The State of Destiny

Yeah, that’s my girl.

The first-person shooter is a staple of the gaming landscape and I’ve been along for the whole ride. I remember punching the arrow keys in the original Wolfenstein way back when. These days, various first and third person shooter games see their respective stars rise and fall with games like Fortnite, Apex, and Overwatch featuring player bases that surge and wane depending on seasonal content and shifting metas.

But amidst that crowded field, there is also a stalwart community of Destiny players–a game that its fans don’t so much come back to as never leave.

Though it doesn’t put the kind of numbers on the board that, say, Fortnite has at its peak, the Destiny community is committed and they play a lot–like a lot. It’s an attractive prospect for a developer and myriad titles have tried to replicate or improve upon the formula. The Division and its sequel, Anthem, and even the big, flashy Marvel’s Avengers game have all tried to establish a persistent community around the logic of loot shooters: Play to get gear so you can play to get more gear.  And all of these have, to varying degrees, failed.

I’ve written before about the strange brain-washing appeal of Destiny and games like it. That was years ago, though. And I’m still playing.

Like many players, Destiny has become my hobby. During the homebody routine of pandemic/lock-down life, it’s just a staple part of my day. Wake up. Check e-mail. Teach online classes. Take the dog to the park. Eat. Watch something with the wifey. Play Destiny with the clan. Read. Sleep.

I’m part of the very much-larger Destiny community, but I also have a core group of friends–and I don’t even feel tempted to put that word in quotations anymore because I’ve played with these people for years now–who spend time almost every evening shooting a few space monsters together and helping each other out with whatever we “need to do.”

That feeling of “needing” to do work on characters or quests is obviously part of Destiny’s addictive feedback loop. But there are plenty of games that have matched the loot cycle or even improved upon it. So what makes Destiny special and allows it to keep on grinding where other games have gone through more traditional flash-in-the-pan-and-on-to-what’s-next cycles?

One obvious answer is that its shooting mechanics–the raw feel of what this game offers–are second-to-none. Bungie, Destiny’s developer, were the original developers behind the venerable Halo series and you see its DNA in Destiny. But Destiny has opened up the formula to truly bizarre and wonderfully weird variations on the old Wolfenstein shooter mechanic. I now routinely run around with a chainsaw sword in Destiny. Last month, I really enjoyed playing with this particle cannon thing that dropped a purple orb of space magic that I could pick up and then dunk on enemies to disintegrate them.

So it’s just fun, sure. But again, there are lots and lots of fun games. Why does this one keep fans like me so hooked?

It’s not the story. There is a story. The story is weird. The story was a problem for a long time in the game’s early days. But it has blossomed of late, with rich characters and even elements of its world–or, er, solar system–that change because of developments in the story. The recent expansion to the game, Beyond Light, was one of the best in terms of story, probably second only to the peak of all Destiny-dome, the Forsaken expansion from two years ago.

But you don’t play the game for the story. It’s just one of the many little facets that may or may not appeal to players. No one thing can explain its lasting appeal. And I think that’s a big part of it, actually, because Destiny is no one thing. It has different stripes and flavors of PvE–Player vs. computer-controlled enemies–content. From mindless little patrols in places like the expansive and very, very white new planetary zone on Jupiter’s moon of Europa or elaborate raids that require extensive coordination between six different people with the patience of saints. It also has a vibrant, and constantly out of balance PvP sandbox where players use those bizarre guns and super powers against each other as, um, a training exercise.

And somewhere in that interplay, somewhere in that inventory of sometimes garish weaponry and armor and that endless to-do list of stuff to do to level-up or simply to get your character looking smoking, something kind of ineffable happens.

Everything in Destiny’s story that doesn’t make any sense–and there’s a lot of it–gets explained away as space magic. And what is magic but a word we use to describe something we can’t quite explain, can’t quite pin down.

Whatever it is that makes Destiny the stand-out from all the wanna-be loot shooters that have failed to sink their roots into players’ brains and free time in the same way must be just that: something kind of magical.

A Not-So-Humble Update to the Founders’ Design

Amendment XXIX

To ensure the dignity and integrity of elections for high offices, no individual or entity shall commission paid advertisement for the airwaves or the Internet attempting to influence the outcome of an election.

Amendment XXX

To prevent the corrupting influence of bribery, no party or candidate for federal office may receive funds from any individual, corporation, or other organization for the purpose of campaigning or to influence his or her fair judgement once in office.

Amendment XXXI

Any candidate or party who receives through the unpaid labor of volunteers signatures amounting to 5% of the electorate in a district or state to be represented or 1% of the electorate in any national race, shall be entitled to equitable funding provided by the federal government from which to conduct a campaign for office without outside monetary influence.

Amendment XXXII

The federal government shall establish an Elections Information Bureau which shall provide verifiable reports on the statements, views, and records of candidates for federal office independent of partisan or other bias. These reports are to be available at least 14 days prior to an election online or via the post upon request free of any fee or charge.

Amendment XXXIII

The legislative powers granted to the Senate under Article I, Sections 7 and 8, shall henceforth be granted to the Parliament. The Parliament is to be one hundred seats to be filled proportionately by members of registered parties who receive at least 1% of a national vote to be held every two years. Should any party fail to have a majority share to the last seat, then the Parliament shall be seated with only ninety-nine members. The Vice President shall henceforth preside over the Parliament and not the Senate.

Amendment XXXIV

The number of Senators representing the several states shall be one per state, to be reduced in number from the current number upon the end of the terms of the junior-most Senators from each state.

Amendment XXXV

Any executive action, pardon, or other decree by the President of these United States must be approved by a majority vote of the Senate within thirty calendar days or be rendered null and void. Should a tie ever occur in such votes or in the confirmation of other high offices appointed by the president or in the ratification of treaties, then the president himself may cast the deciding vote.

Amendment XXXVI

To ensure that elected officials serve their offices faithfully and are not consumed by campaigns to maintain said offices, no member of the House of Representatives, Senator, or President may be elected to two consecutive terms. The tenure of representatives in the House is to be increased to four years beginning with the next election.

Amendment XXXVII

The citizens of any territories controlled by the United States are to be represented proportionally based upon their populations by both members of the House of Representatives and Electors in the Electoral College for the selection of President. Citizens of these territories shall also vote for members of Parliament.

Amendment XXXVIII

Each state shall assign their Electors in the Electoral College proportionately.

There. That should fix it.

