It’s NOT All About Me

Ruby red osiers (red-twig dogwood)

It’s hard to remember that only 10 weeks ago, the American economy was quite good, our foreign relations were on the whole positive, we were on the way to dealing with climate change with subsidies for wind and solar energy, and we still lived in a democracy.

So began Robert Reich’s April 7, 2025, Substack post. It’s true he doesn’t mention what was happening in Gaza ten weeks ago—that wasn’t good news—but it’s hard to argue with what he does say about our world ten weeks ago. 

And now? Barbarians running amok throughout the federal government at all levels, slashing and burning, wreaking retribution wherever possible on particular states, universities, law firms, judges, and anyone else who has dared to stand for the rule of law against the lawless, monolithic attack, and now punitive tariffs on everyone from China to penguins. What can one little bookseller in a small, quiet village possibly hope to say to draw attention away from the national scene and toward her own small interests? 

Does she look dubious?

But I don’t want to divert your attention from the national scene! I want you to pay attention to it. If I include photographs of my dog now and then or images of beauty found in my country neighborhood to give you a reason to smile, that’s not because dogs and scenery are more important than imminent threats to our democracy (as well as our livelihoods) but simply because we need to remember, in the midst of chaos and horror and destruction, that our world, the basic reality being so egregiously attacked, has an essential goodness. 

As for why I include snippets of big news here that you can easily find elsewhere in far greater detail, it’s because I hope that at least one or two people who depend on (dis)information silos to guide their thinking—I cannot stop hoping—will find something I say, some random link I include, if not their stock portfolios tanking, a serious challenge to their ”God’s got this” complacency, because I know that many of them have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as do I, and surely they don’t want our country destroyed before those younger generations have a chance to enjoy a good American life. 

How many people do you know who are downsizing households and reducing material belongings so “the kids won’t have to deal with a mess” when they’re gone? Well, how about a country without respect for the Constitution, without freedom of expression, a country loathed by the rest of the world for not keeping its word? What parents want to see their kids having to deal with a mess like that? 

The Secretary of the Treasury (another billionaire—surprise!) does not think (my sentence should really end there, shouldn't it?) that ordinary Americans facing retirement “look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening” in the stock market. He thinks they don't pay attention to the market, which is somewhat like (although not quite as bad as) the Secretary of Commerce saying that only fraudsters complain about not getting their social security checks on time. What planet do these idiots live on?

Mr. Bessent, sir, Americans preparing to retire are paying more attention to financial indicators than you realize. And Mr. Lutnick, sir, your mother-in-law may not worry if her social security check doesn’t arrive on time, but many Americans rely on those checks to pay their rent. How out of touch with your fellow Americans can you possibly be? 

I’m thinking that right about now, with Social Security threatened and world trade in crisis, Americans who didn’t worry about international students or undocumented aliens being kidnapped without grounds for arrest and without any semblance of a trial—those Americans might be getting a little nervous now that their pocketbooks are threatened. People who were perfectly comfortable with nonstop lies, fear-mongering, and violations of the United States Constitution might not be quite so comfortable with value erased overnight from their own stock portfolios and retirement funds.

Many of us have long wondered what it would take, and maybe this is what it takes. Cart our immigrant neighbors off to prison in El Salvador; cut off funding and trash years of research into serious health issues; make the United States a pariah among nations—but my stock portfolio? My money? You’re messing with my money?! 

Yeah, well, if that’s what it takes, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their pocketbooks. If that’s what it takes for people to start paying attention to the Constitution, now is the time to wake up!

As for what inspired the absurd tariff plan that has the stock market in freefall, the true story would not be believed if it were written in a novel. The actual fiction writer may be offstage for a while (we can only hope), but for now the damage has been done. We’re told it will be GREAT “in the long run.” In the long run, of course, all of us will be dead, and our poor grandchildren will be left to put together whatever pieces of freedom might be left.

This is what happens, friends, when experience, knowledge, and solid background are considered as disqualifications for the highest positions in government. Take a look at the Cabinet and the advisors to the president. Just take a look. The rest of the world is looking on with horror!

Meanwhile, in my little corner of the big world, more snow arrived on Monday and a dear friend died. Time is inexorable. Larry Coppard, we will miss you in Northport, and your absence will be felt far from our village, as well, because a good man is hard to find and heartbreaking to lose. But every life well lived is an inspiration to others, and so the good life Larry lived will continue to light our hearts and our way forward.

