Sobering numbers on the black exodus from Chicago

According to this article, Chicago's black population by 2030 is projected to be 665 thousand, about half of what it was when I was born.  This is a sad situation for a city that has been largely defined by its black citizens.  I want to do everything I can to counteract this trend.

Dirty Computer

So I just wanted to share with everyone this amazing, far-out short film put together by Janelle Monae for her latest álbum, Dirty Computer.  It is basically a montage of videos for songs from the álbum, but with a coherent dystopian narrative going throughout.  It somehow melds 2018 political and racial commentary, with a Blade Runner-esque future, and Monae's trademark 1980s revival musical and aesthetic style.

Filming in Chicago

I have been taking my kid to summer camp in a park in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago for the past few days.  As we walked along 18th street, I noticed a lot of businesses that seemed to have an old sign still up from a prior iteration, but then a newly-printed vinyl sign proclaiming them to be a different business.  For example, a hat store sign was undermined by a vinyl sign proclaiming that the business was in fact a cafe, and was indeed still open. 

Later the same afternoon, I saw lots of people painting new signs in an old-style on the walls.  And there were little notices about businesses still being open during filming.  Finally, the real clue was that there was a "Negro travel agency" with the NAACP's guide for safe roads, businesses, and hotels.  I put two and two together and realized that the old-style signs were part of a movie set, but the current businesses wanted you to know that they were open for business selling cupcakes or tattoos or whatever instead of hats and 1930s fountain drinks.  It hadn't really registered on me before, since there are plenty of businesses in Chicago with signs still up from the 1950s or before, and often these old signs might be left up out of nostalgia even though they no longer describe the current commercial occupant.  People painting walls in Pilsen didn't seem odd either--it is famous for its Mexican-style mural art.  As for all the people working in the street with heavy equipment, I just assumed they were doing summer road resurfacing, another Chicago staple. 

Anyway, I just thought it was funny that this film set, which was very accurately evoking a 1930s commercial strip in the US, didn't register as odd to me.  I guess they chose the location well, if it only needs relatively light, unnoticeable touches to look like a street from the past.

For your information, the show is Jordan Peele's Lovecraft Country, which looks like it will be really good.

PEPFAR and Evangelicals

This is a fascinating look at PEPFAR, the US's revolutionary AIDS relief program created under President W Bush.  Evangelical Christians played a key role in creating this program, after a few decades of not-very-progressive attitudes on the AIDS epidemic.  It's a really interesting story, and continues to be relevant today.

The cost to be smuggled

Here is an in-depth photo essay from the NYT about the experience and the financial cost of hiring a coyote to take you from El Salvador into southern Texas.  It is very expensive, and I can't help but wonder whether that money could have been better invested in starting a small business or getting a college education in the country of origin.

Cops

This is an in-depth article about the genesis of the show "Cops" and its larger effects on our collective culture.

Good news on CPS

This is an interesting analysis of Chicago Public Schools, specifically the elementary schools.  According to the author, 3rd-graders in Chicago test significantly below national averages on standardized achievement measures, but by 8th grade they are more or less equal to their peers nationwide.  That means the grammar schools are doing a really good job.  The article goes on to explore some of the reasons for this grammar-school excellence.

Third World Green Daddy 77: In a good place

Through the latter weeks of my wife's pregnancy, and into my youngest son's latest babyhood, I have been reading "The Blue Jay's Dance" by Louise Erdrich.  It is her journal of the first year of her newborn's life, and documents her observations of motherhood, writing, womanhood, and nature, from her perch in an old farmhouse in New Hampshire.  I originally got it for my wife to read, but she found it boring, meandering, self-centered.  I have really devoured it though--I feel like it has lots of great observations about life and death that really resounded for me in the wake of my mother's passing.

