Exclusivity

Posted on July 8, 2026 by hessd

I would like to think about words today.  I want to specify that because the words I want to think about point clearly to arenas of social conflict and I do not want to be in an arena.  Just the words, ma’am

Inclusion and exclusion are fundamental human acts.  They are reciprocal and they are both necessary.  Being in favor of inclusion but not of exclusion is like being in favor in inhaling and against exhaling.

Exclusion makes “us” and “them” possible.  It is necessary to human society.

All of the questions of how we want “them” to treat “us” and how “we” are going to treat “them” are relevant to the functioning of a society, of course, but they are not relevant to the words we choose to point to those issues.

So how did “exclusivity”  become a volatile and dangerous word?  I think carelessness, mostly.  When you exclude me from something—an event, a group—to which I have a right of access, you have committed an act of unfairness.  It might be immoral; it might be illegal.  The standard I want to use is fairness.

That being the case, it seems odd that the social weight has come to fall on the act of exclusion, rather than the basis of the exclusion.  In other words, exclusivity is not the problem here and that matters.

Why does it matter?  Because our reflexive and unconsidered use of “exclusivity” points to the act of exclusion rather than the basis for exclusion.  We badly need some such expression as “inappropriate exclusivity.”  I know it is long and hard to say, but think of it as being a draftee into the army when a national conflict is looming.  Sometimes there are just things you need to do even when you don’t want to.  Saying “inappropriate exclusivity” is one of those.

And what do you get for all that work?  First, you make “exclusion” and “exclusivity” into neutral words.  If they are neutral—neither good nor bad—they direct attention away from the fact of exclusion and to the basis for exclusion and that is where the attention ought to be.  That adjective—inappropriate— requires that we imagine that there are appropriate exclusions and inappropriate exclusions.  We are against the latter type.  Only.

Without that, “exclusivity” becomes a hungry carnivore, roaming the neighborhoods and gobbling up acts of appropriate exclusion.  Even acts that allocate this to you and that to me by some method everyone has accepted, is just food for the “exclusivity monster.” When you have taken control of your portion and begin to help yourself to my portion, I object.  But “exclusivity” sticks his head in the window and points to the contested part and says that in refusing to share my portion, I am engaging in an act of exclusivity.

Now I expect that you were puzzled by the introduction of the hungry carnivore.  Why all that violence?  This is why. The idea that you, having taken control of your portion, should think that you have rightful access to my portion needs to be resisted.  Everyone agrees to that.  But the charge of exclusivity messes up that agreement.  The carnivore points a finger at my unwillingness to share my portion and say, “Ha!  Exclusivity!” and he is correct.

Ownership or exclusive access was established when the oatmeal was served, some in my bowl and some in yours.  Only exclusion will ensure that my breakfast goes into me and yours into you.  You will say, surely, that it is only common sense that the oatmeal in my bowl is mine and the oatmeal in your bowl is yours, but remember that we are not talking about common sense; nor are we talking about oatmeal.  We are talking about words.

Does “exclusivity” solve the oatmeal problem.  Of course not.  It is the clearest possible instance of it.  Does “inappropriate exclusivity” solve the oatmeal problem?  Probably.  It certainly and reliably changes the focus to whether exclusion is appropriate in this situation.

The snarling beast who points the finger and says, “Ha! Exclusion” now has nothing to say.  There is not, in our current circumstances, an “appropriateness beast.”  Appropriateness requires a committee, not a predator.

“Appropriate on what basis?” is the approach of the appropriate criterion.  And we all know that there are good bases for exclusion and bad bases.  Let’s have a discussion about what is good and bad about this reason for excluding anyone or any claim.  

To shift the metaphor just one more time, the “exclusivity” claim is surgery done with a screwdriver and a wrench.  “Appropriateness” is a scalpel.

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Celebrating Just a Little

Posted on July 3, 2026 by hessd

50 Years ago, I got a pamphlet from the National Joggers Association.  Their idea was that a really good way to celebrate our nation’s birthday, if you are a runner, would be to run 1776 miles between the 4th of July in 1976 and the4th of July in 1977.  I calculated that that would require less than 5 miles a day and my regular runs were longer than that.

No problem.