I Think I’m Beginning to Understand

image from The Boston Globe

Starting Sunday, I avoided it all. I deleted my Facebook app. I didn’t make my usual rounds of news sites. I left the room when my wife was watching Lester Holt talk about the electoral college. I’d done all I could–what little I could–to influence the course of this election. I’d voted (even waited in line because my wife wanted to be part of the historic first day turn out). I’d donated (to Biden…I had to give money to Joe Biden, heaven help me). I’d put out a yard sign (I wanted to add a little placard off the side of “Biden/Harris” that said, “but mostly Harris”). I’d phone banked as much as I could stand to (which is very little because God, do I hate the very idea of it). I’d run my mouth off online to anyone who would listen (which is not very many, but thank you whoever you are, dear reader).

So I waited.

And on Wednesday I woke to heartbreak. I knew that his die-hard, MAGA hat-wearing, Trump-flag driving sheep would follow this so-called president to oblivion no matter what. But what percentage of the country are those people? Not huge, but I was prepared for, say 30% of the country to vote for him no matter what. But that morning, it looked like Trump might actually prevail, which was the most overtly awful thing. But even worse, I think, he had amassed a record turn out for Republicans. The red states, the conservatives, the Evangelicals, the white suburban moms–had not rejected him as they should have.

And yes, they should have, dammit. Listen: his hard core sheep, the ones who would vote for him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they would have accepted whatever he said about the pandemic. America was never going to do super well against this catastrophe. We would never embrace or even accept the robust contact tracing that has worked well in Asia, obviously. The story of fighting COVID is not about winning. We are not going to beat this virus. It is too easily spread and too insidious. Since January, epidemiologists have warned us that this disease will eventually infect a majority of the population of the planet. It is only a matter of time.

But time is what other countries have bought themselves. It’s a battle of delaying tactics and it is Trump who is to blame for sending us into the fray like a human wave over the ramparts.

Literally all this man had to do was to tell people in March to wear masks. If he had done that, if he had prevented this absolutely insane politicization of a basic public health precaution, then we would probably have a hundred thousand fewer deaths right now.

Instead, he railed against the logical, sensible prescriptions of every health expert on the planet.

For that, he should have been punished. For that, he should have been slaughtered at the polls. For that, we should not be fussing over recounts in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The whole damn map should be blue right now. No political leader before Trump could survive a failure of this magnitude.

Yet he had. Has. Even though his defeat is all but complete now, he has grown too enamored of those crowds. His ego–what little he has latched on to that simmering fungal growth of id–has become too dependent on the sycophantic adulation of those red hats. He has longed for this kind of attention his entire sad, small life. He will not make good on his promise to go away, to leave the country. The rallies will go on. (But fortunately, his political vision is so narrowly about himself that I doubt he will ever shape policy again, likely will never seek public office again. I say let him have his circle jerks with these people. Let them circle together in the widening gyre.)

This revelation rattled me. When I was in college, I remember an assignment for my intro speech course in which we had to present a speech about and introducing ourselves. I gave mine using the Voyager space probe as an extended metaphor. I said, “We were both launched in the 70s and we’re both dedicated to expanding knowledge and understanding.” That has been the mission of my life: To understand. To try to share that understanding.

But I had failed.

This outcome, I could not reconcile with my conception of humankind. Yes, of course we were capable of irrationality. Obviously, history is replete with societies gripped by horrible regimes, people who embraced evil. But democracy, I had always believed, would protect us from tyranny, from authoritarianism. People, when given the reigns en masse in a prosperous, safe society would not willingly choose the illiberal, the corrupt, the broken.

But they had.

Every morning I take our dog–a pandemic rescue who has upended our lives, befouled our sofa and floors, and ensured that I get a lot more exercise walking–to the nearby park and let her run around. Standing in the chill, green field alone with dawn just lapping at the edges of my serene, idyllic little world, I thought about the futility of all my sad attempts to engage in political discourse. What had they all come to? What had all that energy, time, and thought been for? I thought I should take a vow of silence on all things political.

“Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.”

You can see how long that lasted.

After walking back from the park with the dog Wednesday morning, I returned to my wife, still obsessively watching every minute of coverage she could. (She would not sleep well until last night, so twisted by anxiety over vote counts.) The hosts of the Today show said something as I was passing through that has rattled in my brain since.

They were talking about how the pandemic and all the other manifest failures of the Trump administration had not broken his support among the broader Republican Party faithful.

The pundit–whose name I didn’t catch–told a story about talking to a conservative voter in Pennsylvania who had told him she had come back around to voting for Trump because she didn’t like the feeling of what the other side represented.

Savannah Guthrie suggested something to the effect of “that feeling may turn out to be more important than any actual issue.”

My son, brigand and iconoclast that he is, is fond of lambasting us, his “liberal” parents and sibling. He has told us often how Trump is all our fault. He is, in my son’s eyes, a reaction to all the excesses of the progressive vanguard in the Culture Wars. By railing so hard to inspire white guilt and extend aide and comfort to more and more narrowly defined fringe groups–LatinX transgender people with celiac disease, maybe–we had so rattled the conservative elements in the country that “in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” (Yes, he really quoted The Dark Knight to analyze politics, which just proves to me, even if he prides himself on not being me, he still is.)

But I’ve always told him that he was being too narrow, keying in on one distorted view of the landscape. So while the Today show comment and my memory of my son’s many, many rants on the subject simmered on the back burners. I returned sometime Thursday to my usual haunts to try again to understand my fellow Americans–48% of whom saw the debacle of the Trump presidency and said, “Yes, more of that, please.”

Anyone who actually pays attention to my political posts (hey, there, dear Reader, whoever you are) knows that my coziest home on the web is The Atlantic. So I read and nodded to conservative Tom Nichols’ lament and warning about what the Trump turn-out means for our political reality in the future. I also read Tufekci’s piece on authoritarianism in America. I’ve always said that what scares me most about Trump is that he has been so successful while also being strikingly inept and that my deepest worry was that out there somewhere, someone much smarter was taking notes and making plans.

But I found myself shaking my head at Lowry’s attempt to explain the Trump red wall in terms of economic policy. It didn’t hold water. Nichols was right: Trump voters didn’t care about policy anymore. They cared about power.

But why? What power did they want? How did they come to believe Trump represented it? Why would, for example, evangelicals embrace a figure as demonstrably anti-Christ as Trump to secure that political power?

Finally, I think I’m coming to understand what’s happening, what has happened to my country, and I think my son was mostly right.

Back in June, I posted something on my Facebook about an article by Arlie Hochschild. he said that the “deep story” that informs support for Trump is basically that, “You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you.”

My post replied to this by urging my Trump-supporting Facebook friends to consider that:  “THE LINE IS A LIE. The line isn’t moving. They’re not really letting anyone through that door. Progressives aren’t trying to let people cut in line in front of you. They’re trying to get enough people together to push the door in.”

