Scatterbrained Ramblings

Hey, all. Just a quick update since things are going well: I’ve been chugging along with my commissions and have made it through all of my new commissioners as of yesterday night. I’ll be starting the repeat customers probably today or maybe tomorrow (gotta go into work today, so that adds a couple of hours to the day I wouldn’t have ordinarily spent).

I wanted to take a quick opportunity to thank all the people who have commissioned me. As you probably know, writing isn’t my “real job”—well, okay, writing fiction isn’t my real job—so anything I make off these commissions is discretionary. It’s bought me things like a scythe last year (a lot more tiring than a weed eater but significantly quieter and in my humble opinion, less of a hassle to maintain) and most recently, a felling axe.

Not gonna lie, I love my axe. I’ve been taking it out into the back of the property and cutting down dead, overgrown, or in-the-way trees. I’ve used axes before, but it was only fairly recently that I learned the difference between a felling and splitting axe. Having cut down a number of trees with each now, I can say that it’s great to have the right tool for the job! You can cut down a tree with a felling axe in the sense that you can put a nail in with a screwdriver, and Whack (yes, I named my axe because this axe is Whack) is a joy to use.

Not sure how many axe aficionados there are out there, but for anybody who’s interested, it’s a Helko Werk Forester. I gotta say, stripping branches off with this thing is effortless, almost like peeling a potato: the blade (okay, okay, “bit” for those who want to use the proper terminology) touches the branches, and they just slip right off. Very satisfying! As for actually felling, I’m still getting the hang of it, but I’ve seen this thing slice through one– or two-inch trunks with a single swing (scary, let me tell ya, but so satisfying!).

I’m hoping that this will help me get into better shape. COVID (and generally being a homebody anyway) has definitely packed on the pounds, and I can definitely feel the burn when I’m out cutting, so here’s hoping a bunch of weight around my middle will move up to my chest. I wouldn’t mind looking like a lumberjack! I’m getting better at it: when I first started, I could swing right-to-left but had pretty much no control if I tried to swing left-to-right. Practice has definitely improved that a lot! I wouldn’t say I’m quite ambidextrous with it, yet, but at least I can consistently hit pretty close to where I’m aiming now. That scene from Titanic where Rose cuts Jack’s handcuffs with an axe makes me cringe every time I miss. Sorry, Jack. You weren’t really using that hand anyway, were you? <shudder>

Speaking of COVID, I had my first shot a few days ago, and my dad and I both get our second ones in early April. Not that I’m gonna stop wearing a mask—it’s all about taking all the precautions we can and hoping it’s enough to stop the spread—but it will be nice knowing that the likelihood of infecting my elderly neighbors (who refuse to get the vaccine) will be greatly diminished.

Welp, enough yammering. I need to finish my coffee and then get on the road. I don’t think I’m gonna get to cut trees today; it’ll be dark or nearly dark by the time I get home. Probably just as well, though; I’ve been out every day this week after work, and my hands and forearms are pretty sore! I need to take the tractor back in there and collect all the wood I’ve chopped up. I gotta tell ya: it takes a few minutes to chop one tree down, but then it takes an hour to chop it up into pieces. When I first started doing this, I went out and chopped down a number of trees and left them lying there. Much of the time spent since then has just been processing the trees I already felled! Great workout, though. Anyway, gotta go. Take care, all!

I’ve been fascinated by the thought of direct air capture and have watched a few videos on it, but inevitably, they always come back to pumping CO2 underground, and I can’t help think to myself:

1. What a waste—there are so many products we use that have high carbon content; why not use that carbon for something productive rather than throwing it away?
2. How long will that CO2 stay buried? Radon gas, for example, has a habit of escaping the soil into homes and buildings. Admittedly, I’m no chemist, but it seems like something the size of tiny molecules should be able to permeate certain soils—if that’s the case, then are we just setting ourselves up for future problems by doing this, metaphorically kicking the can down the road?