Erdrich has a few turns of phrase that really hit home for me.  "Dim wings will close over our conniving brains no matter what and so we lose ourselves most happily in tasks that partake of the eternal.  And once we realize that nothing really does, anything can--pulling weeds, picking apples, putting children to bed."  Often when I am lying down between my two older boys, singing or reading or talking or just accompanying them to sleep, I have my little taste of eternity.  I resolve to forever remember the unadulterated, distilled love and warmth of that moment.  I also shudder to think that one day, soon in fact, those boys may no longer want me to lie down with them, they may push me away and dislike me, and someday I'll be alone dying, years and miles away from this safe, beautiful moment.  But I do hope to remember that moment, to capture it and take it forever with me. 

Erdrich again:  "...longing seizes me.  Not only do I feel how quickly they are grwing from the curved shape of my arms when holding them, but I want to sit in the presence of my own mother so badly I feel my heart will crack.  Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow.  In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss.  This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too--how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the ravling string, the red yard that ties our hearts."

Here's another insightful passage about peekaboo that speaks for itself:

"What causes [Erdrich's baby daughter's] laugh is this:  a combination of the new and the expected with a hint of fear thrown in.  Just at the moment she is afraid that your face won't appear, her expectation collapses.  When you do appear she laughs the loudest.

"The source of laughter lies in anxiety from the very first.  Aside from the chuckle of bears, we are famously the only animal that finds this world a source of humor.  By what marvel?  Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness.  The capacity for humor develops alongside the knowledge that familiar faces vanish.  Long before we speak its name, then, we know loss, and recall in ourselves the charm of hilarity that draws our loved ones back to light."

One of many points that struck me about The Blue Jay's Dance is how Erdrich's world is so quiet and solitary and centered on (and surrounded by) nature.  This is understandable--if you're living in the middle of the woods, isolated from most human contact and human artifice, your observations are bound to be heavy on animals and plants.  It initially made me wish that my life, and especially my kids' lives, had more contact with nature, with solitude, with ancient houses and timeless routines and paths through the forest.  But of course a very small proportion of people in the world today live in the woods, so while it's fair for me to appreciate the nice things about the life Erdrich describes, it's not fair for me to think that none of our lives have as deep of a meaning as hers in the woods.  If we are to find meaning and joy and transmit it to our kids, it must be in the somewhat unromantic, modern, urban world we live in. And in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my life is in a very good place right now, after years of my working to adjust and mold it to how I think life should be lived.

For a long time I was just trying to keep up with work and expenses, and didn't have time or money or mental capacity to invest in longer-term projects.  Perhaps for the same reason, I was really enjoying my family, prizing each moment, living consciously in the way you always say you want to so that you can look back on a life well-lived when you're on your deathbed.  Erdrich talks a lot about daily routines, the sweet solitude of shared moments when it's just you and your kid, and I feel like, within our possibilities, I have also been able to experience these.  I say "within our possibilities" because our life is very mobile and predominantly urban, so we're not able to accumulate years' worth of walks on the same route, appreciating the subtle changes from season to season and year to year, and we're certainly not as close to nature and wildlife every day as is Erdrich, writing from her cabin in the New England woods.  But as I've written about, within the two or three years we've spent in each of the last few places we've lived, my family and I have been able to establish routines, savor the natural world around us, and just live in the moment.

Over time, as I became more stable financially and even just in terms of the logistics of childrearing, I had more time and money to start thinking about larger projects I wanted to undertake.  For years my family and I would only get to Chicago once or twice per year, and we would just relax and enjoy that time.  We would go to beaches, museums, get-togethers with family and friends, but again, we were always in a rush, never able to do everything we wanted.  Little by little though, I had more possibilities of planning our visits to the States to go beyond just the basics of a fun vacation.  We managed to visit, slowly and one-by-one, more distant family members that we hadn't seen in years.  I took my kids to lesser-known museums and sights beyond the big Chicago attractions.  I have even been gradually establishing a few fruit plantings in my family's summer house in Wisconsin.  Later on I was able to invest with a friend in a property in Chicago, and now we're hoping to invest not just in another project but one that will represent an improvement for the social life of a blighted neigbhorhood.