I doubt I swayed any of them. I don’t even know how many of them there are.

But Hochschild’s diagnosis only tells part of the story, I think. As I was reading the article in Christianity Today linked above, I remembered the psychological studies that name fear as the driving force behind conservative political affiliation and the simple formula that being afraid of change pushes people deeper into their tribal identities. When the predators circle the camp, the tribe bands closer together.

We hear more and more about how our two countries–the red and the blue–are increasingly defined by discreet and non-overlapping information bubbles. Many conservatives now live in an alternate reality fueled by misleading media like Fox News and One America and react violently at any perturbations in the barriers of those information ecosystems, like when Jennifer Griffin dared to corroborate the unsurprising story that Trump disparaged WWI veterans as he had publicly done to John McCain.

Liberals, too, live in an information and bias bubble, but there is really no comparison here. Even mentioning the truth that there is liberal bias in a lot of journalism smacks of false equivalency. Fox News has a demonstrable history of deliberate, propagandistic manipulation by Murdoch and an unswerving, idiotic devotion to serving Trump’s interests. So much so, in fact, that whenever the network steps out of line and reports something unfavorable about him, he publicly castigates them on Twitter for not doing their job–which he sees 100% as promoting and defending him!

Imagine if Obama had demanded that CNN not report something negative about him like that.

Looking back, I do think Obama was probably the best president of my lifetime, though that doesn’t say much. I have been very critical of some choices of his administration and very skeptical about his legacy overall. He was, though, a good man. Better, surely than Clinton. Better, I would say, in many ways than Bush. Only Carter, who even my father admits is probably the best person to have ever occupied the Oval Office, would eclipse him in this regard. But it is not for nothing that the warmth of Obama’s relationship with his family shines out all the more brightly in contrast with the dim, disconnected images we see of what can only vaguely be described as the Trump “household.”  The presidency is largely a symbolic position. It matters most in what the president represents about the country (which makes Trump’s tenure all the more portentous).

In retrospect, Obama’s time in office looks almost bucolic. In fact, the greatest beneficiaries of Trump’s tenure have probably been past presidents. Bush’s incompetence looks almost charming in the rearview mirror. Clinton’s immorality looks wholly forgivable beside Trump’s excesses. Hell, even Nixon looks like a Boy Scout by comparison.

Another Facebook post from right after Trump’s election that I never turned into something more robust here lays out how quickly this Obama nostalgia set in for me: “I didn’t know what to say. I thought I might say nothing. But then I saw the articles already about how Obama’s legacy has been wiped out by this election. And yes, it may be true. We go from a man who represented the best of us–child of immigrants and the heartland, rational and tolerant, faithful father and husband, champion of compromise and democracy–to someone who represents the worst of us–arrogant and narcissistic, faithless in business and family, crass and unconcerned with empathy. The twin souls of America on display. Every hard earned inch of progress–millions of people with health insurance, an economic recovery finally reaching down to the middle class, the first inklings of momentum on climate change–may be lost. But the Obama era was still one of class and dignity in the White House and I can only think of one of my favorite quotes from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, ‘If it lives only for a while…it still has lived.'”

And I think now that it is Obama who is the key to understanding Trump and everything that has come since 2008.

Why did the Tea Party turn from an anti-bailout group into an anti-government mob with unsubtle undertones of racial animus? Why did Mitch McConnel pledge on day one of the Obama presidency to fight every, single initiative the new president proposed? What was it about Obama that split the rail of this country and created the two Americas?

You think I’m going to say it’s about race, but I don’t think that explains it. After all, Trump surged (well, improved) with some groups like Hispanics in Florida and even with African-American men in some places. Obviously, white supremacy and Trump’s sympathy for and from white supremecists should be yet another deal-breaker, yet another thing that should have damned his political ambitions forever, but didn’t.

But I think race is only part of something bigger here. Something broader and more ineffable.

Obama ran in 2008 under a simple banner: Change.

I think now that that simple word explains everything. Change. Obama put it on a poster, but he also embodied it. He represented a new kind of America. Multi-racial, yes. But also a product of the meritocracy that some believe aggrieves the white working class so.

It is this change that made the conservative tribe tremble so, that made them recoil from the scary shadows in the night, to huddle together and eventually pledge themselves to Trump. He was not strong, in any traditional sense. But he was loud. Loud enough, perhaps, to impose his will upon the chaos, to hold back the change.

If I had to guess, I’d say: The Hispanics who vote Trump often resent the “LatinX” label. That X represents inclusion, but these are conservatives who have won their share of the American Dream. They believe they’ve waited in Hochschild’s line and now look back and worry over anyone shaking up the order. Black men who voted for Trump see him asserting the masculine privilege to say as thou wilt and not be questioned. Will to power. That’s what this conservative tribe wants. The power to resist change.

Yes, I think I understand them now.

So what I want to say to them is: Grow up.

Snowflakes! Oh, no, America is changing! I don’t feel like I know my own country anymore. Boo-hoo. I don’t either. I’m not going to vote for a sociopath because of it. Your grievances are so shallow, it’s absurd. You want to feel powerful? Go play a video game. I can recommend a few. Oh, did you vote to protect your “religious liberty?” You don’t have a freedom not to see that other people believe other than you do. Deal with it. Just like I have to deal with the fact that 48% of my countrymen are you people. Other people having their own liberty doesn’t hurt yours. It only infringes on your privilege, not your freedom.

To quote Dennis Leary: “Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet.”

So what does this mean for President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris?

Work with them, Joe. Go to McConnel and say, “Listen Mitch, I know you pushed back hard at Barrack. He was a new kid on the block, I get it. But you’ve known me for forty years. We’ve got to do something together here. We can’t have this obstructionism anymore. Look what it did to the country. You know Trump was never your guy. You didn’t want to have to follow him. Let’s turn over a new leaf. We’ve got priorities. You’ve got priorities. Let’s get back to the old days where we tried to govern. What’dya say?”

No, on second thought, let’s go to Georgia and get the Senate back and then crush them into dust!!!

I think I’m only half-kidding.

So now, because if I have so little empathy in my heart for these people, then I still don’t really understand them, I think I will try to be silent for a moment at least…try to just listen, to learn, try to understand these people as more than just irrational, more than just naive, more than just misguided fools. I do hope that this election marks an inflection point. America is broken. Our leadership position in the world ruined. Our culture, such that it was, in tatters. Our economy and our health failing. We need change.

Stow your fear, my friends.

Now is the time to be bold.

Passing the Buck but the Buck is HEAVY

This is part III of my reflection on Ungrading my classes this semester. Part I is here, and Part II here.