Well, it was a problem.  I signed up and among the things they sent me was a card to record my miles.  It had a lot of boxes like the ones you see here.  And not to spoil the ending or anything, this picture shows that on July 2, I ran a regular run of 6.2 miles.  That brought me to 1775 miles for the year.  Then I ran another mile in the afternoon, about which I will say more later.

I put “no problem” in a paragraph by itself because the five mile calculation required that you did not get sick during the year and that you stayed injury-free during the year.  I missed both of those.

I gave it a good run during most of the year and that included both summer—hot and humid—in western Pennsylvania and winter—cold and humid.  Also icy.  And with all that, I would up in March of 1977 283 miles behind the pace.  So that means the regular five miles a day, plus enough to begin to eat into that deficit.

There were very few days that spring when I did not get two runs in; one to keep my pace and one to begin paying off the debt.

The last mile was share with Ron Galbraith, the basketball coach at Westminster College.  Ron was one of the most competitive people I ever knew and it was only friendship that made him willing to ease back a little and let me break the tape.

New Wilmington being a little town, the local newspaper sent someone down to cover the “event.”  The picture is from their story.  Some friends came down to see the last mile.  I remember confetti and a lovely bouquet of daffodils from a friend’s front lawn.

There is nothing particularly meritorious about running a lot of miles in one particular year, but I remember when I looked at the deficit and decided to do it anyway.  And that decision really has stood me in good stead since then.

I remember too, the little games I added.  I would run three miles before my shower in the morning.  It wasn’t the best time to run,  especially if I had been out after dark the previous evening, but I needed the extra miles.  I was living on “new faculty circle” at the time and that circle was half a mile long.  I got into the habit of adding that half mile to whatever the distance it was that I had just run.

I counted on those half miles adding up on the chart.  But what I didn’t count on was that once I started calling that last half mile a “victory lap,” I noticed that my body began to treat that last half mile as “not really running.”  I may have had a stitch in my side or a blister on my foot or a muscle that wanted to keep cramping, but that was “during the run.”  And the victory lap was not a “run;” not really.  So those conditions went away or nearly so.  That taught me a lot.

And once I adopted the “victory lap” metaphor, I began to think of the years of my life as if they represented the four laps of a mile race—twenty years to the lap.  And my years since then, every one of them, is just a victory lap.

It was a really great experience and…you know…only 50 years ago today.

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Being Old: Part IV

Posted on May 30, 2026 by hessd

I see it as a time of triumphs, and so could you.  In this post, I will explain how it can be done and leave you time to reject it entirely.  I will caution you, however that as you begin to reject it, you stop and think whether what you have that is better.

I’ll begin with some examples that will give you all the reason you need to stop reading.  I am writing this at a Starbucks in Denver.  This Starbucks is about half a mile from our hotel.  So I put my computer into my backpack and got ready to head out the door.  I had forgotten, however, to zip one of the pockets in the backpack and a piece of crumpled foil fell out.  I reached down and picked it up and threw it away.  Triumph!

Big deal?  Certainly not.  Triumph?  Absolutely.  Reaching down all the way to the floor is very far from automatic anymore.  It is closer to a routine problem.  What it is NOT is automatic and unnoticed.

Second example.  Yesterday I sat through a graduation ceremony at which two of my step-granddaughters (my step-daughter’s children) graduated from high school.  Word had it that there were 600+ graduates and I was in the middle of a very long row.  I began to get the early symptoms that either are vertigo or that signal an episode of vasovagal syncope. [1]  This is a disaster for newbies, but I am not a newbie.  I crossed my legs and squeezed them together, I rubbed some cold water on my face and neck, and I focused my vision on one of the flags set up on the floor.  And when it was ready, it left me to enjoy the rest of the ceremony.  Triumph!

Third and final example.  Last year, when we attended this graduation (for a step-grandson) we parked in a nearby parking garage, where we were stuck afterwards for over an hour.  This year, we located a neighborhood that was a good distance from the arena where the graduation was held.  Can I walk the distance to the arena?  Yes, despite the fact that if I stride out at my normal pace, the muscles along both shinbones will cramp painfully.  So I dealt with this situation in two ways: social and physical.  The social solution is to tell the other members of my group that I am going to have to slow down periodically and they need to keep track of where I am.  I don’t require any help; just understanding.  The physical solution is to alternate normal walking pace with much slower walking (creeping) pace and cover the distance with scarcely any pain at all.  Triumph!

