Lunch at Henna’s

A reader of this blog recently wrote to me and expressed the hope that I’d write again in the future. It has been a while and such writing as I do these days is of a rather stolid professional sort. But I had a dream last night which I remembered quite well. Since that never happens, I wrote it down and thought it hung together passably as a story. Here it is — a StoneSoup Christmas special.

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Had an unusually memorable dream last night. The end of it was John Krasinski giving me a push on rollerblades to guide me into a barrier between the two sides of the Lincoln Tunnel so I could avoid being hit by highway traffic. He was successful, but I heard a loud car crash behind me and thought “this must be a dream; otherwise I’m pretty fucked” and woke up. 

The overall idea of the dream was that I was late for my friend Henna’s lunch and had not made the food I said I would. (The lunch is a real thing happening today, and the anxiety stems from having less time than I’d like to cook this morning since I fell asleep very late (~5 am) because of very loud music my neighbors were playing while throwing a Christmas Eve rager— the part in these parentheses is absolutely true).

So my earliest memory in the dream (though I think maybe not where it actually started) was being at my parents house to cook food for lunch but failing to because they did not have the right pots and pans (something connected to them being old and infirm).

From there I ended up at my friend Angela’s place with a number of her juvenile siblings (she has one adult sister in real life, who I’ve never met). At this point it’s too late to cook but I’m trying to gather supplies to make things less embarrassing for me (notably the food I was supposed to make is Chinese, as is Angela). I remember eating a barbecue pork bun (which I love and associate with New Years) and was going to bring some though then realized it wasn’t vegetarian. I believe then Rick of Rick and Morty began showing me a picturebook of alternate dimensions that developed in an immoral way and he needed to pare back. I realized that the stories shared a common feature with the myth of the Chocolate Monster, the final story I read. Basically an extension of the Rick and Morty spaghetti-and-meat sauce episode (itself an allegory for eating meat), the Chocolate Monster story initially recounted the delicious desserts the monster loved to eat, but the fine print was that these desserts were actually various enactments of collective human suffering, which the Monster took pleasure in experiencing. (The idea (and I realized this in the dream) is an extension of something I’ve pondered about suffering-risk related both the quantum many-worlds hypothesis and artificial intelligence — the idea that there could be infinite value-observer valences to particular human narratives — e.g. there could be a universe where the holocaust is like a movie enjoyed by the chocolate monster. 

Around this point in the dream, Angela told me I had vetoed some other person coming to lunch (or through lapse in approval caused them not to be allowed to come). I said I’d apologize to Henna and the person involved, who I think may have been a woman I owe an email to about organ donation in real life.

As I’m leaving, Angela mentions Bobbi (my ex-girlfriend) is either definitely coming to the lunch or definitely not (I don’t remember which — I think at one point in the dream I had heard she is definitely coming (in real life she probably can’t make it)) and then Angela in the dream gave me like a knowing glance about that, and then we had a conversation where basically it turned out Angela has been in love with me, or at least wished that I had tried to date her. I stayed with her a beat to demonstrate my understanding of the seriousness of the conversation, and I tried to set up a time for us to meet a few days later (the only time that the real world fact this lunch is happening Christmas Day obliquely came up), but, knowing how late this was getting I felt I had to leave to minimize rudeness to Henna.

Somehow John Krasinski arrived. I think I may have gone from the Angela stairway goodbye scene back into Angela’s house which had become something of a party and met him there, or maybe it was on the A-train platform later. I remember him saying in a self-deprecating way like “you might know me from The Office” to introduce himself, and I joked that he was also in Jack Ryan (a show I’ve never seen). Things were breaking up and I said how late I was to Henna’s party. It seemed like he didn’t have anything better to do (something I may remember thinking was weird for a celebrity on Christmas), and I figured bringing him would help make up for failing to bring food and showing up late. So he decided to come with me.  

But Henna needed to approve his attendance. So I tried calling her, but couldn’t reach her. I was also trying to look up directions which I struggled to find. (I think it’s like 247 West Main Street in the dream.) I am trying to look up the address on my phone while I’m trying to contact Henna, all the while trying to make it to her house. I have a number of train mishaps (I think these postdate my recruiting John Krasinski but he’s not an obtrusive presence). They mostly involve an aboveground version of the A train.

At one point I am climbing an outdoor stairwell (like a fire escape). But I realize I’ve gone the wrong way and must go down, not up. John Krasinski is on the steps sort of mirrored to me but I can’t figure out how to reach him. I find that basically the only way to make my way out is by basically sliding down the center bannister — John Krasinski says careful or I might break my leg. I descend safely, at which point he offers roller blades, which makes sense given how late we are. I feel like we’re finally getting closer, only for me to realize that we have gone the wrong way yet again and have ended up in (I think) the Lincoln Tunnel on the western outskirts of Manhattan. 

As I veer into highway traffic John Krasinski helpfully gives me a push to get me clear of the 80 mph cars. He succeeds and I make it to the middle bank between the two opposing lane of traffic (but perhaps the situation feels unsustainable). I hear a loud car crash behind me and think how screwed I am (mostly in a legal sense but also in a stuck in highway traffic on roller blades sense) and wake up. I hope John Kraskinski survived. 

Superiority Burger

 

What kind of name for a restaurant is Superiority Burger? To some, it’s a simple claim to be a superior burger. And it is a superior burger: delicious like White Castle but gourmet and without meat. The ice cream’s pretty dope too.

But you might suspect another intention: to make a burger so good that it bestows superiority on its consumer— a magical hipster burger that translates dollars and attention to elevation above the plebes. You order at a takeout counter. There’s six things on the menu. There’s no space, an insane line, you’re in the know.

The chef is Brook Headley, once drummer for punk bands Born Against and the Wrangler Brutes, then the head pastry chef at Mario Batali’s four-star flagship Del Posto. He left that job to make the perfect veggie burger, $6 each– the Shake Shack of tomorrow brought to you in the East Village today.

But what makes Superiority Burger and its kin Loco’l and Dirt Candy interesting (along with their ancestors Blue Hill, Shake Shack and Chipotle) is that the hipster superiority being offered has grown from aesthetic to moral. Food that’s vegetarian or ethically raises, service by people given an ethical wage and health insurance, the tastiness of your meal is inseparable from the care and responsibility with which it was prepared. No longer just for cosmopolitans with all taste, no heart, and  New York Values, ethical consumerism lets you perform your moral identity by choosing a place to eat.

At this point, you’re probably like ugh, and “look at this fucking hipster,” because pretension feels gross even if (here) it’s in the service of something worthwhile. Hipsterism combines the idolatry of cultural consumerism with the prejudice of class difference.

And if you want to pass on in populist disgust at the etiolation and ennui of New York’s creative class, I can’t blame you. But… maaaaybe animal suffering is the moral struggle that is our age’s version of slavery. And maaybe… empowering workers in the service industry is crucial to the 21st century labor movement. And maybe there’s something deep and primal about the act of putting something pure and unpolluted into our body. And maybe we live in a consumerist market society for better or worse and we might as well harness our more ridiculous urges in the direction of social justice. If we have the chance, I mean. If it’s not too much. And if that’s all true, maybe ethical consumerism with trendy hipster places in the village could be the start of something bigger.

So ya, Superiority Burger. Eat there. It’s good.

Stop Gawking at Terrorism

The Best Thing You Can Do for the Victims in Brussels is Pretend They Didn’t Exist

So the first thing I need to say here is that the violence in Brussels is an unspeakable tragedy, and my chest shudders to picture the expanding waves of grief and fear emanating out from the killings and woundings that happened today. It’s easy to focus on the thirty lives lost, more than an entire grade-school class, but dozens more are in the hospital—their families terrified that they’re on the brink of death. The horror of the crime that was committed is literally beyond any individual comprehension or accounting.

So it’s only natural to cast our sympathies and attention to the act of terror whose results we mourn. Because their end is so awful, we picture it so vividly. We empathize and imagine our own life cut short. One moment running late to work; the next an explosion of blood and fear.

The image is so garish we can’t look away. So media supply us with an unlimited stream, self-perpetuating that attention to a raging froth. That rage is channeled to violence, the violence benefits the hawks, the hawks provoke the killers, a storm cycle of more violence ensues.

