Dragons - Chapter 67 (DRAFT)

On the way home Jacob had to go potty. 

“Pull over, Alan. Jacob has to go potty.”

“Can’t he wait until we get home? It’ll just be another ten minutes or so.”

“Can you wait, honey? Can you wait to go potty when we get home?”

“NO! I need to go potty now, Mommy! NOW, Mommy!”

“Alan! Pull over! Find a place where Jacob can go potty!”

“All right! All right!” I yelled, craning my neck in six directions to make sure I could move the car safely out of traffic. We were on a major thoroughfare, moving out of the city and into suburbia, and were surrounded by strip malls and fast food joints. There shouldn’t be a problem finding a place to make a pit stop.

I pulled into a parking lot as Jenny continued to coo her soothing incantations to Jacob and his sensitive bladder. It’s okay, honey. It’s okay. Daddy’s finding a place. Just hold it a little longer. It’s okay. As I said before, Jacob was pretty much potty trained, but he usually waited until the absolute last minute to communicate his need to pee. He could have gone at Jenny’s aunt’s house, of course -- if he needed to go this bad, he clearly would have been able to go fifteen minutes ago when we were getting goodbye hugs from everyone in the foyer -- but that would have been the furthest thing from his mind. We’d been through this before, and there had been times when Jacob had wet himself in the car when we couldn’t find a bathroom quickly enough for him.

I stopped in front of a sandwich shop and put the car into park. In a flash Jenny was out of the car and the top half of her appeared in the back seat, quickly unbuckling Jacob from his car seat and dragging him out and down onto the blacktop. The door slammed shut and I watched as Jenny waddled hurriedly into the store, her arm tethered to Jacob’s and dragging him along behind her.

“I’ll just wait here,” I said to no one.

Initially I just sat there. Through the glare on the plate glass window I could see dimly into the sandwich shop, where there was a long line of people standing and waiting to place their orders, and my wife and child weaving their way apologetically through them until they disappeared around a corner and down the hallway where the restrooms were.

Part of me felt relieved that we had made it, that we had found a place and it looked like the accident had been avoided, but there was another and much larger part of me that was still steaming from what had happened back at the birthday party. No one had been able to determine how that accident had happened -- how the television set had been pulled down and broken -- the only two witnesses being Jacob and the even younger Hunter, and trying to get a credible account out of either one of them was a waste of time. When questioned, Hunter was unable to do anything other than cry, and Jacob seemed completely unaware that any sort of crime had even been committed. 

Jacob, what happened to the TV?

It broke, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.

How, Jacob? How did it get broken? 

It fell over.

Yes, but how did it fall over? Did you push it? Did you touch it?

It fell over, Daddy. It fell over and got broke.

It was infuriating, but I knew he wasn’t lying or consciously trying to cover anything up. He honestly didn’t know how the TV got broken. He was still too young. He lived in a world where effect didn’t follow cause. Things just happened around him. Any agency of his own was so focused on the satiation of his own overwhelming desire that it seemed to him more like animal instinct than the workings of a rational mind.

Nevertheless, I knew. I went to Jenny’s Aunt Carol to apologize on behalf of my overly rambunctious son and to offer to replace the set, but Carol would hear none of it. 

“Alan,” she said, a glass of white wine in one had and an oven mitt in the other, “don’t be silly. That old TV needed replacing anyway.”

I pressed her again, knowing from the size and the slim profile of the television that it had to have been in a box at an electronics store no more than three months ago. But she was supremely unconcerned. She just asked me to hold her wine as she bent over and brought the warm artichoke dip out of the oven. 

But I was still running the numbers in my head. I was going to buy them a new TV. I didn’t know where I was going to find the two thousand dollars, but I’d be damned if I’d let Carol brush this off like it was a broken dinner plate.

I was still stewing in those juices when I realized that a lot of time had passed since Jenny had gone into the store with Jacob. Longer, far longer that should have been necessary for that little man to empty his bladder. Was he pooping, too? Sometimes Jacob would take his own sweet time when he had to go number two, secretly enjoying, I thought, the extra time on the toilet. I held up my hand to reduce the growing glare on the store window and could still make out the long line of customers, but saw no sign of either my wife or child.

I fished my phone out of my pocket, thinking that I could call Jenny on her cell phone, but before I could dial I noticed her purse on the car seat next to me. Peering inside, I saw her phone nestled in next to her pocketbook.

Great. Well, his royal highness must be taking a shit, and if so, there was no telling how long I was going to be sitting there. My phone already in my hand, I flipped it open and began scrolling through my recent texts. And, of course, there they were, the texts Bethany had sent while I had been in Boston.

R U THERE?

I NEED 2 TALK 2 U.

PLEASE CALL ME IF U CAN.