Why, exactly, do those illustrate triumphs?

It is that question that impeded my progress for so long.  I think I understand it now.  When I was, say, half my current age, I did not experience any of those obstacles.  No obstacles, no overcoming of obstacles.  That is so obviously true that some of you might be tempted to accuse me of praising the obstacles just so that I could overcome them.  Not so.  In a heartbeat, I would choose not to experience those obstacles last all.  But back when I was 44, I had other obstacles to deal with.

Furthermore, there is an intermediate stage between the easy and natural performance of tasks and the labored triumph I currently experience.  It is stage of ignorance, frustration, and resentment.  IFR.  [2] The fundamental question—so silly that you never actually asked it out loud—is: “Why is this happening to me?  It never happened to me before!”

“Ignorance” because you don’t know what it is, much less why.  In the foil example, my lower back has stiffened up and I have to deal with it diplomatically, as if it were a foreign government.  I know that now. [3]  “Frustration” because I keep trying to do what I have always done—and sometimes it works—and mostly failing.  My efforts are frustrated and I am taking the frustration personally.  Hence the “resentment.”  Something I have a right to has been taken away from me and I am angry about it.  Since my rights (never considered before they were abrogated) have been taken away, I have every right to my resentment.

And I do.

But, of course, it doesn’t help.  And given what I know, I cannot have my ignorance back.  And given that I still have to do the things I was doing, frustration only makes it more difficult to acquire the new skills I need.  So of the three, the only one that needs to be resolved is Ignorance.  The other two I just need to get over.

So here is the hard part of the essay.  I have laid out the three eras.  The interposition of the second era is the basis for my experience in the third era.  In the third era, I no longer suffer from the ignorance I had and, with a little practice, I also no longer have to fail at the task.  There is, in fact, a way of bending over to pick up the foil if I do it thoughtfully, i.e., in the way I have learned to do it and have practiced doing it.  There is, usually, a way to head off the lightheadedness and blurred vision that might be simple vertigo but that also might be a looming social disaster. [4] There is a way to walk “with the group” if they know how I will have to vary my pace to walk the distance.

The first era is nice, but it is not about triumphing over obstacles.  The second era is awful, but it forms the basis for the third era, which I am busy celebrating and suggesting in this post.

These may seem to you to be “cheap triumphs.”  They are not.  In the first place, they eventuate in actions that are worth taking.  In the second place, I had to learn a lot that was hard to learn—even after I got rid of the resentment—and I did and I learned how and when to use it.  Those are achievements—you cannot say they are not.  But they do not need to be celebrated as triumphs.  It was my own decision to do that and the basis for the decision was that celebrating triumphs does a lot of good things for me.

And why would I not choose that?  I can think of only three reasons: ignorance, frustration, and resentment.  I am tired now and I rest my case.

[1]  For people who don’t have this particular inconvenience, it means that heart’s vagus nerve acts up, my blood pressure falls rapidly, and someone calls 911.  These are all consequences that do not belong in the graduation scenario.

[2]  IFR for those who would be disappointed in me if I did not include at least one TLA (Three Letter Acronym)]

[3]  Please do not go off along the lines of what I might be able to do to reconcile myself with my lower back.  This essay is complicated enough without that and you are only doing it so you will not have to think about what I am asking you to think about.

[4]  It is a social disaster only. I am awake and fully competent by the time the ambulance arrives, but I now know that there will be eight hours of pointless testing before they will let me go home.

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The Work of Humans

Posted on May 26, 2026 by hessd

I’m going to skip over all the practical impediments to this.  If it has to get done, it will get done.  We turned the entire economy over the the war effort in the early 40s and did things no one had even imagined could be done.  Why?  Because we felt we had no choice.

So I am thinking AI thoughts on one side of my mind and on the other, I am thinking carboni thoughts from The Ministry for the Future. [1] The carboni is a currency that was awarded to people who reclaimed carbon dioxide  from the atmosphere or who prevented it from escaping into the atmosphere.  There is no natural economic system that would reward that job, so they invented a currency that would and changed a lot of economic behavior that would otherwise not have occurred.