This is called terrorism.

We might say the right response is to simply eschew a violent response, ignore the provocation. Would that it were so simple. Our national emotions are not under our rational control (nor would we want them entirely to be). Rather we need to tackle the problem one level up, by making a mindful effort to redirect our attention away from terror and towards types of grief that are not so self-perpetuating and self-destructive.

I know that sounds like a cold and overly clinical approach to our reaction to terror. I know there is no way that tomorrow we’ll stop having the urge to pay attention – that it’s unrealistic to expect that terrorism will ever be denied outsized attention by our society.

But I do think it’s worth the effort to acknowledge, when we can’t look away from the attacks, that our attention is at least a vice—that we would prefer to be able to look elsewhere even if right now we’re not able. I think we should do that individually, that we should expect commentators to include it as part of their remarks, and eventually news reports themselves need to emphasize that our attention is the literal object of these murderers desire.

We are giving the terrorists exactly what they want. We owe the victims an attempt to break the cycle and frustrate the their murderers’ intention.

And yet, part of me worries that this approach might be callous. Even if we would be better off looking away, would we really want to be a people who turn our heads from suffering just for calculated reasons?

But, sadly we ignore suffering every day. Today, sixteen thousand children under five died. Picture the parents. Twelve hundred deaths from malaria. In America alone, as many as 30 from the kidney shortage. All of these deserve our attention. The sufferings are just as agonizing as the deaths in Brussels, but these ones are amenable to our focus on a solution.

Perhaps a little intersectionality is what is called for, something that expresses solidarity between the types of grief around us, that demands our moral attention for the problems that could use it, not the ones whose horror stem from it.

Maybe what we owe to the victims of the Brussels killings is the privacy to mourn the ones whose killers used as fuel for their public, hateful act.

It’s the Extinction, Stupid (DRAFT) 1.0

Here’s another (very rough) draft I’m working on. Sorry it’s depressing — was in a bad mood last week when I wrote it and now that Trump is set to be President of America’s Next Top Reich, this seemed appropriate. Comments and criticisms very welcome– blunt ones especially.

 

It’s the Extinction, Stupid–

Fear and Loathing in 2016 America

tl;dr – People like The Walking Dead because our species is about to blow itself into smithereens. We need to get our shit together and start treating this like an emergency.

Table of Contents

1. Funny Coincidences Are Funny and Maybe Mean There’s a Higher Being
   1. Americans Love The Walking Dead Because It Me (It Us? It U.S.?)
2. The World Is Going to End
   1. The Math: It’s Unlikely You’re One of the First Humans—There Probably Won’t Be That Many More of Us
   2. Nuclear Weapons Will Continue to Be a Thing
   3. Existential Russian Roulette Ends Poorly: We Will Keep Developing Technologies that Will Have Some Risk of Destroying Us Until We Kill Ourselves
3. Our Political System Is Fucked and Cannot Solve the Problem
   1. We Can’t Even Get Global Warming Right
   2. Look at This Fucking Election
   3. Political Parties Have Dumb Incentives
   4. We’re Doing a Terrible Job Regulating Technology and Consumer Data
4. (Detour: Major Technological Revolutions Are Awful for Early Generations—Sucked to Be a Chimney-Sweep)
5. But Why Is Our Public Sphere So Terrible?
   1. We Live in a Totalitarian Consumerist Market Society (Bummer…)
      1. Companies Can Control You (Like a Lot)
      2. Corporate Managers Are Tied to the Profit-Maximizing Shareholder Value Machine (Or “The Singularity” as I Like to Call It)
   2. Our Public Sphere Has Deflated
      1. Where Are All the Academics and Journalists? Shivering Quietly in the Corner
      2. Public Institutions Are Permeable to Dominant Private Interests
   3. The Internet Is for Apocalypse
      1. Artificial Intelligence Is Just One Example of Terrible, Unsafe Digital Infrastructure
      2. What If Human Identity Became Impossible to Prove Online? Scary, Right?
   4. Much Like the GOP Nominees Who Didn’t Realize Trump Had Practically Already Won, We Should Treat This as an Emergency, Because It Is

–        –        –

Funny Coincidences: If you’re drawn to being a spiritual person, you’ll often find yourself wondering about the artful coincidences that sometimes feel like your fate. For example, that I live in a country whose abbreviated name reads literally as “Us” is amusing to me. Or one time, right after a serious breakup, I tore a muscle in my chest—tangible evidence of my broken heart. Little things like that.

This amusing parlor game can take on a paranoid cast if you’re a younger member of the American ruling class staring out at the bleak national banquet that feels like our future. Why was I born at the inflection point of a declining empire?

That the most obvious looming catastrophe of our making is the earth literally heating up and summoning up a global flood may seem an especially appropriate metaphor. (Never mind that it is not nearly the worst danger we face.)

Indeed, I think one of the most perfect of these fitting ironies is that it looks like the world is going to end, and the name for my generation is “millennial.”

I haven’t seen anyone really bite the bullet and predict our generation will extinguish itself, but in my opinion, this unspoken sense of existential dread pervades American life. Why do you think we’re so obsessed with zombies and the apocalypse after all? Because we’re expecting one. Why do we hate any and all public institutions—because we know they’ve failed us and we’re careening toward catastrophe.

This essay is saying that we need to wake the fuck up and publicly acknowledge what’s going on. Unless something major changes, our species won’t make it out of the 21^st century alive.

–        –        –

Odds Are: Here’s a mathematical conjecture that initially struck me as silly but that I never could quite disprove. It implies the world will likely end soon. The idea is fairly simple: imagine all the human lives to ever exist as names in the telephone book, but spread out chronologically beginning to end. Your life, the one you’re living now, is as one picked randomly from this book, so it’s probably fairly close to the middle. So far, so good.

On the one hand, you might think there’s no surprise that you’re living in the 21^st century because the most humans alive at one time do indeed live today. But that raises a scary question: if humanity were destined to grow and thrive for millennia to come—if there were trillions of us yet to be born, what would be the odds of your having drawn a 21^st century life and not a later one? Pretty low.

But if our candle is soon to be wicked out, your being here to see the end is no surprise at all: the odds work out quite reasonably. If you’re in the middle of the book, you’re only one or two generations and maybe 15B or so people from the end. (Spoiler alert…)

This logic is far from incontrovertible (someone has to be alive today, no matter how many trillions of people end up being born). It would be merely an amusing parlor trick if only the other augurs of doom were not so insistent.

Nukes: Start with nuclear weapons—thousands of which are in the hands of despotic dictator whose guiding principle is machismo and whose constituency is dying off rapidly. That’s before you get to Pakistan, China, India, Israel —how many nuclear states will undergo massive upheaval this century? (Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump).

While we’re talking odds, how likely was our surviving the 20^th century? 70%? Even if each year our chance of avoiding nuclear catastrophe is 99.5%, that gives our species a half-life of a century just from the nuclear threat alone.

Russian Roulette: The key thing to realize is that nuclear weapons are simply the first of an indefinite number of existential threats. Humanity will continue developing technologies with some probability of our extinction. Take bioengineered pandemics, artificial intelligence, climate change, cyberwar, autonomous weapons, nano-machines. (Please). Each one is a different sized bullet in the game of Russian roulette our species is playing. The specific odds each time you pull the trigger aren’t important: if you keep playing, you’re destined to lose.

–        –        –

Bad Politics: So the question then becomes whether we can build an infrastructure to develop technology safely in time to stop the fatal trigger pull. And in this context both global warming and the current American election each provide a particularly bleak reply.

Global warming because the problem is so obvious yet the solution so far beyond reach. (It’s become increasingly clear that geoengineering will be needed. That brings its own risks.)

Today’s political climate in America is awful both on its own terms as a failure in responsible governance and on a deeper level as to what it means for our declining public sphere.

The incentives American political actors face no longer bear much relation to the welfare of Americans. I don’t want to belabor here the horrifying, Trump-ean specifics of the 2016 election. The point to emphasize is that we live in a time where technological change is accelerating and the ability of the political system and public sphere to manage that change is declining. We’re like a car strapped to a rocket engine—the acceleration feels exhilarating until you lose control, crash and explode.

