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Nonfiction Samples

All I Want for Father’s Day Is My Two Front Teeth, Which Were Knocked out in a Barroom Brawl

By Kyle Heger

Well, to tell the truth, sometimes I want more. I mean, let’s get real. Little boys might be made of snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, but we grownup men are a bit more complicated. It takes something more substantial to keep us going.

What I really want for Father’s Day are all the things that America’s marketers say that I, as a red-white-and-blue blooded American man, want. And that’s saying a lot. Because if anybody knows what I want, it’s those guys. But that shouldn’t come as any great surprise. After all, that’s how they make their money: by knowing what makes their target markets tick.

I have no apologies to make for wanting so much. I’m just that kind of a guy. A guy with big appetites. Big impulses. Big dreams. Larger than life. Like Paul Bunyan. Oliver North. Or John Cena.

On the other hand, I’m also a level-headed guy. A problem solver. Mr. Practical. So I know that not much can go wrong if I trust in America’s marketers. By putting myself in their hands, I’ll be a team player, conform to expectation, comply with the system, do my part as a consumer to keep our economy strong here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I have confidence that they’ll do right by me.

Patience has never been my strong suit. I’m more of the shoot-now-and-ask-questions-later type. So, to get an idea of what kind of gifts I can expect this upcoming Father’s Day, I did a little checking on the internet. And, boy, oh, boy: I was not disappointed with what I found. Here’s a heads-up for all of you who will want to recognize me on this special day.

First Things First: Getting the Greeting Cards out of the Way

Everybody knows that greeting cards come before gifts proper. Like Cheetos come before pizza. Yes, all that sentiment and communication can be boring. But it’s tradition. And, though I’m more than a bit of a rebel, I’m also all for order. Like any good soldier, I know when it’s time to snap to attention and salute. With that in mind, my first stop was at some ecard vendors.

Hallmark, the gold-standard in greeting cards, will serve as an example of the best of what’s out there with its Father’s Day ecard page. You won’t go wrong giving me one of their cards featuring Indiana Jones and his father. I fancy myself a bit of a rascally action hero myself, somewhere between John McClane of Die Hard fame and Marvel Comics’ Wolverine.

I also get a kick out of Hallmark cards with Star Wars characters, including one with iconic father figure Darth Vader himself, along with the inspiring words, “Dads have the answer.” I mean, sure: He was a tyrant and a murderer who cut off his son’s hand while attempting to kill him. But you have to admit he had charisma. And he was damned good with a light saber. There are worse role models: pacifists, socialists, secular humanists.

And you’ll be on the safe side picking one of Hallmark’s cards featuring superheroes, muscle cars, beer bottles, a hammer, nails and plenty of fishing scenes. It’s nice to know that even in the midst of chaotic social changes, there’s someone out there who knows that the foundations of fatherhood remain the same: fast driving, hard drinking, home repairs and sports. America still has a chance of staying true to the roots that made it great.

Shopping for Happiness in All the Right Places

After that bit of business was out of the way, I was free to take the bull by the horns. So I tracked down some of our country’s most beloved purveyors of consumer goods to see what they had in store for us men folk on our special day.

Target didn’t let me down. They never do. Their web site shows that they still know what I, as a red-blooded, true-blue American man want. They had me hooked from their eye-catching “King of the Grill” tee-shirt right on through the mouthwatering book “ManBque: Meat, Beer and Rock and Roll.” Just reading the title makes me feel like a five-alarm belch is on its way.

These savvy retailers don’t stop with more selling equipment for traditional forms of manly recreation such as horseshoes and golf. They prove that they have their feet planted squarely in the new millennium by highlighting electronic media. They offer wide-screen TVs; the classic laugh-till-you-puke comedy, “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off” and the inspiring death orgy of Frank Miller’s “300.”

In addition, Target also has the X-box games Madden NFL 25 and NBA 2k14 9 (because men never get enough of throwing, catching, kicking and bouncing balls, even if it’s only on a computer screen) and, my current favorite, Titanfall. Now that’s what I’m talking about! If fighting a war in the near-future as either an elite pilot or a huge, heavily armored “titan” doesn’t bring out the father in me, nothing will.

Good old Walmart doesn’t specify exact items for Father’s Day. But they do lay out some general categories under the Father’s Day umbrella, showing that their heads are still screwed on straight. Under the DIY Dad section, they have subsections on tools, auto gifts, outdoor power equipment and grills. So far so good. In their electronics section, they offer TVs, phones, video games, laptop computers. Still batting a hundred.

To Walmart’s credit, some categories are conspicuous by their absence. You sure won’t see categories such as “housekeeping,” “low-fat cooking,” “jazz,” “literature,” “yoga” or “parenting.” Everybody in his right mind knows that great fathers aren’t made, they’re born. Either you’ve got the gift of knowing how to toss the old pigskin around in the backyard with your boys or you haven’t.

And in a section called “Sporty Dad,” Walmart not only has subsections on fishing, camping and fitness but also has the gumption to include one of fatherhood’s most defining pastimes (and rites of passage): hunting. It’s going to take a lot more than a bunch of vegans, animal rights-activists, environmentalists and gun-control advocates to stop us dads from slaughtering animals. And enjoying it. And loving every minute of it. Hunting’s in our blood. Leave it to good old Walmart to stand firmly beside us on this.

Big-Buck Gifts for Your Favorite Big Buck

Next, I wanted to see what guys with loved ones who have more disposable income than mine do can expect for Father’s Day. I sure got an eyeful at the Sharper Image website’s list of Father’s Day gift suggestions.

Where else, outside of the IMAX version of “Top Gun” could you see such enticing forms of flying fun? They have a “video chopper,” a motion-controlled RC helicopter, and even a “football helmet copter” described as “the high-flying way to show your team pride.” Their engineers must be real Brainiac. These little whirly birds even come equipped with a “built-in projector to beam your team’s logo onto the wall!” Sometimes it seems that life just can’t get any better.

But the high-flying good times don’t end there for Dad. Not when Sharper Image has so m any ways to scratch his drone itch: from the relatively simple video camera drone, video camera drone with LED and video drones with real-time display, to the more sophisticated “Steady-Cam Professional HD Video Drone” and the “Quad Smart Drone.” It’s just too bad these flying beauties have to stop with taking videos instead of actually being able to drop a payload so I could see a little bug-splat action like those lucky devils who operate the real things in Afghanistan get to witness.

I don’t imagine that anyone who is going to buy me Father’s Day presents can afford to get me one of these gizmos. But if they could … wow, that would make my day! Imagine how high I could rise in the neighborhood-watch organization if I was able to track suspicious characters with my very own eyes in the skies. I could sure put one of these to good use the next time some punk kid has the gall to come prowling through my gated community on the way back home from a convenience store wearing a hoody and carrying candy.

The good folks at Sharper Image know the playbook of my heart by heart. They know that I want not only to play sports, but to excel at them, to be the best that gadgets can make me. Thus they sell golf swing training aids, golf shoe bags, golf club organizers, clip-on golf accessories, LED golf balls, US golf course travel maps, hybrid golf watches, electronic return putting matts and home golf training systems.

Of course, my sporting ambitions don’t begin and end with golf. So the company also offers Zepp Tennis Swing Analyzers and Zepp Baseball and Softball Swing Analyzers.

And the company realizes that my love of sports extends well beyond active participation to include the wonderful world of fandom. To empower me to improve my tail gate parties, they sell Mega-Can Sports Coolers to hold plenty of beer cans. These beauties come in NFL, NBA, MLB and college team designs.

To help me show my team spirit from the comfort and safety of home and in my day-to-day life, they sell: Washington Post baseball books, MLB ballpark maps, MLB money-clip wallets, 3-D football stadium replicas and even a Yankees World Series Display, which they describe as a “framed collection of replica tickets commemorating the unsurpassed 27 World Series won by the New York Yankees.” Gosh, owning something like that would be the next best thing to actually participating in history.

As everybody knows, some of the best man games take place up close and personal in recreation rooms. So Sharper Image is smart enough to sell 2-person basketball sets, Foosball coffee tables, 2-in-1 flip-top game tables, Pac-Man’s Arcade Party, Pac-Man's Arcade Party Cocktail Tables, Dead-Heat arcade games, and Deadstorm Pirates video arcade games. Put me down for one of the latter. If I’m gonna wish, I might as well wish big. Anything with the word “Dead” in it has got to be cool. I’ll be a natural when it comes to piloting a pirate ship with one hand and shooting down enemies with the other. After all, I’ve got years of suburban rush-hour commuting under my belt. I’m a cinch for the much-coveted yo-ho-ho rating.

And, of course, nothing barks out, “Man up” better than a good dose of blood-letting. So Sharper Image sells “A Time of War” 50-DVD sets and “WWII: The Ultimate DVD Collection.” Let the good times roll. Just like a tank over enemy territory.