In the meantime, the AI side of my brain is trying to grapple with the fact that we keep defining jobs so that they can be done better by AI.  There is no reason we could not define some jobs that can only be done by humans (and leaving others to whichever life form does it best) so that there is a balance between economic efficiency and human flourishing.

The way I have heard the problem posed took for granted that the most efficient (productive) way to provide various good and services is the best way.  When that argument fails on the merits, the argument is that firms that refuse to work that way will be put out of business by firms that excel in it.

You could even define “human support jobs” in a way that would allow AI machines to outperform humans.  What you cannot do is to say that jobs that are defined by human to human contact can be better done by AI.  Some jobs could be made to come under the productivity metric; other jobs come under the human support of humans metric.

If that sounds like Affirmative Action to you, I am willing to let you be reminded.  If the alternative were to turn out to be Affirmative Inaction or Affirmation Rather than Action, it wouldn’t sound as bad.

I, myself, think that we can be more discerning about what only another human can do for a person.  I think we have not paid much attention to that form of the problem yet.  But I also have a nightmare scenario that pushes me in the direction of the human care of human beings.  It is that if we settle for the simulated care of human beings of which AI is already quite competent, we will begin to define what we value and what we need in terms of what it can produce for us.

Perhaps a silly example would help.  Imagine that the speech programs with which they fit up AI systems are unable to pronounce the Sh- as in shibboleth.  Like the Ephraimites, they could not pronounce the Sh-.  Fine; use it as a test.  But this was a battlefield situation.  They can either pronounce it or they can’t.  But if you were living with them, as many people so far have lived with robots, you would have the chance to decide that your really preferred a word that sounded like “Sibboleth” rather than the old way.

Some years ago, Sherry Turkle wrote a book with the title, Alone Together.  It is a spectacularly good book, but along the lines of this essay, it is good to remember that the subtitle is: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.  The short answer is that we develop emotional attachments to these AI devices and want to prefer what they offer us to what could be available from any other source: human or machine, natural or artificial.

The reason the system I am trying to imagine would require humans providing services to other humans is that if we do not, humans will be vulnerable to choosing the AI performance over the human one.  And that is only the provision of services.  There are also special skills required to receive those services in an affirming way. [2]

It seems sensible, I am sure, to lob the ball up as if it were a jump ball and allow the better performer to control the play thereafter.  You could even say that we will simply let people choose which source of their “personal services” to use, the natural ones or the artificial ones.

But it is not sensible.  AI systems can be tweaked to provide better service in the same way that viruses tweak their performance to stay ahead of anti-viral  treatments.  AI systems can perform in the way that is coolest or hottest, depending on the era; squarest or weirdest depending on the culture.  The authentic response of one human being to another is not going to meet the preferences of people who allow their preferences to be messed with like that.

As nearly as I can see it, nothing short of defining personal services as services provided by one human and received by another human.  That should take care of the competition between the two.  It may very well, as in the carboni example, require a lot of rules and a new currency, but it seems to me that it is a step in the direction of thinking it through together.

[1]  Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful sci-fi novel about the rescue of the planet.

[2]  Giving and receiving are discrete sets of skills, neither of which can substitute for the other.

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Being Old: Part III

Posted on May 24, 2026 by hessd

One event after another has chased me back into my extensive electronic library.  Let me illustrate.  Where I live, there is a debate being formulated based on the Tragedy of the Commons.  In fact, there is a much more relevant literature based on Elinor Ostrom’s study of Common Pool Resources, which I have in my “library.”  The prospect of the debate reminded me that I have it.  It shouldn’t have taken that much.

In one of the Bible courses I teach, a theologian is criticized for being too general in his prescriptions, but I have a much earlier book that he wrote which is aimed precisely at the individual application of the same teaching and I have that, too, in my electronic library.

You get the idea. 

But I go to that vast and curated collection only to look something I have forgotten.  I do not treat it as the very individually chosen treasure that it is.  What I do instead is scout out new books, many of them on those same themes.  Mostly, I do that because someone has just discovered the issue and has found a book and wants to talk about it.  But I am old now (see title) and it has come to seem to me scandalous that I leave my library alone or check on it only episodically.