I started deleting them from my phone and then realized that there were more from Bethany, still texts that she had sent me the last time I had been at Carol’s house. I deleted those, too, and actually considered, but refrained from deleting Bethany entirely from my contacts.

I hadn’t heard from Bethany at all that weekend -- not since our secret and somewhat abrupt conversation on Thursday night, the night before my interview in Boston. That shouldn’t be odd. As far as I could remember, we had never spoken to each other on any other weekend in history, but since she had started texting me, and since the time we had spent together in Miami, it felt like none of the old rules applied anymore. She had called my home, I now remembered. She had called my home looking for me, and had spoken to Jenny a few minutes before or after she had spoken to me. That still didn’t make much sense to me, but it felt way safer to let that sleeping dog lie than go over and kick it. I didn’t want anything more to do with her, outside the bounds of a professional relationship at least. I supposed I would see what she was thinking and feeling when I saw her back in the office on Monday.

There was still no sign of Jenny or Jacob, and now I was starting to get a little worried. Did he fall in? And did he drag Jenny down with him? What the hell were they doing in there so goddamn long?

I decided to go in and investigate. I turned off the car, got out and shut and locked the doors. I then walked around the back end of the vehicle and started making my way towards the glass door of the sandwich shop -- but stopped dead in my tracks. With the car shielding some of the glare on the windows I could see more clearly into the store, and I saw both Jenny and Jacob framed in the glass pane of the door. Jacob was red-faced, contorted, in the middle of a full-blown tantrum, and Jenny had her hands cupped into each of his armpits, struggling and somewhat failing to keep him from flopping down onto the floor. I pulled the door open and the force of Jacob’s cries hit me like a wall of sound. I hesitated just a second, supremely conscious of all the staring eyes around the scene, in a flash contemplating the feasibility of getting back in the car and driving away, but then I rushed forward, claiming, in front of witnesses, the screaming and broken child as my own.

“What the fuck is going on!” I found myself yelling, the rage overwhelming me in an instant, like a geyser of hot lava rushing up through my chest.

“He wanted a cookie!” Jenny screamed back, her voice matching the milky tears on her own face. “Help me! Help me get him out of here!”

I grabbed Jacob around the middle, his flailing limbs blindly kicking and punching me in the process, lifted him clear of his pregnant mother, and turned to leave the store with him. He was wet and hot, like a sick animal, and our movements threw me off balance, and I fell roughly to the floor. Jacob flopped out of my grasp and banged his head on the tile.

“Alan! OH MY GOD!”

If he was seriously hurt, Jacob seemed oblivious to it. He was in the throes of his all-consuming tantrum, a searing fire that burned at the heart of a super massive star. He screamed, but he was already screaming. He writhed about on the floor, but he was already writhing.

I scrambled back to my hands and knees and shot across the floor to him, scooping him up again, and holding him tight against my chest before attempting to stand. Using a nearby wall for support, I skooched myself up with him and then resumed my hasty exit. A new customer was just entering the sandwich shop -- an elderly woman with tightly permed hair and a magenta jogging suit -- and I barrelled past her, almost knocking her down the process -- desperate to get the two of us out of there.

“Jenny! Open the goddamn door!” I barked, meaning the car door, and in a moment Jenny was ahead of me. She pulled on the door handle and it popped out of her hand without budging.

“It’s locked!”

The keys were in my pocket and Jenny had to fish them out while I held Jacob tight, tying and failing to keep his hard rubber shoes from connecting with his mother’s head.

“JACOB!” I shouted in his ear. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

His wet face had been pressed against mine, and now he gave himself another great twist, his head moving away, turning, and then coming swiftly back to smack me right in the nose, watering my eyes and causing blood to flow. If I had been strapped into the rocket ship of anger before, this mindless, useless, and oblivious action blast me off into orbit around planet fury. It took everything I had to stop myself from throwing him down onto the pavement and kicking him.

“It’s open!”

And so it was. Jenny waddled out of the way to reveal a wide open car door, a child’s fish cracker-encrusted booster seat and a pile of toys and torn activity books. I rushed forward again and body slammed him into the seat, his wailing temporarily stifled as the breath whooshed out of him. His kicking and flailing continued unabated and I tried desperately to both keep him pinned in place and snake the straps of his restraints out from underneath him. I could feel the blood dripping out of my nose, and I took half a second to wipe some of it away with an errant hand, but that just bloodied my fingers and made the job of manipulating and snapping the buckles into place that much more difficult.

“JACOB!” I could hear my own voice screaming -- screaming to the point of breaking, but still somehow muffled, as if I was under water. “STOP IT! GODDAMN YOU! STOP IT!”

He was inexhaustible, raging on and on, grunting and bleating now, his throat worn raw, the gyrating movements of his plump limbs expressing only his own helpless fury. He began to slide down in his seat, his shirt coming up to his neck and revealing his soft belly and sunken chest. I had to grab him by the armpits and move back into position, and his head rocked back and forth, unable to shake the fabric of his shirt off his face.