So, I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about #1. What high-carbon products do we use (or would we use, given a plentiful source of carbon) that we could produce from the CO2 we extract? I’m deliberately leaving fossil fuels out of the list since experts are saying that merely offsetting the CO2 we’re producing isn’t enough—even if we could reduce our net output to zero today, we’d still have too much CO2 in the air, and creating fossil fuels that we then burn and release more CO2 only undoes the work we’ve done in capturing it in the first place. Still, there are a number of things on the list:

• Carbon fiber
• Carbon nanotubes
• Graphite
• Diamonds

Admittedly, I imagine not many people are using #2 pencils today (and those also contain something other than graphite in them to make them #2), but still. Everything I’ve heard is that carbon fiber is amazing but expensive to produce, and carbon nanotubes have amazing properties but are also too expensive to produce. Diamonds are hard to mine but can be produced synthetically and have amazing thermal conductivity and electrical insulation properties. Without wanting to devalue diamonds as gemstones, there are plenty of scientific and industrial applications where this would be useful if we had a supply of carbon to make them.

Again, I’m not a chemist, and it could be crazy expensive and energy-intensive to do what I’m suggesting, but in case it’s not crazy, I’m throwing it out there for somebody who knows the processes better than I do to take and run with. What if we capture CO2 like we’ve been doing but add another step to the process to strip the carbon off the CO2, resulting in solid carbon and oxygen gas? Then we’ve got this abundant source of carbon to make carbon fiber, carbon nanotubes, diamonds, graphite, etc. so that we don’t have to treat all that carbon like garbage, something to be buried out of sight?

This post made it look like there might be a chemical process that doesn’t involve heating the gas to 600 °C, and that makes me wonder: if we used renewable energy to power the reactions and set a few of these things up worldwide, could it make the price tag of carbon capture sting a little less, or would this add so much cost that it’s not worth the effort? I’m not an environmentalist or anything, but the idea of turning this waste product into something useful is very enticing to me, and I think that from the standpoint of getting commercial ventures to adopt it, there’s gonna have to be something in it for them besides government subsidies.

Phew, what a whirlwind it’s been since my last post! I had thought that things would slow down once the tiny house got here, but it turns out there was just more work to be done once it did! My dad and I got the electrical hooked up, and I got the water hooked up. Then we spent several days putting in the skirting (it looks pretty nice, actually—it needs to be wiped down and cleaned up to take the construction dust off it and have the paint retouched, but I’ll do that once it warms up outside), and then the septic guys put the septic in. Meanwhile, I was having furniture delivered, so things have been crazy. But, today is my 2-week anniversary of moving in, and things are going well.

I bought $200 worth of groceries the other day and was worried that they wouldn’t fit (I’m so used to the camper’s lack of space that it’s hard to conceive of being able to fit all that), but the refrigerator is still almost empty, and the freezer has enough space to store probably 4-8x what I bought, despite having bought enough to make one of each meal I know how to make (probably enough to last me 6 weeks or so). It’s crazy how much space there is, even though the place still isn’t “big”. Showering every day has been glorious, and being able to do laundry without leaving the house has also been wonderful. With these groceries, I might well be able to stay in the house for a few weeks without leaving for any reason…a really weird concept to me since before I had to go to the grocery store before every meal to get supplies. I even got hold of some resistance bands and have started working out a bit. I’m not sure whether it’s a realistic goal, yet, but I’m hoping that by, say, June, I’ll be in considerably better shape than I am now. The ability to eat something besides TV dinners and crock pot recipes will help a lot, as will having space to exercise and full-length mirrors to keep my motivation up (yeesh, my gut has become…erm…ponderous!). I’ve also really enjoyed having my (musical) keyboard back. I’ve been playing the stuff I used to play, and I’m learning the Game of Thrones theme. I had forgotten how much I missed making music, so it’s really nice to be able to do it again.