Last week, the devil demanded his due. It was progress report time. I pledged to let students reflect and grade themselves and to resolve the grades posted through conversation. But I didn’t realize one thing:

These conversations are exhausting.

It took a lot of time to cajole students to consider follow-up questions and to examine evidence from their writing to justify their scores. A. Lot. Of. Time.

I’m definitely picking my battles. Some students I might not have agreed with, but if they made their case and weren’t way off what I would have said the mark was, then I let it go. In most cases where I couldn’t in good conscience do that, after I asked them to consider the exemplars we studied and look at specifics in their own writing, students changed their evaluations of their own writing. Afterwards, I tried to be encouraging, reminded them this was all process and that they should take this reflection as a foundation to build on.

I did have one conference with a student through my online office hours and it seemed so much better to be having the conversation live. I don’t know how the student felt, but we were able to dynamically look at the writing, I could help direct her attention in real time, and she settled very quickly on a score that seemed reasonable and based on the evidence we had just looked at in her writing.

But there is no way I could do this with all two hundred students.

I remember at one point in my AP classes (back when classes took place in classrooms), I set aside a chunk of time to have one-on-one conferences with students about their writing. It took all week to schedule them all, the meetings were really rushed and did not feel as fruitful as this one-on-one discussion I had during office hours last week.

Maybe, as I’d originally planned, it doesn’t have to be everyone…but darn it, I think everyone would benefit from this process. Even if it’s not everyone who goes through a “live” conference, it still means rethinking and retooling my procedures to try to get those windows with more kids.

 

P.S. I also got this e-mail from a student:

In this correspondence, I hear Rorshach from Watchmen. She’s looking up and shouting “validate me.” And I have to answer, “No.”

My reply:

She, too, came by office hours. It was a nice chat, but I still get the feeling that she wants very much to live in the old world.

To the Trump Voter

“Losers…Suckers.”

Now, at last.

Now, at last you have no excuses. No false equivalencies left to fabricate. No way to spin away what is right before your faces.

Now, Trump has shown the very bottom of his nature.

He has shown that not only does he not care about us, his fellow Americans, but he thinks we are all beneath him.

By insulting service members, by insulting our fallen soldiers–our war dead–he has revealed without question that not only is he without empathy, but he is constitutionally incapable of understanding sacrifice and nobility. He is the worst of us.

You cannot hand-wave this away as a fabrication of the “mainstream” media. At least four sources in the room heard this. Four people who were part of the Trump administration. This is confirmed by, of all outlets, Fox News.

Fox News.

And you cannot pretend he is not an unrepentant liar. He lied immediately during his denial, claiming that he was so upset about not visiting the cemetery in France that he called his wife back home to bemoan the disappointment.

But she was on the trip with him. She was right there.

He is a liar. He is a narcissist. He is the smallest man to ever occupy the Oval Office.

Now you cannot deny it.

You cannot.

But it is not too late. It is never too late.

You can still do the right thing.

It’s hard to admit when we’re wrong, but you can do it. I did it when Clinton was revealed to be a liar and a bastard–and quite possibly worse. But his faults and crimes pale in comparison to the display we have witnessed these past four years.

What will America be after another four years of this?

Weaker. Our alliances, tattered now, will be laid to waste. Our enemies and rivals, emboldened now, will tower over us.

Poorer. The economy that is struggling to revive itself will only limp toward profits for a few, leaving the many wounded by these crises in pain and need. The brain drain we are already seeing from slower immigration will accelerate, with more Americans of means fleeing the crumbling United States.

Sicker. Our healthcare system, strained, will be utterly shattered. Our environment, unprotected now, will be completely sullied, degraded by greed.

Uglier. We see in our streets strife and disorder. You think this is something Trump will stop? He has brought it on us. He has led us to this terrible moment by emboldening white supremacists, by stoking violence, by simply being himself–selfish, hateful, petty.

You cannot deny it any longer. Trump is the problem. He has brought us low.

He lied to you. You believed him. You thought he would be different. He was. He was worse. So much worse.

You must admit it to yourself. You must.

We must do better than what this man offers us.

Trump is right about one thing said at the Republican convention: This election will decide America’s soul. And what does embracing this man as a leader say about us as a nation? If he is shameless enough to disparage those who made the ultimate sacrifice for country, how can he be the man to redeem that country’s soul? In your hearts, you must know what you have to do: Admit that this election is bigger than party or party priorities. Admit you were wrong. Do the right thing now.

Reject the tribalism. Reject his hateful, divisive vision for America. Embrace reason.

Vote Biden.

 

Passing the Buck and Pulling My Punches?

This is Part II of my record and reflection on Ungrading. Part I is here.

I am two weeks into the semester now.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Revolt? Shock and awe? Between my description on the syllabus and the supplementary video I recorded for my students, I got almost zero questions about the grading system. I think I had to elaborate once or twice in six “live” sessions and not-at-all for my one purely online asynchronous class. Of my 200 plus survey responses, very few mentioned the grading system. One notable exception read:

“My concerns right now is that I have to grade my own essay and I have never done that before. Also the grading system it somewhat excites me knowing there are no more points but at the same time that terrifies me.”

Which is pretty much exactly what I would hope a kid would think and say about it…well, except for the terror.

I can relate, though. I started to feel, if not terror, then at least anxiety as I began grading, er, dammit–began reading my students’ writing samples last week. They were assigned a one page analysis of Anna Quindlen’s “Write for Your Life” so that I could get a sense of their capabilities and have a benchmark for their writing portfolios. Ordinarily, I would soak these pieces in comments, correcting typical errors, criticizing over-summarization, suggesting angles for deeper thinking.

But, this semester, I’d vowed not to make anyone cry with my feedback, so…

I tried to keep my feedback almost entirely in question form and to only post about three questions for each student to think about in revising their pieces this week. For me, though, it felt like pulling my punches. I worried that I was being too soft. After all, kids whose writing needed a lot of work might not get the sense of how deeply flawed their efforts were. Kids who really knocked it out of the park may not have a sense that they had done well. I also felt like the questions I was asking were just the same old critiques in different syntax.

So, yeah, maybe there was some terror. Fear I wasn’t doing anyone any favors.