It was the moment I needed to finally get the buckles snapped over him, pinching his pink flesh at least once in the process. Secured and cinched tight, I was able to take my hands off of him and pull his shirt, thick with slobber, down from over his face.

“STOP IT!” I shouted at him again. “FOR FUCK SAKE JUST FUCKING STOP IT!” I was lost in my own rage and was oblivious to what was going on around me. In that moment I hated him, hated him and myself in equal measure, and I wanted to do something hurtful, something to show him who was boss, something that would get him from being the horrible monster he had become. 

Possessed with such wickedness, I began grabbing his toys one by one, holding each up in front of his face, and then chucking it, throwing it as far from the car as I possibly could. First up was his doodle pad, a purple piece of plastic with a stubby magnetic pen hanging by a cord. It sailed across the parking lot and smashed to pieces on the roadway we had so recently left.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed behind me. “Stop it!”

Next up was a coloring book, happy cartoon animals smiling at me, each smeared with a blur of color across its black lines. It flapped like a wounded bird and landed less than six feet away. The back seat of the car was so full of his junk that I had no shortage of things to choose from. I taunted Jacob with each item before it left, cruelly telling him it was gone, gone forever, and that he needed to stop his tantrum if he didn’t want to lose everything.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed again, now actually tugging on my shirt and trying to pull me away.

Nothing was premeditated. I was acting on instinct. An evil and base instinct, one that couldn’t abide anyone or anything getting the better of me. And they were. They were all getting the better of me. They were all spitting on me. My career, my job, my wife, my son, my own roaring sense of my own inadequacy -- they were all spitting on me, spitting their poison venom and hatred right in my goddamn eyes.

Suddenly Milo was in my bloody hand, the little blue puppy dog that Jacob treasured above all else. When the stuffed animal was thrust momentarily into Jacob’s face, his breath hitched and his eyes went wide, but I was too far gone to even notice that I had finally penetrated Jacob’s own cloud of rage. As quick as Milo appeared to him, he was gone, sailing across the parking lot and landing in the curb.

“Alan!” Jenny screamed again. “That’s enough!” And now she started hitting me, clubbing me on the back of my head and neck with her heavy fists and forearms. “Stop it, goddammit! You fucking monster!”

Grunting with desperate effort, she managed to shove me aside and I found myself stumbling and falling to the pavement. In a flash Jenny’s wide form filled the space of the open car door, and then she had Jacob in her arms, his crying loud but his tantrum over.

“Go get it!” she spat at me.

I felt like an alien abductee who had just been plopped back into a deserted cornfield. One second a tornado had been raging around me, a freight train roaring in my ears, and now I could hear the birds chirping and the warm sun on my skin. There were pebbles pushing into my palms, and over me stood a mother, her crying son in her arms. I thought I knew her. She seemed strangely familiar.

“Do it, you son of a bitch! Go get Milo!”

And then the shame filled me. Filled me so close to bursting that had there been a knife I would have cut my own throat. People were staring and she hated me -- and they were both justified. People should stare, and women should hate a monster such as me. Only slowly was I able to find my feet and stagger over to where the little blue puppy had landed.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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The Trouble with Reality by Brooke Gladstone

Brooke Gladstone is co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, On the Media. Yes, I know On the Media is a WNYC and NPR radio program, but I listen to it as a podcast, so there you go. Having heard that she wrote a book, I put it on a recent Christmas gift list and was surprised to discover that it is barely a book at all -- more a pamphlet. Big type and only 92 pages between its two paper covers.

And I wish I had more to say about it. There really isn’t much there. It’s subtitle is A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, and I guess that resonates with the left-leaning intelligentsia, but at the same time, it kind of misses the larger point that its title suggests.

The trouble with reality, after all, is that -- at least from a political point-of-view -- it is constructed out of ideology; of late, two ideologies, each in further and further retreat from one another. So only for some is there moral panic.

Perhaps you picked up this book because an icy hand grips your viscera; sometimes squeezing, sometimes easing, always present. And you suspect that this intimate violation, this forced entry, proceeds from something more profound than politics. You imagine that reality itself is engaged in an epic existential battle and you stand helpless against the onslaught, as the truth is trumpled into dust.

It’s telling that Gladstone went with “trumpled” instead of “trampled” -- because, of course, for others there is no moral panic. Truth isn’t being trampled or trumpled. Truth is in ascendance again, finally, after decades of being denigrated and demeaned.

President Trump is the demagogue that today stands for one side of that equation -- his moral superiority crushing any moral panic his opponents may be feeling -- and Gladstone will spend a lot of her 92 pages focused on his role in our current drama. And real questions remain as to whether he is the director or only another actor in that play. But the “trouble with reality” was with us before he arrived on the scene and will be with us long after he had departed.