The Artist called his dear friend Larry "Lorenzo"!

These are the things that matter: dear friends and family, principled human beings, the reassuring cycles of Nature, art and literature and music and memory and all the ways our souls live on past the body’s return to earth. 

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. In other words, tyrants come and go, but love remains.

A David Grath sky --

Postscript 4/10. Nope. I’m not done. Do you know what the president’s golf outings cost taxpayers? Do you know that the new 100% unqualified assistant director of the FBI, a big “strongman” podcaster, apparently needs a 24-hour, 20-man security team, no matter where he is or what he is doing? (Those guys don’t work for free.) Do you know that the Secretary of the Interior, at the same time that park rangers are being fired across the United States, has paid aides baking cookies for him on demand, because he has to have them warm? 

Oh, right! It’s all about cutting costs, trimming waste, making government more efficient. You believe that?  This, friends, is how autocrats rule: Living like pashas, they take from the people and give to themselves.

We All Have Our Worries

Storm gathers

When I learned last Monday that the Tucson Festival of Books had been cancelled, following the pull-out of a hundred rationally (at this time) flight-phobic authors who were to have been featured guests, I was disappointed. The Artist was relieved. He was worried about my presence in those big crowds, even though the book fair is an outdoor event. That was Monday. On Friday I got word that my part-time job as a volunteer reading tutor at Willcox Elementary School had also been suspended. School is on spring break this week, but even if the students go back next week we tutors won’t be there, and I’ll miss the little kids, but given the age of our tutor pool and added vulnerabilities of some of us, I have to admit that precautions are only sensible.

Note that I don’t ask if my readers have kept abreast of developments in the coronavirus story, since there is little else on the news these days as the number of reported cases and the number of countries with cases continues to rise. Events cancelled, schools closed or closing, everyone avoiding crowds, until it becomes difficult to imagine anyone, sick or not, who will remain unaffected financially. Not everyone — not even all office workers — can work from home. Many will not be needed if their places of employment are closed. Retail and restaurant employees, bus and cab and Uber drivers, actors and musicians (Broadway dark!), and domestic service workers. For many people, not working means no income.

Suddenly we have a whole new vocabulary, and self-quarantine is a star in that list, with Americans admonished not to panic, not to hoard, but to make sure they have enough food and other supplies on hand to get through two weeks of isolation, if need be. Paper products, hand sanitizer, and soap are vanishing from store shelves.

But why do I write these things that everyone who’s not in a coma has heard hundreds of times a day by now? Young or old, working or not, there is no one in the world without a corona virus-related worry list. Will it bring us together in resolve and commonsense, or will it fuel fear of the Other? I wonder.  

Although I’m more than one decade (never mind how many) older than I can quite believe, it did not occur to me immediately that I was part of a “vulnerable” group, simply by virtue of my age. Then there is what one doctor diagnosed as “cold asthma,” an affliction that had become terrible during Michigan winters but something I am able to forget (and then gratefully realize I have been forgetting) out here in the Arizona sun. Besides that, the younger and stronger, even if I were among that group, are in danger themselves — the danger of transmitting the virus to older and weaker friends, relatives, and strangers.

Darkness moves in

Even when neighbors gather, there are no “large crowds” in a ghost town, but people here still have their worries. Surgeries postponed, ongoing cancer treatments, auto-immune issues, necessary travel, falling stock values, lost earned income. No one is untouched.

For myself, I admit the worries were slow in coming, but they have arrived now. Will we be able to leave the ghost town on our scheduled departure date and reach Michigan again safely? What will virus statistics look like a month and a half from now? Will I be able to re-open my bookstore on schedule? Proceed with my Thursday Evening Author events? Will I have any customers — any income — at all? In time, of course, the crisis will pass, but how much time? Every independent bookstore exists on a narrow margin, hanging on, when possible at all, by its metaphorical fingernails through seasons and years of financial drought, and an artist’s earnings are similarly uncertain.

One ray of hope comes more as optimistic speculation than confident prediction, and that’s the idea that as spring proceeds and warmer weather arrives, the virus will die down. In childhood, when I begged my mother for something I desperately wanted (say, a kitten or a puppy), the parental reply I most dreaded was “We’ll see.” There was cause for joy in “Yes,” and “No” could be argued against, but the dreaded “We’ll see” left me hanging in limbo, especially when my mother added, as she usually did, “Keep pestering me about it, and the answer will be no!” Hope with no certainty: that was the torment of “We’ll see.” But “We’ll see,” I’ve learned as an adult, is the human condition.