These folks know my love of cooking starts and stops with BBQ grills, the modern equivalent of the caveman’s bon fire. These high-end merchants provide such man candy as: digital BBQ forks, digital BBQ and kitchen thermometers, stainless steel steam-cleaning grill brushes, cordless BBQ thermometer spatulas, BBQ grill lights and fans, automatic BBQ grill cleaning robots, Grillight BBQ gift sets, personalized grillmasters apron (prepare for some gut-busting laughs), personalized BBQ matts (equally big laughs), 3-in-1 BBQ tools, 6-in-1 BBQ grill tool sets and even 24-piece BBQ tool sets. Talk about pushing the envelope!

And they have something to please two-fisted drinkers like me, from those devoted to beer and wine up to those with a hankering after the harder stuff: craft home beer brewing systems, beer tasting guides, mini keg coolers with taps, double-walled beer glasses, stainless steel beer mugs, wine carriers, LED illuminated bar caddies, executive whiskey glasses and wall mounted liquor dispensers. Here’s mud in your eye, Pardner! Let’s take bets on who can drink who under the table. But I’ve gotta warn you: I’ve already made one hell of a head start.

Not ones to look down their noses at another time-honored masculine vice, the aficionados at Sharper Image offer double cigar holders and flasks, 3-cigar holders with cutters, 5-in-1 cigar tools, various humidors, cigar cutters and crystal cigar ashtrays. It gives me hope that someday they will even hearken back to the glory days of manhood by offering up the much missed, good old-fashioned cuspidor. Ping! Nailed it at 20 yards! They sure beat the hell out of the rusty old coffee can I’ve been using to spit out my wads of Skoal.

A Cave for Every Man and a Man in Every Cave

Of course not everybody can afford such costly items. Fortunately, thousands of rip-roaring gifts for men are but a simple Yahoo search away. For instance, by typing in “catalogs for men,” on this search engine, I found a result called “gifts for men” that, in turn, lead to a website called “Catalogs.com” and a page titled “Gadgets and Guy Stuff.”

Heh. Heh. They had me at “Gadgets.” Options there includes such meaty finds as “Sporty’s Tool Shed,” “Shop Knuckleheads” (all about the Three Stooges), “Pool Dawg” (about billiards), “Spy Museum Store” and “Air Rattle” (about Airsoft guns). Heady stuff. I knew I’d come to the right spot.

Best of all, they have a catalog called “Knife Cave” chock full of affordable items such as a V-42 fighting stiletto, throwing stars and blow guns. I couldn’t have found this at a better time because, somehow, I’ve managed to misplace my blow guns and could sure use some new ones.

They also offer a Maxam stun gun, handcuffs, various batons and a selection of concealed weapons, including belt-buckle knives and ink-pen knives. You never know when you’re going to need to slip somebody some cold steel on the sly.

Some of my personal favorites are the “Cold Steel Urban Pal with Black Rubber Handles” the “Black Hawk Serpa holster for Glock” and “Scorpion Knuckles Burgundy.” Hint. Hint. My old brass knuckles are falling apart, and they’re just plain brass colored. I could sure use an upgrade to something like that sweet little burgundy Scorpion number.

I hate to be a complainer. However, I can’t help pointing out how disappointed I was that I didn’t see any monogrammed blackjacks listed. Or any blackjacks at all, if you can believe that. But maybe I just missed seeing them under another name, such as “saps.”

The site helpfully lists themes by which shoppers can search for products, including: dragons, skulls, pirates, spiders, scorpions, serpents, ninja, samurai and the ever-popular catch-all category of “German.” It reads like a who’s-who list of guy fetishes.

It’s just a hop, pounce and jump from the Knife Cave to the holy grail of Father’s Day gift seekers: a magnificent site called Man Cave.

The term “Man Cave” was popularized by John Gray in his groundbreaking book, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” For those of you who need a reminder of what it means, the site provides this description: “A Man Cave is created by ‘the man of the house.’ … Man Caves are often used for spending time alone or socializing with other male friends. And yes, even women and children are allowed in as long as they remember who is ‘King’ of the castle. Particular events that take place in a Man Cave include: watching sporting events, getting together to talk, playing poker or billiards, beer or wine tasting …

“The Man Cave is a reflection of its owner. … His interests and passions are on display for everyone to see. Some themed Man Cave ideas include: The Las Vegas Casino Man Cave, the NFL Man Cave, The Classic Car Man Cave … the Cigar Lounge Man Cave.”

This place is the bomb. If it belongs in a Man Cave, you’ll find it here. When I found this site, I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven, where I could luxuriate in the true spirit of Father’s Day.

In the end, it turns out that guys who get gifts from Sharper Image aren’t all that different from those who receive the bounty of the Knife Cave and the Man Cave.

As fathers, we’re all men. We work hard, and we play hard. We drink hard, and we eat hard. We BBQ hard, and we even swing around in our hammocks hard.

Back to the Tusks

Sure, I want all the great stuff featured on these websites. I lose sleep at night, drooling over it.

But, when push comes to shove, I’m nothing if not a hardscrabble, bare knuckled realist, so I’ll take what I can get. I’ll stand by the title to this thing -- All I Really Want for Father’s Day Is My Two Front Teeth—with one slight amendment: I’ll settle for my two front teeth for Father’s Day, if that’s the best deal I can get.

But not just any old teeth. Oh, no. I won’t settle quite that easily. I may be a practitioner of realpolitik, but that doesn’t make me a pushover. Not me.

These tusks must be realistic reproductions of General George Patton’s teeth (or, in a pinch, General Eisenhower’s). One of them must come equipped with a little tracking device so that, in case my dare-devil lifestyle gets me kidnapped by eco-terrorists, atheists or illegal immigrants, members of my man pack can locate me, come swooping down out of the hills in full throat, lay waste to my jailers and free me.

The other tooth must have an easily employed cyanide capsule in it. Because I never know when I’m going to be called upon to make the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice. We heroes are like that. And heroism is what Father’s Day is all about.

The above published in Umbrella Factory

Fun and Games at Office Depot:

An Argument for Agoraphobia

By Kyle Heger

I was about as eager to buy my seven-year-old son, Riley, a new backpack for school as I would be to enter a reality-TV game show that offered the chance to win some consumer goods by surviving interrogation at the hands of former Abu Ghraib prison guards.

To say the least: I put it off.

Either as a result of how I as an individual am aging or how society itself is being twisted by its roots (or maybe because of both), I find myself increasingly reluctant to engage in any kind of transaction outside my own doors. Any kind of transaction. Walking. Driving. Checking out a book at the library. Meeting a friend at the park.

Even what are on the surface the most innocent, natural, problem-free behaviors now tend to seem like actions performed in Kafkaland: exercises in absurdity and alienation. Usually, I chalk this up to the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy and technology. But in my less optimistic moments, I suspect that it’s really because of a growing rot at the core of the universe.

I delayed getting my son’s backpack for as long as my conscience let me, until the poor thing (the backpack, not my son) was hanging on by a thread, ready at any minute to spill onto the street or sidewalk in a sad spectacle of homework, snacks and such lovingly school-ground- treasures as bark, pebbles and pencil stubs.

An Attempt at Pain Avoidance

Riley had been using his current backpack (an inexpensive number I’d purchased at Target) since a few months into kindergarten, when the Spiderman novelty backpack with which he’d started school fell apart at the seams.

Faced with his current backpack’s imminent failure, I determined to be a smart shopper when it came to buying its replacement. In my case, smart shopping comes down to an attempt at pain avoidance. Or at least pain reduction. In order not to feel too humiliated and frustrated by the experience, I would need to meet several goals which were in some ways mutually exclusive: 1) spend as little money as possible, 2) spend as little time as possible, 3) end up with something that would work OK and last long enough that I wouldn’t feel I’d been cheated.

I wasn’t in the market for anything fancy. The whole wheels-and-handle bit was out of the question both because I couldn’t picture a backpack of that type fitting easily into his cubbyhole at school and because I figure the more moving parts are involved the greater the chance of malfunction. Neither was I considering the heavy-duty type with a frame that serious hikers and campers use. His school is only a block away, so he won’t exactly need something in the survivalist tradition.

All I wanted was a backpack that would last a few years without falling apart, would be light enough not to saddle my son a lifelong posture problem, and would be big enough to hold his school belongings. In other words: something that wouldn’t fill me with buyer’s regret as soon as I’d bought it. I might as well have gone looking for the Holy Grail.

My Quest Begins

Since we were going to Target anyway for something else, I decided to check out the backpack selection there. The fewer times I leave the house, the better, so I’m a big fan of doubling or tripling up on errands.

I reasoned that it wasn’t Target’s fault that the last time I had bought a backpack there, it had been their least expensive model. If I was willing to spend a few more dollars, I told myself, I might even wind up with something that would last Riley through elementary school.

The first hurdle I had to overcome at Target was Riley’s sudden aversion to backpacks with sports stars or superheroes or cartoon characters or company slogans and logos. I could dig it. I mean, I don’t like being a walking billboard myself, pandering to the combined demands of pop culture, peer pressure, Madison Avenue and Hollywood. On the other hand, his dislike of these fashion statements meant that we had to look, not at the less-expensive children’s backpacks, but at the more expensive ones for adults. I approached the task with more than a bit of apprehension, wondering how much money this was going to set me back.