What I should be doing in my old age is lovingly reviewing them; reminding myself why I scanned

them and saved them.  They are my “old books” and I should be luxuriating in them.  I am looking forward.  I think that is mostly a good thing.  But I am looking forward instead of looking backward and I think that is a shame.

All the materials that formed my Political Psychology course are there.  All the materials I wrote for my Political Psychology course are there including some very pertinent examples.  I have there the best study of the framing of issues I have ever read and I have not read it in maybe twenty years.  If it is as good as I remember, I should read it again very soon.

I have three sets of such libraries.  The first is largely academic and it is material I collected for three reasons.  The first is that I really needed a PhD and to do that I had to persuade a committee that I had done some original work.  The second is that I taught courses in Public Policy over the next forty years and I added to my electronic library every time I taught the course.  Some of it I wrote myself.  Most of it, I found in journals and textbooks.  The third is that I spent that same forty years also teaching courses in Political Psychology, and I kept reading the founders of the subdiscipline and their modern critics.

The second set has more to do with theology and biblical exegesis.  I have studied those topics since the 1960s and began adding them to my electronic library as soon as I had a computer and a scanner.  I have some tomes and I have articles that tickled my funny bone.  I found them to be humerus.

The third set more or less defies classification so I just built a library under my own name.  All kinds of stuff is there, but if it intrigued me and if it is not political science or biblical studies, that is probably where it is.

I have built the case for not reading new books on my old topics.  As usual, I have overbuilt.  What I would really like to do is to allow the new issues to chase me back to the old materials.  The illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons and the institutional contours of Common Pool Resources is a good example of that.  The issue came up here where I live.  That discussion would be much enriched if it were broadened to studies that are contemporary and empirical.  I actually have some of that material in my library that will show me how to get more if I need more.

I really need to spend more time there.  It could very well be that is one of the great compensations of being old.

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The Days of our Life

Posted on May 8, 2026 by hessd

Donald Trump is a disaster as President, but he is probably the best pitch man we have ever seen in the Oval Office.  He has found a way to attract and hold the attention of an electoral majority.  He has made American government the favorite soap opera of many voters, who turn on their TVs to find out “what he has done next.”  The quality of attention that is paid to the DT Show is like the quality earlier generations paid to a soap opera, hoping to find out of Dustin will FINALLY pop the question to Jennifer.

The Framers were not, as everyone surely knows, fans of “democracy.”  In fact the principal connotation of that word in their time was “mob rule.” They dealt with that worry by restricting who could vote (white male property owners) and who they could vote for.  The people elected one part of one branch of the legislature.  Period.  And even so, the argument had to be made in the Federalist Papers that if trouble arose, regional dissatisfactions would not flourish (the country is too big) and that, in any case wiser heads would prevail (the Senate).  They also made no place for political parties, which were not invented until some time later (1800).

It is easy, from our present standpoint, to look back and call the Framers’ presuppositions naive, but our own ideas are beginning to look naive as well.  We have thought, until recently, that voters will vote for and sustain in office, parties that solve their problems and meet their needs.  Until recently, nearly all of that took place “off camera.”  Heads of departments and bureaus were budgeted for projects and given authority to complete them and then left alone. [1]

The clear demonstration of the Trump administration is that “off camera” is no longer adequate.  It does not sustain the attention of voters for whom “what is he going to do next” is the question of the day—day after day after day.  Among some segments of the electorate, there is the sense the “he is doing all this for us” but even for people who have not been carrying that grievance, the “on camera” form of government has attracted their attention.

It would be easy go slide off into a rant at this point.  I say that to help me control the tendency.  What I want to say, really, is that DT has changed the form of government by changing the appearance of government.  He has successfully “personalized” government.  When he says of an action by some foreign power “They have disrespected us,” millions of people see themselves as part of the “us.”

I felt sly when I titled this post, “the Days of our Life,” using the collective singular instead of the plural.  It is in fact, “our life.”  Citizens who are appalled at what the President is doing are saying in vain, “He does not represent me.”  Yes, in fact, he does.  However much liberal Democrats may hate the actions and the posturing, this President does, in fact, represent “us” and will until he is replaced.

This is “our life” and these drama-ridden days are the days that define that life.