But when I found myself writing this comment, I started to feel like I was getting it:

It was a simple moment in feedback. Last year, I would’ve just put “example?” in the margin and moved on. Or, worse, might have just slapped something like “this is vague.” But the open ended question felt like much more of an invitation to conversation than a rebuke. I started to, I think, get a sense of the ethos I was going for with all of this. So in another essay, instead of just barking at the student to be more specific, I said:

So I thought back to those kids whose work needed lots of, well, work. How much good was I going to do them by just overwhelming them with negative feedback? Wouldn’t that lead to the kind of shutting down I said before I wanted to avoid? And what about those kids who could already write a great one-page analysis (that actually took them three pages)? Shouldn’t they get more out of it than a sense of smug satisfaction? So I left them notes that part of academic writing was working within limits and guidelines and asked how they could focus on the most important elements for a one-page response? And I found questions to ask them about their ideas, too. More nuanced, more focused, perhaps. But I tried to give everyone something to think about.

It felt like progress.

But looming on the horizon is the prospect of progress reports.

My original plan was to give the students a temporary grade as feedback. I would use the BlackBoard rubric for their online discussions to give them my sense of how well they were doing and protest up-and-down that it wasn’t really a grade and they shouldn’t think of it as such and it’s just feedback, I pinky promise.

Looking back, as the first number to get slapped on them in this supposedly fundamentally different class, this now looks like a terrible, horrible, very bad idea.

Fortunately, fate intervened. There was massive miscommunication between our high school campus and the college where the students are enrolled for their Dual Credit classes and the rosters on the college side look like they were diced in a food processor when compared to the real class rosters at the high school. Going into their first weekend reading assignments that require BlackBoard discussion posts, at least 20% of my students are either in the wrong class section in BlackBoard (and would see their contributions to the BlackBoard forums erased when they get moved) or aren’t even yet able to access BlackBoard.

On top of that, I want discussion to extend throughout the whole week, but knowing my campus, we’ll have to post progress report grades by noon on Friday, leaving me very little time to actually record scores for BlackBoard participation.

Again, thank god for all that nonsense.

Because thinking “what am I going to do” got me past the cockamamy plan of just trying to grade hundreds of BlackBoard posts Thursday night–if all the kids can even get into BlackBoard by then–and made me remember that the students are supposed to be evaluating themselves. If this is their first of the necessary-evil grades, then they should, ya know, grade themselves.

So instead of me slapping a number on them as teachers always have before, in class starting tomorrow, I will take them through a BINGO game identifying common errors and stylistic faux pas in writing to let them get a sense of what issues they need to improve. Then they will read a sample student exemplar of the assignment they just turned in and write a reflection in their portfolios assessing how well they did. Then they will give themselves a progress report grade with this rubric:

A – I completed a thorough analysis in a timely fashion and took thoughtful notes on all the weekend readings.

B – I completed a solid analysis on time, but I feel I could have done a little bit better; I read the assigned readings and took helpful notes.

C – I completed my analysis (but it was late or not the best I could have done); I did some of the assigned readings and took some notes.

D – I completed my analysis late and did not get very far with the readings.

F – I did not complete my analysis.

There! Now I’ve completely acclimated to Ungrading and from here on out, everything will be hunky dory?

Right?

 

 

 

Passing the Buck – Prelude to an Ungrading

This is not a how-to. This is a how-I-did.

For the uninitiated, Ungrading is the name I favor for a movement in education that looks critically at “assessment” and asks the hard question: What are grades supposed to mean?

I remember first grappling with this question more than a decade ago. Wanting to be precise and purposeful–and correct–in my grading practices, I dug into resources and documentation from the state of Texas, where I’ve now taught for over two decades, looking for simple guidelines for what the grades in my course should actually represent.

There weren’t any. Not just no simple guidelines. There were none at all. No one seemed to know what grades should actually mean. Or at least, no one seemed willing to put it down in words.

I think the secret answer is “the grade just tells you which students are better than the others.”

Over the years since then, my school district has made various pronouncements about grades. For example, there should be fifteen daily grades per grading period. (See, the periods are all about grades, but we don’t know what the grades are about.) My school experimented with a push toward standards-based grading, wherein teachers should award points based solely on mastery of the relevant state standards. As a campus leader, I was neck-deep in this push. We cooked up rubrics and did trainings. But teachers kept giving extra credit points to kids who brought in Kleenex boxes for the classroom.

I stepped down from my leadership position to teach Dual Credit full time and relished the autonomy of just teaching my way–away from the sway of the very same kind of top-down initiatives that I had spent a decade spearheading. It was a good gig and I liked it. Kids feared and dreaded my “harsh” grading, but enough told me in their end-of-year reflections that my “heartbreaking” feedback made them better writers that I consoled myself with the idea that I was doing the work, making them better.

All along I watched the Ungrading movement from the side. I’d flirted with gamification one semester with an AP class, but found that none of them were interested. To the undermotivated, it seemed like grades in another form (because it was) and to the grade-hounds, they shrugged and seemed to say “if it ain’t broke…”

But it is broke. I couldn’t shake that feeling.

2020 came and the world fell apart. A pandemic ripped the economy to shreds and sent us all indoors. Until injustice dragged thousands upon thousands into the streets. Our leadership came to assert its authoritarian tendencies more and more, even as its incompetence became more and more apparent. I thought of O’Brien in 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” But it didn’t seem so much a boot as an oversized clown shoe.

Yet amidst all this tumult, I was in autodrive. I was already used to BlackBoard, the online system used by the community college, so shifting online didn’t scare me. My wife recently told me about a colleague who showed up to professional development in a shirt that read “Aspiring Retiree” and that was me too. In the forefront of my imagination at work and whenever I thought about school there was a giant countdown timer. Anyone could ask at any moment how long I had until I could draw a pension. It was seven years as I faced the beginning of the 20-21 school year.

Seven long years.

After I’d spent a week refreshing my syllabus for my introductory composition Dual Credit course, a friend and colleague asked me if I’d changed anything to “reflect current topics in our nation and world…?” I think when I got that text message, I kind of bobbed my head, like I’d gotten a little slap. When I’d built my very first syllabus for the course, I’d built a social justice unit smack dab in the middle of the course, drawing on lots of exciting readings in the textbook for the course. Then, before I ever got to teach it, I had to redo the syllabus when I found out that my kids would be getting a newer version of the book, one that had mysteriously lost the texts central to that mini-unit. Thinking about my friend’s question, I started wondering why–in the middle of one of the most tumultuous times I’d ever lived through, much less these young people–I should be satisfied with only teaching them reviews of Fault in Our Stars and Dave Barry memoirs about Halloween. They were fine writings and all, but c’mon: This was 2020.

So I started rebuilding the syllabus I’d already spent a week tinkering with. I thought at first I might throw in one or two contemporary essays to spice it up. First I found an Atlantic piece of how Germans saw the Trump regime and its pushback against protestors. Then came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech on the house floor and various analyses of her performance. Before I knew it, I’d rebuilt the first third of the syllabus as a mini-course in discourse and rhetoric.