Should worst come to worst in the high desert, should the Artist and I be compelled to remain within the confines of our rented cabin walls and the immediate outdoors surrounding, we will be able to stretch our food supply to the requisite two weeks. Maybe, however, ordering another delivery of propane would be prudent. One thing is certain: we have enough reading material to last out a quarantine period. We’ll never exhaust books-not-yet-read, and if we did, we are both happy re-readers of our favorites. 

The other night, in fact, for some reason I pulled from the shelf Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson, and re-reading those essays last night and this morning has been sheer delight. May I say, very good medicine -- something we all need right now. 

What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. 

Indeed. For all the slings and arrows life aims at us, who would be anything else than living and choose anywhere in the Universe to live other than on this brown, green, tan, black, red, yellow, blue, and beautiful earth? The worries of the present historical moment, however, are very real. If you have friends or family members working in health care in areas that the virus has reached, you know it's worse than what we hear on the news. So please, be very careful out there, friends. I won't tell you what measures you take. You already know.

Who Belongs ?

Local crowd? All locals?

These past couple of days, I was really feeling like a stranger here. You forget about it for a while, but then a few things happen and people say things to you in a certain way, and it all adds up. You may be welcome here, but at the end of the day, you’re not part of this. You never have been and you never will be. 

- Steve Hamilton, Die a Stranger (an Alex McKnight novel)

I’ve been thinking again lately about who belongs and who doesn’t, since I’m not “from here,” as we say, and tourists visiting my bookstore in the summer often ask me if I am. Sometimes they are looking for someone or something and wonder if I can give them directions or information; other times they’re merely curious. But no, I’m not “from here.” Born in South Dakota, raised in Illinois, long-time downstate and elsewhere resident until 25 years ago, I don’t have generations of county roots.

Steve Hamilton’s McKnight character, living in Paradise, Michigan, is in a similar position, having moved to the U.P. from Detroit. Do writers, I wonder, working in solitude as they do, relate naturally to solitary fictional characters? Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the broad appeal to general readers of the outsider, the loner, the one who doesn’t quite fit in.

crowd moseying along

And so, I wonder, is that a feeling we all (or most of us) secretly harbor, the suspicion that we’re on the periphery, looking in? Or — another possibility — do we sometimes feel so surrounded, even crowded, by other people and demands that we like to fantasize ourselves as loners escaping from the crowd? 

Moon -- solitary and serene

Maybe even sometimes one, sometimes the other feeling?What do you think?

…The air was still almost warm. Then the wind picked up and as it hit my face it brought along an unmistakable message. It may be July, and it may feel like summer just got here, but the end is already on its way. The cold, the snow, the ice, the natural basic state of this place, it is right around the corner. 

And oh, yeah, there’s that, too.

Sarah's winter face

Where Does It Come From, and Where Does It Go?

Money, money, money! Wouldn’t it be great not to have to think about it? Well, we’re all thinking about it these days, as Congress flounders around in the dark on what promises to be the worst tax bill ever fobbed off on the American people, but even in sunnier times most of us are curious about other people’s financial situations. So here is my basic story.

My income derives from the sale of books old and new. In the past I’ve worked a variety of additional part-time jobs, from teaching and tutoring and freelance editing to picking apples and doing garden maintenance, but more recently I have focused exclusively on my retail business. And it is a business, not a hobby. I don’t have a trust fund or a pension from some earlier career, and if I didn’t need the income, I would stay home and garden and write and raise chickens and feeder calves.

As to where the money goes, that’s simple, too. Monthly business expenses get paid and groceries bought before money goes anywhere else, and then the Artist and I have all the usual expenses of any other household, with the exception of frills like television (we watch DVDs and listen to radio and, of course, read!), air conditioning (we have window screens), and dishwasher (washing dishes is my kitchen meditation time). If we stay home all winter, there is fuel oil and plowing the driveway to pay for; if we go elsewhere, there are frugal travel costs. 

Still, charitable giving is something I take seriously. It’s on my mind now because Facebook reminded everyone this week about “Giving Tuesday” (I give in my own way and in my own time) and because December is when I make my largest annual donations. 

