Trying to Stay Positive

This blog is extra for me. I’ve got work doing radio things for Minnesota Public Radio, I’ve got some responsibilities for Trivia Mafia, which I’m a part owner of, I feel like I am on a mostly solo island trying to drag this new Heiruspecs record across the finish line.* I’ve got two beautiful children who have spent about 15% of their weekdays in daycare due to COVID19 positives in their classrooms. I took a PCR test on Monday with my daughter Sadie, she got her negative test back Wednesday afternoon. I still haven’t gotten mine back. It’s just a shit time and it’s been hard to take a breath and reflect on life. I don’t think I’m worth much on this blog unless I can reflect on life.
But yesterday I got to cover the morning show for my colleague Jill on the Current, that took me off of my usual evening shift responsibilities. That had me getting a babysitter and heading out for dinner and dessert with my wife Rachel. And that gave me the opportunity to just breathe and get some distance from things. Here’s some terrible silver linings for the era we’re living in:

The Black Plague
You think in 1350 circa four years into bubo life the folks said “we’re screwed, millions of us are gonna die”. I bet they did! But I’m glad some of them lived and kept on having kids. Cause that’s why some of us are here, raising our kids, using the internet, enjoying coffee and trying to make the world a better place. We are in a trying time in our history. Our country refuses to live up to ideals it has at least paid lip service to in the past. The world is becoming less equitable, wealth is isolating in fewer and fewer spots. Most of us don’t even entertain our kids having a better life than us. And a lot of boomer parents know their kids aren’t getting the same quality of life that they had. But, think about those bubo filled folks in Eurasia in the 1300s! Dying. Dying alone. Dying smelling bad. Dying in the street. The shit still happens today.

We aren’t going to come out better from this. The world is not learning the lessons it should from COVID19. The world is not learning the shortcomings of our current system. We are gridlocked, land wars are starting, we are making it harder to vote. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn. That doesn’t mean I can’t make St. Paul better, or at least my block better, or my workplace better. 2020 and 2021 have been about raising standards and lowering targets. I want to do smaller things better. I don’t want to shut off the outside world, I want to aim at the things I can make better and measure my results. It might be demoralizing, but it’s not immobilizing. I just keep on thinking about not having a bubo in my armpit, having the ability to share music with the world, having wonderful children and a wonderful wife and having the push to keep on trying.

Sunsets
They’ll still be sunsets. That’s something. They’re beautiful, amazing things and they happen everyday. Preserving the environment in such a way that coastal cities don’t sink is important for hundreds of reasons. But sometimes it helps me to keep it simple. We have operated machinery, driven cars, demanded products and structured life such that there is already less space to enjoy the bounty of mother nature. We won’t change in meaningful ways because this machinery, these cars, these products, they make tremendous amounts of money for people and those people wield a lot of power. But, that’s shortsighted. At some point an oil magnate will be forced to realize that their grandchildren won’t see sunsets, their grandchildren won’t sit on a beach and look at a healthy ocean. And the lockers full of money will be powerless, useless. The opportunity to enjoy sunsets is fading. The opportunity for the power brokers to imagine a reason to change that is just opening.

Racism
Dubois wrote “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. It’s true now too. And I bet you a lot of the abolitionists, and particularly radical abolitionists didn’t think this would be the defining problem of the NEXT NEXT century of American life. But here we are. I am watching the PBS special “Reconstruction” right now. It is too easy to forget, especially being white and in the North for my whole life, how much white America came together to keep black people down after the letter of the law sought to right the ship. It is stunning but without the positive connotations of the word stunning. The threat of black people being shoulder to shoulder in opportunity, rights and agency in our country is a nightmare to so many of my fellow countrymen. That hasn’t changed. I don’t see this in the narrative as much nowadays, but I still think that so much of the American Right now is built as a visceral and strategic response to a black President.

Why would I share any of this paragraph in the world of things that are positive? Well, there is a potential for a counter-response that I don’t imagine was as possible in the 1990s. Why? In the 1990s it seems there was an idea that white America should pretend racism is over. If we pretended racism was over it would be hard to fight against racism. It was a racist idea, but it made counter attacks difficult. There was tangible progress; people who refused to acknowledge or simply voice that it was too little too late or unfairly focused on outcomes improving strictly for middle and upper-class black families could be painted as quacks. Racism becoming more obvious in this era is a bad development, but it results in more opportunities to challenge racism. Mitch McConnell separated black people from “Americans” in an interview this week. It was a slip, but he doesn’t even really have to apologize for it because everyone knows that’s how he thinks. The ugly truth is more out in the open and this is the chance to capitalize on it.

See! Black plague, sunsets, racism. The world is doing better.

*For dragging across the line context, The last notes I played on a bass on this record were in 2019. Since then it’s been all pdfs, mix reviews, google sheets, and conflicting criticisms from the members of Heiruspecs. It’s all part of the game, but man it’s a shit part of the game. I’m the leader of Heiruspecs, but we’re equals. That means that I end up shuffling a lot of shit against my will but in concert with the wants of some members of the band. I’m not complaining, I think it works. But at this moment as I’m pulling teeth just to get comments on artwork and masters it stresses me out.