I’ve got a massive list of projects lined up, too. Stuff like caulking and touching up the paint on the skirting, finally ridding myself of the trash in the barn and getting rid of that !@#$ trailer house, putting in more road base, building some climate-controlled space in the barn, putting in gutters, sealing the porch, and planting a garden. It all has to wait for now: between finances (I’m stretched super thin right now) and winter, it’s not the best time to be doing much of that. But, I’ve got clear direction and am optimistic about the future, which has been a major improvement over the last 9+ months! And, if I can stick to the plan, I’ll be debt-free once again come early to mid 2022, so there’s that to look forward to, too.

As for writing, I have started looking back at the commission I was working on before I went on hiatus. I haven’t added much to it, but at least it’s back on the radar again. Still no promises as to when I’ll finish it, let alone open up for commissions again, but I am at least thinking about it again. Now that I’ve finished Game of Thrones and don’t really have another show I really want to watch, the lack of distraction might help a bit, too…

The election has been called for Biden, and for that I’m grateful and relieved. However, the closeness of the election has given me pause. A big pause.

I have never liked Trump, and it’s not because I’m anti-conservative. I lean fiscally conservative myself. What I dislike about him is his divisiveness, the rude and disparaging remarks he makes about anybody he doesn’t like, his refusal to condemn supremacists. As I have said before, he represents the figurative crux of all of America’s cultural divides: black vs. white, man vs. woman vs. transgender, rich vs. poor, young vs. old. While I was shocked and appalled to see him elected in 2016, once I realized this, it began to make sense: Trump was what America deserved, even if for half of us, he wasn’t what we wanted.

In 2020, I had expected things to be different. After seeing tensions increasing to the breaking point, riots starting across the country, his abysmal handling of COVID, and his propensity for outright lying with shocking frequency, it seemed obvious to me that he’d be hurled out of office, that those who had voted for him in 2016 realized their mistake or were shocked and appalled by his behavior over his term and would vote for the clear lesser of two evils. Not that I dislike Biden, but as even he has said that he’s a bit of a rebound president; he’s probably not going to be the one to achieve much healing of the Great Divides, but maybe he’ll give us all the space we need to regroup and maybe look into something more serious in 2024.

But the vote was a whole lot closer than that. The Democrats were much aggrieved when the “blue wave” never hit, when things remained too close to call not only for the first day but for several days thereafter. One estimate I heard said that Biden won by around 5 million votes. If that’s true, and if there were 160 million ballots cast, then Biden won by only 3%. Does that mean that 47% of the country is racist or that the divisions in the country are less terrible than what Biden was proposing? Okay, okay, say 45% since some people voted 3rd party. Still, almost half?

I was brought up in a suburban / somewhat rural area, about 50% white, 49.5% Hispanic, and the remaining 0.5% shared among everybody else. Yet even in that environment, I was taught that racism was bad, that prejudice was something to be overcome, something that we as a country had overcome (mostly). Yet here we are in 2020 with Biden winning by only 3% of the vote. I had always imagined that the racists in the country were very small, isolated groups, that yeah, there might be 10,000 of them nationally but that they didn’t really represent that big of a threat to democracy. Yet there were 70 million+ votes for Trump. That’s a whole lot more votes than I’d have expected, and frankly, I still have trouble believing that there are that many racists in the country. It has to be something else. That begs the question: what is it that Democrats are proposing that would turn 70 million people away from them?

I’ve talked to or read articles from people who planned to vote for Trump, and the things that I saw came down to abortion, gun control, healthcare, welfare, the green new deal, and taxes. I think really, it comes down to just abortion, gun control, and taxes since I don’t think anybody would have a problem with free healthcare, welfare, and environmental protections if there were truly a way to achieve them without raising taxes. So, let’s take these one-by-one.