Our Wimpy Government: Look at the fight between the DOJ and Apple—ignore whether their respective positions are reasonable. Instead notice that the issue of mass consumer data collection, both by the government and by private companies, is absolutely transformative to our society and also nearly entirely removed from public reason or the capacity for reform. The battle lines are set between the unrelenting private interests of tech capital who wants to own this massive windfall and the security state motivated brutishly by dumb fear. The capacity of public interests to compete feels like it’s at a low ebb.

(Btw the government’s handling of bitcoin is similarly Keystone Kops).

In some ways, this dominance by capital is has precedent in American life—look at the robber baron era of the late 19^th century. The wealth generated fed into a future Progressive era and the rise of the modern state—a development that may imply a reassuring type of cyclicality and renewal. This to me is the greatest grounds for hope.

(Facebook Is Digital Manchester: It’s worth saying that the changing of technological epochs (from hunter-gatherers to agricultural society; from agriculture to the Industrial Revolution; now from industry to the Digital Revolution) tend to be quite bad for their early generations. Farmers lived shorter and shittier lives than hunter-gatherers; same for the denizens of industrial London and Manchester compared to those who remained in the countryside. If we’re lucky, our digital descendants will look back at our Facebook in 2016 the way we perceive benighted Dickens characters and chimney sweeps.)

But there are a couple crucial distinctions: (1) in no other epochal change did we possess the capacity to destroy ourselves; (2) at no other point did we have the density of centralized control that’s possible (indeed normal) now. The totalitarian state is a 20^th century invention.

–        –        –

Don Draper as 1960s Marx: I do think we have to come to grips with consumerism as a type of totalitarian ideology. Not to say it is as bad as communism or fascism. Protecting voluntary choice is a powerful safeguard albeit an imperfect one that deteriorates over time.

We see this now with the tech boom: the companies that mediate your social life, attention, information, and buying decisions know an incredible amount about you and can test interventions on massive numbers of customers until they find the ones that most reliably trigger a response.

This will only become more dramatic over time. For example, n every time you contact another human being is now a part of some corporate database (online obviously; in person via GPS).

And to close the loop—not only are your choices dominated by the interests of capital, but the ideology of shareholder value also locks corporate management into exclusively using their power to maximize profit. It’s no better sign of what some would call late capitalism that the most profitable profession is the one with literally no other purpose than to make money. The centralization of control in the financial sector further shrinks any behavior that doesn’t maximize profit.

This is not to say capitalism is evil (it continues to lift enormous numbers of people out of poverty), but that our system has become terrifyingly single-minded and denuded of other goals. Civic society in the form of group membership has collapsed (see Bowling Alone; also e.g. religious affiliation). “People have lost the narrative of their lives.” The space for public spirit has shrunk. Private interests are indeed private, closed off, hard-to-regulate, hard even to see.

Along with declining social participation, failing community, and diminishment of alternate sources of meaning, our capacity for public reason has also declined. You can spot this most clearly in the decline of journalism in the 21^st century. Despite a growing population and economy, half as many journalists are working today as did twenty years ago. Academia is similarly diminished. Thus, the media infrastructure through which our public discourse is conducted has become broken down and inadequate to the task of understanding and managing massive technological change.

Moreover, because public institutions (the government but also nonprofits) are permeable to the interests of capital, a sclerotic, closed-off, dominant private economy helps lead to a dysfunctional public one. (Informational polarization via social media doesn’t help).

–        –        –

This all compounds the problem of existential risk. We have no reason to belief the shared infrastructure of the internet (or of our food supply, or our electricity, etc.) is being developed in a safe, sustainable, healthy way. The financial collapse was one example of this, and even then nothing systemic seems to have been fixed.

But our shoddy technological infrastructure is the most frightening. Take data breaches—which are extraordinarily common. Take identity theft—skilled hackers can easily ruin your life. Take the casual disregard for the law of model companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Zenefits. Realize that no federal agency even exists to handle these issues nor is there any pressure to create one.

There’s been a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence as an existential risk—that an artificial agent might become so powerful that it’s misaligned goals could literally spell human doom. To me this is just a particular subspecies of the broader concern of digital infrastructure safety: that our interdependent internet monoculture could break down (or be broken) in an unpredictable set of ways.

To pick one example at random, how do you prove you’re you online? Imagine a technology that can ape you well enough (knows enough data about you for example, can copy your voice) that proving you’re you becomes impossible or very difficult. What would a day look like when no one’s log-ins were secure? Think of all the bank accounts plundered, all the public infrastructure to go haywire. The mind boggles at the mayhem.

–        –        –

The End: Ultimately, we’re on history’s greatest engineering spree in the shadow of potential extinction. We have no reason to think we can safely regulate what we’re doing. We deserve to be fucking terrified.

And we are (even if we don’t acknowledge the reason consciously). When you see people furious at Mark Zuckerberg for giving 99% of his money to charity, that’s why. When you see an insane panic at a disease that kills zero Americans, that’s why. When approval rates for public institutions are at a record low amid a growing economy, that’s why. When tens of millions vote for Donald Trump (or elect Trump President) that will be why. In our bones, Americans can feel that things are very, very wrong and that no one even has an idea for how to fix it.

I don’t think we’re literally doomed, but I don’t have much interest now in sketching out my theories for how to fix it.

Instead, I want to sound the alarm that we are driving off a cliff and we need to wake the fuck up and realize we’re in the midst of an emergency and that drastic measures are needed.

I Wanted the Government to Buy Kidneys: Why I Changed My Mind (2.0)

Here’s a new draft brought to you by the blizzard currently striking NYC. Same caveats as the previous one. Thanks to everyone who’s provided comments so far.

Please let me know any ideas for how to make it better. In particular, it got even lengthier, so if you have ideas for how to shorten it, I’m in great need.

—

Four years ago, when I became a kidney donor, I passionately believed that the government should pay people for their kidneys, save a great deal of money, and rescue tens of thousands from a grueling death. So in 2013, I left my job at a corporate law firm (and my home in Boston), moved to Toledo, and joined the transplant field in order to enact this change.

A year after that, I co-authored a letter in favor of incentives signed by hundreds. By that June, I’d received a grant from a major foundation to plan a nonprofit to bring incentives to the transplant field. But then I changed my mind.

I didn’t change it all at once or entirely. I still think donors should be treated better than they are. A lot better. But what’s different is where I used to think kidneys could be an item to be purchased by a government monopoly, now I think it’s a bad idea to treat organs as just another commodity up for exchange. Instead, for kidney donation to be respected, our society needs to treat it like an act of public service and to honor donors accordingly.

Here’s how I got there.

Why I Liked Incentives

The kidney transplant shortage might be the most underrated public health problem in America. The current waiting list is a hundred thousand names long. Each year, twenty thousand more people go on the list than receive a transplant. That number represents 50% more than all the homicides committed in the nation last year. Year after year, this shortage crisis represents a truly massive number of lives lost.

<infographic comparing mortality of car accidents, gun related homicides and suicides, kidney failure, war deaths>

Kidney donation is a safe, laparoscopic procedure. Most donors are out of the hospital after a couple nights and off prescription painkillers after a week. Donors lead normal, healthy lives.

As with any surgery, there are risks: about 1% of donors will develop kidney failure over their lifetime, compared to 0.1% if they hadn’t donated. By contrast, the lifetime risk in the general population is 3.2% (kidney donors are healthier to start with). Like any surgery, donation can have complications, but the chance of dying is just 3 in 10,000.

<risk infographic>

And there is uncertainty; the real risks may be higher than our estimate. People have been donating kidneys for sixty years, but ascertaining exact health effects decades down the line for an unrepresentative population is an epidemiological struggle– one that with necessarily imperfect results.

But what is clear is that kidney donors remain as healthy or healthier than the general population after they donate.

Moreover, kidney donation saves the government a great deal of money: Medicare guarantees coverage for patients with kidney failure regardless of age, and over their first five years, transplants cost $60K less per year than dialysis. Since a living donor kidney lasts for fourteen years on average, saving $300K per transplant is conservative.