I tried to include here a picture from Trump’s early acting career  [2] in order to make the point that it was so successful that he is still using it.  What “the U. S.” used to do, he does now, and he casts it in language everyone will understand and some will cherish.

[1]  Not quite “alone.”  They always had the rapt attention of representatives from important interests watching them, but those representatives often came in pairs, one pro and one anti, depending on the proposed legislation.

[2]  He is playing his final role at the moment and we are all paying for it.

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Polostan

Posted on April 12, 2026 by hessd

Very soon, the second of Neal Stepehson’s Bomb Light trilogy (D: Heavy Water) is going to be published.  The review that Amazon has posted says that Owen Crisp-Upjohn is going to find himself pulled into the orbit of “Aurora, a curiously compelling woman with a shadowy past rooted in Soviet intelligence.”  That really is the least that can be said about Aurora, who dominates the first of the Bomb Light trilogy, which is called Polostan. [1]

Polostan is a spectacular book.  It introduces a fearsome variety of people, half American, half Soviet and weaves their stories together. He does it not only by interspersing chapters–this one in Chicago, that one in Magnitogorsk–but also by playing one personality type off against another.

In any case, the first thing Aurora says to Crisp-Upjohn in her own voice, is “The OGPU [2] wants me to sleep with you.”  She has been playing the part of “Katya,” speaking Russian-accented English.  But this she says in her own Montana plains voice.  The only thing she had previously said in her own voice was the line just before that one,  which was, “Owen.  This whole thing was a setup.”

That is a lightening fast re-introduction to a person he thought he knew, but he is up to it.  He says, “How may I be of assistance, young lady?”  Aurora replies, “Fall in love with me.”  He responds, “Done. Will there be anything else.”

Given that, I am not surprised to learn that she is with him in the second book.  I knew she wanted to get out of the Soviet Union.  She had spent a long time, several chapters earlier, strapped naked to a bed frame and dipped by ropes on a pulley into a hole in a frozen lake.  After a while, Shpak, her interrogator, began to hold a knife to the rope, cutting a strand or two and suggesting much more.

I will come back to that experience later, but here, I want it to introduce this reflection of Aurora’s.  “She knew that as long as she lived in this country, she’d be dangling above that hole in the ice, the knife on the rope.” Dangling in that way was not just interrogation. It was a way of life.

That is why I am not surprised to learn that in the second book, she is in England, conspiring with Crisp-Upjohn.

It was Lavrentiy Beria himself, head of the secret police under Stalin, who ordered that she be cut down from the bed frame.  “I’ll have them cut you down,” he said.  “We’re going to be late for dinner.” We. Are going to be later for dinner. OK.

When you read this book, you have to get used to very large and very fast changes in tone.  From the bed frame to “late for dinner” was one.  The next one comes when she is in the hotel where they put her, and they call her for that dinner.  She could have just, the text says, 

“sat in bed enjoying the solitude, but the man with the glasses (Beria) had been insistent that she show up for dinner and she got the clear sense that she belonged to him now.”

Got that one?  Next:

“So she did what she could with her hair, put on a skirt and blouse, and went down to the hotel’s restaurant.”

Stephenson can make the narrative turn on a dime and he has done it in Polostan more than any of his other books I have read.  What she says to Crisp-Upjohn, abandoning her role as “Katya,” sets the stage for the next book.  On the last page of Polostan, Crisp-Upjohn says he will be leaving soon.  She says, “Write me letters.”

He says “…which will be read by the OGPU.”   She says, in her real persona, Aurora, “Of course.  Go around the world and do what you do.  Eventually they’ll send me out after you.

And apparently they have.

[1]. Which is a pretty good joke in the context.  They have just invented a Red Army Women’s polo team and the field they provide for them is so big that Crisp-Upjohn names it the first time he sees it, just by slapping the -stan suffix onto the polo field.

[2]. Soviet era secret police

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Being Old: Part 2

Posted on April 6, 2026 by hessd

People who write about the changes in perspective that come with aging talk about the new “temporal horizon.”  I get what that means, but when I ask the question of myself as a newly “old person,” it takes the form of “How much longer can I keep doing this?”

