Stay Optimistic
I listened to a podcast from Vox today that asked some questions about what an experience like the pandemic is doing for all of us mentally. TLDR: Bad things mostly!
The pandemic has brought a lot of terrible things into my life. So many close friends lost family members, a lot of my friends have gotten really sick. It turned one Heiruspecs record into a five year email chain (new album coming soon!). It derailed one of the company’s I own. It exposed so much that is wrong and that is right about the world. The pandemic has let us sometimes find out the truth about each other and it has often been terrible. Somebody’s got a big sign in their window on Randolph that reads “We’ll All Get Through This Together” and sometimes it rings so empty to me. We have cheated each other out of money, we’ve stolen food out of hungry kids mouths, we’ve killed each other at startling rates, we’ve screamed down school board members doing their best in a difficult situation. I think it’s possible the pandemic has pushed the country beyond the brink. You hear people decry all the time how divided our country is now. And folks point out that Republicans and Democrats used to be so much more civil. I don’t hear as often the clarification that there is not much civil in what many leaders aspire to do. Am I supposed to remain civil to white supremacists because they share a name with a party from fifty years ago? That’s a joke. That’s a taunt. I will be civil towards people who are civil.
Terrible things are going to keep on happening, sometimes they won’t for a couple days, but right now we seem to be in a cycle of school shootings, horrendous news from Iran and the war in Ukraine, a tremendous loss of reproductive freedoms for women across our country. I don’t let these things pass me by. I read Washington Post on my iphone when I poop just like you. But I don’t resign myself to a world where these things keep happening. I aspire to make incremental changes for the good both as an employee, a human, a citizen and more. I fooled myself into thinking that I didn’t have time to contribute my time to a lot of “make the world” better efforts but I think that’s wrong. I thought I could send a check. For a long time I fooled myself into thinking that all the cool benefit shows that Heiruspecs played and donated our time to functioned as my service in the world of volunteering. And just to be clear, we did a bunch of benefits and when it works for us, we continue to do that. We’ve been a part of raising money for the Philando Castile Scholarship, we run our own scholarship and in our young days we got behind a lot of causes. But we don’t play as often anymore, and we don’t play nearly as many benefits. I find myself really busy being a positive part of my family, doing a kick ass job at Jazz88, supporting Trivia Mafia and running the still active parts of my musical career. It’s a good laundry list.
A year ago I thought that if COVID came down and plucked me from the Earth I would feel really good about what I did on this earth. Now I feel a different responsibility. This country has been a democracy for such a criminally short period of it’s history. We aren’t a democracy until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If you are old like me your parents might’ve voted at a time when black people were strategically kept from voting. We still live in a time where the potency of the black vote is willfully and openly diluted. I believe in our life time there is going to be a white supremacist candidate for President who will say “this is the last election where the outcome will be decided in any significant way by the white vote. Vote for me and I’ll make sure that white votes keep on making the difference in who is elected, pluralities be damned.” That is truly not far off from the rhetoric we hear currently. And I believe that that campaign would gather steam. I can’t sit on my hands until that happens. I need to work from my position, from my privilege, from my pseudo-level of influence to point out how lazy, bankrupt and corrupt that point of view is. But beyond just sending checks and writing blogs I need for myself and my family to see me set aside our most valuable asset, our time, to fight against this and to fight for the opposite, a healthy democracy where votes are trusted and we live not just up to the best ambitions of the founders but beyond them.
My wife and I are reading the book “Bowling Alone”. The book establishes a decline in civic participation in the 1970s. I’ve already received some gems from the book and I’m just about half way through. But I am starting to believe that though I am busy everyday, I am not seeing some of the pockets of time that I could dedicate to my community, to community involvement. I wonder if some of that energy will come with me being more closely connected with the Temple we are members of. I’m not Jewish but the rest of my family is and I’ve been really impressed with Temple Israel in almost every capacity since we became members over there and I believe getting involved in there might check a lot of boxes for what I’m looking for. In the parlance of “Bowling Alone” I am more of a schmoozer than a macher. I like having people over, I am unafraid to initiate a conversation with a stranger, I reach out, I start events, I make fun things happen. But I haven’t done a lot in my personal life to organize for the greater good or to harness my schmoozosity into a concerted effort to improve the world I live in.
But I’m not giving up. I’m not positive that society is terminally screwed. We face horrible facts, milestones and stories every single day. My impression being born white and upper middle class in 1981 was that the worst of it was behind us. Part of my college degree was in African-American studies and I graduated right around 2007, I read most of the material about the Civil Rights era with the underlying spirit that the worst of it was behind us. This was short-sighted on my part. At age 25, one wants to think that the world is on a straight path towards being a spectacular place. I’ve grown to understand that we are living in turbulent times where drastic measures are on the table from the good guys and the bad guys. The bad times are behind us, ahead of us and they are right now. We are living in the moment where we can make thirty years of change in five years. And if it doesn’t work I want to die trying, I don’t want to die resigned to think that stuff is shit. Even when I go to a hotel for a two day stay I empty my whole bag into the dressers. I stick my foot into things and I go the whole way. I want to know that between the things that bring me joy, the things that bring me money and the duties I have to my family I contributed to helping the world, to helping my community. I’m optimistic about all of this. I think we can all find some of that optimism. I know a lot of people already have. The pandemic changed to me what I think success can look like, the pandemic made me value the people most immediately in my life more. The pandemic made me realize that I need to enjoy where I am more, but I am responsible to make where I am better. I have had a really beautiful life so far, I get paid a living wage for playing jazz music. My backup plan to being a bassist was being a radio host. These are pipe dreams and I get to do that. And I am the co-owner of a beautiful company called Trivia Mafia*. I have amazing children, an amazing wife. I have so much to be thankful for and so much reason to hope that more people can have things to be thankful for. I have so much reason to hope that people can keep the freedoms, the joys, the pleasures they are thankful for. We are in turbulent times, but I am not standing by. I am optimistic and I know that amazing things come out of hard times.
*In fact I was lucky to have a meeting with one of our employees this morning and unsolicited she said that it was a great company to work for, like truly great. She is not one to give out praise willy-nilly, I knew she meant that shit and it made me very happy. I can’t claim much credit for the current Trivia Mafia culture, but I helped plant the seeds when I was working the day to day so I’ll take it!