It turned out I needn’t have worried. They didn’t have any backpacks that fit the bill. Oh, they had plenty of duffle-bag-type affairs, scads of cases for laptop computers, and any number of those increasingly popular, medic/bike-messenger/courier bags that sling over one shoulder. I suppose I could have considered one of the later more seriously, but after years of reading about how important it is ergonomically to distribute backpack weight evenly across the body, I just didn’t know if this style was something to which I was willing to subject Riley.

Our Next Stop

Our next stop was Office Depot, where I remembered having seen some backpacks.

Again, I couldn’t help feeling solidarity with Riley when he turned up his nose at the sparkly pink backpacks (presumably for “girls” of all ages, from preschool to the assisted-living senior center) and the camoflouge-patterned ones for males who, presumably, all have a built-in urge to emulate hunters and soldiers. And, again, Riley’s precocious attack of good taste and independent thinking narrowed the field considerably.

Finally, after we had given up on that search and were heading to the exit, I spotted a few Jansport backpacks hanging on the end of an aisle in the “we must move this inventory now,” position. I dimly remembered having owned one or more Jansport backpacks before and finding them to be durable. So I pointed them out to Riley.

He picked out an unassuming gray model that seemed to meet all his qualifications as well as mine and came in at a price of $46.99 without sales tax. It was a bit more than I’d planned on spending, but, if buying an acceptable backpack was going to be as difficult as it was shaping up to be, I thought it might be wise to just buckle down, pay the price and get on with my life.

The actual process of the purchase seemed to go without a hitch, and as we left the store, I breathed a sigh of relief, believing that I’d got off pretty easily.

Then the alarm began screeching as we passed through the store’s scanning system. I assumed it was a mistake because those damned things are always going off when I pass through them (even when I’m not actually shoplifting). But, as I usually do, to avoid being tackled by a security guard or an overzealous clerk as I make my way down the sidewalk, I paused and looked back at the cashier questioningly. He looked over at me, nodded and waved me on.

An Unsettling Discovery

About two weeks after I had made this purchase, Riley put my hand on a lump in the backpack and asked me what it was. At first, I thought he was trying to pull a joke on me. But I certainly didn’t laugh when I peeled back the zipper area to discover a white plastic object which I identified as one of the magnetic devices that stores or manufacturers put into merchandise so they will trigger alarms if not removed prior to leaving shops.

“So that explains why the alarm went off in Office Depot as we left the premises,” I told myself. Apparently the cashier had neglected to remove this device when we were paying. I wasn’t tempted to try removing it myself. I had done this before with other products and I had always broken the items. I didn’t want to spoil this backpack with which Riley and I were both satisfied, and which had cost a pretty penny into the bargain.

For a few moments, I assumed I would just leave the device in place, but then I was seized with a clear vision of all hell breaking loose every time Riley entered or exited a store or other business. The fact that I’m always setting those systems off even without any merchandise shows me what a hair trigger they have. I could hear and see it all happening: alarms ringing, lights flashing, people staring, loudspeakers barking out to my first grader: “Stop where you are and drop the backpack. You have been caught red-handed in the act of stealing merchandise. A SWAT team is on the way.”

I decided that the only sensible thing to do was to take the backpack back to Office Depot and have the people there remove the device. But just as I was prompted to visit Office Depot by my clear, all too clear, imaginings of what the future would hold for Riley if I didn’t remove the device, so now I was likewise prompted to put off the visit by equally vivid imaginings of what would happen when I took the backpack to Office Depot to have the problem fixed. As I entered the store, the device would trigger the alarms, invoking the same sturm und drang described above.

To lessen the chances that the people who work there would perform a citizen’s arrest on me, put me in a headlock and sic the police on me, I settled on the simple expedient of bringing in my sales receipt to show that I’d purchased this item. Even with that in mind, I was still far from enthusiastic about the visit. I found myself procrastinating, certain that if I went back there, something would go wrong. Painful experience has taught me, time and again, that even the simplest transactions have become complicated and grotesque in today’s world.

Back into the Meat Grinder

One day, after I had gone through enough hours without trauma that I felt a little courage bubbling to my surface, I decided to get the pain over with and force myself back into what I thought of as either Kafka’s castle or simply “the meat grinder.”

So, shortly after Riley returned from school, I spirited his backpack away and drove, white-knuckled, to Office Depot, not telling him what I was doing in case I ended up coming a cropper.

Maybe I should have been pleased when I walked past the sensor in the doorway without setting off the alarm. On the encouraging side, it meant I might be able to avoid the whole flight-or-fight surge of adrenalin that I dreaded. On the discouraging side, it cut the ground out from under my feet. I mean, if this device didn’t trigger alarms, I had been putting myself through the wringer for the sake of an unnecessary worry.

Resolutely, I plodded up to the cash register, grateful to see that it was staffed by the same man who had rung up my purchase of the backpack. But, of course, he didn’t remember me. When I told him why I was there, he looked at the device with an expression with which I have become all too familiar, the look of someone who has just been struck between the eyes with a pole-axe, a look that expresses the dismay attendant upon an encounter with a completely unexpected event.

“You bought this here?” he asked in shock. He couldn’t have been any more surprised if I’d slapped a live iguana on his countertop and asked him to castrate it. Without the benefit of anesthesia.

Answering in the affirmative, I flourished the receipt as proof.

“This device isn’t one of ours. We don’t have the right kind of tool to remove this,” he told me in a tone of voice that managed to be accusing.

I couldn’t imagine what underhanded game he suspected me of playing. I mean, how many people come into Store Two with something they have stolen at Store One, trying to trick the employees at Store Two into removing the evidence of their dirty deed? I suppose it’s possible. But statistically, it can’t be anything but an insignificant blip.

“Have you tried removing it yourself?” he asked, squinting at me, again with that vaguely accusing, put-upon tone in his voice, as if he knew that I was a slacker at heart who just hadn’t had enough get-up-and-go to solve the problem on my own and now insisted on wasting his time instead.

“No,” I replied, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’ve tried that with other items and haven’t exactly been pleased with the results.”

“Oh!” he said. You guessed it. The same accusing, suspicious tone of voice. He didn’t feel completely comfortable dealing with a guy who wasn’t a do-it-yourselfer, handy with pliers and bolt cutters. He looked at me briefly and barely succeeded in stopping himself from hocking up a gob in disdain. I guess those customer-service trainings weren’t a total loss, after all.

“I’m going to have to talk to my manager about this,” he said, plodding away dolefully.

I could see where this was going. If they didn’t think that I was a shoplifter trying a trick, they would think that I was a hopelessly confused or forgetful old soul who had probably bought this damned thing in some other city or state and was now making them suffer from the weight of my mental deficiencies. If they were polite, they’d try humoring me. If they weren’t, out on my ass I would go.

Studying the receipt to pass the time, I now realized that it was a flimsy piece of evidence. I was far from being sure that the cryptic words “BKPK, SPRBRK, AS” and a product ID number were sufficient proof of what I had bought. I am so accustomed to the people with whom I do business making mistakes, that I was not even sure that the information was accurate. The man with whom I had been attempting to do business a moment before certainly hadn’t been overly impressed by it.

“This isn’t one of our devices, Sir,” another voice spoke. I have heard that word “Sir” used in that same way far too many times for my skin not to crawl when I heard it now. It is the particular property of border guards, security guards, police officers and other practitioners of institutionalized violence who put a spin on the word that makes it feel like a slap in the face. “Will you please pull over to the side of the road, Sir? Would you like a little pepper spray in your eyes, Sir? Are you going to lower your pants yourself, Sir, or am I going to have to do it for you?”

I would prefer being called a “motherfucker” to my face to suffering the venomous sting of that smug and sarcastic word.

In the commercial world, unless you are already at gunpoint with the cops on the way with sirens blaring and a K-9 officer salivating with eagerness to get a chunk of you, you can sometimes get away with receiving the old passive-aggressive treatment for a while before being subjected to outright brutality. At least if you are, or are likely to be, a paying customer from whom they can wring more money by judiciously alternating the carrot with the stick as a motivator.

This was the case here. The person speaking turned out to be a large man who came toward me with Riley’s backpack swinging from one hand. He wasn’t armed. That was a good sign. He had that same pole-axed look, his forehead wrinkled in consternation, trying to make sense of the puzzling phenomenon with which I was confronting him, determined to spend at least some time tolerating my unwelcome presence.

“Are you sure you bought this here?” he asked, furrowing some more ripples into his brow.

“No. I guess I must be lying,” I responded before I could control myself, my patience stretched to the breaking point in a tug-of-war between the memory of similarly senseless transactions that have occurred in the past and my anticipation of more senseless transactions occurring with increasing frequency in the future.

“No, Sir, I’m not suggesting that,” he responded. But, of course, that didn’t stop him from subjecting my receipt to an intense scrutiny.

Apparently it passed muster because he asked, “I can’t remove this, Sir, but how would you feel about trading this backpack in for a new one without a device?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’d feel right about doing that to you folks. I mean, this thing has been used by my seven-year old five days a week for the last month. God only knows what he’s had in there.”

He looked stunned, as if he couldn’t quite take in the possibility that, in the dog-eat-dog war between buyers and sellers, I seriously wanted him to believe that I gave a rat’s ass when it came to fair play for a business.