I’ve made adjustments to priorities in recent years, but, as it stands now, the five organizations to which I contribute on an annual basis are the ACLU; Save the Children; the Carter Center; Foods Resource Bank; and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I started years back with the first two and added the third, fourth, and fifth more recently (and in that order). FRB and Save the Children do primarily community work (FRB focused on food security), both in the U.S. and overseas; the Carter Center focuses on do-able health projects in Africa; and ACLU and SPLC are concerned with justice and freedom here in our own country. Healthy, food-secure, and just communities are the goals I have chosen to support.

Leelanau County hosts many worthy organizations — charitable, cultural, environmental — but what I’ve finally come around to with those here at home is that, instead of sending a set amount to the same few every year and ignoring the rest, I give to whichever groups people have chosen for memorial gifts, whenever appropriate. One person’s obituary might list the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Saving Birds Through Habitat. Another might name a church or the League of Women Voters or the Leelanau Foundation. Whatever their priorities, when I send a check with a sympathy card, I honor those wishes and in that way give locally.

The Artist and I take a standard deduction (we have thus far been fortunate in not having sufficient medical expenses to make itemizing advantageous), so our income tax situation is not benefited by donations to charities and other nonprofits. Giving is simply what I decided long ago that I wanted to do, and it is my good fortune that I am able, thanks to my bookstore customers, local and visiting, who buy books on Waukazoo Street in Northport. 

So thank you for your support of Dog Ears Books, and please know that your support goes further than you may have realized. You are not only keeping a little bookstore alive in Northport but helping strangers, in very important ways, far from northern Michigan. It all adds up.

For details and to see if you want to contribute to any of the organizations I support, please follow the links up in the fifth paragraph of this post. And thanks again! Being in a position to give is one of the gifts I have received over and over again along the path of my life, and I am grateful.

Managing My Blood Pressure

Warning: My post today may be like a confusing tennis match, back and forth between economics and poetry, my blood pressure rising perilously and being brought back to the level. But if you can't be dragged kicking and screaming into a discussion on economics, just scroll past those parts and take in the poetry breaks. They are the real meat, anyway.

The Perils of Economic Realism

Not for the world would I give up reading serious nonfiction, but sometimes the difficulty is as much -- or more -- in the effect of the reading on my nerves, shall we say, as in comprehending the ideas. For instance, recently I’ve been reading a book that sends my blood pressure soaring. It was published in 2012, and I can only imagine what the author, Hedrick Smith, would say if he were writing Who Stole the American Dream today. What do YOU think is responsible for the enormous and widening chasm between the growing pool of Americans in poverty and the hyper-rich at the top of the heap? Is it simply the result of technological growth and “progress,” the “Invisible Hand” of classical economics at work? Do differences in education across socioeconomic strata account for the gap? How about financial irresponsibility at the bottom and deep wisdom at the apex of the social pyramid?

Hedrick Smith believes it’s none of the above. He points to 1978 as the turning point, for it was then, he says, that large corporations across America joined forces and began their own very interested political activism, pouring money into campaigns and subsequently, with their successes, reversing the growth of the middle class seen in the previous three decades. A secondary cause, in Hedrick’s view, was a new corporate ethos. No longer were business and workers seen as having common interests. Now a CEO was focused (and continues to focus) almost exclusively on short-term gains for shareholders. In the glorification of predatory capitalism, ruthlessness is admired as strength, and it pays off in CEO pay, bonuses, and “golden parachutes.”

It makes sense that a CEO would be compensated at a higher rate than a worker on the line. Of course. The boss gets paid the most. Who would argue? From 1978 to 2013, however, inflation-adjusted compensation for CEOs increased 937 percent, double the gains in the stock market for the same period and in marked contrast to wages, which gained only 10.2 percent. Contrast this to 1965, when the CEO to worker pay ratio stood at 20:1.

The standard argument for colossal CEO compensation packages is that a CEO is responsible for the growth and success of his or her (usually his) corporation. Nonsense, says Hedrick Smith. First of all, they receive the same compensation whether they succeed or fail to enhance the price of stock. Second, compensation packages are awarded by boards generally composed of other CEOs and former CEOs. Third, every company wants to look good, and if their CEO’s pay is below average, they believe their company image will suffer, so for corporate image’s sake a CEO must be richly rewarded. Cutting jobs, closing plants, shipping those jobs and facilities overseas where costs are lower – all cut costs in the short term and fuel the vicious cycle of increased unemployment and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid at the same time that the apex ascends ever higher.