For this, Gladstone appropriately pulls from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, who reminds us that the stakes were long ago laid out by two of our most recognizable dystopian prophets, George Orwell in his 1984 and Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World.

In Orwell’s vision, he notes, we are crushed by a merciless oppression imposed by others, whereas in Huxley’s vision, we are seduced, sedated, and satiated. We enslave ourselves.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

“In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.

“In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us…”

Orwell, who in 1948 was fixed on Nazi devastation and Soviet ascendancy, seemed to have nailed it. But thirty-seven years later, Postman saw that in our time and place, it’s unquestionably Huxley. He portrayed a world that leads ineluctably to the election of Donald Trump.

The sad lesson of Brave New World, of course, is that by the time the World State is established, it is already too late to do anything about it. Those within are happy to be there and it is only the “savages” who look at it from the outside who can see the crushing waste of it all.

By the same necessity, I suppose, Gladstone can only write her book for the savages, horrified by the slide into authoritarianism that they see as they are slowly pushed into the tiny reservations that exist outside the Trumpian bubble. She offers advice for what we can do to detect, dissect and categorize the leader’s toxic tweets, but when it comes to actually fixing the problem, she doesn’t have much to offer.

Meaningful action is a time-tested treatment for moral panic.

Focus on policies that matter to you. Congressional offices keep tallies of phone calls from their districts. Make calls. As for street protests, they feel great, but unless they are large and well planned, they’re not all that effective. Since the president actually may believe the polls are rigged, even the most exemplary protests are unlikely to move his needle.

But protests do raise funds. When the American Civil Liberties Union showed up at airports to assist travelers caught in Trump’s travel ban, it garnered six times the donations in a single weekend that it usually gets in a year. And they do spook legislators, especially in their districts.

Protests also have another impact: They transform observers into activists. As Brian Resnick of Vox wrote, “If people who are showing up to protests just because they are curious and sympathetic eventually move on to greater, more consistent action, the movement grows. And change can happen.”

But not soon, and not without sustained effort. Action is vital. Democratic progress stalls without that eternal tug-of-war. But activism alone does not address the bigger issue, the focus of this tract. You cannot march to a long-term solution to your reality problem with a cadre of like-minded allies. That is a solitary journey, and it never ends. You have to travel out of your universe into the universe of others, and leave your old map at home.

It’s up to you, she seems to say. Protest, agitate, donate, vote, yes, but more importantly, get out of your reality bubble and go live in the bubble of others, at least long enough to see what it looks like on the inside and gain the credibility needed to establish a dialogue with them.

But while you’re in there, I suppose you’d better watch out for the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. Although John the Savage couldn’t make the transition to the World State, there’s no guarantee it won’t seduce you.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 66 (DRAFT)

I got home from Boston on schedule and Jenny was there to pick me up at the airport. Jenny and Jacob both, and when I emerged from the jetway, I saw them there in the concourse, Jenny awkwardly crouched down around her pregnant belly so that she could speak softly into Jacob’s ear. She pointed me out to him, and I saw his little eyes scan quizzically in my general direction, and then lock on me, first with recognition and then with delight.

“Daddy!” he shouted, and then took off in a dead run, his sudden absence causing his mother to topple over onto her backside. I quickly moved out of the line of deplaning passengers, and crouched down much as Jenny had been. “Daddy! Daddy!” Jacob said again and again, the red lights in his shoes blinking with every stride, and in a moment he was in my arms, squeezing me as tightly as he seemingly could, and me squeezing him right back.

We stopped at a fast food joint on the way home for dinner, where we could get decent hamburgers for Jenny and me, and a hot dog swimming in ketchup for Jacob. French fries all around, of course. Dining out with Jacob was no simple feat, but Jenny, as usual, was more than prepared. While I was up placing and collecting our order, she wiped down his chair and tabletop with a sanitizing wipe, strapped his portable booster seat in place, unrolled and fastened a fresh plastic table topper -- this one emblazoned with Sesame Street characters instead of his favorite tank engine crew -- got his royal highness into his bib-smock, strapped him into his booster seat and pushed his chair up as close as she could to the edge of the table. When I arrived with our tray of food, Jacob was already sucking noisily on his sippy cup while he pushed a dozen or so Cheerios around the heads of his favorite muppets.

While Jacob was more or less occupied with his jumbo dog Jenny and I talked about the interview and the strange experience I had had in the Emerald Club.

“They must be really interested in you,” Jenny said.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. Sounds like this Thompson is a real piece of work and they can’t wait to get rid of him. Did you see any of the other candidates while you were there? At the airport, I mean?”