Choosing to simply ignore my comment, he said “Let me go look and see what we have available.” Although I appreciated the fact that he seemed to be trying to solve my problem, I was still so uptight about all the time I’d spent on what shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place, that it was all I could do to nod humbly, say, “Sure, that would be great,” and try to slump into some kind of receptivity while I waited.

After five or ten minutes, he came back with a black Jansport backpack and said, “We don’t have your type anymore but we have these. They cost about $15 more. Do you want to trade your old one in for it?”

I must be a particularly unfortunate mix of persistent pessimism and recurrent naivety. This makes me an easy prey to disappointment. Somehow I just assumed that he was going to take the old backpack and give me the new one, maybe doing a little paperwork to record the transaction. I assumed that he would have Office Depot eat the $15 difference as a courtesy, a gesture of customer service in an attempt to pay me back a bit for the inconvenience they’d caused me.

But something in his manner led me to believe in a few minutes that this was not to be the case. To test the waters, I ran my credit card through a countertop scanner because it said, “slide payment card,” hoping that my crack about how I must be lying hadn’t blown the chances of his making a goodwill gesture and saying something like, “Oh, no. That’s not necessary, Sir. This is on the house.”

Of course, instead of saying anything like this, all he said was, “You have to wait a minute before sliding your card, Sir.”

Surprised that I was still speaking in a calm and measured voice instead of screams, I replied, “The machine told me to slide the card.”

“Oh, they always say that, Sir,” was his response. Of course. What else can we expect from the technology that everybody is so wild about than for it to regularly and predictably give us incorrect information?

After dutifully sliding the card on his cue and signing my name, I was just about ready to go. As a last-minute precaution, he showed me that there were no devices in the new backpack that would trigger their alarm.

I forced myself to thank him and say goodbye, reminding myself that he didn’t “make the rules” and was probably in many ways as much a victim of “the system” as I was. Heading toward the door, I considered that things could have ended up a whole lot worse.

As I passed through the doorway, the security alarm went off, more loud and shrill than I remembered. I froze in mid-step as if I had been transfixed by electric currents. I spun around and looked at the two men who had helped me. I held my arms out to my sides and tilted my head to one side in a “What do I do now?” attitude.

They waved at me in a way that was dismayingly familiar, making shooing gestures and said, “It’s O.K. It’s O.K.”

For a moment, I debated with myself about whether or not I should go back in and seek an explanation to make sense of what had happened, maybe even make sure that this backpack wasn’t going to trigger alarms wherever it went just as I had feared the first one would. If it did, I would have the same problem I had started out with, plus be out three quarters of an hour of my time, plus $15 and an immeasurable hunk of wellbeing. I would not qualify as a smart shopper.

But I felt that I was at the end of my emotional and mental resources, and that unless I beat a hasty retreat, I might end up exploding incoherently in front of a store full of employees and customers. So I settled for shaking my head, waving my hand and leaving.

A Sense of Doom

Now, of course, the unresolved nature of the situation leaves me with a sense of impending doom.

Is there a device of some kind in the backpack, a small device hidden there that will set off alarms the next time Riley goes through a toy store or library doorway, bringing the full weight of authority down on him? I guess to spare him this, I should myself put the backpack through some trial runs, bringing it through two, three, even four different types of security systems before letting him do so. But even then, I would never be sure that because of possible differences between scanners, he could pass through system number five, six or seven without setting off alarms.

I could just get another backpack, but I refuse to put myself through that financial kind of self-torture.

I could also take it back again to Office Depot to find out why the alarm system had gone off and to make sure it won’t happen again. But you know how successful my last attempt at that was.

And now I have a new worry too. I can’t help wondering if the whole situation, from the moment I bought the first backpack until the moment I bought the second one wasn’t just Office Depot’s sly way of squeezing an extra $15 out of me. I know it’s improbable. But the fact that I even consider it as a possibility shows how nightmarish the whole process of going out into the world and engaging people has become. Agoraphobia is beginning to seem like a more and more reasonable reaction to life.

Published in Corvus Review

When Is Kindness Not Kindness?

When It’s Twisted into Nonsense and Crammed Down Your Throat.

By Kyle Heger

If your e-mail inbox contained materials from a county jail cheerfully announcing its participation in something called “The Great Kindness Challenge,” complete with smiling faces, peace signs and flower graphics, you might feel a queasy sense of disconnection. Then you’d know how I felt getting a similar message from my son’s public elementary school, which, in my experience, is little better than a typical “correctional facility” in terms of how kindly it treats its warehoused population.

My first reaction was “School administrators are at it again, adding ‘kindness’ to the list of words such as ‘respect,’ ‘critical thinking,’ ‘safety,’ and yes, even ‘love’ that they deform for their own purposes.” And, the more I looked into this boondoggle, the more I found that my first reaction was justified.

Granted: Words are by their nature elastic, open to some interpretation. But, if they are to serve as a medium for communication, they must bear some kind of commonality of meaning. Hence the usefulness of attempts at definition.

A look at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (hardly a radical, “alternative” authority) uses words such as “sympathetic, helpful, gentle and forbearing” to define the state of being “kind.” But, as used in materials included in “The Great Kindness Challenge” the word “kindness” is a catch-all under to include almost any activity, even those that have nothing to do with kindness as defined above, or can even reflect its opposite.

“Peace Dumbed Down”

The “challenge” is a turnkey program provided by Kids for Peace. A look at the group’s website reveals it as a nonprofit organization that seems to use “peace” the same way it uses “kindness,” as an umbrella for a hodgepodge of supposedly “positive” behaviors.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for peace. In fact, I’ve been a peace activist ever since I was nine-years-old, signing petitions, marching, contacting elected officials, serving on committees to oppose selective service registration, the nuclear weapons build up and military interventions all over the world. I was the disarmament coordinator for Greenpeace Great Lakes and worked for Ground Zero, Freeze Voter 84 and the Contra Costa County Nuclear Weapons Freeze.

But the kind of peace-making to which Kids for Peace resorts is a dumbed-down version of the real thing. It reminds me of the kiddie-menu fare that I despised so much as a child. Those things confine minors to a dietary ghetto, while this group’s “wag more, bark less” programs confine them to a political ghetto. Such programs often try using developmental-psychology to defend themselves, explaining that kids aren’t ready for the truth. What they end up doing is giving kids a bunch of misinformation, with the hope that they’ll eventually straighten it all out.

One assumption of the group seems to be that if only people understood each other more, there would be no violence. Despite the fact that the European countries involved in World Wars I and II were all linked by centuries of intimate contact, inter-marriage, cross-cultural pollination and business connections. And the fact that the warring Asian parties in the World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were hardly strangers.

Another assumption seems to be that if only people treated each other nicely enough, there would be peace. As if competitions for power and resources or a clash of world views and values aren’t the main causes of war. Usually, I feel a bit taken aback by bumper stickers that say, “If you want peace, work for justice” because they seem too threatening, but, compared to this treacle, I find them a breath of fresh air.

“‘Kindness’ in Action”

My son’s school kicked off the challenge by having students participate in group “affirmations” about how they “choose” to be kind. So much for the value school officials put on students’ freedom of thought, feeling and expression. This exercise puts me in mind of rituals during which people were forced to make propaganda statements out loud in the former Soviet Union during its Stalinist phase and in China during the Cultural Revolution. It also smacks of people here in the U.S. forced to sign loyalty oaths and pledge allegiance to a flag.

Third-to-fifth graders at the school got a version with fifty kindness “challenges” to perform. They were told to perform at least 30. If goals are met, the children will be rewarded by seeing the principal work on top of the school roof for one day. Talk about inspiration.

A look at a few activities on this list makes my point about how thin the program stretches the word “kindness.”

“SMILE AT 25 PEOPLE.” Does smiling really strike you as a “kind” act? How would you feel if you were one of the 25 people lucky enough to receive one of these smiles and were told that it was bestowed upon you as a “kindness”? What if the people who smiled were even more explicit, saying that they did it as an act of “sympathy” and “forbearance” and that they counted it as a “challenge”? The chances are pretty good you might be tempted to tell them to cram that kindness right back where it came from.

Of course, there are other types of smiles that might be more pleasing to recipients, for instance one that springs from a genuine, spontaneous pleasure in seeing them. But smiling by policy is, at best, a pretty cold affair.

"COMPLIMENT 5 PEOPLE." Right. Telling people what they want to hear is always kind. For instance, when you tell someone that his hairdo is attractive and he is thereby induced to keep trotting proudly about with that thing on his head even though everyone else laughs behind his back. Or when you say to the school bully, “I really think it’s great the way you shoved that little kid in the mud puddle.” The path to enablement is often paved with compliments. And who could imagine anything unpleasant about complimenting someone in a position to grant you favors? A little toadyism, anyone?

"TELL A JOKE AND MAKE SOMEONE LAUGH." Surely, by now, everyone knows that not all jokes, even ones that make people laugh, are kind. Feel free to provide your own examples here.

“LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT YOUR TEACHER.” Yes, like her gambling addiction, her track record of promiscuous and unprotected sex or her compulsive lying. Now those are nice!

