to them. You cannot argue them out of this fact. In those cases, I print to PDF and send them a FAX.

OneBox: A great little company who provide an “800” number that I can point to whatever actual phone I want, a voice-to-text-to-email service, good conference calling, and so on. If you send a FAX to my onebox number, It shows up as a PDF in my email – as God intended.

Adium: Apple finally broke iChat beyond redemption, so I switched to Adium. I have the feeling that it’s broken at some level, but I don’t care enough to dig into it. Of course, I also use Skype because everybody else does.

Amazon’s Cloud: I finally moved this blog over to Amazon’s cloud servers. Next step, turn off the server in the basement and cancel the IP address that I’ve been paying for.

This weekend I spent three days at PAX East. PAX stands for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a convention / exhibition of games and gamers. It’s also something of a movable-feast nerd mecca. This year, like last year, it was at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) – the biggest venue in town short of the football arena. If the rumors are true, they sold out the entire space for Friday and Saturday, and had some tickets at the door on Sunday. I heard numbers like “20,000 attendees.” I have no idea whether that’s at all accurate or if it’s inclusive of the exhibitors and staff. In any event, it’s large. I started seeing PAX badges on the trolly that I take into town. I decided to walk from South Station to the site because of the mass of gamers waiting for the shuttle bus.

PAX briefly deforms the mass transit user profile of Boston. Is that big? I think it’s big.

Games and gamers have gained much broader acceptance in the past decade or so. Computer games in particular used to be the realm of pasty faced basement dwellers. Now, the gaming console is a staple of the main feasting halls where the cool kids dine and dance. Musical / social beat matching games like Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution have added athletic and group participatory aspects to games. Phone based social games like Lexulous and Draw Something mean that adults can and do play parlor games with their parents and siblings before bed – maintaining a social connection sorely lacking since the Great Error of single-family housing in subdivisions of the 50s.

PAX brings all of those people together in a massive convention hall.

I don’t want to sound like too much of a shill here, but I’ll go for it anyway: I see in PAX a microcosm of a different and better sort of society. The core of it is that PAX people (at PAX – I have no idea how they act at work or in their daily lives) are, by and large, accepting of each other in a way that I do not usually see in broader society. Everyone knows at some level that when you show up at a gamer convention, there will be gamers there. Most of us pasty faced basement dwellers figured out early in life: Everybody is weird. Everybody, without exception, has a freak flag that is flown on occasion. Each of us requires special handling from time to time. Most of us have read Stranger in a Strange Land and felt its uncanny truth. Hell, there are entire subgenres of scam built around the universal feeling of being just a bit different – just a bit outside.

There’s also a flavor that I picked up in the Martial Arts. There is a default to humility because in all likelihood, the person you just met is really very good at whatever game they do play. Sure, I’ll take you apart at Gears of War – but I don’t even know how to work the controls for … what are you playing again? It looks really cool. Also? Rad costume, bro!

So we had 20,000 people, give or take, all packed into a convention center – and we were all weird together. More important was that the vast majority of us are used to having weird friends. Even the superficially normal people who showed up had to admit that – yeah – they like to play the same games as the geeks.

So what does that mean in practice? The exhibitionist extroverts wear costumes and pose for pictures with each other. Introverts like me quickly tire out and then wind up in a safe little corner watching from a safe distance. There’s a dance stage where people who want to play the dancing games do so. People who want to watch, watch – and we applaud even when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.

So we’ve got something like 20,000 people doing what they actually want to be doing, and accepting what other people are doing – for a whole weekend. It feels fundamentally different from my day to day interactions with most people most of the time. We can laugh and say “that’s why they have to pay you to be at work,” but I fall back on Jane Mcgonigal‘s comment last year: “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” Obviously we cannot play games all day every day – but bringing a gamers attitude to day to day life might help a lot of people a lot of the time.

Sure, there’s a corporate flavor to the expo floor. That’s where the funds are centered. We’re still in an economic model where large amounts of resource are pooled and re-distributed via corporations. In 2012 you don’t get to rent the BCEC unless you have the resources of several major corporations at your back.

Don’t like Microsoft? Fine. Go ahead and dislike Microsoft. However, they did rent out a thousand or more square feet of the convention floor at full fare to host your party. Yes I know that you paid admission. You think that your measly registration pays for the hall? You thought perhaps that PAX is expensive for you to attend? Let me assure you that there would not be a party there without the corporate sponsors because none of us could afford to throw it.