That means the government could easily afford to pay $50K or $100K for donors to undergo a surgery that is safe and saves another person’s life. If you persuaded one in two thousand Americans to take that deal, you’d end the shortage tomorrow. No more waitlist: a hundred thousand lives saved; a hundred thousand families rescued from tragedy.

Back when I donated, it seemed like a no-brainer.

And while it’s reasonable to worry that most kidney sellers would be poor, the shortage is itself extremely discriminatory. Minorities make up 38% of the American population but 63% of its waiting list. African Americans get kidney failure more often, are less likely to be listed for transplant when eligible, wait longer for an organ once listed, and are less likely to find a living donor. An incentive system could correct vast inequities in access to life-saving care.

The Problem with Incentives

When I moved to Toledo, Ohio to join the Alliance for Paired Donation, I didn’t know anyone that lived in the Midwest. I had a lot of free time.

Much of that was spent gorging on Netflix and text messaging with my ex-girlfriend, but some was spent on kidneys and some smaller portion of that was spent trying to understand why people disagreed with me about incentives. Since I’m a philosophy geek, that meant reading authors like Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Radin, Lewis Hyde, and Michael Sandel to better understand commodification and the philosophy of market exchange. That led me to reconsider my views.
To vastly simplify, commodification is when you take something that’s sacred and sell it like it’s scrap. But sacred how? A bible is sacred, but selling bibles does nothing to tarnish them.

Things are commodified when selling them reduces them from a rich, multi-dimensional source of value down to just their worth as a dollar figure. Picture prostitution. Whether or not it should be legal, whether or not it can be empowering for workers who perform it, there is some change in meaning of a sex act when it includes a transaction for money. If this were the only the type of sex we had access to, we would justifiably feel diminished.

The commodifying effect of organ selling isn’t purely hypothetical. While organ trafficking is a scourge throughout the developing world, Iran is the only country where it’s legal to buy and sell an organ. Not coincidentally, it’s reported to be the only nation without a shortage.

But in many parts of the country, kidney donation is a source of shame and signal of desperation. Rather than feeling honored to have saved a life, donors may hide their good deed for fear of being treated as a lesser person who sold off a part of themselves.

That does not mean the decision can’t be a rational one—the going rate is more than the average annual income. But a decision can leave us worse off in some dimensions that cannot simply be converted to money or aggregate welfare

Somewhat embarrassingly, the example that best illuminated this for me was my time as a corporate lawyer. Like many such, I was all at once unreasonably well-paid, extraordinarily lucky to have the job, and absolutely miserable. Though it may have been completely rational to sell years of my life for money, in some real way it left me diminished.

So how to weigh this risk of commodification against the benefits? I’m honestly not sure, but I do know the lives saved by incentives don’t just erase the problem. A society that looks down on kidney donors as desperate and unclean – as mere human vending machines – would be unspeakable no matter how much healthier it was than our own.

Moreover, diminishing the value of donation could also have bad consequences. Living donors currently give 5,500 kidneys a year; deceased donors 11,500 more: will people still be so generous if the status of organ donation were to decline?

And then there’s the risk. What would the price of organs even be? How much would it cost to buy up enough organs, even the ones that were now given for free? Would donors lie about their health history to be able to donate? How would we avoid trying to save on cost by neglecting safety standards? Market incentives would represent a drastic change with consequences that aren’t totally knowable.

The national regime of organ donation took hard effort to build and relies on only the public’s good will to survive. Jeopardizing that system through drastic change could sacrifice people who definitely receive transplants today for the mere potential of lives saved tomorrow. We should avoid that risk if at all possible.

Transplant Support

When my co-founder Thomas Kelly and I started the planning of Waitlist Zero in 2014, we conducted a listening tour of the transplant field. We saw great respect for this 2006 paper arguing for lifetime health insurance for kidney donors. The leading professional societies published a paper in favor of incentives, but were fearful of brooking controversy: to many in the field, cash incentives would never be acceptable.

On the other hand, free health insurance for donors just make sense. Donors risk their lives in ways that are limited but real and not perfectly known. They do it to help others, and their gift helps not just the recipient but the broader community as a whole. Public servants like teachers, firefighters, police officers, and soldiers all receive special benefits that are not reducible to cash (e.g. health insurance, early retirement, free education). Why can’t we think of donors the same way?

A GI Bill for kidney donation wouldn’t be stingy, but it would avoid the worst problems of incentives. Transplant support would treat kidney donors like public servants. Far from commodifying donors, transplant support would honor them. Instead of crowding out generosity, support would nourish it. It builds from the current system and sets an example that we would want the rest of the world to follow.

In practice, respecting donors as public servants could mean things like:

• Free lifetime health insurance to alleviate and offset the risks of donation;
• annual research stipends to donors to encourage participation in follow-up study and care;
• reimbursement of donation expenses like lost wages, travel, and childcare expenses;
• public recognition with a National Organ Donors Day.

I admit that the idea isn’t perfect and the details need to be worked out. But the kidney shortage is a crisis, and these measures have broad support today. We need to move beyond the old debate about incentives and forge a new path.

If you told me there was a button I could push tomorrow that would install incentives and end the shortage, I’d still have a hard time saying no. The lives saved would weigh too heavily for me to honestly prefer the status quo. But that’s not the best system we can create. It would leave donors worse off and risk failing entirely.

Transplant support would end the shortage by treating donors with respect. It is the best way I could come up with to simultaneously save tens of thousands of lives and improve our society’s sense of dignity and self-respect. It is what I am working to achieve today.

 

I Wanted the Government to Buy Kidneys: Then I Changed My Mind (DRAFT)

Here’s a draft of a piece I’m working on. Would love any suggestions for improvement or other thoughts. The more critical the better!

Also note that it’s just a draft, so I may make dumb points or say things in stupid ways. Wait till it’s final to hold it against me.

I Wanted the Government to Buy Kidneys: Then I Changed My Mind

Four years ago, when I donated my kidney, I was a passionate believer that the government could pay people for their kidneys, save a great deal of money and rescue tens of thousands from a grueling death. So in 2013, I left my job at a corporate law firm (and my home in Boston), moved to Toledo, and joined the transplant field so that I could enact this change.

A year after that, I co-authored a letter in favor of incentives signed by hundreds. By that June, I’d received a grant from a major foundation to plan a nonprofit to bring incentives to the transplant field. But then I changed my mind.

I didn’t change it all at once or entirely. I still think donors should be treated better than they are. A lot better. But what’s different is where I used to think kidneys could be an item to be purchased by the government, now I think it’s a bad idea to treat them as just another commodity up for exchange. Instead, for kidney donation to be respected, our society needs to treat it like an act of public service and honor donors accordingly.

Here’s how I got there.

Why I Liked Incentives

The kidney transplant shortage might be the most underrated public health problem in America. The current waiting list is a hundred thousand names long. Each year, twenty thousand more people go on the list than receive a transplant. That number represents 50% more than all the homicides committed in the nation last year. Each living donor transplant saves a decade or more of life. Year after year, this shortage crisis represents a truly massive number of lives lost.

Kidney donation is a safe, laparoscopic procedure. Most donors are out of the hospital after a couple nights and off prescription painkillers after a week. Donors lead normal, healthy lives. As with any surgery, there are risks: about 1% of donors will develop kidney failure over their lifetime, which is 0.9% higher than if they hadn’t donated. By comparison, the lifetime risk in the general population is 3.2% (kidney donors need to be healthier to start with). Like any surgery, donation can have complications, but the chance of dying is just 3 in 10,000. And there is uncertainty—people have been donating kidneys for sixty years, but ascertaining exact health effects decades down the line for an unrepresentative population is an epidemiological struggle– one that is necessarily imperfect.

But what is clear is that kidney donors remain as healthy or healthier than the general population after they donate.

Moreover, kidney donation saves the government a great deal of money: Medicare guarantees coverage for patients with kidney failure regardless of age, and averaged over the first five years, transplants costs $60K per year less than dialysis. Since live donor kidneys last for fourteen years on average, a cost savings of $300K is conservative.