Take a Break for Poetry!

But I can only read a few pages at a time and take some sketchy notes before I need a break. It is just so discouraging, the power of money to pound everyone else into the ground! I spent Sunday like an invalid, relaxing with a couple of totally “fluffy” novels (between yard work sessions) but began the new week stronger, with poems and essays of Philip Levine, Detroit native and U.S. poet laureate in 2011. Oh, heaven, this Michigan voice! I stretch out on the front porch after supper with The Last Shift and read and breathe. And it is enough.

Nose Back to the Grindstone

Okay, but what about tax cuts for the wealthy? What do you make of the claim that such tax cuts will translate into business investment and new startups, creating jobs and lifting all boats? Experience, history, and numerous economic studies fail to support the claim. More money left in the pockets of the rich does not trickle down. Hedrick cites analysts who agree that “high concentrations of wealth correlate with poor economic performance in the long run,” and he writes of the years “2009 to 2012 as evidence that offering low tax rates to promote investment did not work.”

Even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was moved to comment in 2011 that Corporate America was sitting on nearly $2 trillion in idle capital. Greenspan asserted that the reluctance of business leaders to spend on new plants and equipment and on hiring more workers “accounted for almost all of the rise in unemployment” from 2007 to 2011.

Go back and re-read that quote above, after reminding yourself that Alan Greenspan was the darling economist of Ayn Rand, hardly a friend to taxes on wealth. There is a radio announcement these days for a firm specializing in “wealth management.” The firm promises to keep and grow your family wealth, and whenever I hear it, I think of the old ads for Stop-Leak. Know what I mean? Why would the wealthy want their fortunes trickling down?

A Poet’s Life

Time for another cooling-down period. Reading an entire volume of Philip Levine’s poetry, cover to cover, I knew I would be coming back to it in quiet moments and savoring more slowly the individual poems, but for now, my busy season of the year heating up faster than expected (and my blood pressure soaring from that economics reading), I turn to Levine’s memoir essays, My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry. The first line of the title essay, for me, instantly stops the rush of time. “I composed my first poems in the dark.” Isn’t that wonderful? That sentence is a poem. I smile and breathe and continue.

The poet-to-be was fourteen years old, a Detroit boy, son of immigrants, and he did not yet know poetry, but it had already found him.

In truth I never thought of these early compositions as poems: I never thought of them as anything but what they were: secret little speeches addressed to the moon when the moon was visible and when the moon was not visible to all those parts of creation that crowded around and above me as well as those parts that eluded me, the parts I had no name for, no notion of except for the fact they were listening.

What Levine writes of his first attempts at writing poetry, without having a name to give to his “speeches addressed to the moon,” instantly made me think of another Michigan poet, Diane Seuss. She too – and this was years ago, long before My Lost Poets would be published – said that she didn’t know, when young, that the pieces she was writing were poems. She had no name for them, either. It’s a different way of coming to poetry, very different from growing up in a home filled with serious literature and wanting to do what the writers in those books did.

A high school teacher introduced Philip Levine to “Arms and the Boy,” by Wilfrid Owen and loaned him a collection of Owen’s work.

I could lie and say those poems changed my attitude toward and my understanding of the importance of poetry. No, what it changed was my attitude toward myself.

And isn’t that a great and important gift to receive from poetry, a gift from a poet who had more to give than his own reflection?

At the first poetry reading young Philip Levine attended, in Webster Hall at Wayne University [not yet called Wayne State], he was bowled over by the first line read by a fellow student, Bernard Strempek. Strempek was one of Levine’s “lost poets” in that he died young, leaving only “enough poetry for one tiny, posthumous collection of satiric, hard-edged poems....”The line that so dazzled Levine on that first reading, “When in a mirror love redeems my eyes,” did not appear in the posthumous volume and may “live now only in this essay.” Stop and think what that means: a young, aspiring poet reads his work to a small audience, and another young, aspiring poet is so struck by the first line that he never forgets it, and later, in an essay, he shares the line with the world, crediting the friend of his youth, now deceased, whose name we would not otherwise know.

Shakespeare wrote, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” How much more fitting for a poet than a graveyard tombstone, to be immortalized in the written word!