There are a number of reasons for this culture. The biggest one is the attitude that Mike and Jerry bring to the direction of the thing. Wise and well heeled publications pontificate on how “leadership defines the culture of an organization,” but to see it in action is mind-bending. Mike and Jerry stand up on stage for an hour plus, each day of the convention, and take questions from the floor. I’ve been to the large corporate all-hands, and this is different. Some of the questions are cringe-worthy – but they invariably take them in stride. At the Saturday session, they got asked rather specific details about their sexual preferences and proclivities. Jerry, in particular, laughed it off and then gave rather specific answers. He closed with something along the lines of:

“I think that if we don’t talk about this stuff, then people sit around thinking that they may be weird and unacceptable, and they don’t know because they cannot talk about it. Perhaps they are weird. Probably not. Probably better to know for a fact whether or not you’re weird. The only way to know is to talk about it.”

My favorite response was to a questioner who asked them to use their powers to resurrect the TV series Firefly. Again, paraphrasing:

“I think that the idea of technology enabled participatory democracy, where massive numbers of people directly effect the behavior of corporations and governments, I think that’s not some sort of sci-fi fictional future. It’s today. It’s happening over and over again in 2012. You people got together and caused a company to change the content of a game that was already pressed to plastic and distributed to stores! You called the government on its SOPA bullshit! So you’re asking me to do something? I say go for it! What are you asking me to do, exactly? You look at the same internet that I do! Make it so!”

Anyway, I wandered the floor, I sat in a corner and watched the exhibitionist extroverts. I caught some music in the JamSpace. I picked up one new game for my phone. I played a couple of console games that I’ve wanted to check out. I even watched some friends play tabletop role playing with many, many dice. I wound up tired but happy.

PAX was fun. Would attend again.

I find it difficult to select charitable organizations to support with either my dollars or my time. Everybody has a hand out. Federal “not for profit” status is no indicator of good intent, much less effective action in the world. Neither is appearing in the news any kind of a clue about whether or not you ought to support someone. The recent kerfuffle over the Invisible Children organization is a great example of why you need to do your due diligence. Kony is a terrible criminal, but sending cash to Invisible Children appears to be a rather limited way to address that.

On the opposite front, there are just too many good causes and good people out there to support them all. I find that I have to make a choice and accept that, at least today, there are going to be a lot of perfectly good efforts in the world for which I have no dollars or time left.

Anyway here are a few groups that I support. I would love to hear how you decide where your limited charity budget goes.

Boston Area Charities

• The Birth Sisters at Boston Medical. These folks provide comfort, support, and good advice to women in urban Boston who really, really need it. This is a great charity. I also heard last night that their budget is simply not making ends meet.
• AIDS Action of MA: Within my lifetime, AIDS has gone from being a death sentence to being a chronic but survivable disease. AIDS Action has been a leader in both clear, honest information and effective support for more than 30 years.
• Greater Boston Food Bank
• Rosie’s Place: A Boston sanctuary for poor or homeless women.
• WGBH: I think that democracy only works if you have an informed citizenry. Public radio provides a critical service. Also? I like the weekend shows.

Women’s and Reproductive Rights: Yeah, I’m savagely pro-choice. Also pro-women. Actually, let’s go with “pro-sentient-beings.”

• Medical Students for Choice.
• Planned Parenthood.

International, with a focus on Haiti

• Family Health Ministries: These are the folks with whom I’ve traveled to Haiti. They’re good people with their heads in the right place, and they work hard.
• Partners in Health: Paul Farmer’s organization. Highly, highly effective and visionary group addressing the root causes of disease in some of the poorest places in the world. If you want to be horrified and inspired at the same time, read some of Farmer’s books. I recommend The Uses of Haiti as a starting point.
• Amnesty International: Amnesty does direct action, but they also serve to keep certain unacceptable horrors in the world front and center in the news. They’ve been fearlessly speaking truth to power for a very long time.
• The International Campaign for Tibet: I’ve been to Tibet, I’ve seen the ongoing, deliberate, focused efforts by China to destroy Tibet as a culture and Tibetans as an ethnic group. ICT are the most effective group in the world trying to protect that culture.

Animals:

• MSPCA: The MA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
• Sea Turtle Hospital. This started out in a garage on Topsail Island, NC – where my family used to take our summer vacations.
• World Wildlife Fund.

I was reading Matt Taibbis most recent blog post, and I feel moved to build on his points.