And if that seems like a natural question to ask, I would have to say that it is a new question for me.  I have asked other questions, all of which seemed natural at the time.  For example, I have asked whether some public contribution is being made by my participation in this activity.  That may seem to be an odd question, but I put it first because otherwise, the first question would be “Am I enjoying this?” which does not seem to me to be a proper first question. It is a good later question.

I have also asked whether I am good enough at the skill the group requires to continue, in good conscience, to be a part of it.  If it is a discussion group or a class with a teacher, those are often harder questions to answer.  In music groups, on the other hand, it is easy to answer.  In my church choir, I am called on to sing the pitches that are called for.  The higher pitches are really not available to me anymore unless they allow the right volume (forte or better) and require the right vowel.  Getting to my seat on the third level of the rehearsal room (and back down) is getting more challenging.  It is not “challenging” enough for me to conclude that I can no longer do it, but it is challenging enough to make me wonder how much longer I will be able to do it. Enough about choir.

There are several elements involved here as I see it.  First, this is not a failure of ability.  Foreseeing a time when I will no longer be able to do something is not at the moment, a failure of ability.  After all, I can still do it.  It is more like an awareness; a part of my mental background on those occasions when it occurs.  As a “mental background,” it is something we do not have good words for.  It is more like a flavor or a scent or a barely audible hum.  It influences how I attribute things.  Young and able, I am surprised when I stumble over things.  Old and less able, I predict it, try to allow for it and take it for granted when it occurs.  Those reactions are effects of what I am calling “mental background.”

Or, let me take a stereotyped scene from fifty or so dramas.  Two women are sitting at a bar.  One takes for granted that she is attractive; the other takes for granted that she is unattractive.  They look identical, but they give off different “vibes.”  That puts it in the flavor or scent or hum category.  It is there and it is important, but you can’t see it.  Actually, you probably did see something, but you don’t know just what it was you saw.

The third thing is that it is about me.  There are things that meet the other two criteria (failure of ability, awareness) but that are about settings or other people or programs.  This is an awareness about me—about who I am now—that has considerable implications for what I notice, what I attempt, and how I file it in my “how did it go” file.

That makes it centrally important, however hard it might be to nail down specifically.  That is why it is important to call these essays “being” old, rather than “getting” old.  To me, “being old” is something I have noticed as if it were an objective condition.  I know it is not.  It is just a subjective condition I had never noticed before, and, having noticed it, I find myself struggling for terms to describe it.

As you see.

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A Bulwark of Democracy

Posted on April 1, 2026 by hessd

I don’t often see “existential” in a political column, so the paragraph below caught my eye.

The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading “The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,” a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida, posted on The Bulwark.

The provision of a link made going to the article a simple matter, so I did.  Schale’s article was in the Bulwark, a site I had heard referred to several times before but I had never paid much attention to it.

This article made me wonder what kind of a site it was, so I googled it.  This is what came up immediately.

This is the answer to my Google question: What is the Bulwark?  The page they directed me to contained 352 words.  Here are some of them.  Their words are italicized.

The Bulwark is an American news and opinion website dedicated to defending liberal democracy and providing center-right political analysis.

I don’t often see “liberal democracy” and “center-right” analysis paired, so I was interested.  I suspect that they will have a carefully guarded, but defensible, definition of “liberal.”  I am sure I will find out; on the basis of this first page, I signed up.

The next paragraph says that the site—here called a “platform”—was founded in 2018 “to provide a home for rational, principled, fact-based center-right voices who [I would have said “which” on the grounds that “voices” are not “persons”] oppose tribalism and polarization in politics.

I, myself, am a little wary of the claim of “fact-based” because it is the collection of relevant facts, organized according to some relevant value, that are important.  On the other hand, there are people now in office who deny or ignore “facts” so just believing in them in general isa good thing.

I have never thought of myself as “center-right” but I reacted very well to it this time.  I will be getting a lot of opinion pieces from The Bulwark, so I am sure I will have a chance to make up my mind.  “Rational” and “principled” can be put to various uses, but I am willing to accept them at first pass.

That brings us to opposing “tribalism” and “polarization.”  I don’t oppose either of those absolutely, but I know that they are negative words connoting tight social bonds, on the one hand, and the alienation of those outside those bonds on the other.  Sometimes it might turn out to be worth it, but I like the idea of opposing them in general.