Gathering Up My Courage Again...

The picture of a CEO sending manufacturing jobs overseas (while his own personal wealth skyrockets) is already a somewhat old-fashioned figure, because today’s American economy is not all that focused on making anything. Financial markets are the big thing now, finance overtaking manufacturing in the late 1980s, its profits accounting for 46 percent of total U.S. corporate profits in 2005. And this making of money is built on – can you guess? Debt. There are huge profits to be made by servicing debt, as we are all becoming more and more aware. Glass-Steagall (the Banking Act of 1933, inspired by the Crash of 1929) was repealed in 1999. We all know what happened in 2008. Now Congress is poised to repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. It seems our memories grow ever shorter as time goes on....

Better Late Than Never to Meet a Poet

My husband knew poet Philip Levine slightly. I wish I’d known him. From what little I’ve read, he sounds like a wonderful guy. A Michigan poet, Detroit native, poet laureate (2011), and David knew – how could I have missed reading him for so long, only to “discover” him now, after his death?

It’s all right. Many a reader is unknown to a poet whose works the reader loves, and many a time it is just that, the time, when a poet’s work enters one’s life that matters deeply. And poetry, my friends, is the real world, too. The money runs out, the poets and the financiers die, but the poems live on.

Fat Cats and Very Skinny, Very Hungry Mice

Economic disruption is nothing new, as anyone who thinks about it for two minutes must realize, but how far back in history would you look for the first displacement of workers? Douglas Rushkoff, in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, sees the beginning of the corporate model, still dominant today’s digital economy, occurring in the late Middle Ages -- not long after a few clever peasants (mice, in my scenario) had managed to escape the thumb of the aristocrats.

Prior to the rise of trade guilds, the aristocracy held all the cards. With the guilds, a previously nonexistent merchant class began to emerge. Europeans returning from the Crusades brought back the notion of the bazaar, and European economic expansion took off.

“The problem,” Rushkoff writes, “was that while the merchant class was gaining wealth, the aristocracy was losing it.” Naturally, the aristocracy was not thrilled with this turn of events, and since they were still the ones making laws, they had the power to reconfigure the emergent economy. Demanding taxes and official charters, breaking up guilds (think “unions” today), and outlawing of local currencies by mandating that only the “coin of the realm,” issued by the king, was legitimate, the aristocracy soon had craftsmen selling their labor rather than their products.

What we now call industrialization was actually an extension of the aristocracy’s effort to usurp the growth it witnessed in the peasants’ marketplace and to imitate it by other means.

With mass production came cheap goods – nominally “cheap,” anyway, because many costs, then as now, were hidden or externalized. “Prices may be low, but the costs are high,” Rushkoff writes. Then, for some reason obscure to me, he puts the following key sentence in parentheses:

(The government pays for wars to procure cheap oil and roads to convey mass-produced products, while we all pay for the environmental stresses caused by corporate agriculture, and so on.)

His primary historical thesis is that the digital revolution has only speeded up a sequence of events repeated many times throughout the course of history: independent artists, artisans, and entrepreneurs find ingenious ways to escape what we in the Sixties called “the System,” only to have the System evolve new ways to ensnare labor or eliminate the need for workers altogether so fat cats can take the lion’s share of profits. Industrial robotics? Just the latest wave.

Responsibility of corporate CEOs is only to shareholders, not to you, the employee, or you, the member of a community. Not only industry but even education has been transformed by burden-shifting. And as for the immigration “problem,” it isn’t so much families illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico but business gaming of guestworker regulations that should be worrying Americans. Read about that, if you please.

These days musicians and writers are expected to give their work away 24/7 for the “exposure,” Uber drivers (many of them unemployed workers driving fulltime) find themselves making less than minimum wage after expenses, and at-home keyboard pokers for the online behemoth earn less than two dollars an hour.

...When Arianna Huffington went on to sell [her] entire enterprise to AOL for $315 million, she did not cut her nine thousand unpaid writers in on the winnings. It was as if receiving exposure on the Web site’s pages, we were already the beneficiaries of Arianna’s largesse.

“Re-invent yourself! Brand yourself!” the laid-off worker is told in hearty, encouraging tones by life coaches paid to promote positive thinking. Meanwhile, firms that manage retirement funds take bites out of the savings of others at every turn, that savings often shrinking rather than growing, while 70% of the savers don’t even know they are being charged fees.