I hadn’t, and now that she mentioned it, I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the other candidates at the offices either. There had been other candidates, hadn’t there? I mean, Pamela Thronsby had said there were, and she seemed to be carefully marshalling us around the office to make sure we didn’t accidentally run into each other.

That night in bed we talked about it some more, and by that time I had almost convinced myself that there hadn’t been any other candidates, that their purported existence had been a ruse to keep me off balance, to keep me from thinking that I had this thing in the bag.

“Alan, I love you, dear, but that’s just crazy.”

She was reading her worn and dog-eared copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, propped up against some pillows propped up against our headboard, and I was lying on my side next to her, looking up at her face from below.

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. That Pamela Thornsby turned out to be about as phony as they come. It’s a safe bet that anything she told me was at best some veiled version of the truth.”

“You’re paranoid,” she said, not taking her eyes off the page.

The next day was Saturday and we had a birthday party to go to. One of Jenny’s cousins had a daughter a year or two older than Jacob, and that was reason enough for another one of those bashes at Jenny’s aunt’s house on the lake. The preparations for the trip and subsequent appearance made getting Jacob ready for his Happy Meal look like child neglect. Start to finish, including a shower, I needed about twenty-five minutes to be ready to go somewhere and look presentable, but Jenny needed at least two hours, and tacking a third on was usually a good idea if you didn’t want to be twenty minutes late.

It was more than just getting herself ready, of course. There was Jacob, always Jacob, to think of. The backseat of our car was already littered with his toys -- but those, of course, were his car toys. He couldn’t possibly be satisfied with just those, he would have to bring some of his house toys with him as well. There was Milo, the little blue stuffed puppy dog that had been with him since the day he came home from the hospital, he would have to come, of course, there was no question about leaving him behind, but there were any number of other important decisions to make.

And then there was all the equipment and paraphernalia that would need to be brought to keep the little man satiated and fed during the ordeal to come. A dozen or more little pieces of Tupperware, each containing something salty or sweet -- grapes, mozzarella sticks cut into little bite-sized pieces, the ubiquitous fish crackers -- all of them my job to cut and prepare, and all of them stuffed into an old diaper bag with a dozen juice boxes kept in a small ice-packed thermos in order to keep each little eight ounce serving of sugar water at the optimal temperature for the thirsty man on the go. And speaking of diaper bags, there were also a dozen or so pull-up diaper shorts, wet wipes and butt paste thrown in for good measure. Jacob had successfully been potty trained, but he still had accidents from time to time, especially in unfamiliar or exciting locations.

By the time the cargo manifest had been checked and confirmed, we were all buckled into our car seats, and we were backing out of the driveway we were already twelve minutes late, and it typically took between twenty and thirty minutes to get to the party destination.

But no one seemed to notice. As was typical, our arrival was treated like the social event of the season, with our names chortled out with glee and a long line of aunts, uncles, and cousins marching to the home’s wide foyer to welcome us and bestow hugs, kisses, and handshakes all around. They had all clearly been waiting for our arrival so that the birthday ceremonies could begin, but no one brought that to our attention or even seemed all that concerned. When we entered the home’s enormous living room, we saw an even larger collection of relatives arranged in a kind of amphitheater of bar stools, chairs and sofa cushions, all directed towards the large brick fireplace, upon whose hearth sat, surrounded by brightly-wrapped presents, the very guest of honor whose slowly advancing age we had all come to celebrate.

“Happy Birthday, Jessica!” Jenny shouted, holding our contribution to the excess above her head as she maneuvered herself and her pregnant belly through the assembled crowd to deposit our gift on a pile already teetering at a height higher than the birthday girl herself.

Jessica, a blonde-haired and brainless angel of six -- or was it seven? -- in a pink party dress and bare feet with tiny, painted toenails leapt and clapped her hands. “Now. Mommy? Now?”

“Yes, Jessica,” one of Jenny’s cousins -- Rachel, I think -- told her. “Go ahead, honey.”

The ritual that followed was a familiar one. While thirty or more adults and other children sat quietly and watched, Jessica, exulting in the glory of all that attention, took one gift after another off the pile, announced who it was from, and opened it. With every rustle of wrapping paper, the family dog, a smelly, furry beast of indeterminate breed, would come forward to investigate and would be first told and then gently pushed away. Silly dog. With every reveal, those of us in the audience would obediently ooh and ahh, even when we had no idea what the colorful piece of plastic was. What is it? An older relative would inevitably ask, only to be told in a string of syllables that they did not have cultural context to understand. Silly grandpa. And with every gift, Jessica, already at six -- or was it seven? -- was trained enough to hold the item up beside her smiling lips and largely vacant eyes for the dozens of photographs that would be taken and never looked at again.

It was enough to make one contemplate taking one’s own life.

Later, after the cake had been served, and people were allowed to drift to the rooms and company that suited them best, I found myself in the den with a much-needed beer in my hand.