“GIVE YOUR FRIEND A HIGH FIVE.” Right. After he runs over a chipmunk with his mountain bike. Congratulations, like compliments, don’t always encourage behavior in others that could meaningfully be called “kind.”

“SIT WITH A NEW GROUP OF KIDS AT LUNCH.” Yes. You are God’s gift to other kids. You’re doing them a big favor by sitting with them. Kudos for sharing the wealth. Maybe you can become really popular by announcing to them that you’ve joined them out of kindness, not because they have something to offer to you, for instance, companionship.

“STEP UP FOR SOMEONE IN NEED.” O.K. As if there’s no way this can end up as a self-aggrandizing act that amounts to condescension. People love to be treated as charity cases. For example, the blind person who is “helped” across an intersection even though she hasn’t asked for help, doesn’t want help and is perfectly able to cross on her own. Revenge may indeed be a dish best served cold. I really have no idea. But clearly kindness can be a dish better in the serving than in the receiving.

“HOLD THE DOOR OPEN FOR SOMEONE.” I have two words for you to consider here before you get too excited about how kind you were to do this: “sexism” and “ageism.” See the “Step up for Someone in Need” above for an overview of how treating people as needy can backfire.

“BE ON TIME FOR SCHOOL.” Yeah. Very kind. Although I think the word “punctual” might be a little more on-target. Like many other activities on the list, this one clearly seems more a technical matter than one of kindness. But, hey, if you don’t value honesty as much as you do “kindness,” you might be able to make it work.

“Listen to Your Teacher the First Time.” Here we have obedience parading under the “kindness” banner. Combining this with all the suggested activities that involve thanking school authority figures (superintendents, principals, bus drivers, crossing guards, librarians, nurses, volunteers) will give you a pretty good picture of young sycophants-in-training.

“A Case Study”

On the day the group affirmations took place, I observed what use two third graders made of the checklist. I was surprised that they did seem motivated by a desire to see the principal working on the roof. But I had the sense that this wasn’t because they felt this was something admirable on her part, but because they wanted to see her look ridiculous.

They quickly buzzed through the list, checking off as many items as they could, using past experiences as criteria. When I said that I thought that the idea behind the program was for them to only count actions they took after they’d received the checklist, they were momentarily stymied. But they quickly found work-arounds. For instance, for “Smile at 25 People,” they smiled at each other and me repeatedly until they reached a count of 25. For “Draw a Picture and Give it to Someone” they knocked off fast doodles and exchanged them. You get the idea.

I applaud the ingenuity and critical-thinking skills they exhibited. But I didn’t see a lot of kindness brought into play.

After a few minutes of this kind of thing, even the inspiring image of the principal sitting atop the roof lost some of its sparkle, and they dropped the checklists, saying, “This is stupid,” and moved on to other things.

“A Monocrop of ‘Good Little Doobies””

Are teachers and administrators really still as out of touch with the reality of student experience as they were when I was in elementary school decades ago? Does is not strike any of them that the type of “kindness” they get on demand is likely not to be kindness at all, but something that ranges between lip service and downright imposture? Do they really believe that a program like this will do anything more valuable than confirming the high esteem of children who already pat themselves on the back for being kind and leaving the other children untouched in any but the most superficial way? Or are the adults simply going through the motions, hoping to placate each other or figures higher up in the organizational hierarchy?

The emphasis on kindness takes on even more disturbing implications when viewed as part of a larger trend at my son’s school to reach beyond students’ external behavior and try controlling their private, subjective lives. They are told that they are grateful, that they are respectful, that they work their hardest, that they love their teachers. They are told they must be attentive. Their progress reports measure how “positive” their attitudes are.

The school conflict-management program looks an awful lot more like a conflict-suppression program. Students are told to say they’re “sorry” even if they’re not and that they “forgive” even when they don’t. An “Emotion Management” program emphasizes reducing or eliminating students’ “disruptive” emotions and “calming down” their anger, frustration, worry, anxiety and blaming.

While this sometimes takes place under the banner of “social justice” and the goals of “inclusion,” “diversity” and “tolerance,” it has the effect of driving any hint of dissension or disagreement underground, churning out a monocrop of “Good Little Doobies” who respond to authority not only with obedience but with actual enthusiasm.

“You’ll Be Kind and You’ll Like It!”

Walking into my son’s school with the “challenge” in full swing was not unlike walking into a scene from “1984.” Big Brother was speaking for the children around every corner. Posters declared, “We Choose to Be Kind” and “We Believe that … Kindness is Everything.” Get that? Not just one among other (presumably important) things, but Everything. How’s that for saddling ideas with superlatives to the point where they are dumbed down to nonsense? Strung upon the walls were light-bulb shapes on which the students in my son’s class had been told to complete the sentence, “I will light up the world with kindness by ….” Of course, most simply filled in the blanks with words from the checklist.

Has it occurred to the program’s creators, or to people at the school who are foisting it off on us, that public schools don’t have any legitimate business trying to inculcate kindness in students? Or, that actually it is their business to avoid such mind control? Isn’t kindness, in most meaningful definitions, a subjective state? Since when do we pour tax payer dollars into an institution so it can brain wash our children, to tell them, in essence, “You’ll Be Kind and You’ll Like It!”?

Of course, on the surface, kindness is one of those subjective states to which it might seem that no reasonable person could object. But, as the above review showed, the activities recommended as part of the “Great Kindness Challenge” aren’t necessarily acts of kindness at all.

Consider the issue of precedents, and you might see that the “Great Kindness Challenge” casts ominous shadows. Even assuming that public schools will wield the power to shape subjective experience in ways of which you approve, what is to guarantee that, once given this power, they will always use it in ways of which you approve? Once given the power to cultivate kindness today, what is to stop them from cultivating cruelty tomorrow if it becomes convenient?

Consider this program in the “best use” context. Assuming that a school has limited time, energy and attention, and that there are more significant things to do with those resources than investing them in this program, is the school anywhere justified in using them this way?

“The Risk of Counter-Productivity”

In several ways, a program like the “challenge” actually threatens to undermine its stated purpose.

First, by being force-fed, the program runs the risk of becoming, for some students another task to be dodged, for some students another waste of time to be tolerated, and for yet other students another program to be opposed. This last is a predictable reaction from highly perceptive students who are already learning to maintain their independence by automatically distrusting and rejecting messages from authorities.

Being told that you are kind by the same people who tell you that you are guilty of breaking rules even when you’re not, who tell you that you “adore” a book even when you can’t stand it and that you “loved” a field trip even when you think it stank makes for a pretty big credibility problem.

Hypocrisy is not too strong a word in this case.

Second, by trivializing kindness into a set of quick, easily performed and easily measured stunts, the program risks being taken at face value by students who already pride themselves on their kindness, their ability to win approval from authority or their ability to out-compete their school mates. On the other hand, the independent-minded students are given just another reason to reject the whole notion of kindness out of hand as more garbage spewed from out by authority.

Third, presenting kindness as either a given or something that can be easily achieved simply by choice, risks making students complacent about the experience. If they come to believe that kindness is a universal constant, they have little incentive to observe or cultivate it.

Fourth, by offering external rewards for “kindness,” the program could easily lead some children to believe that kindness is something someone gives someone else to get “treats” from a third party, rather than being a naturally occurring experience that can be intrinsically rewarding.

Acts of “kindness” done in this context bear an unsettling resemblance to the kind of tricks dogs can be taught to do in exchange for a handful of Beggin’ Bits, tricks like “shaking hands.”

“A Martyred Sigh”

I can easily predict how some enthusiasts of this program will respond if they read this essay: a martyred sigh and the much-overused words, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But, in reality, a more accurate summarization of what I have attempted here would be, “This particular smug, superficial, ill-conceived attempt at brain washing has not gone criticized.”

Need I say that I am taking to task not kindness itself but the uses to which the word is put, in particular, misguided attempts to cram it down people’s throats as if they were so many geese being force-fed through esophageal slits in order to more efficiently produce pate de foie gras?

In fact, I feel that I am defending kindness from people whose efforts will end up misrepresenting, counterfeiting and cheapening it. Kindness is a deep experience which seems to blossom in most people if not stifled. Under the right circumstances it grows organically as people’s brains and bodies develop and as their experience with others widens. Seeking to tinker with something so profound is a bit like trying to raise more marketable fruits more cost-efficiently by growing them where they don’t belong, with growing media, light, nutrients and pesticides that are all synthetic. You could well end up with fruit that is weak, tasteless and diseased and with an environment that is poisoned.