America is losing its competitive edge. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one if them is almost certainly the fact that we pay our highest wages in nonproductive sectors like banking, and to nonproductive roles in business. This draws the proverbial “best and that brightest,” away from science and industry and into fields dedicated to money for its own sake. We have placed the incentives for talented young people almost exactly wrong, and our society is falling behind as a result of it.

I understand the values that banking and finance bring to an economy. I also understand the value of a skilled executive team at the top of a large business. There is nontrivial benefit to a robust lending market, to accurate valuation, to accessible capital for businesses, to strong accounting and auditing practices, to good management, and so on. However, we need to acknowledge that (as Iain M Banks said in Feersum Endjinn): “People said they made [money] work for them but money cannot work, only people and machines can work.” Unless banks and management build on an actual ever-increasing store of value produced by human beings, then any profits derived from banking are hollow at best and theft from society at worst.

The same is true with executive compensation. My belief is that there is no person who is worth a salary more than tenfold greater than the lowest paid worker in her organization. This is because there is no executive who could produce a car, a phone, or even a sack of fertilizer without the combined labor of their workforce. Certainly they multiply value, but multiplying any value by zero (the business without the labor force) doesn’t get you far. Leadership relies on labor. Compensation, in a fair world, would reflect that reliance. Similarly, banking relies on society as a whole. When banking becomes an extractive enterprise and a supposed profit center in itself, something is terribly wrong.

If we set the hourly wage at, say, $10 (a little above the legal minimum but it makes the math simple) and the work week at 40 hours, then a worker who puts in her time on the job will gross about $20,000 per year. That’s not a lot. If we say that housing ought to be about a third of your annual budget, they’re contributing perhaps $500 to the rent. A hard worker, taking extra shifts and working nights and weekends can perhaps double that to $40,000. A two income family can push even higher, though they will incur other costs along the way. Let’s assume that our notional hard-working executive works just as many hours as that hard working laborer (bullshit). Under my system, they can earn a nice salary of $400k. That’s pretty good all around. Additionally, if there are profits left over because the company is well run, then perhaps their share of the company increases in value.

I’m not setting limits on compensation and I’m not advocating any sort of handout. All these people work hard. I’m setting limits on the ratio of compensation within an enterprise. I trust the market to work out an equitable balance between competing companies, and I trust the government to break up monopolies that interfere with that healthy competition.

Alternatively, that executive could take the Back Street Boys road to riches: Create a product that several million people want to buy, and get a few bucks from each of them. I.e: Don’t manage, produce. Don’t “create jobs,” but actually do one. I sort of like the incentives there.

As a society, we attract people to various roles by means of certain incentives. Money is a major one of those factors. I think that we have set up a system where many talented people waste their lives dithering with other people’s money and telling people what to do, rather than advancing society.

We don’t need more managers and bankers, we need more inventions and brilliant engineers. If we want to attract those people, we should pay them banker wage, and pay the bankers by the hour.

Jessica Alqhuist is a student at West Cranston High School in RI. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one who noticed that her school still displayed its “School Prayer” (a relic from the 50’s) on a large banner (a relic from the 60’s) in the auditorium. Initially, the prayer was a mandatory daily recitation by all the students in place of the Lord’s Prayer. From “Heavenly Father,” right on through to “AMEN.” In the early 60’s they stopped the prayer recitation in favor of a moment of silence but never bothered to take down the banner. This year, Jessica asked that it be removed. School officials said “no,” so she took it to the school board. After a couple of raucous public hearings where people said horrible things about and to her, the board voted (against its own written policy) to retain the banner. Jessica, with her family’s support, approached the ACLU – who helped her to bring a lawsuit to force the issue.

This week, a Federal judge issued a judgement that the banner must come down immediately. The full text of the judge’s decision is a clear, lucid, and highly readable summary both of what happened and what the law says about all parts of it. It’s a good read, and I highly recommend it.

The touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the First Amendment
mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between
religion and nonreligion. When the government acts with the ostensible and
predominant purpose of advancing religion, it violates that central Establishment
Clause value of official religious neutrality, there being no neutrality when the
government’s ostensible object is to take sides.

Or, if that’s too long, he says it again later on: The Government must not appear to take sides on issues of religious beliefs.

He notes that public schools are held to a higher standard because kids are impressionable, and wraps up. As I mentioned back in April, this is a simple case.