Abortion was one that one of my neighbors and an article I read both mentioned. And, I get it: Democrats are generally pro-choice, and to someone who believes that abortion is literally murder, I could see that being one of those things you “just can’t compromise about”. Yet even those people made exceptions for cases of rape or where the mother’s life was in jeopardy due to the pregnancy. I realize that these are the most extreme cases, but it does demonstrate that there is some common ground between the two sides: I think most people can agree that in these cases, abortion may be acceptable albeit still undesirable.

Gun control is another one. Trump’s misinformation, saying that Biden was “gonna take your guns”, of course stirred the pot. But, Biden went on record saying that wasn’t the case. I understand conservatives’ concerns: to them, the right to bear arms is the right to remain independent, to be able to defend themselves. Out here in the sticks, calling the police isn’t going to do you any good if someone—animal or human—threatens you or your livestock. It’s going to take the police a minimum of 30 minutes to get to me. So, I can either shoot the thing threatening my animals or my person, or I can have a dead or injured animal on my hands. That idea of “I have to protect myself” is integral to people’s sense of security, and for many conservatives, distrust in the government makes it just one more critter from which they might have to defend themselves. So, the government taking their guns away or limiting their access to them validates that fear, and I think that’s why they oppose it so strongly. As I’ll get into later, that wound is very raw right now—has been for the last 20 years or so—and it’s going to take a period of leaving things alone and letting it heal a bit before anybody’s going to be willing to put that fear aside.

Lastly, taxes. Again, Trump did an impressive job of glossing over the fact that Biden’s increased taxes only apply to corporations and people making over $400K a year. I know I’ve talked about it before (though I don’t remember whether it was on here), but aside from the fact that the $400K caveat was omitted, I think the fallacy of “that could be me one day” is what causes the most angst when it comes to taxes. The economics YouTube channel I’ve been watching (Economics Explained, for anybody interested) has covered how counter-cyclical fiscal policy is supposed to work, and frankly, we should have had increased taxes during Trump’s term rather than lowered taxes. Nobody wants to hear that, but counter-cyclical fiscal policy is like the government’s equivalent of a rainy-day fund: when you’re raking in the money (strong economy), you set some aside (taxes) for when things get bad (recession). Then, when things do get bad, you set less aside and start drawing from your reserves to level things out a bit. The highs aren’t quite so high, but on the other hand, the lows aren’t quite as low, either. Unfortunately, before COVID hit, we weren’t saving; instead, we were spending as fast as we could so that when the downturn came, it hit us really hard. Had we had some savings from the better times, the stimulus packages wouldn’t have had such a negative connotation in Congress. But, here we are. Unfortunately, Biden is now wanting to impose taxes while things are not-great. This is also the wrong thing to do, but like Trump, Biden will be doing what he can while he’s in office. But, I digress. Especially with the economy being ripped to shreds by COVID, I can understand why conservatives would be afraid of increased taxes—particularly if the misinformation they received made them think they themselves would be affected.

So, I think misinformation played a big role: making everybody think Biden was going to tax the hell out of people and take away their guns would probably be a pretty effective way to convince conservatives that didn’t check the facts to steer clear. Apparently there was also a Spanish-language smear campaign going on saying that Biden was a pedophile. I kinda feel like, “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and the same goes for if something sounds too bad to be true.” Unfortunately, critical thinking isn’t this country’s greatest strength these days.