Kindness Checklist Part Two

By Kyle Heger

Some go-getting elementary school students might find that they have completed all the activities suggested in the Great Kindness Challenge. If they want to take on some more challenges in the same spirit, I suggest that they try the following:

1 Wear suspenders

2 Agree shrilly

3 Wink

4 Tell someone using a wheelchair what an “inspiration” he is.

5 Pinky-swear

6 Kowtow

7 Ride a unicycle

8 Say “Cool”

9 Use a tuning fork

10 Say, “Patience is a virtue” to someone who is angry.

11 Seal an envelope

12 Call something “cute”

13 Perspire

14 Offer to flush toilets for people

15 Lick a stamp

16 Simper

17 Pop a friend’s pimple

18 Tell a classmate with whom you’ve never interacted that you love him. Then stick by his side all day.

19 Open a door

20 Grind black pepper

21 Give Disney princess erasers to girls and Darth Vader erasers to boys.

22 Amputate someone’s gangrenous limb.

23 Say “Awesome”

24 Polish your teachers’ shoes with a good spit shine

25 Blow kisses indiscriminately

26 Inhale

27 Exhale

28 Do the splits

29 Paint a smiley face on a hearse

30 Rhyme

31 Giggle

32 Call an old woman a “young lady.”

33 Assure a permanently paralyzed boy that he’ll be “up and running” in no time.

34 Floss a stranger’s teeth

35 Take a selfie

36 Use a shoe horn

37 Flip a coin

38 Add numbers

39 Subtract numbers

40 Tell a morbidly obese man than he is looking “in the pink.”

41 Turn a knob

42 Say “wahoo!”

43 Blush

44 Talk like Donald Duck

45 Volunteer to euthanize someone’s suffering pet

46 Use exclamation points

47 Hurry

48 Slow down

49 Enter

50 Exit

The above published in Storgy

Anchor 2

Anchor 3

Thanks, Schools, for Controlling Our Children’s Feelings.

Somebody Has to Do It.

By Kyle Heger

Even in these fractious times, there are a few things we parents can agree on. First, to succeed in our society, a person needs good behaviors. Second, good behaviors are largely caused by good feelings. Third, to make sure our children grow up to achieve success, we adults must control their feelings.

Unfortunately, we parents can’t always do this. We try role-modelling, rewards, punishments, rules, orders. But their feelings won’t always conform. Most of us don’t have specialized training to deal with a task this daunting. We don’t have time for it because we’re so busy working all day to churn out useful goods and services and spending the rest of our time consuming them.

Fortunately, allies to help us control our children’s feelings are as close as neighborhood schools. Educators there are already experts at making students toe the line cognitively: keeping them on track with the right facts, figures and technical skills. What many parents don’t realize is that these educators are in a position to also control students’ feelings: their emotions, attitudes, opinions, values.

If you want to find out how to enlist local educators in this campaign, you could do a lot worse than getting them to follow the example being set by a small school district in the San Francisco Bay area that uses four basic approaches to control “The Whole Child.” Let’s call it “District X.”

Approach One: “Feel as We Say You Must.”

Sometimes direct approaches are among the best. District X has great success simply ordering children to feel certain ways.

One of the main feelings it demands is positivity. A positive population is more likely to put its shoulder to the wheel. It’s less likely to waste authority’s time with foot-dragging or protests.

An elementary-school “Parent and Student Handbook” tells students, “Show a positive attitude ….” It doesn’t get much more direct than that.

In performance evaluations, conducted three times a year, a student here is measured on how well he “exhibits a positive attitude.”

Respect is another demanded feeling. In fact, it’s one of the “Big Three” rules at an elementary school in District X. Most dictionaries more or less define “respect” as a feeling of high esteem. And, because the “Big Three” don’t specify what’s to be respected, the implication is that respect is to be universally applied. People who hold everything in high esteem don’t generally stir up much trouble.

It turns out respect doesn’t have to be earned; it just has to be commanded. The same is true of attentiveness. The “Parent and Student Handbook” requires students to “focus attention on the speaker.”

Such dry language doesn’t go far enough to satisfy one gung-ho fifth-grade teacher. A sign in her classroom tells students, “Listen attentively the entire time with hearts and minds.” If it was worthwhile for our government to try winning the hearts and minds of Vietnam’s population while we waged war there, surely, it’s worthwhile for our schools to try to win them in an effort to socialize our children.

The district even uses a canned curriculum to spell out for students which feelings should be avoided and which should be cultivated, engaging them in homework and in-class exercises to practice “managing” emotions. Called “Second,” it’s provided by the organization Committee for Children. “Disruptive” emotions that it seeks to “manage” and “calm down” include anger, frustration, worry, anxiety and blaming. Feelings it seeks to cultivate include: focus, respect and being positive. You can’t get much more authority-friendly than this.

Approach Two: “Feel as We Say You Do.”

Educators here have also become skilled in a subtler form of manipulation: telling children not what they must feel but what they do feel. Think of it as authority making a declarative sentence (“You feel enthusiasm.”) as distinct from an imperative sentence (“Feel enthusiasm.”).

In some ways, the declarative form is more effective. It assumes as a fait accompli that students are already doing what authority says they must do. There’s no wiggle room. It’s as if compliance were a metaphysical, perhaps a divine, given. The message is that authority, at the least, knows children’s innermost experiences, and, at most, creates them.

Students here are assiduously told by teachers and parent-volunteers that they will enjoy, are enjoying and have enjoyed field trips. If adults do resort to a question, it’s along these lines: “We’re going to have a blast on this field trip, aren’t we?” or “Didn’t you just love that field trip?” They’re too smart to ask dangerously open-ended questions like “How did you feel about the trip?”

The “Parent and Student Handbook” shows educators here are masters of You-Talk by stating, “Our students want to contribute positively to the school. All students want to do well, be respectful … and value their learning.”

Approach Three: “Express Your Feelings as We Tell You to.”

District X has another trick up its sleeve: It instructs students to express particular feelings. This accomplishes two things. First, it requires students to have these feelings. Second, it requires them to “share” these feelings, to commit to them publicly.

Some of what it does in this regard is already standard fare across our great land. Kindergartens are told, near Thanksgiving, to create posters saying what they’re grateful for. The grateful feel that benefits they receive are a gift from above, and, as such, can be removed or withheld if they don’t continue to please authority.

And, of course, students are told they must say, “I’m sorry” even when they aren’t, as a way of “resolving” conflict. They’re told to use “dear” in letters’ salutations and “love” in their closings even if they have no affection for recipients.

The most spectacular example of the “Express Your Feelings as We Tell You to” type of manipulation here is a series of events and exercises held in District X last year under the rubric of the “Great Kindness Challenge,” a national program coordinated by an organization called Kids for Peace. Children had to make affirmations out loud in a group about how they “chose” to be “kind.” They also were required to make posters in which they finished the sentence, “I will light up the world with kindness by ….”

Approach Four: “We Will Express Your Feelings for You.”

Using this tactic, District X bypasses students altogether, steps into their places and expresses their feelings for them.

In the “multipurpose room” at one school, posters on the wall assume students’ voices, saying for them, “We Do Our best,” “We Know Learning Is Fun,” “We Are Part of a Caring Community.”

Encouraging her students to “share” information about themselves, a fifth-grade teacher has no hesitation in speaking for them, sending them a note saying, “We are so excited to learn more about you.”

A sign on a door, created by parent volunteers during Teacher-Appreciation Week boldly proclaims, “Thank you, Miss X. We Love You.”

Bringing It All Together

One fifth-grade teacher brings these approaches to feelings-control together in her classroom. Three lists are posted there, based on input she elicited from students. “Ways We Want Our Class to Be” includes the words “respectful, attentive, optimistic, compassionate, empathetic.” A “Please Do” list includes “be patient, be open-minded, believe in yourself, listen attentively.” A “Please Don’t” list includes “Be negative, give up, judge people.”

The lists are clearly the result of “brainstorming” sessions carefully orchestrated by the teacher. Which words did and didn’t end up on the lists were, of course, a foregone conclusion. And, though brainstorming is typically done at the start of the group decision-making process, here it was treated as an end-product without going through a critical thinking or editing stage.

This teacher has announced she will have students sign contracts agreeing to abide by these lists. You can bet that when kids were tossing these words around in a top-of-the-head way, they didn’t know they’d have to comply with them.

This visionary teacher also has students take turns serving as honorary members of the Feelings Police, or “scouts,” who watch for evidence that fellow students are complying with the above-mentioned lists in interactions with each other.

What a great way to make sure that, right from the get-go, kids won’t develop unrealistic expectations that there will be anything democratic or empowering in group decision making.

Parents in Unity

If you’ve read this far under the impression that feelings-control in schools is something supported only by the politically conservative, you’re in for a surprise. Sure, decades ago, in the name of “civil rights” for children, it was mainly people considered “Leftist” or “Progressive” that hamstrung authorities in public schools. Because of them, many schools no longer demand that children say prayers or say the Pledge of Allegiance. But times have changed.

Some of the most recent feelings-control efforts this district has undertaken have a decidedly progressive flavor. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, signs appeared in District-X schools proclaiming, “We believe: black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything.” Signs saying “No room for hate” have been posted in response to accusations that some high-school students in the district engaged in racist and anti-Semitic expressions.

But conservatives shouldn’t get too worried. Using administrative ju-jitsu, school authorities in the past have turned campaigns against school violence, sexual harassment and the marginalization of certain groups into rules against anger, spontaneous affection and value judgements.

Tomorrow, if the winds of politics change, the signs posted in District X schools could just as easily read: “We believe: white lives matter, fetus’ rights are human rights, no war criminal is illegal, creationism is real, indifference is indifference, obedience is everything” and “No room for critical thinking.”