Between the lines, the judge is pretty clear that Cranston shot itself in the foot with all the bible thumping and yelling that took place at the hearings. “The Court concludes that Cranston’s purposes in installing and, more recently, voting to retain the Prayer Mural are not clearly secular”. He’s being polite. People at the school board meeting professed their own Christian faith, screamed at Jessica, called her a witch, and told her to go to hell. The school board members themselves felt compelled to make declarations of personal faith prior to casting their votes. If the townspeople had come out and calmly said, “it’s a historical artifact, religion has nothing to do with this,” it would have been a slightly harder sell. As it is, the town revealed its religious purpose in the banner, and thus were forced to take it down.

Or, as the kids say: P0wned.

I got to meet Jessica back in June, shortly after the kerfuffle started. I’m an occasional contributor to Freethought RI, an atheist radio show. I happened to be in the studio when she stopped by to share her thoughts on the air. She’s a well spoken and charming person who seemed honestly surprised that this has become such a big deal.

At the time, I recall that I downplayed the situation to her. I remember encouraging her to not get too hung up on it. Jessica is completely in the right on this one, which is rare in life. When you’re absolutely, completely correct, my opinion is that you should go ahead and run with it. In the grand sweep of things the prayer banner is a small matter. Any actual injuries the banner’s presence caused her are incredibly slight. There are much larger fish to fry, even in the ongoing squabble between theists and non.

Unfortunately, my analysis missed something. I’ve lived in the North, in big University towns for a long time. I live in a safe little bubble where even the guy who works the cash register at the gas station probably has a college degree and some mature thoughts on current social affairs. I had forgotten what I learned growing up in the South: There are some incredibly violent knuckle draggers out there. People exist, right here in America, who will actually, literally take you in the woods and beat you to death for crimes like failing to be Christian enough, being gay, dressing the wrong way, loving the wrong person, being the wrong color, and so on.

Jessica lifted a rock and exposed a nest of those sorts of people in Cranston. She’s endured some truly vile treatment, in person and online. The comment stream on the Providence Journal articles covering the story are an open sewer of bigotry. One blogger has captured a few dozen of the juiciest pieces of online asshattery. It’s nauseating. The police are investigating the online threats that she’s been receiving, and so on.

So while I still think that Jessica should wrap this up and turn her considerable talents to more important things – I was wrong to downplay the banner. Perhaps I’m wrong to think of prejudice against non-christians in America as a solved and trivial problem. Turns out that when you go after one of their symbols, theres still a decent slice of that community who get spitting mad. Of course, they’re not running campaigns of punitive rape or using child soldiers to raze villages. What we have in Cranston are first world problems, but they are serious problems nonetheless.

The silver lining is that when the world at large looks at the situation, it seems to come down squarely on Jessica’s side. Reddit held an “Ask me Anything” for Jessica and it’s really smart. Beyond Cranston and Providence, in the broader world, commentators are incredibly supportive. That night in June on the radio show we received a record number of calls from all over the country – every single one of them expressing support.

Unless we can talk openly and honestly about things, we’ll never change any minds. It’s hard to get the bigots out in the open. They’ve learned to keep to themselves as the culture matures. You draw a lot of heat and fire when you pull them from their holes. Hopefully at least one of the violent idiots Jessica exposed will look around at some point and see that the world is laughing at them.

Changing minds would be the real victory. The banner itself is small change.

At the end of each year I make a little summary post listing the first (interesting) line from the first post of each month. What I note this year is that I basically stopped writing as of September, and also that I seem to have spent a lot of time pissed off about various things.

Bummer.

Previously:
* 2004
* 2005
* 2006
* 2007
* 2008
* 2009
* 2010

January: There is a decent amount of coverage about how the key study linking vaccination to autism was outright fraud.

February: I’ve begun a bit of a project now that the massive new brew kettle is fully armed and operational.

March: The situation with the state employees pensions in Wisconsin and other states is deplorable.

April: The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against the city of Cranston, asking them to take down a banner in the auditorium that shows the “school prayer.”

May: Morning. A crew of painters is walking around outside the house. Two humans (Chris and Jen) and two cats (Maia and Minnow) are watching from inside and preparing for work.

June: Jen and I are taking a trip to Tibet, and I’ve been asked more than a few times: “Why Tibet?”

July: Just like every year, I’m running for president, god-emperor, and tzar of the world.

August: The four noble truths of buddhism, restated:

September: Didn’t post anything in September

October: I write this from the Northbound Acela, returning home to Boston at the end of – I think – my third trip in as many weeks.

November: I recently read Griftopia by Matt Taibbi.

December: Christmas day falls very close to the solstice, and also to the shortest day of the year in North America.