But you know, I wonder if the bigger issue isn’t the vitriol between Democrats and Republicans itself that pushes people away. “Socialism is evil”, one conservative said. “Trumpists are Nazi fascists”, one liberal said. “They’re destroying this country”, they both said. But, as I’ve said before, I really don’t believe that’s true. I believe that the vast majority of people want what’s best for the country, as viewed through their perspective and upbringing. To a liberal, “destroying the country” might mean rescinding gay and trans protections. Yet to a conservative, rescinding gay and trans protections is just a way of protecting the country because they believe that the rise in gay and trans activism is a threat to their conservative values. To them, “destroying the country” might be implementing socialist programs that will inevitably lead us to be like Venezuela—once prosperous but now impoverished and overrun with corruption. To liberals, those social programs are what level the playing field for the 99% and give those at the bottom a safety net in case something bad happens. Personally, I see the pros and cons of both sides. As one of my neighbors put it, “I don’t have a problem with gays getting married, but I don’t want to have to watch them kissing on my TV with every ad.” On one hand, I get it: the guy’s uncomfortable at seeing something that he considers inappropriate. Many liberals certainly cry foul when they hear someone use the n-word or other slur—something they find inappropriate even if it isn’t said in the presence of someone the slur is intended to degrade. Liberals will argue that they’re not the same, that the n-word is inherently harmful. Conservatives will also argue they’re not the same, that the proliferation of gay relationships on TV is inherently harmful. Having been in the middle for a long time, I understand where both sides are coming from. The right just wants to be left alone, to not have to adapt to changing times. The left just wants to be left alone, to not be oppressed by the mores that got codified as laws. I get it; I really do, and I cannot condemn either side as “evil” or “selfish”.

Imagine if you will that you’ve gotten a blister between your thumb and index finger, and for as long as you can remember, somebody has come up at least once a day and poured some salt on it or rubbed it with sandpaper. It hurts, and it is really sensitive. How long would it take before you just automatically assume that anybody coming up to you is going to hurt you some more? How much of a chance are you likely to give someone to have a look at your blister if there’s a really good chance that that person is going to be the next one to make it worse? That’s how our country is right now, how it’s been for quite some time. The slightest mention of black lives matter has conservatives clutching their hands. The slightest mention of a conservative justice, and liberals are shielding their hands with their bodies. But just like an infected blister, we can’t heal if we can’t expose the wound to someone that can treat it. There’s going to be a little bit of pain on both sides, just like scrubbing a road rash or spraying antiseptic on a cut, but in the end, if we’ll all open up a little bit, be brave and take a step towards the other side, we can get better. But right now, we’re all acting like caged wolverines (or at least what I assume a caged wolverine acts like, having never seen one): we instantly lash out at anybody from the other side who comes near us.

I read a sarcastic article today from a liberal saying that he was sorry conservatives hated him for Biden winning, that even though they had told him to “cry more, libtard”, he would try to understand their side, and so on. While I understand the sentiment, that’s not helping; that’s gloating. The article talks about “I’m going to have to understand you because you won’t understand me”, and if we remove the sarcasm and bitterness, I think there’s something to that. As you guys know, I work with my herd a fair bit, and Cloudy just does not want to be social. So, I’ve begun working with her, making the first move to bring us in close contact (hugging her neck and petting her withers). She was never going to make the first move, but for both our sakes, it’s better if she’s amicable when I come out to tend them. It is similar, I believe, for conservatives. They want to be left alone, to not be told what to do; one of the hallmarks of conservatives is not wanting to explore new things or ways of thinking. It is, I believe, unreasonable to expect a conservative to make the first move towards reconciliation. Of course, this is a gross generalization and there will be plenty of patriotic conservatives who will step out of their comfort zones and even take the lead for the sake of keeping the country together, but again, even the word “conservative” is synonymous with wanting to take things slowly and cautiously. So, yes, liberals will likely have to reach far across the aisle to find common ground, and if they’re going to be successful, this has to be done with a true spirit of wanting to walk forward together, not just reaching over to grab someone by the wrist and yank him across the aisle. As civil rights go, liberals are the gas pedal, and conservatives are the brakes. All brakes and no gas, and the car doesn’t go anywhere. All gas and no brakes, and you get Venezuela. There is a give and take, and by learning to tread that middle ground, to reduce the amplitude of the political pendulum’s swing, we’ll make a lot more progress that is mutually agreeable to everybody than alternately flooring the gas and slamming the brakes. As a moderate, I’m getting whiplash, and an awful lot of people I’ve talked to have said the same thing…while also saying that “it’s the other side’s fault because they won’t compromise”.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m seriously considering running for election in 2024. I think I’ll start the Gray Party. Why gray? Because not everything is black-and-white. Because that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because when you mix equal amounts of all the different colors of light, you get gray. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but it seemed clever to me.