And then something else happened. A “in for a penny, in for a pound” switch got flipped in my brain. I joined an anti-grading Facebook group. I started reading blogs. Downloaded a Kindle copy of Hacking Assessment by Starr Sackstein.

And I ungraded that syllabus.

According to this new plan, there would be as few grades as possible. I’d have to give out some during the course of the semester to post on progress reports and such, but I noted that these were “not final” and were meant to just be a kind of feedback. For the real grades, the 15% on each major essay, the students would evaluate themselves and I would confer. Then the real final grade would be the subject of reflection and writing for the students at the end of the semester. The syllabus read, “Grading is one of the most problematic aspects of education. The myth that a single number can communicate how much a student has learned is deeply ingrained into our educational system, so much so that many students find it hard to imagine any other way of engaging academically. For this course, grades will only be used to the extent that they are institutionally required. Students are strongly encouraged to focus on learning and on the ongoing development of their capabilities as writers holistically and not on arbitrary or limiting grade assessments.”

I recorded a video for my online classes elaborating, trying to explain the philosophy more, urging them to “focus on what you can learn through the process of engaging in discourse during the course of this semester. What can you learn from the texts you read? What can you do in writing that you couldn’t do before? Do not be afraid of what grade you’re ultimately going to get. Take risks. Forget about the grades. Don’t think about scoring an easy A or eeking by with a good-enough C. Reject all those shallow labels and focus on your growth and capability. Because at the end of the semester, you want to be able to look at yourself and assess how ready you are for college level inquiry, to be part of academic discourse. Have you learned enough and what more do you still have to learn? Being able to answer those questions for yourself will be worth a lot more than a column full of numbers.”

I sat back from this thing I had created, this plan that felt bold and audacious to me. I saw that it was good. But was it hopelessly naive? Would it lead to disaster?

I ran it by my daughter who’s just a few years out of high school. She was a grade hound in her day, but when she read my script for my video, she said she thought if she’d had a teacher tell her those things it would have really made her think. Ultimately, she thought she would have appreciated it. “Besides,” she told me. “You’re excited about doing this. You should.”

But, really, this isn’t about those grade hounds like her. They’ll be fine, I think. I want to get to the kids who just coast by or don’t even coast. Throughout my career, I’ve been vexed by a certain type of student. In both honors and regular classes, I run across capable, bright students who nevertheless just shut down, who seem to give up. I know they could do the work and get the grades, but they don’t. I’ve tried a thousand times to reason with students like this, to cajole them into action, to get through to them somehow…to no avail. Students who could’ve passed easily, but maybe didn’t know how to truly excel, just let themselves fail. It seems like a kind of learned helplessness or maybe a defense mechanism. Maybe, on some deep psychological level, if they don’t try then they don’t feel like they’ve failed.

If grades and top-down judgments from teachers have played any part in creating this sub-set of our student population, then that alone justifies the attempt to ungrade my course as much as possible. Because if that is the case, then my “harsh” and “soul-crushing” grading (yes, it’s actually been called that–not proud of that fact) must have perpetuated the trend and it is high time I pay penance.

So this year, I’m shelving the safe syllabus I built early in the summer and I’m going to run with the grand experiment.

Gulp.

What To Do About the Schools?

As the summer of “meh” winds down, the debate about how to handle the new school year amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic grows more raucous by the day as time to develop a good option for restarting American education (and there are no good options) runs out.

The Atlantic recently featured an article by New York ICU nurse Kristen McConnell titled “I’m a Nurse. Teachers Should Do Their Jobs Like I Did.”

Now, Ms. McConnell likely had nothing to do with that rather combative title. The construction of click-baity links is something left to professional journalists and editors, but McConnell’s argument that teachers are essential just like grocery store workers and, yes, medical professionals like herself is not far removed from the sentiment slapped at the top of her essay.

And, to be sure, some of her argument makes sense. Yes, education is essential to our society. Yes, social distancing and mask-wearing have made grocery stores and hospitals reasonably safe to resume necessary operations. Her question, then, is why not schools?

There’s no easy answer here, and that’s where McConnell is wrong. She pretends that the situation on the ground and the immediacy of the societal need is simply the same as with her grocery store and hospital analogies.

New York city just released a plan to add 2,475 new ICU beds to the system. To. The. System. City-wide. At my suburban high school, we have more than 2,475 students. Every. Day. Likewise, a grocery store on a slow day (which they should all be slow days if we’re sticking to essential shopping only) will have at least two thousand customers. In. A. Day.

But in an American high school like mine, there are three thousand bodies stuck inside a big, blocky building for eight hours. Eight. Long. Hours. Thousands of teenage bodies colliding with one another again and again like billiard balls.

It’s not the same. It’s not controllable.

And, of course, McConnell also admits that her teacher husband was doing his job even when schools weren’t in session–through Zoom, through e-mail, through whatever means necessary. (Just as she admits we’re only having this conversation because of a monumental failure of leadership in our government.)

My job in the next few weeks will not be easier. I will not have the next couple of weeks off. (Granted, the being able to wear shorts every day is kinda nice.)  We will be conducting live classes following a bell schedule, but through Microsoft TEAMS. However, we can’t bank on every student being able to log in with their schedule because of potential conflicts for students, like taking care of younger siblings or watching over elders or a thousand other things we can’t and shouldn’t presume to know about their lives at home. So students will also be able to access our recorded lessons and do the classwork asynchronously later. Taking attendance for the day to report our head counts to the state will become a fun little game of detective work! Hooray!

So this isn’t a vacation for America’s teachers and we’re not asking for one. I think most of us would prefer to go back to normal. But that’s not happening.

Social distancing in school, as Ms. McConnell suggests, means that my classroom right now has only half its desks out (the rest are piled against the wall) and their positions are mapped out by blue tape on the floor. Our current cockamamy plan is that some students will remain online in the coming weeks and some will come back, further complicating the challenges of teaching during the pandemic.

I understand that teaching elementary kids online seems highly problematic. We might expect high school age students to learn through a computer screen, but how much are little, little ones going to get out of such an experience? But, as my wife who has taught second and third grade for over twenty years will tell you, there’s something pretty unpalatable about trapping kids in their classrooms all day without breaks for PE, music, lab time, lunch in the cafeteria, etc. Those little bodies and minds don’t deserve to be stuck in socially-distanced rows, unable to circulate. The monotony and sameness is stifling.

And maybe that’s the lesson we need to learn from all of this.

Our schools are not healthy places for our kids to go back to during this pandemic, but maybe that’s because our schools weren’t healthy places to go to in the first place.