That means the government could easily afford to pay $50K or $100K to donors to undergo a surgery that is safe and saves another person’s life. If you persuaded one in two thousand Americans to take that deal, you’d end the shortage tomorrow. No more waitlist: a hundred thousand lives saved; a hundred thousand families rescued from tragedy. Seemed like a no-brainer.

And while we may reasonably worry that the people incentivized to donate would be disproportionately poor, the shortage itself primarily affects people of color and the impoverished. The primary causes of kidney failure are obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, which each share a racial bias. Minorities make up 38% of the American population but 63% of the kidney waiting list. Access to living donation is also racially skewed. Only 29% of living kidney donation comes from minorities, and a white person in the top income quintile is three times more likely to donate than an African American in the bottom quintile, despite African Americans needing kidneys at three times the rate of whites.

Whatever negative racial pattern incentives might have for donors would be dwarfed by the extraordinary health improvement it would achieve for vulnerable communities.

The Problem with Incentives

When I joined the transplant field, I wanted to understand the best case against incentives (so I could beat it). Since I’m a philosophy geek, that meant reading authors like Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Radin, Lewis Hyde, and Michael Sandel to better understand commodification and the philosophy of market exchange.

To vastly simplify, commodification is when you take something that’s sacred and sell it like it’s scrap. Prostitution takes something intimate and reduces it to something more empty. Selling organs could turn our very bodies into a mere repository for parts (“Kidney Depot”). Even though the seller can rationally consent, she might not be able to avoid being in some way worse off.

Mortifyingly, the example that best illuminated this for me was my time as a corporate lawyer. Like many such, I was all at once unreasonably well-paid, extraordinarily lucky to have the job, and absolutely miserable. Though it may have been completely rational to sell years of my life for money, in some real way it left me diminished.

So how to weigh this risk of commodification against the benefits? I’m honestly not sure, but I do know the lives saved by incentives don’t just erase the problem. A society that looks down on kidney donors as desperate and unclean – as mere human vending machines – would be unspeakable no matter how much healthier it was than our own.

Moreover, diminishing the value of donation could also have bad consequences. Living donors currently give 5,500 kidneys a year; deceased donors 11,500 more: will people still be so generous if the status of organ donation were to decline?

And then there’s the risk. Market incentives would be a drastic change to a national regime of organ donation whose creation was hard-fought and which relies on only the public’s good will to survive. Jeopardizing that system through drastic change could sacrifice people who definitely receive transplants today for the mere potential of lives saved tomorrow. We should avoid that risk if at all possible.

Transplant Support

Transplant support was my way of trying to get the benefits of incentives while avoiding their pitfalls. Transplant support treats kidney donation as a public service: making donation an act of community support rather than individual heroism.

In practice, respecting donors as public servants means offering them lifetime health insurance to alleviate and offset the risks of donation; it means providing annual research stipends to donors to encourage participation in follow-up study and care; and it means removing disincentives to donation by paying donor expenses like lost wages and making the experience of donating as convenient and easy as possible.

This GI Bill for kidney donation isn’t stingy, but it also avoids the problems inherent to incentives. Far from commodifying donors, transplant support honors them. Instead of crowding out generosity, support nourishes it. It builds from the current system and sets an example that we would want the rest of the world to follow.

I admit that the idea isn’t perfect and the details need to be worked out. If you told me there was a button I could push that would immediately install incentives and end the shortage, I’d still have a hard time saying no. The lives saved would weigh too heavily for me to honestly prefer the status quo.

But that’s not the best system we can create. Transplant support can end the shortage by treating donors with respect—by transforming a system that demands a patient beg for her life to one where transplant is supported by the community.

 

Whistle Stop Europe: 2.5 Days in Berlin

[posted after getting to my Prague hotel tonight, but written earlier in the day]

10:46 a.m. I have just bid adieu to Berlin and am writing this on the train to Prague. I thought that this nearly-five-hour train ride would be a good time to write about my last few days in Berlin.

Getting to Berlin. I took a Norwegian Air red-eye from JFK Tuesday night — the cheapest flight I could find run by a reputable company. I had a great experience flying Norwegian Air (Dreamliner).  I watched The Imitation Game, which was entertaining but nothing amazing. Forgoing sleep, I arrived in Berlin Schoenfeld Airport at 2 p.m. local time after a brief layover in Oslo.  I took a taxi for 40 euros to the Generator Hostel in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin (very clean and safe, and the location was perfect for exploring the city). In retrospect, I wish I had taken Berlin’s excellent public transportation to get to my hostel, which would have been significantly cheaper (3.3 euros) and probably even faster.

Berlin Itinerary.  I knew very little about Berlin before I started planning for this trip, other than its place in the history books. I ended up enjoying the city very much.  I thought that two and a half days — which included a half-day trip to Potsdam — was the perfect amount of time to see all of the main sites and get a good feel for the city. My itinerary for these two and a half days is below.

Day One (Half-Day):  The first thing I did after landing in Berlin was to take a free walking tour of Berlin with Sandemans at 4:00 p.m., which I highly recommend. I find walking tours to be a great way to get oriented in a new city, especially when there is limited time to explore. The tour lasted 2.5 hours. It started at Pariser Platz and the iconic Brandenburg Gate, commissioned by Frederick II of Prussia in the 1790s. Among other historic events and speeches, the Gate formed the backdrop of President Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech.

We then walked to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — a vast field of towering gray monoliths hammered into the ground at slightly different angles and different heights, through which visitors could walk and interpret in their own way. The Holocaust museum lay underneath. The tour guide led us to the next street over to a car park and apartment complex — which she revealed sat on the site of Hitler’s bunker.  A few more streets down, we saw the austere former Luftwaffe headquarters (one of the very few Third Reich buildings still standing and now home to the Finance Ministry) and caught our first glimpse of a standing portion of the Berlin Wall next to the Topography of Terror museum (sitting on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters).  We passed by Checkpoint Charlie, one of the most famous crossings between East and West Berlin (and tourist trap) and the beautiful Gendarmenmarkt public square.

The tour concluded at Bebelplatz, where Humboldt University stands on one side and the State Opera House (currently under heavy construction) stands on the other. Most infamously, Bebelplatz is the site of the book burning of May 1933, when 20,000 books went up in flames. An 1821 quote from German playwright Heinrich Heine is engraved on a plaque in the square: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (in English: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people”). Near the plaque, a window on the floor of the square opens into a white room below containing rows upon rows of empty bookshelves — large enough to hold 20,000 books.  I returned to each of these sites on my own over the course of the next two days.

Following the tour, I walked up the Unter den Linden (think German Champ-Elysees) from Bebelplatz to admire the Berliner Dom (Cathedral of Berlin) and then back in the other direction to the Brandenburg Gate to watch it light up after dusk.  For dinner, I had a delicious Kalbsroulade at Lokal, near my hostel.

Day Two:  In the morning, around 8 a.m., I headed to the Reichstag — the seat of the Bundestag (German Parliament) — to see whether there were any last-minute tickets to tour the dome (normally, you need to book months in advance).  I got lucky!  They had ample tickets for the next day, and I booked a visit for the very next morning (note:  you must bring your passport with you to book tickets).  I then took a day trip out to Potsdam and Sansoucci Palace, the summer residence of Frederick the Great (also known as the “Versailles of Potsdam”).  (Tip:  Get an all-day ABC Zone ticket for 7.80 euros).  The train took about 30 minutes — I got off at the Park Sansoucci stop (with the help of a graduate geology student at Potsdam University). The stop was a short walk from the Neues Palace, which stands at the opposite end of the park from the Sansoucci Palace. From there, I took my time meandering through the park (which is made for meandering — a myriad of rambling paths criss-cross the park, dotted with the occasional bust or gazebo) until I reached Sansoucci Palace.

Following lunch, I went to Cecilienhof Palace, which was the site of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, attended by the Big Three – Churchill (later Attlee), Stalin, and Truman – and took a short tour there for 6 euros. The highlight of the tour was definitely the conference room in which the leaders sat to hammer out the Potsdam Agreement.  I got back to Berlin a little past 4 p.m. (so I spent a total of seven hours in Potsdam, which included the travel to and from).