So it’s an old story, repeated down through the ages -- but now that there are no new continents left to exploit, according to Rushkoff, the system has begun to cannibalize itself, and that’s why in the digital/investment world the best way to make a killing is not to make anything. The dream now is to have an idea, attract investors, and then turn around and sell for a fortune. Those of us who still work for a living and believe in the value of work are the chumps, as in “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

Could the world be different? Amazingly, the author believes the answer is yes. Money, he points out, is a system created by human beings, so there’s no reason they can’t modify the system or create substitutes. He gives detailed examples, but I’m not getting into that. I’ve tried to distill only enough of the story to convince you that this book is worth reading.

What do you think?

*  *  *

Oddly, perhaps, I feel less alone seeing my life and those of my cohort in historical perspective, and I feel proud of those of us who do an honest day's work. Am I crazy? We’re not raking in the dough, maybe barely hanging on, but we’re keeping the faith, and I would be ashamed to acquire wealth, as my artist husband puts it, by “kneeling on the backs of the oppressed.” 

A few years ago I was approached by a financial scam artist who opened his spiel by saying that perhaps I’d noticed he wasn’t working any more – and that was because, he boasted, he longer had to work. He’d gotten in on this terrific Ponzi scheme – oops! He didn’t call it that, of course. “Financial opportunity,” I believe, was the phrase he used. Still, he was not a very smooth operator, in general, putting his foot fully into his mouth to assure me that he didn’t expect me to have money for the scheme (true, but gratuitously insulting). He just thought I could give him the names and telephone numbers of some of my “rich friends.”

What kind of friend did he take me for? Drive my friends like lambs to the slaughter? I hope it goes without saying that I declined to be involved in any way, shape or form.

Only later, à l’escalier, as it were, did it occur to me what I should have said when he told me he was no longer working because he “didn’t have to.” This is it:

I’m still working. I feel I have something to contribute to society.

Anyway, read the book. No kidding, it’s a page-turner. I’d love to see the National Writers Series bring Rushkoff to Traverse City. Anyone else feel the same way?

My Concerns: Independence and Independent Access

Today’s post is a sequel to the one preceding, as I continue musing on the value of handwriting. I will try very hard not to beg the question or to exaggerate the case to be made in favor of cursive script. I'm also including some sunny winter scenes to sweeten the pot.

Why do we put a high value on health, other than the fact that being sick is usually no fun at all? Aside from the yucky aspects of illness, don’t we also love to feel strong and healthy, in large part, because it means we can do things for ourselves, because we’re not dependent on others when we’re healthy? Getting old brings changes much more serious and unwelcome than wrinkles and sags, white hair and dry skin. There is the inevitable losing of strength and energy, the dreaded “slowing down” -- in short, not being able to do all the things one took for granted when young and strong. That’s what makes old age such a drag!

And human independence goes way beyond the physical. Americans generally consider a driver’s license, a valid passport, plenty of money, and freedom from debt as possessions and states to be desired. Being grounded as a teenager, going to jail or prison as an adult – the punishment in each case is loss of freedom and the curtailment of choices – but crushing student debt, burdensome mortgages, and payments on credit cards and/or new cars also place restrictions on independence.

Are you with me so far?

Okay, how about this: I can’t help believing that real, sustainable, and continued intellectual independence and efficacy demand an ability to function in the absence of electronic devices. I’m not arguing against ever using the devices. How could I do that and not be a complete hypocrite, given that I composed this essay on a laptop device and uploaded it to the Internet? My argument is, rather, that we should not become so dependent on them that we are helpless when the power goes out. We need basic competencies.

For a long time, parents and grandparents have been worrying that children relying on calculators are not learning basic skills in arithmetic. Well, why should they? They have calculators, so why should they bother calculating in their heads or on paper? Isn’t learning to do that a waste of valuable time?

Math skills make a good subject for me to defend because math was always my weakest academic subject. If I could, I would have avoided it altogether after third grade.

But now, as an independent adult, I don’t have to trust blindly in a cash register total or what a clerk tells me “the computer says,” because I can estimate the cost of my selected items before I got in line. I don’t even have to take a calculator with me to the store and hope the battery doesn’t go dead, either, because I learned addition and subtraction, multiplication tables, and estimating (that last, for me, the most difficult) back in my school days. I do it in my head. Estimating did not come naturally to me, and my math anxiety, supplemented by innate stubbornness, resisted it for a long time. Why look for approximate answers when I could do the calculation and get an exact number? Now I estimate on a daily basis and am thankful to have the skill. I have three avenues open to me – mental estimating or exact calculation, calculation on paper, or resorting to a calculator. Isn’t that range of possibilities preferable to dependence on the electronic device?