But gosh, that sounds like an awful lot of work.

The last six or so weeks have been, in a word, insane. I paid off the land and then promptly ended up in the hospital for five days with diverticulitis. While that was not “enjoyable”, it did light a fire under my ass to get out of the camper. I was lying there on the next-to-last day, thinking about how I missed my animals and my computer…but not the camper. I did not relish the thought of sleeping on my uncomfortable bed or sitting in my uncomfortable chair, both of which make my back and/or hips hurt. My parents had been taking care of my herd for me while I was laid up, and when I asked them what I could do to thank them for their help, they told me I could, to quote my dad, “get out of that damn camper.” So, here we are, about 5 weeks later, and while I’m not out, yet, I’m very close. I’ve picked out a tiny house (with a front porch—that was a major selling point), leveled a spot for it (right between the barn and the herd’s little pasture, so it’ll be just a few steps to walk out and greet them instead of the 500 feet it is currently—I’ve taken to driving), put down and compacted road base to put it on, dug a 70-foot long trench (50 feet by hand), and put the water line in. If all goes well, I’ll have the electrical done this weekend, and then it’ll just be waiting on the tiny house to get here sometime around November 12th. After that, I get the septic installed, install the gutters and the skirting, and it’s move-in day! I’m pretty excited. It’s even got its own washer and dryer, which is *super* exciting: for the first time in 4 years, I won’t have to leave the house to do laundry or to shower!

But, with all this stuff going on, I haven’t been doing any writing. Today’s actually the first day since last Monday that I haven’t spent hours digging a trench. Last Monday was 1-1/2 hours, and it’s been roughly 2 hours a day ever since…except Saturday, which was 8 hours…plus voting and getting replacement tires. So, yeah, no writing for the foreseeable future. I still have a couple of commissions to finish up from the last batch that I put on hold once I start up again, so it’s definitely looking like I’m not going to open up again until 2021. We’ll see how things go once I’m in the tiny house—maybe the newfound comfort and space will inspire me to write, but I’m not really holding my breath.

Anyway, just wanted to say I’m not dead. Dead tired, maybe, but not dead!

I wanted to make this a poem, but the words and meter escaped me. So, prose it is.

They sit alone, their surroundings intimate. One warm, one cool, they feel each other out. Lips find muzzle, fingers twitch. But be careful: not too fast. Go to savor it. Gently, fingers: mind the 0.125.

Their hearts begin to pound. The climax nears. A quivering breath stirs the silence. Trembling fingers caress and stroke. The magazine quivers, straining with its load. Won’t someone please unleash it? Its release is nigh—please!—it’s only 0.125.

The fingers tease—but wait—is this right? A second thought, a second chance. They really ought not. But then, a surge of ecstasy, renewed resolve! They seize each other. Breath catches. They throw safety to the wind. A little squeeze—that’s all it takes to achieve 0.125.

An orgasmic blast shatters the silence. A triumphant report fills the air. The herd looks up in surprise. Silence. False alarm, perhaps. They return to grazing. Enjoy your peace, sweet ones, while it lasts. You’ll soon learn the truth of 0.125.

As you guys know, I’ve been struggling with what I perceive to be an awful lot of blind animosity in the US right now. It’s disheartening since I don’t really know what to do about it. I certainly don’t have the solutions to the country’s complex problems—I haven’t even experienced a tenth of the country, let alone from all the different perspectives.

But as I’ve been thinking about it, there is one thing that’s come to me over and over again: one party trying to solve the problem hasn’t been working for us. Pick a topic—any topic—and no single party has been able to solve it. Why? I firmly believe it’s because every party only sees a piece of the problem. If you’re trying to do a jigsaw puzzle and can only see four of the pieces—pieces that don’t even go together—then how can you expect to solve it? The parable of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind. It seems to me that if we’re going to solve any of these complex, diverse problems that face us, we have got to get more people involved so we can see the rest of the puzzle.