“Hey, how’s that job search going?”

It was Tom, one of Jenny’s cousins. Was he the one married to Rachel? I couldn’t remember. I knew that he worked in financial services.

“Okay.”

“Did you have that phone interview? With that firm out in Boston?”

I always marveled at how much information the people in Jenny’s family could remember about me. Tom and I had spoken about my job search more than a month ago, and then for no more than three minutes, and here he was asking me about it like it was yesterday.

“Okay, I guess. They asked me out for an in-person interview. I just got back.”

“From Boston?”

“Mmmm hmmm,” I said, taking a sip of my beer.

“My man!” Tom said with what could only be taken as genuine enthusiasm. He held up his hand and I slapped it. A little macho, sure, but better than getting another hug.

Tom wanted all the details, and I gave him as many as I thought prudent. Or, to be more precise, I only gave him the ones that I thought reflected favorably on me. That’s what people do, right? When they’re speaking to people they don’t really know? In those situations you can’t share any of the doubts and despair that keep you up most of the night. When I got to the part about the meeting in the airport lounge, Tom’s eyebrows really went up.

“Hey, Alan, that’s great. It sounds like they really want you.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I kept my mouth shut.

Tom clinked the ice in his glass, probably assessing when it would be time for another rum and coke. “So is Jenny already looking at houses in Boston?”

Suddenly there was a loud crash in another room, quickly followed by the wails of a pair of shrieking children. One of the high-pitched voices, undoubtedly now being heard throughout this affluent neighborhood, was unquestionably, that of my own son.

When Tom and I arrived on the scene we could only join the gaggle of spectators that had bottle-necked in the entrance of a wide set of double doors that let into a sunken and ill-lit den at the very back of the enormous house. Craning my neck I could see that, despite the leather chairs and the dusty bookshelves, someone had tried to repurpose the room as a kind of play room for the youngest children, with a small table and chairs, two fingerpainting easels, and, now, a million or more plastic building blocks scattered all over the slippery throw rugs and darkly-stained hardwood floor. Against the central wall was a low entertainment center, the large television set that had once sat atop it now tipped over and broken on the floor before it -- clearly the source of the crashing sound we had all heard. Crouching among the debris were two adults, Jenny and one of her cousin Rachel, each ministering tender mercies to one of the two children, mine and a boy of about the same age. Jacob, at least, had stopped shrieking, and now stood petulantly and pouty-mouthed while Jenny spoke to him soothingly. The other boy -- Hunter, I think his name was Hunter -- was still crying openly.

A sudden surge of anger rose up within me. I had no evidence for who was at fault -- for which child had broken the television or for what they had done to cause the damage -- but the secret shame I harbored inside had no ability to wait for evidentiary procedures in such a circumstance. It had been Jacob, of course it had been. He had been doing something he shouldn’t have been, something no normal child would ever dream of doing, and he had broken what looked like a two thousand dollar big-screen television.

But before my rage could manifest itself in any action, Jenny’s aunt Carol pushed her way through the crowd. It was Carol’s house and by extension Carol’s television that lay broken on Carol’s hardwood floor. She was one of those unflappable and ever-happy older women -- not quite the matriarch of her clan but clearly heading in that direction and supremely comfortable and confident in her ability to take on that mantle. Her reaction when seeing and understanding what had occurred was very different from mine.

“Oh my!” she said after working her way through the knot of relatives. “Is everyone all right in here?”

There was not a trace of anger in her voice. She moved quickly from place to place, ensuring first that Rachel and Hudson were okay -- Hudson, that was his name, not Hunter -- and then performed the same duty for Jenny and Jacob. “Such a big TV!” she said, the tone of her voice expressing commiseration more than any other emotion. “It must have been very scary when it toppled over like that.”

Then she began issuing orders. First to the two mothers, take the children into another room. Then to two of her grown sons, Tom, evidently, being one, to begin cleaning up the mess of the broken television. Then to the rest of us, disperse, the damage was done, there is nothing else for anyone to do. She spoke with calm authority and no more concern than if someone had tipped over a cup of soda.

“Alan!” Jenny cried, in contrast, her voice in great distress. “Help me with Jacob!” There was a desperate and more frantic message in the tone of her voice that I’m sure was apparent to all. I’m eight months pregnant, you son of a bitch! Help me!

I waded into the room, unintentionally kicking my way through a sea of plastic bricks and crushing a few under my shoes. After helping my wife to her feet I scooped up Jacob and we retreated from the room as a family. Hands were placed on Jenny’s back, and people wished Jacob well as we passed. It’s okay. Don’t worry. You’re fine. Everything will be fine.

But I wasn’t fine. I managed to maintain a cool exterior, but on the inside I was a wild, rampaging beast. How the fuck had this happened? What had Jacob done? What was everyone thinking of us? And who was going to pay for that goddamn TV?