Back in Berlin, I walked through Potsdamer Platz, where the few skyscrapers in Berlin are clustered, to the Topography of Terror museum, where I spent two hours reading up on the chilling history of the SS and how the Nazi party came to wield such total power and control. I had a currywurst dinner (one of the foods Berlin is known for) at Curry 36 and ended the night walking up Friedrichstrasse (the equivalent of Fifth Avenue) and seeing the Gendarmenmarkt lit up — though, inconveniently, all while attempting to dodge and wait out the intermittent pouring rain going on all evening.

Day Three:  I began the day with a self-guided audio tour of the Reichstag dome, which I thought was absolutely stunning (there needs to be a Mission Impossible or James Bond scene set there!).  It also afforded some great views of the city.  After an hour there, I walked over to the Bundeskanzleramt (the personal office of Angela Merkel) and cut through Tiergarten, the big park in Berlin. I particularly enjoyed the Beethoven-Haydn-Mozart memorial and Lowengruppe monument. Emerging on the other side of the park, I walked a short distance to Bendlerblock and the courtyard in which Claus von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of the July 20, 1944 attempted assassination of Hitler (Operation Valkyrie) were shot. It is now the site of the German Resistance Museum (free), which I browsed briefly.

I walked back through Tiergarten to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and spent 1.5 hours in the museum portion underground. The exhibit that hit me the hardest was a room containing excerpts of correspondence from Holocaust victims to their loved ones, inscribed and lit up on the floor. One postcard was from a 12-year-old girl, Judith Wishnjatskaha, to her father — apparently written moments before she was murdered. “Dear father!” she wrote, “I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won’t let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly. Yours, J.” I had to take a few moments to compose myself after reading this one.

After this sobering visit, I headed to Museum Island (Museumsinsel) and the Pergamon Museum, where I saw its awe-inspiring reconstruction of the Gate of Ishtar and Processional Way. (Note:  The main attraction of the museum, the Pergamon Altar, is closed to visitors until 2020). Following the museum, I continued my way up Unter den Linden to the Cold War-era TV tower (constructed by East Berlin to demonstrate prosperity) at Alexanderplatz to rent a bike from Fat Tire. For 7 euros, I got a bike, helmet, and lock for 4 hours. I biked down to the East Side Gallery, a 1.5 mile portion of the Berlin Wall covered in graffiti art.  Artists from all around the world were invited in 1990 to paint on this portion of the wall, the most famous painting of which is that of U.S.S.R. leader Brezhnev kissing East German leader Erich Honecker (based on an actual photograph, I learned; I actually always assumed it was satire). From there, I biked across the Oberbaumbrucke bridge — great view of Berlin at sunset — to the Brandenburg Gate and then back up the Unter der Linden to Alexanderplatz to return the bike. Biking was a fantastic way to explore the city, and I’d highly recommend it!

I spent the rest of my final night in Berlin writing postcards. I slept in the following morning, had a delicious traditional German breakfast at a nearby cafe in the Mitte, and headed to Hauptbanhof (the main Berlin station) to take a 10:46 a.m. train to Prague.

Whistle Stop: European Edition

Today, I embarked on a four-week train trip of Central Europe, which seemed to me like a good excuse to resurrect Stone Soup. Three years earlier — almost to the day — I took a six-week train trip around the United States, which I also blogged on this site. Like then, I’m blogging now to capture memories for myself and to share practical advice to aid those planning their own trips to these regions.

I’m beginning my trip in Berlin, where I arrived earlier this afternoon. From Berlin, I will journey entirely by rail, staying primarily in hostels. My itinerary will take me slightly behind the former Iron Curtain, through Prague and Budapest (I’ll save Russia and the former U.S.S.R. for another day), to the one-time seat of the Habsburgs in Vienna, the hills of Salzburg, Munich (in time for Oktoberfest), followed by Milan, the French Riviera, Provence, and Paris. I’m particularly looking forward to visiting key locations from World War II, opera, Mozart, and (of course) the Sound of Music, among other personal areas of interest. But I am also acutely aware of the fact that while I tour Europe for my own edification, tens of thousands will be making their way through these same cities driven by necessity and hope for a better life. I arrive at the Budapest Keleti station next Monday, September 14, where our paths will likely cross for the first time.

Whistle Stop: Coda (Itinerary for Days 1-25)

As I dust off this blog for my upcoming train trip around Europe, I discovered half a dozen never-published posts from my Amtrak train trip around the United States three years ago.  I’ve now collected these half-written posts into two posts detailing my itinerary for that trip, which has made for a wonderful trip down memory lane.  While a lot of the itinerary is personal to me, I also make a special effort to include useful information such as the time frame for activities, my hostel experiences, and transportation options for the benefit of those trying to plan their own trips to these regions.

That six-week trip — which turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences of my life — took me through seven national parks and seven major cities: NYC –> Toronto –> Niagara Falls –> Chicago –> Glasgow, Montana –> Glacier National Park, Montana –> Seattle, Washington –> Olympic National Park, Washington –> Crater Lake, Oregon –> Lassen Volcanic National Park, California –> San Francisco –> Los Angeles –> Grand Canyon / Flagstaff / Petrified Forest / Painted Desert, Arizona –> Independence / Kansas City, Missouri –> St. Louis, Missouri –> Chicago –> NYC.

Day 1 (Thursday, Sept. 6):  I kicked off my trip by taking a super-cheap Megabus out of NYC around noon.  (The Amtrak USA Rail Pass doesn’t cover Canadian segments of Amtrak train routes).  After eleven surprisingly painless hours, I arrived in TORONTO.  I’d been to Toronto before, so this visit was less sight-seeing and more friend-seeing.

Day 2 (Friday, Sept. 7):  My friends and I spent the day walking around downtown Toronto, including St. Lawrence Market (once named the world’s best food market by National Geographic in April 2012 — the Montreal bagels and Peameal Bacon sandwich are must-tries!).  [Note: Closed on Mondays.]  We then took the ferry ($7 RT, 15 mins one-way) out to the Toronto Islands, which afforded great views of the city skyline.  For more on Toronto, see my previous post.

Day 3 (Saturday, Sept. 8):  We visited Pacific Mall, located in neighboring Markham, Ontario, which holds the distinction of being the largest indoor Asian mall in North America.  While I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit this mall, it could be a good rainy day activity if you like Asian food.

Day 4 (Sunday, Sept. 9): On the way to NIAGARA FALLS, we stopped by some wineries on the Niagara Peninsula (or Niagara-on-the-Lake). We reached Niagara Falls State Park (U.S. side, $10 state park entrance fee for vehicles) at around 3 p.m., where we did the Cave of the Winds tour, which fits you with a poncho and lets you walk right up to Bridal Veil Falls.  Following the Cave of the Winds, we enjoyed an evening stroll around Goat Island along the illuminated rapids. I boarded my first Amtrak train at BUFFALO Depew station at 11:59 p.m. for Chicago. For more, see my previous post.

Day 5 (Monday, Sept. 10): After arriving in CHICAGO a little before noon (on the first day of the Chicago teachers’ strike, incidentally), I walked from Union Station to Chicago Hostelling International to drop off my stuff. The hostel was only $33/night and, for my first hostel, exceeded expectations — it’s very professionally-run and secure, with 3-4 levels of swipe access required to access your room; the staff was extremely friendly and provided invaluable tips on exploring the city.  I spent the entire day on foot, hitting up Buckingham Fountain (much better at night though!), Millennium Park, and the Loop area (architectural landmarks at every turn — pick up a guide first!).  I had a an early Chicago deep-dish pizza dinner at Giordano’s before walking across the Michigan Avenue Bridge to see the Centennial Fountain (nothing special, but the riverside walk was nice), Chicago Tribune Building (its facade contains pieces of famous structures from all over the world, e.g., the Great Wall of China, Hagia Sofia, Berlin Wall, etc.), the Magnificent Mile (Fifth Avenue equivalent), and finally John Hancock Tower for the sunset (tip: skip the pricey observation deck and go straight to the Signature Room to enjoy the same view over a drink).  After nightfall, I lounged around Cloud Gate (the Bean), watching security guards zoom around on segways.  For more, see my previous Chicago post.