Any statistician will tell you—and the parable of the blind men and the elephant demonstrates—that a single sample—a single viewpoint—is not a very good estimate of the whole population or the “truth” of a thing. It takes many samples—many perspectives—to even begin to approach the real thing. This notion, that the truth can only be approximated given a sufficiently diverse set viewpoints, is the thesis of this article, or, put differently, E pluribus veritas, “From many, truth.”

In linear algebra, if you have a certain number of unknowns, then you have to have at least that many independent equations to be able to solve for them. It’s no different here. For decades, our country has been trying to tackle hard problems—problems on whose solutions even the world’s experts continue to disagree—without having enough information to do it. Consider that for a moment: if you had to plan a budget for your family and you had absolutely no idea how much your rent, mortgage or property taxes were going to cost, you’d be at a pretty big disadvantage, wouldn’t you? Now, if on top of that, you also didn’t know how much it would cost you for transportation—fuel and auto costs, bus passes, etc.—or how much food would cost you, all of a sudden, your budget becomes a bit of a joke. That is, I believe, what our government—and worse, society at large—have been trying to do. Now, consider that you live with several roommates. One of them knows how much your rent is, another knows how much food for the group of you will be, and still another knows how much your transportation will cost. By talking to all these different people, suddenly you have the tools to put together a budget that actually has a chance of being right.

But even then, it won’t be perfect. One of you eats more than the others, so that person’s food budget will be higher. Another is a homebody who works from home all the time and as such has almost no travel expenses. For something as basic as creating a budget for a few roommates the variations suddenly begin to matter, and the person who eats like a bird and never goes anywhere might not be too keen on having to pay more so that the one person can eat like a horse and the other can go jet-setting.

Now take the squabbles that could ensue from that very simple example and expand it out to apply to the roughly 325 million people in the country. One group—be it old, rich, white men, old, rich, black women, or any other group—is like one roommate. Sure, there are many people in that group, but their views are broadly aligned—not exactly, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In that sense, their perspectives are not independent in the mathematical sense; they’re just variations on a theme, and they don’t provide new information. Take me, for instance: I’m a 30-something, middle-class, white guy. If you were to group me with other 30-something, middle-class, white guys, we might have different opinions on things, but not one of us could tell you definitively what its’ like to grow up poor, to grow up black, to grow up rich, to grow up a woman. Asking me—or anyone in that group—what any of those things is like is like asking the roommate who knows the cost of food and asking how much it costs to get from point A to point B: we’ll all gladly take a guess, but none of us have the perspective to be able to answer it authoritatively.

That is why, to answer hard questions like how to address poverty, race relations, or education, we need a lot of perspectives. Without firsthand experience of what it’s like to enter poverty, to live in it, and to get out of it, we’re trying to solve for a variable without enough equations. Without perspectives of blacks, whites, countless other races—and, yes, even racists, any solution we try to provide is sure to be a poor estimate of the optimal one. Why? Because if you leave the racists out and come up with a solution that seems great to everybody else, the racists will claim you beat them over the head with it. It won’t appeal to them, won’t have any common ground on which they can stand, and feeling shoved off the island, they’ll throw up their hands and walk away, dig in their heels, and reject any kind of change, no matter how small. When communication stops, our country stagnates. And, like stagnant water, a stagnant country begins to stink.

So, I’m starting the hashtag #EPluribusVeritas. I have no idea if it will catch on. I hope it does. I hope it attracts smarter people than I am. I hope it attracts a wide variety of perspectives so that we can finally start wrapping our heads around these massive problems that have only gotten bigger during my lifetime. I hope it attracts a presidential candidate—and a party—that we can all get behind. But most of all, I hope it starts to heal the cracks before our country splinters into a hundred different pieces. Say what you will, we’re stronger together.

-Jack