During this phase, I would sometimes worry to myself that I was focusing too much on for-profit projects that didn't contribute to the surrounding community.  This would alternate with worrying about pursuing too many social ventures that might help a few people but that were at heart unsustainable.  At other times I would worry that, in my breathless pursuit of educational trips with the kids and new projects (for- and not-for-profit) and family visits and new experiences, I was overlooking the present, thinking so much about perfectly plotting out the future that I didn't appreciate when those plans finally came to fruition, not to mention the day-to-day sharing with my family that I was supposedly striving for.

But right now I am in a good place.  I feel in control of my professional and my extracurricular projects, I can explore new projects without too much aimless dreaming or whipping myself into a frenzy, I am happy with the balance of socially-relevant and purely for-profit activities I'm pursuing.  All the while, my wife has been on a similar journey on her end, setting up both for-profit and not-for-profit projects in Colombia.  Most importantly, I've got my projects sufficiently under control that they don't occupy my thoughts all the time.  This means I can sit down and pay attention to my kids, talk to them, hear their thoughts about the world, offer them my meager insights.  And that's the kind of stuff you want to make sure you did when, someday, you're on your deathbed, looking back on a life well-lived.

Happy 90th to a Liberation Theologian

Here is a letter from Pope Francis wishing a happy 90th birthday to Father Gustavo Gutierrez, author of the book Liberation Theology.

Chicago universal basic income

A propos of my recent discussion of conditional cash transfers vs. more institutionalized social security programs, here is a pilot program being proposed in Chicago to provide a universal basic income that would provide people with the basic money needed to live, such that your work income would just come on top of that.

More on feeding the world

I recently linked to a discussion of the major challenges in feeding the world through the 21st century.  Here is another article that goes into more depth, and specifically gets into human fertility and the need to curb population growth as a long-term aspect of being able to feed the planet.

Third World Green Daddy 76: Learning patience

I didn't mean to sound too self-congratulatory with my recent post on the joys of fatherhood.  I definitely have my shortcomings as a father, chief among them my impatience with my boys.  Over my life I've developed a strong conviction that irrational and thoughtless actions are a major source of the world's ills, and this has led to a self-righteous anger whenever I see things that just don't make sense, that are done carelessly.  When it comes to a world leader or even just everyday people acting in an unthinking fashion that hurts others, I think I'm justified in this.  However, when a kid spills his juice because he wasn't being careful, or instinctively pokes his brother just to get a rise out of him, it obviously doesn't make sense for me to explode at them with a whole tirade about the injustices of the world, or to yell at them for acting thoughtlessly.  This has been a real challenge for me.

Especially with my middle son, who has a beautiful way of seeing the world through social relationships and emotions as opposed to cold, abstract concepts and absolute physical phenomena, I am trying to learn not only to tolerate this way of being that is so different from mine, but indeed to embrace it and celebrate it.  Sometimes I catch myself admonishing him to "act normal", to never do anything without thinking, and then I dread that I'm slowly stamping out the creative impulses that make him who he is, and that will surely contribute wonderful things to the world around him throughout his life.

One positive aspect of my realizing what an insufferable dick I can be with my kids is that I'm sympathizing more now with the archetypal angry white voter.  Ever since I was a teenager I often asked myself about how people could be so angry, and so dysfunctional, in a place like the US where life is pretty good for most folks.  In the US we had decent access to health care, pretty abundant food, nice parks and museums and stuff.  Why were people so angry?  And I'm not talking about the poorest of the poor, those beleaguered people suffering at the bottom of the heap with crappy healthcare, living from check to check, fighting just to keep the heat on.  I've known plenty of people like that in Chicago, but they're not the ones talking about the carnage of America, how immoral and corrupt everything is, and trying to tear it all down by advocating for fascism and intolerance. 

No, the angry people I tended to see were white, and better off than the poor of Chicago.  Why did so many people want to destroy themselves and others, abuse their kids, or drink themselves to ruin, if they weren't in the desperate circumstances of a Calcutta slum or something?  I could understand that they had some inferiority complexes going on, maybe felt spurned not because they were materially lacking but because they felt others were getting more than their fair share.  When you go to a theme park or even the streets of tourist sites in Europe or elsewhere, you'll run into American families that are just bickering all the time, about nothing and everything.  There's some inchoate anger there with everyone and everything, even with those people that you should love the most.