Today, the practice of controlling students’ feelings isn’t tied to a particular political stripe. It’s hyper-political. It can accommodate the Red and the Blue, in fact everybody except those so radical they question the foundation of technologically-based consumer society itself.

School authorities in District X command one of the most important subjective experiences: conscience. They’ve decided in advance what social justice is. There’s no longer a need for messy grassroots debates.

The district makes students learn “Social-Emotional and Social Justice Competencies” as measurable technical skills. In a “Social Awareness” component, it teaches kids to feel, “I care about others.” In “Relationship Skills,” they learn to feel, “I am a good friend.” Often, the lesson is a blend of cognitive and subjective experiences. In “Knowledge of Social Inequities, children learn the lesson: “I know what is fair.” Yes, they know because their teachers have told them.

District X even makes forays into a subjective realm often considered more elevated than conscience: states of consciousness. It offers instruction in “mindfulness.” Perhaps the time will even come to revisit the idea of prayer in public schools. It’s not a bad idea, considering studies showing how useful such practices can be in making people happier and more productive.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve given you confidence in educators’ ability to put your children on the right path subjectively. But they can’t do it without the support of parents.

So, elect the right people to office. Be the voice of reason on the PTA. Present a united front with educators. Help children work within the system. For example, explain that pretending to have demanded feelings is just as good as actually feeling them, if you do it well enough. Motivate them by explaining that in today’s competitive job market, employers are looking for enthusiastic team players who can share their organizations’ core values, missions, passions and love for customer service. With the right attitude, they can grow up to take a big bite out of the American Dream: fast cars, smart phones, trips to Epcot Center. The sky’s the limit.

More than anything, trust educators. After all, you’re a product of the system they’ve heroically sustained for decades, right? You didn’t turn out so bad. Neither will your offspring.

The above published in The Penmen Review

A Forced March of Hilarity through the American Revolution

By Kyle Heger

“Give this a chance,” I urged myself as my gorge began to rise. I was watching a young woman pretend she hadn’t heard a classroom full of fifth graders return her greeting. She stopped dramatically in mid-stride, raised a hand to her ear and asked them, “What did you say?”

From one perspective, I should’ve long ago developed a tolerance for this kind of thing. I’d heard it inflicted on my son, Riley, and his fellow students before by a wide range of adults, including the principal at their public school, a camp counselor at a “working farm” and a docent at a “hands-on” science museum.

But the truth was that each repetition of this bit of showmanship built on the intolerability of the ones preceding it, making me wonder: “Do these adults really still believe that what they’re doing is in the least bit original, spontaneous, genuine, entertaining or even useful?”

Judging by the woman’s big smile, vigorous head-nodding and fist pump when the students gave a sufficiently ear-splitting response, I had a sinking feeling that she either really stilled believed it or was still good at pretending that she did.

Lights, Camera, Salivate!

Despite this less-than-auspicious beginning, I tried keeping an open mind to the possibility that these children would end up gaining some value from this “living history” activity and the weeks of effort leading up to it. After all, at the farm, they got a chance to run around a meadow with goats. That was nothing to sneeze at.

Perhaps, this project would have a pay-off too. Perhaps they’d learn something, develop their abilities to think critically and express themselves clearly, use their imaginations.

But it soon became clear that this activity wasn’t likely to provide such results.

I had come expecting to find some kind of “home-made” affair that the children had whipped up with help from teachers and maybe some parent volunteers. I was prepared for the winningly amateurish, the forgivably clumsy. But what I found was a canned, turn-key production by a third party.

This production resembled nothing so much as a reality-tv game show of the “turn up the volume and dumb down the content” variety in which everything is scripted and rehearsed, exaggerated and at the same time superficial.

True to form, students were divided into color-coded teams. You guessed it: red for the British, white for colonial loyalists and blue for colonial rebels.

The teams competed for a grand prize of a certificate. They earned points depending, in part, on how well members acted out historical scenes (The Battle of Saratoga) or recited brief speeches either in the roles of historic characters (John Paul Jones) or as “experts” in historical fields (the Coercive Acts).

Watching them try to earn extra points by coughing up answers to a quiz and by scrambling to beat the clock while piecing together a jigsaw-puzzle map, I couldn’t help thinking of Pavlov and his dogs. It’s called positive reinforcement.

Are We Having Fun Yet? Don’t Ask.

This game-show vibe came through loud and clear through the activity’s shrill emphasis on positivity. Students were expected to applaud wildly whenever one or more of them acted out a scene or spit out memorized lines. Of course, just like the audience in a TV game show, parents in the classroom reacted with enthusiasm too, clapping and yelling “woo-hoo” right on cue whenever the students did anything.

Every time points were given to their teams by the facilitator, students were also expected to stand and make whatever meaningless noise of triumph she’d assigned them. Parents even applauded these acts of self-celebration as if to say, “Good job of applauding your own team, Junior!”

This facilitator had all the spontaneity, sincerity and warmth of a game-show host, calling the students, “my friends.” Depending on how far one’s willing to stretch the definition of “friends,” I guess she might not have violated the word beyond the point of recovery.

I’ll say this for her. She wasn’t a slacker. She tried awfully hard to be funny: admitting that when put on refrigerator doors, the winners’ certificate would be ignored by students’ siblings; calling Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” and speaking in silly English and French accents. Of course, she makes the same jokes at each school where she does this, but somethings just never grow stale, right?

Humor was at such a premium that the audience even laughed when students pretended to be Crispus Attucks being shot to death by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre and Nathan Hale being led away to execution. Understand: These were “heroes” of “our side,” the colonists. Somehow or other, the parents had got it into their heads that these deaths were supposed to be funny. So, determined to be supportive of their children, they dutifully laughed. I hate to think what they would’ve done if they thought they were supposed to be amused by a re-enactment of the bombing of Hiroshima or the interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But don’t get the wrong idea. This show was not just about fun. Oh, no. It was about respect too. The facilitator insisted upon this. She was an iron fist in a velvet glove.

How does one show respect while reliving the American Revolution? Simple. Through attentiveness and enthusiasm. Enthusiasm meant being loud on demand. Attentiveness, the facilitator informed students, meant that they must be sitting upright at the edge of their seats. Further, they must keep their eyes and ears on her (anatomically challenging, to say the least).

How does one induce students to give respect? Positive reinforcement, of course. This time, in the form of lollipops, thirteen of them, one for each of England’s North American colonies. When the facilitator singled out individuals to be rewarded for showing respect, she turned on a flashing light. Students had to come up on center stage before the flashing stopped. Then, each removed a lollipop from a stand. Candies with golden sticks earned teams fifty points. When students picked these, they had to say, “Goody!” in a funny voice. When students picked lollipops without golden sticks, they had to say, “Bummer!” in a funny voice. When the children went back to their seats, they were instructed to say, “Nighty-night, Lolly.” Big surprise: They were told to say this in a funny voice too.

Take-Home Messages

The demand for positivity also extended to the content of the performance, to historical lessons students were meant to learn. In particular, the rebels and the country which they created were painted in a glowing light.

Sure, the facilitator took about thirty seconds to admit that Native Americans and African-American slaves didn’t exactly have equal rights under colonial rule. But she did it the way a TV station might run a public service announcement in favor of gun control in the middle of a Dirty Harry marathon.

The take-home messages fell into the predictable good-guy vs. bad-guy category in which “we” (the colonial rebels) were the good guys.

Benedict Arnold was described as “one of the worst traitors in American history” for switching from the rebel side to the British side of the conflict. But George Washington, Paul Revere and John Adams weren’t described as “traitors” for taking up arms against their government in the form of the British king, parliament and army.

According to the facilitator, the rebels “hoped the American Experiment” would bring “freedom to the colonies.” Really? What kind of freedom? For whom: slaves, indentured servants, the working poor, women, Native Americans? Or just rich, white men?

Also, according to the facilitator, the freedom colonists exercised by violently removing themselves from the rule of one government and setting up their own government is directly comparable to the freedom people in the U.S. have exercise today by voting, petitioning and protesting. For a reality check on how free we are to remove ourselves from the rule of our current federal government, consider what happened to southern states that tried to secede from the union.

Solidarity in the Warehouse

Trying to find comfort as the two-and-one-half-hour presentation wound down, I reminded myself that at least for this activity I hadn’t been required to sign a waiver absolving the sponsors of responsibility if my son was injured through the sponsors’ negligence. To that extent, it was one step above a YMCA camp and an art-instruction group with which Riley’s school does business. It was two steps above a bike-safety training organization that insists on even being absolved from responsibility for student injuries caused by gross negligence.

Also, if nothing else, by being there throughout the performance, I’d been able to express solidarity with my son, not the kind of solidarity that says, “Yeah. Celebrate what a wonderful thing you’re doing,” but the kind that says, “I’m sorry you have to endure this. But at least I can keep you company.” How depressing it was to realize that this was the same kind of solidarity I often end up expressing while visiting people warehoused in other institutions: hospitals, nursing homes and jails.