Many–myself included–have argued that this crisis presents myriad opportunities to reevaluate how our society runs. How much are we paying those “essential” workers anyhow? Why should people who suffer through weeks and months of recovery for COVID leave the hospital only to face inevitable bankruptcy because of our for-profit healthcare system?

Maybe we need to also ask: What should our schools look like?

We are still running an industrial-era school system in the post-industrial world. Kids, with their bright, curious minds, shoved into rooms with fluorescent lights for hours and hours. Asked to sit still. Listen. Take this test. Then another. And another.

Though we can’t make every pie-in-the-sky idea for transforming schools work for this upcoming school year, we should seize the larger opportunity to make fundamental change in the way we teach and the way students learn.

I’ve embraced this ethos for the upcoming semester. After years of flirting with the Ungrading movement, I’ve rebuilt my syllabi to deprioritize arbitrary numbers as a means of assessing student performance and product, and shifted toward a model that (hopefully) focuses them more on reflection, self-assessment, and meaningful learning. It’s an experiment, but honestly, it can’t be worse for kids than the mind-numbing system based on constant multiple choice testing and teacher-centered “engagement” that has dominated educational thinking in the 21st century. Through my twenty year career, I’ve watched our school system sink deeper and deeper into a morass where students are measured only based on what circles they can bubble in and where teachers are expected to run a three-ring circus of constant stimulation to command students’ limited attention spans and (somehow) work miracles.

It’s absurd. So let’s start asking some hard questions: What do these tests actually measure? Do students need to be in class this many hours? Could we redesign schools to focus less on hours of education and more on actual progress–but not measured just by standardized tests? Smaller classes for less time? More student-driven learning? Outside learning?

This is an inflection point in history. We’re seeing the limits of our politics, of our healthcare system, of our justice system, of our economy–it’s time we reckon with education as well and build something better.

 

Discipline

America looks today like a failed state. A botched response to a global pandemic has left over a hundred thousand dead, the worst fatalities in the world. The sloppy, unhasty lock-down and lopsided stimulus in response to the pandemic has now hurled us toward a second Great Depression. And now, police violence has triggered monumental unrest throughout the country.

Let’s be clear. We must make a distinction between the protestors and the rioters and looters. There were tens of thousands of protestors in many of the afflicted cities. Only a few hundred rioters and looters, though.

Because if tens of thousands of people had rioted, then there would be no Philadelphia, there’d be no Minneapolis. If tens of thousands of people set out to burn a city down, then it will be burnt down. Whether looting is really a political act is open to debate, but Dr. Martin Luther King’s remark that a “riot is the language of the unheard” has been quoted quite a bit in the last few days. It’s important to note, though, that while he sympathized with the anger that led to rioting, he objected to it both on moral and practical grounds–because he feared that rioting could be used as justification for further oppression and would alienate large segments of the white populace. We can see from the currents in online discourse that he continues to be hauntingly prescient to this very day.

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail and other writings, Dr. King speaks about the need for discipline among non-violent protestors. In preparing for marches and demonstrations, he knew it was asking a great deal, asking perhaps something unnatural, for protestors to not react to violence, to meet sometimes horrific attacks with peace and restraint.

This component of the campaign for Civil Rights took planning and coordination.

Spontaneous protests like those that sprang up over the past several days in the wake of the murder of George Floyd obviously cannot benefit from that kind of planning and coordination. To be sure, many march organizers worked hard to ensure that the protests remained nonviolent, but other forces have now conspired against those best intentions.

We don’t yet have a clear picture of what those forces are. Obviously, some of the looting is simple opportunism. But there seem to be radical elements from the left and right–although they may only be from the right posing as the left–looking to exploit this moment toward their own ends. There may be instigation from foreign agents using the Internet to stoke our divisions. There were other moments where police have prompted violence through unwarranted use of force. These contributing factors may never come into perfect focus. Only time will tell.

What we can reflect on now, though, is another kind of restraint, another kind of discipline.

The police are the segment of our society to whom we, typically, grant a monopoly on the use of force. In theory, this monopoly is wielded in order to serve and protect the public’s interest in maintaining law and order.

But, of course, there are problems implicit in this long-standing arrangement. What if, for example, the order the police maintain is corrupt? What if, as was the case during segregation, the law itself is immoral? And even if the laws and the societal order being protected are just, what kind of discipline does this monopoly on force require of its agents?

We know a lot about how wielding power, particularly violent power, shapes human behavior. From historical case evidence to psychological studies, we can see how dangerous a monopoly on the use of violence can be. To wield it responsibly is asking at least as much if not more than King and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement asked of the members of their movement.

And, to be sure, there are many fine civil servants who wield that power ethically and responsibility, fully cognizant of their duty to the public, the entire public–victim and accused alike. In recent days, we have seen many officers and departments reaching out to stand in solidarity with outraged communities.

But we’ve also seen too many times that there are many within our police forces who do not wield their power ethically, and I’m not even talking about Derek Chauvin and the other officers who held down George Floyd.

What about the cops in riot gear, chomping at the bit to bash some skulls? What about the officers indiscriminately shoving people to the ground as they advance through the streets? What about the police vehicles being used like battering rams on assembled crowds? What about the cops hosing down protestors with pepper spray from car windows? What about reporters being hit with rubber bullets or beaten with plexiglass barriers?

How do we address this kind of police behavior? This is the conduct of police forces in an authoritarian state, and there’s no place in a democracy for this kind of behavior. There is a pervasive problem in police culture, an us vs. them mentality that allows officer to dehumanize and assault the very people they are meant to serve, along with an insular ethos whereby bad cops are not called to task by their peers.

Obviously, protests and video records of these abuses and crimes bring greater visibility to the problem of police abusing their monopoly on the use of force, but they do not in themselves present a clear path forward. The protests’ purpose is to bank social capital to leverage change (something the distraction of violence and looting makes harder, so we should all keep our focus on the positive direction of the much larger non-violent demonstrations) and we should be careful not to squander that capital.

Bringing Chauvin and his accomplices to justice is not enough. We need systemic change to maintain this visibility and make police procedure transparent so that bad cops are flushed out of the system, or at least too damned scared to abuse their power. (In fairness, many departments have already moved in this direction and, nationwide, police killings are down compared to past years.) Given the role that video evidence has played in bringing so many of these kinds of crimes to light, it’s tempting to push–as so many of us did years ago during the rise of Black Lives Matters–for more body cameras. According to the Police Use of Force Project, though, these tools are too easy for crooked cops to circumvent and have not correlated with fewer police killings. Instead, their research shows that demilitarization, greater oversight (especially federal oversight), and more emergency response options for communities lead to the best outcomes when seeking to reduce criminal transgressions by the police.