Day 6 (Tuesday, Sept. 11): I spent the morning at the Art Institute (the setting for one of my favorite movie montages and home to one of my favorite paintings, Nighthawks) then headed across the street to the Chicago Cultural Center.  [Tip: Visit this first!  It’s both informative for tourists and a beautiful attraction in its own right.]   Then I took the Metra (which I’m told is preferable to the Green Line, safety-wise) down to the University of Chicago to see the campus and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House.  At night, I enjoyed a Chicago-style hot dog at Portillo’s and walked down La Salle Street (which ends with the Chicago Board of Trade building) while recalling the Dark Knight scene.  I ended the day by admiring the Chicago skyline from Buckingham fountain, where I was treated to light shows accompanied by cheesy renditions of patriotic songs on the hour.  At around 10 p.m., a crowd of Chicago teachers swarmed the fountain in protest. I wandered the Lake Michigan waterfront area for a bit before calling it a night.

Day 7 (Wednesday, Sept. 12):  To kill time before my early afternoon train, and at the suggestion of one hostel staff member, I rode the Brown Line ‘L’ train from Adams/Wabash to Armitage for a view of the city and back again. The round-trip took a little less than an hour. [Tip: Ride in the last car so you can look out the back window.]  I departed Chicago Union Station at around 2 p.m. on the Empire Builder line for Glasgow, Montana.  This was my first major train ride of the trip: a whopping 24 hours from Chicago to Glasgow, a small town of 3800 in eastern Montana where my cousin lives. I passed the time chatting with Mennonites and other rail riders.

Day 8 (Thursday, Sept. 13):  I arrived in GLASGOW, MT around noon, where my cousin picked me up.  One thing that struck me immediately about Montana: everyone has so so much land.  And horses.  Everyone has horses.  My cousin took me to the pastures where her family keeps their two horses — left behind by a family that had moved a few years back.  After spending over an hour tracking the horses down on the land, I rode the tamer one bareback while my cousin led me around.  She also took me down to Milk River, named by Lewis and Clark, who followed it for a portion of their journey.  For dinner, I had wild elk that my cousin’s husband shot last year. .

Day 9 (Friday, Sept. 14):  My cousin’s husband, a professional hunter and writer, took me out for an abbreviated round of dove-hunting in the morning (the only kind of hunting permitted in mid-September; only bow-and-arrow hunting was allowed for everything else).  No luck finding any doves, but I shot at cans with a .14 caliber rifle.  We then visited Fort Peck museum, where I learned about the trove of dinosaur fossil discoveries in Montana (home of the Tyrannosaurus Rex) and the Depression-era PWA construction of the Fort Peck Dam to channel the Missouri River.

Day 10 (Saturday, Sept. 15):  I departed Glasgow at noon for Glacier National Park, located in the western part of Montana and part of the Rocky Mountains.  The trip was eight hours.  I arrived at the WEST GLACIER stop (the western entrance to Glacier National Park) at around 9 p.m.  Montana is more or less flat, open space up until the Rocky Mountains, which shoot up out of nowhere.  Aboard the Empire Builder, I enjoyed commentary from a Trails & Rails volunteer about Glacier National Park.  The railroad and Glacier National Park share an intertwined history, with Glacier marketed by the railroad as the “American Alps” and also advanced for national park status by the railroad.

Day 11 (Sunday, Sept. 16): I took the eight-hour Crown of the Continent” Red Bus tour, which starts at West Glacier, traverses the entire length of the famously scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road (featured in the opening scene for The Shining and Forrest Gump’s run across America) and loops back around.  Glacier National Park was actually the reason I moved my trip up by two weeks, as Sept. 16 marked the last day that all of Going-to-the-Sun Road was open.  [Tip: Check on the accessibility of Going-to-the-Sun Road — and all national parks in general — before you visit.  One thing I learned on this trip was that most national parks are essentially only open in their entirety for three months of the year — mid-June to mid-September — due to snow.]

As with the railroad, the Red Bus company, which dates back to 1938, has a long and storied history intertwined with the park’s.  I enjoyed the tour very much and would highly recommend it, as I imagine it would be difficult to drive the winding mountain roads and appreciate the views at the same time.  After enjoying a slice of huckleberry pie with huckleberry soda (huckleberry is the big thing here), I departed at 11 p.m. for Seattle.

Day 12 (Monday, Sept. 17):  I woke up when my train was deep in the Cascades.  After reaching the coast, the train followed Puget Sound all the way down to Seattle.  Shortly after arriving in Seattle, I took the Olympic Bus Dungeness Line — the only transportation to the Olympic Peninsula that I could find ($69 RT, 3.5h) — to PORT ANGELES.  I arrive in Port Angeles at around 4:30 p.m., rent a car, check into my Super 8 motel, and drive up to Hurricane Ridge (a 17-mile, mountainous drive for a stunning vista of the mountains) just in time for the sunset.

Day 13 (Tuesday, Sept. 18):  I wake up early and manage to hit up Lake Crescent (where I do the popular and short Marymere Falls hike), the Sol Duc Falls hike, Hoh Rain Forest (Hall of Mosses Trail), and the First Beach at La Push (the westernmost point of the contiguous U.S. — a classic Pacific Northwest beach complete with driftwood, fog, and rock outcroppings) all in the same day.  The Hoh Rain Forest — a primeval rainforest — was my favorite part of the Olympic Peninsula.  I check into a Forks motel for the night (see previous post on Forks).

Day 14 (Wednesday, Sept. 19):  In the early afternoon, I boarded a bus back to Seattle from Port Angeles.  After checking into the Seattle Hostelling International, I took the Bainbridge ferry out and back for sunset views of the city.

Day 15 (Thursday, Sept. 20):  From my hostel, I walked to the Seattle Public Library, Pike Place Market, Olympic Sculpture Park (great view of the Space Needle), and the Seattle Center (where the Space Needle is).  From the Seattle Center, I walked uphill to Kerry Park for a magnificent view of the Seattle skyline.  After that, I took the Seattle Monorail back to downtown Seattle and my hostel.

Day 16 (Friday, Sept. 21): I took an early morning train out of Seattle for KLAMATH FALLS, OREGON, the closest Amtrak station to Crater Lake National Park.  Two Trails & Rails volunteers between Seattle and Portland talk about Mount St. Helens and the Cascades mountain range.  I arrived in Klamath Falls at 10 p.m. and checked into Maverick Motel, a 7-min walk from the station.

Day 17 (Saturday, Sept. 22):  I took the 9:30 a.m. shuttle provided by Crater Lake Trolley up to Crater Lake ($25, boarding from the Amtrak station).  Once there, I decided to do the two-hour Crater Lake Trolley ranger-guided Rim Drive tour as well (another $25).  After the Rim Drive, I hiked Garfield’s Peak, an easy trail that alternated between stunning views of the lake and of the Cascades (highly recommend!).  At 10 p.m., I departed Klamath Falls via Amtrak for REDDING, CA, where I would meet up with a friend to explore Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Day 18 (Sunday, Sept. 23):  I arrived in REDDING at 3 a.m. and walked 7 minutes to Thunderbird Lodge to join my friend.  In the morning, we took a quick detour to see Calatrava’s Sundial Bridge (the most notable attraction in Redding). Then we made our way to Lassen, where we first hiked Lassen Peak before going down to Bumpass Hell for geothermic activity.  We ended up stargazing in the parking lot to Bumpass Hell before heading to a hotel in Chico.

Day 19 (Monday, Sept. 24):  We stopped by Sacramento on the way to San Francisco, where we wandered around Old Sacramento and toured the State Capitol building.  We arrived in San Francisco in the early evening.

Days 20-25 (Tuesday, Sept. 25 to Sunday, Sept. 30):  I spent the week in San Francisco with friends.  This was my halfway recharge point.

Part 2 coming shortly…

Not My Liberal Values

This post is the second in a conversation I hope to engage in here at Stone Soup regarding the so-called “free speech crisis,” allegedly conducted by “leftists,” currently underway in America (and more specifically, the internet). My last post can be found here, and some issues raised in today’s piece refers back to that one; more importantly, today’s responds to an article by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic entitled, “Mozilla’s Gay-Marriage Litmus Test Violates Liberal Values.” Again, reading the article is not necessary for moving on to my comments, but it helps.