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

There was a time when this book was pushed as required reading for white people.

Then there came a time when it was trashed as dehumanizing condescension -- perpetuating the same “color blindness” it purports to tackle.

I feel unqualified to judge. Here’s what I found that was valuable to me.

Definitions

If you want to have a productive dialogue with someone, you have to agree on a set of terms. Here’s a handy primer on three of the most vexing and disputed terms in any discussion about race in America -- racism, discrimination, and prejudice.

To understand racism, we need to first distinguish it from mere prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is pre-judgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected onto everyone from that group. Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages.

All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. If I am aware that a social group exists, I will have gained information about that group from the society around me. This information helps me make sense of the group from my cultural framework. People who chaim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization -- we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.

Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed. We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them. In this way, our misunderstanding about what prejudice is protects it.

So, prejudice is thoughts and feelings. We all have those -- but I suppose DiAngelo’s definition means that someone raised in an environment that did not reinforce racial prejudices would not have them. Racial prejudice, therefore, is a learned not an innate phenomenon.

Discrimination is action based on prejudice. These actions include ignoring, exclusion, threats, ridicule, slander, and violence. For example, if hatred is the emotion we feel because of our prejudice, extreme acts of discrimination, such as violence may follow. These forms of discrimination are generally clear and recognizable. But if what we feel is more subtle, such as mild discomfort, the discrimination is likely to also be subtle, even hard to detect. Most of us can acknowledge that we do feel some unease around certain groups of people, if only a heightened sense of self-consciousness. But this feeling doesn’t come naturally. Our unease comes from living separate from a group of people while simultaneously absorbing incomplete or erroneous information about them. When the prejudice causes me to act differently -- I am less relaxed around you or I avoid interacting with you -- I am now discriminating. Prejudice always manifests itself in action because the way I see the world drives my actions in the world. Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates. Given this reality, inserting the qualifier “reverse” is nonsensical.

So prejudice is thought and discrimination is action. That makes sense to me.

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.” American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves.

There is the conscious workings of people and then there are the unconscious workings of the system that has been built or emerged. That’s the only caveat I would inject into DiAngelo’s definition of racism above. Yes, men can consciously hold women back, but so can the unconscious system that has been built and, to a certain extent, supported by the entire society. Indeed, in her suffrage example, change happened not when women attacked men, but when women stopped supporting the system that had been oppressing them. DiAngelo will make this very point next.

Similarly, racism -- like sexism and other forms of oppression -- occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal authority and institutional control. This authority and control transforms individual prejudices into a far-reaching system that no longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the intersection of race and gender in the example of suffrage; white men granted suffrage to women, but only granted full access to white women. Women of color were denied full access until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The system of racism begins with ideology, which refers to the big ideas that are reinforced throughout society. From birth, we are conditioned into accepting and not questioning these ideas. Ideology is reinforced across society, for example, in schools and textbooks, political speeches, movies, advertising, holiday celebrations, and words and phrases. These ideas are also reinforced through social penalties when someone questions an ideology and through the limited availability of alternative ideas. Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence. Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing. Examples of ideology in the United States include individualism, the superiority of capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system, consumerism as a desirable lifestyle, and meritocracy (anyone can succeed if he or she works hard).

Any use of the word ideology is going to remind me of my experience of reading The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek, in which he argues that ideology is not just a way of understanding reality, it is, in fact, a way of structuring reality. Sounds like DiAngelo would likely agree with that concept -- but it begs the larger question. When it comes to the ideology of racism, what is the sublime object that represents it, and what is the real object that can stand in opposition to it? Finding ways to bring that real object into prominence could be an effective way of combating it. Sounds like another dissertation I can write when I pursue my next doctorate.

The racial ideology that circulates in the United States rationalizes racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order resulting from either genetics or individual effort or talent. Those who don’t succeed are just not as naturally capable, deserving, or hardworking. Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.

Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of our society. It is not limited to a single act or person. Nor does it move back and forth, one day benefitting whites and another day (or even era) benefitting people of color. The direction of power between white people and people of color is historic, traditional, and normalized in ideology. Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systemically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects.

These definitions seem necessary to me -- that prejudice is thought, discrimination is individual action based on prejudicial thought, and racism is institutional action based on prejudicial ideology -- to any honest discussion of the subject. As with so many other difficult subjects, one should always first seek to ground the discussion in a set of common terms and definitions. With these understandings in place, it is much easier to move on to a shared interpretation of practical events. To wit:

People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual. Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.

White Supremacy: The Hidden Ideology

I’m not sure I have my head wrapped completely around this one, but it is a fascinating idea.