My mother learned shorthand when she was young, and I never did, but I did learn cursive handwriting and also developed my own idiosyncratic abbreviations for note-taking in college and graduate school. Relying on someone else’s notes would have made me very nervous. How could I know another student had understood the lecture or captured all the important points? In all honesty, I admit that I only took a typing class in high school because my parents insisted. Moreover, having that skill as “something to fall back on” – their argument -- worked against me for a long time: I kept falling back into jobs I hated! But finally I got it together to finish an undergraduate degree and go on from there, and being an excellent typist still serves me well.

Touch typing, that is. All fingers employed. One hundred and twenty words a minute. No two-thumbs texting or pathetic hunting-and-pecking with forefingers! 

      

I won’t reiterate here all my reasons for valuing books on paper a topic I’ve covered before (most recently here), but I do apply similar reasons to my case for handwriting. That is, I value it not simply out of nostalgia or because I grew up writing by hand or because ink is retro and cool, but because I can write on paper wherever I am, without an expensive device, without charging cords or batteries, without rare minerals having been extracted from the earth and without sending plastic and worse to landfills, and because I needn’t trust in a “cloud” to store my words or a sophisticated system to transmit them. With pen and paper, I exercise independence.

Blogging would not exist without the Internet, and those of us who participate obviously use electronic devices to share our thoughts. Blogging takes place only by virtue (!) of a virtual world. But my entire life would not be over if my online life came to an end. The truth is, I like being offline at home, and I like being disconnected when I’m out walking with my dog. That, of course, is a matter of preference. Perhaps others would feel their independence – their powers – diminished in the circumstances I find so freeing. I get that. I do.

But that’s my point. I can go back and forth. And that, I think, the ability to live in different worlds, to use different tools and media, as circumstance demands or as preference indicates, is the greatest degree of independence possible.

What does it matter, one of my readers responded (on my Facebook link to the earlier post), the form of communication young people use, handwriting or texting or some other digital means, since all are ways to communicate. True, but to me this is like asking why learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and estimate if you have a calculator. For that matter, given the availability of audio books, why be bothered to read? Why not just listen to someone else doing the reading?

As for me, I’ll listen now and again, but I would certainly not trade literacy for listening. Neither would I give up handwriting (or touch typing) and be confined to poking my fingers and thumbs at a tiny screen.

Here’s another thought: Most Ph.D. programs have traditionally had foreign language requirements. Some gave that up to allow computer “languages” as substitutes, which seems suspect and squirrelly to me in most cases. A language is not, after all, a code. The intention of the original requirement was to ensure an ability to read important texts in their original language; a secondary benefit that comes with second-language acquisition, however, is the realization that many of the concepts we take for granted in our native language are not universal. Different people divide the world up differently. They see the world differently. It’s important to learn that. It’s the difference between learning to converse and read and write and think in a second language and having to rely on a program or “app” to translate for you.

So as far as the ability to read historical documents is concerned, what if future students of history were required to learn cursive handwriting in the same way they might be required to learn Latin or French or Russian? As a specialized professional skill? I can imagine the day, not far in the future:

LANG 350: “Cursive as Foreign Language”

And for many people, if an ability to read historical documents is all that’s at stake, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the vision. Well, here’s what’s wrong with it from my point of view, and it’s the same thing that’s wrong with giving up on learning second languages (or learning to read, for that matter) because “smart” machines can do the work for us:

Having the machines should make our worlds bigger, not smaller; enlarge our access to the world rather, not shrink it; give us greater flexibility and choice and independence. Not stunted brains and overgrown thumbs.

And I’ll stop now to ask, as the scary truck driver asked a hitchhiking friend years ago, in an ominously threatening tone of voice after subjecting her to his extreme political views, “Agree or disagree?”  If you disagree with me, though, that’s fine and dandy, because I’m enjoying thinking about the pros and cons of cursive writing on this winter’s day. It’s a pleasant mental vacation from the season’s national political campaigns and primaries, isn’t it?