We need tougher standards for cops (and I’d say, better pay to recruit better candidates to replace the officers who need to be purged from the ranks for their crimes) and we need to demilitarize the police departments and reculture them so they do not think they are fighting a war on the communities they’re meant to serve.

All of this calls for national leadership that we are unlikely to see until after the election. It may also feel inadequate to those of us who remain deeply troubled by the rise in overt racism in our society over the last few years. There is ample evidence that racism and implicit and institutional bias are deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that overt, visible statements of racist sentiment had become taboo in American society in the last generation and that that taboo has subsequently been worn away over the last few years, allowing all manner of repugnant displays–from public harassment of people of color to white nationalist marches–to become more commonplace.

Policy can’t create taboos. The taboo against explicit racism that seemed to have taken root in American thought only a decade ago can only be rebuilt and strengthened by loud, unequivocal anti-racism from all of us. Tens of thousands of Americans in the street saying “enough” is certainly a powerful way to push back against the tide of ugly racism that’s risen the last few years.

But that racism is only one dimension of the problem with our police forces and those problems require targeted and informed policy decisions–from both local and national elected officials.

That means the next front in the campaign for justice for George Floyd, for Breonna Taylor, for Sandra Bland, for Philando Castile, for Eric Garner and for all the victims will be waged on November 3rd.

 

 

 

 

A Cruel Invitation

My daughter–recently returned home prematurely from study abroad–told me a story she heard in South America about a pair of researchers who just emerged from an eight week research junket in the rainforest to find: A pandemic sweeping the globe. Cities on lock-down. Businesses shuttered. Completely cut off from civilization, they return to a world transformed.

But aren’t we all, really, like them. This is the twenty-first century we didn’t know was coming.

This isn’t like the movies, is it? In film, the viral apocalypse spreads–undetered, unassailable–until human civilization buckles and we tear each other to pieces trying to save ourselves.

Instead–aside from some toilet paper hoarding–we’re doing the right thing. We are making tremendous sacrifices to suppress the spread of the disease. Even though it does not threaten us with a barren world like Stephen King’s The Stand or other super-viruses from fiction that result in a Mad Max-like hellscapes, we are coping. Civilization hasn’t broken. It has prioritized.

And really, I find that heartening.

To be sure, there are parts of this global story that bear deep reflection. We see already that nations that responded swiftly, that prepared wisely are faring and likely will continue to fare much better than the United States. By now it is apparent that no level of corruption or incompetence will sway the base of support propping up this president, but it must be noted: Trump disbanded a pandemic response team in the executive branch and then lied about doing it. Trump waved away early concerns about the virus, and then lied about ignoring its dangers. As always with this so-called-president, he has failed the test of leadership dramatically–worrying more about positive news and the press than American lives and well being. It’s an all-too-familiar pattern: this president believing that through sheer bravado and self-deceit he can rewrite reality in his favor.

Yet this time, reality failed to oblige.

When we come through this pandemic, we will indeed be facing a new world. Our economy will be in tatters. Jobs will have been lost or disrupted. Supply chains strained. We will–as a people–face many choices about how to move forward.

If we are willing to sacrifice so much during this crisis to protect the most vulnerable among us, then maybe we need to admit that our way of life, our economic system, our very society do not do that on a day to day basis.

Our growing inequality is on display everywhere. Across the border in Ciudad Juarez, there’s another story buzzing around. A member of high-society, some rich kid just back from Europe, was too entitled to pay any heed to the orders to self-quarantine and spent a week partying in night clubs and socializing before his diagnosis. He’s now isolated alright–in hiding from death threats. And here in the U.S. we’re asking questions about why so many high profile celebrities and athletes are managing to get preventative testing, when people who are already sick go without. Our for-profit healthcare system is strained and scrambling to prepare for the triage days to come. Our coproratopia shutters, leaving hourly workers adrift.

When we rebuild…we can do better.

Already the bailout is taking unfamiliar shapes. Yes, help the airlines, they say. Obviously, they say we should help out small businesses. But now, Mitt Romney sounds like Andrew Yang, suggesting we just hand out money. That’s pretty bold for a Republican whose party is always on the ramparts, ready to combat the evils of socialism or big government.

And this is a time for bold leadership.

Honestly, the best choices to lead us through the wake of this disaster have been eliminated from the field of candidates for the upcoming election and we are left with a choice in November between the inept man-child or the bumbling, amiable every-man. Personally, I’d rather have Warren crunching the numbers or Sanders rallying the people–but we’ll just have to hope their leadership in the Senate is enough to help us through this.

The real momentum for transformation, though, must come from us.

From the people.

We need to demand the bold restructuring that will inoculate our society against this sort of disaster in the future and build a more just world as a monument to this moment in history.

Let us insist that the executive branch be reigned in after decades of expanding power and that it become fully transparent and accountable to Congress so that decisions like disbanding the National Security Council’s global health security office can no longer be taken on a whim.

Let us consider using taxation–as we did after the Great Depression and World War II–to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth. Should we tax every dollar earned above a million dollars at a much higher rate as we used to? In 1945, it was over 90%. Should we impose a wealth tax to fund the rebuilding of our nation so that the huge stockpiles of banked capital in the hands of people like Jeff Bezos are not simply growing wealth for the 1%, but generating economic activity for the nation?

Should we deprivilege corporations in favor of cooperatives so that when calamity strikes, workers are part owners and can enjoy some economic security, knowing that when normalcy returns, they are part of the solution and not a cost to be cut. Should we restructure the very nature of the corporation–that very synthetic beast–and find new ways to generate capital and drive markets? Can we break the cynical operations of high finance and reward stock holders for the health of a company as a whole and not simply for profit margins that come at the expense of employees and customers–but never, somehow, CEOs.

Should we reunionize? Should we take our democracy online? Should we amend the constitution? A Green New Deal, perhaps?

If this looming pandemic-driven recession is our Great Depression, then we know what our Great War is that must follow it. Because of the flaws in our systems, we have created a society of waste and neglect that is reshaping our environment, our very world. Yet today, dolphins were spotted in the canals of Venice. As we recede from our conspicuous consumption to protect ourselves, so too does the natural world breathe easier for a moment.

If we can rise to the challenge of this crisis, then we can find the fortitude to reshape our lives and our culture to fight the good fight and preserve the world for our posterity. They are right now leaving their colleges, sheltering themselves in their homes, giving up their wages to protect the older generation from the ravages of this disease.

It’s only right that in the next phase, we serve them by helping to create a better world.