In his book The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills argues that the racial contract is a tacit and sometimes explicit agreement among members of the peoples of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the world. This agreement is an intentional and integral characteristic of the social contract, underwriting all other social contracts. White supremacy has shaped a system of global European domination: it brings into existence whites and nonwhites, full persons and subpersons. It influences white moral theory and moral psychology and is imposed on nonwhites through ideological conditioning and violence. Mills says that “what has usually been taken … as the racist ‘exception’ has really been the rule; what has been taken as the ‘rule’ … [racial equality] … has really been the exception.”

Mills describes white supremacy as “the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” He notes that although white supremacy has shaped Western political thought for hundreds of years, it is never named. In this way, white supremacy is rendered invisible while other political systems -- socialism, capitalism, fascism -- are identified and studied. In fact, much of white supremacy’s power is drawn from its invisibility, the taken-for-granted aspects that underwrite all other political and social contracts.

In other words, “white” is assumed to be the neutral structure against which all the other ideologies are opposed. But “white” is its own ideology, with no more claim to neutrality than the others. In many cases, DiAngelo’s own language falls victim to this assumption, even when she is trying to dispel it -- what, exactly, is a “white” anyway, other than an ideological golem at the center of white supremacy -- and that may be why her work has grown to be so vilified. But, whatever the challenges associated with fish seeing the water they are swimming in, this seems like an important understanding for people who have been advantaged by white supremacy to have:

Our umbrage at the term white supremacy only serves to protect the processes it describes and obscure the mechanisms of racial inequality. Still, I understand that the term is very charged for many white people, especially older white people who associate the term with extreme hate groups. However, I hope to have made clear that white supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists. White supremacy describes the culture we live in, a culture that positions white people and all that is associated with them (whiteness) as ideal. White supremacy is more than the idea that whites are superior to people of color; it is the deeper premise that supports this idea -- the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.

The Rules of Engagement

Much of DiAngelo’s commentary is based on her role as a consultant and trainer on issues of racial and social justice. She is the person who goes into the dysfunctional workplace and engages people in the necessary but difficult questions about race.

It is in this practice that she first came to define the term white fragility. It refers to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially. As the back cover of her book helpfully explains, it is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence.

It was these experiences that prompted DiAngelo to draft the following “Rules of Engagement,” the edicts that seem to govern, unconsciously or otherwise, the defensive posture adopted by those expressing white fragility. In reading through them, I saw them not just as rules that create difficulties in our discussions on race, but more broadly as rules that create difficulties in our discussions on a wide range of social and political issues.

The rules could be phrased with the following preamble. If you wish to give me feedback without triggering me:

1. Do not give me feedback on my racism under any circumstances.

If you insist on breaking [this] cardinal rule, then you must follow these other rules:

2. Proper tone is crucial -- feedback must be given calmly. If any emotion is displayed, the feedback is invalid and can be dismissed.

3. There must be trust between us. You must trust that I am in no way racist before you can give me feedback on my racism.

4. Our relationship must be issue-free -- if there are issues between us, you cannot give me feedback on racism until these unrelated issues are resolved.

5. Feedback must be given immediately. If you wait too long, the feedback will be discounted because it was not given sooner.

6. You must give feedback privately, regardless of whether the incident occurred in front of other people. To give feedback in front of any others who were involved in the situation is to commit a serious social transgression. If you cannot protect me from embarrassment, the feedback is invalid, and you are the transgressor.

7. You must be as indirect as possible. Directness is insensitive and will invalidate the feedback and require repair.

8. As a white person, I must feel completely safe during any discussion of race. Suggesting that I have racist assumptions or patterns will cause me to feel unsafe, so you will need to rebuild my trust by never giving me feedback again. Point of clarification: when I say “safe,” what I really mean is “comfortable.”

9. Highlighting my racial privilege invalidates the form of oppression that I experience (e.g., classism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, transphobia). We will then need to turn our attention to how you oppressed me.

10. You must acknowledge my intentions (always good) and agree that my good intentions cancel out the impact of my behavior.

11. To suggest my behavior had a racist impact is to have misunderstood me. You will need to allow me to explain myself until you can acknowledge that it was your misunderstanding.

They describe a tight, little trap, don’t they? Now, go back and reread the list, substituting references to “racism” with “objectionable political opinions.” Isn’t it interesting how the rules seem to work equally well in both situations? In this regard, much of the population not only seems to suffer from white fragility, it also seems to suffer from a wider form of social and political fragility. After all, you, under no circumstances, are ever allowed to question or challenge my political sensibilities.

And to wrap up, I think rule number 9 is my “favorite.” That’s an odd way to phrase it, I know. But it truly is the one that’s best at defusing any uncomfortable situation. Black Lives Matter? No, ALL Lives Matter! Yes, of course, they do, but why do we have to make the discussion always about you? Why can’t we spend some time focusing on the oppression of others?

Oh, I know. It’s because of white supremacy, isn’t it?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.