In the next section, they say that the publication “emphasizes honesty, good faith, and putting country over party, aiming to create a community for the politically ‘homeless” who reject extreme partisanship.

I confess that I begin to get wary here.  Who is against “honesty” as a principle?  Even people who confuse emotional authenticity with “honesty” would say they are in favor of honesty.  The same for good faith; there is no way to be against it, so it is not of much value as a distinctive value.

“Country over party” is harder.  If you step back just a little, you come to an understanding of democratic governance in which the free contest of parties, each of which has committed adherents, is thought to be the best way to determine and to enact the public interest.  It is the lingering attractiveness of that model that makes me wary of “country over party.”  Party, in the model I described, is a way of determining what supporting the country would involve.  In the absence of some way—not necessarily that way—of determining what supporting the country means, it doesn’t mean very much.

This way of putting it is aimed at people who will look at the disastrous effects of a policy on the country and the very good effects of that same policy on their party, and approve of it on that basis.  I am happy to censure such people, but it is hard to describe in general terms.

On the other hand, the last description—a place for the politically homeless— hits me right where I live.  When they talk about the politically homeless, they are talking about me.  I will vote for Democrats every time I get a chance, but I have not had strong feelings for the Democratic party since early Obama.  The logic of partisanship pushes my party in directions I am not comfortable with.  It isn’t the logic of partisanship that is pushing me, so I move more easily in other directions.  So the party, for its reasons, and I for my reasons, have chosen diverging paths.

Maybe I have become “center right.”  Maybe they have moved the center.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  In any case, I will be reading the people who write for the Bulwark for a while and maybe I will find out.

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Being “Old:” Part 1

Posted on March 26, 2026 by hessd

I was surprised at how fast it happened.  There is a series of experiences that I have mentally labelled “getting old.” But, as you see, the difference between getting old and being old is as clear as the difference between being on a journey and arriving at a destination.  I am now at the destination.

By “old,” I am going to mean the way I experience it.  It isn’t another way to say decrepit.  “Decrepit” is just Latin for “broken down.”  I did not suddenly become broken down.  On the other hand, just what is broken on any given day is more salient than it once was.

I used to say that I began a day by “calling a play.”  I am the quarterback of my team, in this metaphor.  Then I adapt the play based on the abilities and the conditions of the members of the team.  I have vertigo, for example, and for the purposes of brevity, let’s say it is a problem of the inner ear.  Sometimes it is active; other times it lurks at the periphery of awareness.  I call a play and the middle ear says “I can’t provide any guarantee of your standing up for that long at one time.”  The left calf (intermittent cramping) says, “That play runs twice as long as I can go.”  And so on.  And I modify the play to utilize the present condition of the available players.  That’s not what I am calling “old.”

“Old” is when I gather my resources in the team huddle and see who is there.  Until I know whose help I can count on, I don’t even make notes in my date book.  When a new resource shows up—no dizziness at all so far today!—I call a play I had hesitated to call before.

But “being old” is more than that.  It is a mental construct, for one thing, not a physical condition.  And it is a place where my mind starts, not a condition to which it adapts.  I would not, for example, decide to start a project or enhance a relationship and then think, “Oh wait.  I’m too old for that.”  Rather, I would start with “OK, I’m old.  Given that, can I start a project like this or work on a relationship like that?”

“Starting with old” is what I mean by “being old.”  I started doing that only recently.  Who would have thought it?  And it has required the reconsideration of some patterns of thought I have really enjoyed.  

When I moved into a Senior Center ten years ago, I was really intrigued by the number of people who excused their actions—more often, their inactions—with the tag line, “I’m Old, You Know.”  It sounded so routine and so practiced that I made a game out of it.  This is a “game” in the Games People Play sense.  It joins, NIGYYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch), which is one of the best known of Eric Berne’ s“games.”  I called it IOYK (I’m Old You Know).

And I still think most of those IOYK namings were correct.  But now I realize that there is an alternative.  It is not “old” as an excuse; it is the naming of the initial mental condition of the which the person was aware.  Maybe preemptively aware. It is, in other words, “starting with old.”  It is, at those times, beginning with the mental awareness of age—not of decrepitude—and saying or doing things that require that initial premise.  That’s not really IOYK.  It’s just being old.

Like me.

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