Today we gather to weep for the martyrdom of an ex-CEO who donated $1,000 to ensuring marriage rights were stripped from a class of people.

But first, Atlantic staffer Conor Friedersdorf wants you to know just how much he supports same-sex marriage. Like, totally one hundred percent “I have a gay friend I swear to god” supports same-sex marriage. He says that in 2008 he “spent more time arguing in favor of gay marriage than any other issue.” He details how he, as a right-leaning moderate (read: conservative), tried to convince conservatives and coworkers about the merits of same sex marriage. Conor Friedersdorf loves same-sex marriage, and don’t you dare think otherwise.

But still, Conor Friedersdorf is not in favor of public pressure to force Brendan Eich, the father of JavaScript and one time donator of $1,000 to Proposition 8, to step down from his position as CEO of Mozilla. Friedersdorf’s title says that this activism “violates liberal values,” and, I’m blushing here, because, oh Conor, how did you know much I like liberal values? They’re like pretty much my favorite type of values (don’t even get my started on neoliberal values or I’ll begin to sweat).

Conor’s first argument is that a majority of Californians at the time, as well as Barack Obama, believed that “gay marriage ought to be illegal.” Here we have to already split hairs. Barack Obama has always been fuzzy with his support on same sex marriage rights, but he was openly against Proposition 8, despite his lack of support for same-sex marriage. You can call it a contradiction in terms, but you you can’t just say, “If you wanna fire Eich, you gotta get rid of Obama too!” Not going to work, Conor, but good call on knowing how much your average liberal reader loves Obama. He’s like the best.

Friedersdorf then writes that if we are to live in a society where people’s professional lives are also affected by the things they do in private, “it will damage our society.”

And so here’s the thing that upsets me: what Eich did was not some political gesturing or belief held only in his mind that had no ramifications. Nor did he not intend for his actions to have consequences (since motive has become a predominant neoliberal concern in discussions of homophobia/sexism/racism). He purposefully donated to an anti-gay campaign, which succeeded. People’s rights were taken away, overnight, in small (but non-zero) part due to action that Eich intended and hoped would come true. How is it that once he becomes CEO of a popular company, a position that is tantamount to holding office in terms of the power, respect and prestige we have for corporate America, we can just ignore that fact? And it wasn’t just holier-than-thou leftists clamoring for Eich’s resignation; it was Mozilla employees themselves who said they did not feel comfortable with a boss who financially contributed to the stripping away of their rights.

But according to Friedersdorf, what’s done is done, so no use crying over spilled milk. He writes: “Proposition 8 was overturned. Gay marriage is legal in California. Having a CEO who opposed gay marriage now would in no way diminish equal marriage rights for gays.” You hear that, same-sex marriage proponents? Demonstrating to anti-marriage activists that if they try to act against equal rights there will be consequences would, according to Friedersdorf, in no way diminish the cause. Move on, nothing to see here.

Except for Friedersdorf, the real fear is in the slippery slope. You liberals might think you’ve got the bull by the horns now, but what about when unpopular opinions are thrown back at you and your for-profit, private sector job (that is where everybody works anyway)? Friedersdorf asks, “Would American society be better off if stakeholders in various corporations began to investigate leadership’s political activities on abortion and to lobby for the termination of anyone who took what they regard to be the immoral, damaging position?” Ooooh he’s got you there, liberals. Conor knows you like abortion, but what if you work for an advertising firm in Oklahoma and one day your political beliefs are revealed?

I’d say that that’s when we can begin the actual martyrdom, but I’m not persuaded it’s going to happen. Because by analogizing to abortion, Friedersdorf is using pundit speak to label both it and same-sex marriage as Divisive and Contentious Issues, and continuing with Lovett’s point from earlier, asking, hey, can’t we all can just agree to disagree about these issues? I mean, do we really live in a country where simply holding a contrarian belief means you’re fired from your job, your livelihood taken away?

No, not really. To ask for people to agree to disagree is to ask for the dominant political voice to win outright. Just because people disagree about abortion and same-sex marriage doesn’t mean (again going back to triangulation) that the two sides are both equal. Opposing same-sex marriage is bigoted, and we need to live in a society where people are held responsible for their bigoted actions. Because remember, Eich did not simply hold a private belief, at which point I would agree that forcing his resignation would be inappropriate.

But that’s probably why, after this article was written, Friedersdorf wrote articles entitled, “Why Gay-Marriage Opponents Should Not Be Treated Like Racists” and “A 23-Year-Old Gay-Marriage Opponent Explains Herself.” You see, this is why Friedersdorf opened his piece trying to convince you, dear reader, why he was so definitely one hundred percent not even a second thought in favor of same-sex marriage: because he really likes defending those against same-sex marriage. Friedersdorf writes in the first of his secondary pieces: “Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it’s also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not meant to join couples for love and companionship alone.”

Oh my god. Really? “Much-less-problematic?” That’s the best you can come up with, a nicer-sounding rewording of the typical ludicrous right-wing argument that gays can’t make babies? The argument that ignores the infertile, ignores the elderly, ignores the fact that gays can adopt except when the same people who think marriage is there to raise babies pass laws saying gay couples can’t raise babies?

Conor, I’m starting to think that your essay should’ve been about why firing Eich violated conservative principles, not liberal ones.

In his other secondary essay, Friedersdorf trumps out a 23-year-old Christian woman who explains why she is against same-sex marriage. Friedersdorf asks, “[S]hould society stigmatize this young woman as a bigot and punish her professionally for the mix of attitudes and beliefs expressed above?” Well, let’s see, Conor. Is she a CEO, a position that requires much more responsibility and public spotlight? Did she use her time and/or resources to make sure gay people cannot marry? If both of those, then yes, her too! But besides Friedersdorf’s attempt to infantilize the anti-gay advocate (“c’mon guys, she’s a young Christian girl! Lay off her!”), her positions are really goddamn offensive:

“I believe that God, who created all people, has His own intention for what marriage is supposed to be. I believe He deliberately created two inherently different, non-interchangeable types of humans so that each one could permanently join and start a family. In both Testaments, the Bible mentions that homosexual behavior is a sin…The reality is that I am trying to show others God’s picture.”

Okay, you can rationalize being against same-sex marriage as being part of God’s will (not to mention how transphobic this point of view is), but guess what, Friedersdorf and anonymous, victimized Christian woman? I can also call you bigoted, and I don’t care much if you like it or not. And I can push for you to get fired as CEO once you try to take away rights of Americans, because I also have a voice.

So here’s where I get angry. Friedersdorf says that those who called for Eich to get fired “should face and own up to the fact that they helped force out a CEO solely because he disagreed with them about same-sex marriage.” No Conor, it was not about disagreement; it was about action. Eich was actively contributing to discrimination against gays. And here’s where it gets very serious, and this may seem like strong language but I believe it with all my heart: Brendan Eich was harming the bodies of LGBTQ Americans. He was acting violently, and it’s not intolerant for a group to defend itself. It was a courageous form of defiance, and I’m proud of them for succeeding.

And so here’s where I’d like to end things on both Lovett and Friedersdorf: when both of you speak, political disagreements sound innocuous and without consequence. Maybe it’s because you are both white, cisgendered, heterosexual males (as am I, mind you). But there are real consequences from the actions of others, whether it’s giving a thousand dollars to strip rights away or using racist language in public. Every day, people from marginalized groups suffer, tremendously, for the transgressions of Polite America, which refuses to acknowledge or even consider that one side of the argument could be bigoted, no matter the lengths to which that side goes to hurt the other side. By reframing active discrimination as just another political talking point, you are euphemizing atrocities.

I do not weep for Stephen Colbert or Brendan Eich. They will be just fine. I do worry that neoliberal triangulation will water down, or shut down, dissenting voices. I do worry, deeply, that discriminated-against groups will continue to live in pain, and when they scream for mercy from the pits of hell, the response from on high will be, “Please stop yelling, we’re trying to discuss the level of your pain up here.”