It turns out I was doing a lot of this myself, and now that I've turned away from it, it's almost impossible for me to understand even my own thought process when I was so impatient and angry.  Why would I be so angry, so judgmental and frustrated with my boys, if they are really good kids?  Everyone who meets them remarks on how well behaved they are.  Granted, some of this may be that I'm so furious and terrifying that they stay in line, but I think I can still be demanding and even stern when needed, without being aggressive or insulting to them.

Why would the little things that your loved ones do get on your nerves?  Why would you get annoyed when your kid or your mom or whoever does that thing that they always do?  Shouldn't the things they always do, even the things that might otherwise be annoying, be precisely the things that you value, because they typify your loved ones, typify who they are as people?

I guess my impatience was born of the noble desire for rectitude and gratitude.  I want people to do right, and when I see so many cases where people aren't doing right in the world, I get furious.  This is understandable and okay.  But if I am constantly surveilling my kids, watching them like a hawk and waiting for them to screw up, that's a perverse twisting of this impulse toward rectitude.  If I am so obsessed and insecure with the idea that nobody is sufficiently grateful, that I pounce on any absentmindedness of my kids and interpret it as a perceived slight, then I've gone off the deep end.

I've given all that up now, but having gone through this impatience and frustration myself does now help me when I see people in other spheres, especially of public life, advocating for what seem to be totally untenable positions of malice and intolerance.  I think a lot of people are so focused on how things should be (according to them) and the fact that the world doesn't meet their high standards, that they assume that everyone is doing ill or is out to get them.  What I'd advocate for isn't necessarily a softening of one's position on what's right and wrong, but rather for people to get over themselves enough to realize that actually, lots of people are doing the right thing a lot of the time.  If you've got a foregone conclusion about a flawed, Fallen world, then you don't see what's actually happening.  I've certainly experienced this as I've chilled out a bit with my boys.  To be honest, in the past few weeks I haven't really been able to identify any instance of malice or gross ingratitude on their parts, whereas before I was detecting such ill will throughout every day.  They still sometimes do things that annoy me or that I have to correct, but it's not a big deal; I can ask them calmly to stop, and they do.

Thus far my efforts to become more accepting of my sons' differences from me, as well as to be more gentle and tolerant when they do mess up, have consisted in my unplugging a bit, in not insisting that everything be totally coherent or exactly as I would do things myself.  At the same time, I'm increasingly aware that I can't unplug to the point of indifference, of not educating the kids in both moral values and the more precise academic stuff like counting, reading, and geography.  I'm still working on how best to teach the boys their life lessons without ripping their heads off in the process.  This is my biggest challenge, my biggest shortcoming, and my biggest shame.  Especially for someone like me who fancies himself the grand pedagogue, I am slowly accepting that I can't always make things click for my sons the way I sometimes can when I'm tutoring someone else.  For now I've given up most hopes of being an exemplary teacher--in fact, I'm thankful that I didn't get into this field professionally, since I'd probably end up on the news after flinging some hapless 8-year-old across the room!

As often happens in fatherhood, I am becoming more humble, giving up any grand illusions or pretensions.  It may lessen my grandiose image of myself, but hopefully it makes me a better father and a better person.  Certainly a better student, as I learn from these little people entirely new ways of thinking and interpreting the world.  Maybe eventually it will make me a better teacher.

Disease burden of urban livestock

This is an interesting article suggesting that, despite what one might assume, keeping of urban livestock does not have a clear relationship to disease exposure.  It's important for research like this to occur in order to paint a clear picture of what the real risks are or are not of practices common in the developing world and among the poor, like smallscale livestock rearing in urban areas.  If something is genuinely dangerous, policies can be made to diminish or mitigate that risk.  And if something is shown not to be a risk, this can bolster the arguments of the poor, who are often broadsided by heavyhanded laws and regulations that can be more informed by prejudice than by scientific fact.