One Dimension Isn’t Enough

Also depressing was how eagerly other parents in the room lapped up this nonsense. They weren’t just tolerating it. I didn’t see any rolled eyes, hear any sighs. Apparently, it didn’t dawn upon them that these children weren’t learning much beyond a few lines they were forced to memorize and would soon forget. Other than a few kids who enjoyed hamming it up for a little extra attention, most seemed to go through the motions rather sheepishly, as if they felt a bit humiliated by the whole thing.

And why not feel humiliated? They weren’t there to think critically, be spontaneous, feel agentic, express themselves, use their imaginations. They were there to be told how to feel and think and act. They were there to smile and laugh and applaud on demand. They were there to be dressed up and posed like dolls for photo opportunities.

I shuddered as one mother cooed to another in the following vein: “Isn’t this great? I can’t believe that when we were kids, we just had to read books about this stuff.” Has our need for constant “entertainment” reached the point where the idea of reading a book seems so awful?

After the performance, a number of mothers descended upon the facilitator, assuring her in falsetto voices that she’d done a “wonderful job.”

But, of course, for most of the parents, the success of this project was a foregone conclusion. They simply couldn’t imagine not enjoying it, much less objecting to it. After all, the classroom teacher had sent a message home beforehand describing it as “an exciting and engaging interactive educational presentation of the American Revolution.”

In a follow-up e-mail message, the teacher told parents: “Students were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the experience; I think we can all agree, it's a great way to learn about history.” There’s all the proof they need that they’d been right to join in the celebration.

Sad to say, I believe these parents, if they thought they were supposed to do so, would cheer their kids for hitting each other with a dead possum. And shout “Encore” when they stopped.

The futility of my years of protesting such occurrences at this school led me to remain mute in the classroom. If I challenged them, these parents, I knew, could easily turn on me like a swarm of angry bees.

Back in the mid-1960s, social critic Herbert Marcuse warned of how in modern society, people are increasingly raised to be one-dimensional, able only to assent to and agree with the life options mass produced by social structures. What would he make of an ordeal such as this put on four decades after his death? And how many people except me are still able to care?

The above published in The Bookends Review

Anchor 5

Anchor 4

All you need is love (to make a sale)

By Kyle Heger

The Beatles hit the nail right on the head decades ago with their pop hit, “All You Need Is Love.” Their song was so prophetic it deserves to be the anthem for today’s go-go marketing world. Proof surrounds us every day in every way, on store shelves and our phones and computers, in our refrigerators, mailboxes and our hearts themselves.

Today, love is well-nigh ubiquitous. It’s almost impossible to find an ad, package or website that doesn’t have the word slapped on it, along with heart icons and pictures of people holding up their hands in the stylized figure of a heart.

That’s what I call progress.

But that progress didn’t come in a way that many of us in the chaos of the sixties would have predicted. Love has reached a high point in our society not because of protest and social division and political action but because of marketing. It has evolved over time, peacefully and productively, a testament to the inherent beauty of our capitalist system and intelligent design.

Because, to some extent, this evolution has been incremental, many of us might not see how much progress we’ve made on this score in recent years. It’s time to look around and appreciate what we have, to stop and smell the sweet, sweet love. So, please join me in considering the following examples of how closely linked love is with marketing. You might say it’s a match made in heaven.

Made with Love

Many businesses take the direct approach by telling us that products they sell contain love.

The variety of products “made with love” sends the mind reeling. Consider Washington D.C.’s Made with Love Catering. and Pennsylvania’s Made With Love Not Gluten Bakery and Made With Love Juicery.

Packages of cheese from Clover assure us the product is “The only cheese made with love.” I bet plenty of other cheese manufacturers would dispute that claim. But, hey, in a free-market economy like ours, a little competition is a healthy thing.

Annie’s macaroni and cheese is also “made with love.” The package tells us so, backing up this message with plenty of feel-good words (“joy,” “yum” and “yummy”) and images (bunnies, a peace symbol, a heart).

Gazing at this package, I’m remind of what another pop music sensation of the 1960s, Ohio Express, sang:

“Yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy
And I feel like a-lovin you
Love, you're such a sweet thing, good enough to eat thing
And that's just a-what I'm gonna do.”

But the fun doesn’t stop with food. Online, you can visit the “Fresh Made with Love” company, which sells “personal care products” or Bed, Bath and Beyond, which sells “The Made With Love Stoneware Cookware and Kitchenware Collection.” The subject line in an email message to customers of Ten Thousand Villages touts Christmas decorations “handcrafted and made with love.”

At a recent visit to a brick-and-mortar Office Depot I found a display where big plastic storage bins were sold beneath the announcement. “Made with (Heart Sign)”.

My personal favorite has to be the Love Is an Ingredient marijuana dispensary in Minnesota. Bring on those good vibes!

Love Is the Product

Some marketers, rather than saying their products are made with love, suggest their products actually are love by including the L-word word right up front in brand names.

On the internet, you can buy products from Love Shoess or Mad Love Shoes brands.

Reach for the Booda Butter Tub of Love made by Booda Organics, and slather on some moisturizer. “Spread the Love … All of our families and fans can now enjoy more buttery love at a better value!” gushes the manufacturer’s website.

If you’re willing to drop a few more bucks, you can buy a Love ToothBrush online. The company’s website says, “Engage In And Enjoy This New Quantum Leap Of Toothbrush Technology!”

Don’t let the $1,000 price tag for the Virgin Blue Edition Love ToothBrush freeze you in your tracks. Consider it an investment. Made in limited editions, these beauties are bound to rise in value. Think Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch dolls.

If you’re in the market for something else on the high-end side, why not indulge yourself by buying a Lovesac StealthTech at one of a number of different retailers in the U.S.? The website for the manufacturer, the Designed For Life Furniture Company, calls the product “An unparalleled, immersive home experience.”

For those who are still a little unclear on what the product is, the site explains, “With StealthTech, the next evolution in Sactionals has arrived, and it’s extraordinary.” A Sactional, it appears, is “the world’s most adaptable couch.”

These babies have speakers built in.

To get some idea of cost, I designed my own Lovesac online. The total was $6, 495.50, which is on the low end because I picked the least expensive options, with one notable exception. I added $525 for a Lovesoft filler. Here’s how the site describes this stuff: “A luxurious material that’s soft, supple, and resilient. Lovesoft keeps its lofty look without the need to fluff.” No need to fluff? I’m sold.

Target reaches for the stars when it comes to love, advertising that it has “Everything you love.” That’s what I’m talking about!

Ike’s Love and Sandwiches restaurant chain started in San Francisco, California and has now spread to other states. Imagine the gratification of sashaying in and saying, “The regular, please: a poor boy sandwich, a double helping of love with extra hugs and kisses, and keep the change.”

In San Francisco alone, there are 245 fictious business names that feature the word “Love.” Included are such worthies as Bottle Love (manufacturer of decorative, reusable water bottles), Love Berry (an ice-cream parlor) and Love Shack (a marijuana dispensary).

It's not only chains and nationwide brands that get in on the act. A business in Portage, Michigan is called “Peace, Love and Little Donuts.”

And who can forget the cultural icon Luvs disposable diapers? These treasures have been filling up our landfills for years and are still flying off the shelves.

A little more subtle are marketing plans that equate products with love but don’t actually use the magic word in brand names.

A TV ad for Macy’s says, “Give Love,” and shows a man unwrapping a present at a party. It’s … wait for it … his very own little drone. A mailing from the same company says, “Give Love. Give Style” and shows a young man cavorting about in camo pants and grinning widely. Nothing says “love” like drones and camo. Unless maybe it’s facial recognition technology. Or AI.

If you keep a sharp eye out for deals, you can sometimes come across incredible cost savings on love. For instance, signs on trucks for the California-based company Boulevard say it’s in the business of “delivering love, joy and happiness.” All three, presumably, for the price of one.

A billboard ad for Stella Rosa wine says, “Love is Stella Rosa.”

Uncle Matt’s Organic Orange Juice, headquartered in Clermont, Florida, gives us “love at first sip.” How romantic! My lips are tingling.

As a sign of things to come, Subaru trumpets these glad tidings about its electric vehicle Solterra: “Love is now electric.”

The Power of Suggestion (and Command)

Some companies stop short of telling us their products are actually made with love or actually are love. Instead, they settle for friendly reminders that we do or should love what they sell.

The Elephant Playing Cards company tell us, in a note that comes with decks, “We hope you LOVE your new deck” and “We (heart-shaped emoticon) seeing customers with their new cards!”

Over the internet, the Empire Today company invites people to “Love Carpet Again.”

TV ads for Honda offer, “More to Love.” Boy, that has “Vroom, Vroom” beat five ways to Sunday.

A message on the main page of Amazon.com told me it had “Lots to love for everyone.”

Clicking that link, I found various subsets, including: Most-Loved, Foodies, Same-Day Gift Finds, Date Night, Internet Favorites, Domino Magazine Picks, Kate & Quinn Picks, Ghetto Gastro Picks.

All were tempting, but I ended up taking a deeper dive into “Most Loved,” figuring it was the best-of-the-best option. I was greeted with this message: “Fill your basket full of love.”

Some things I found there: “Olaplex No.5 Bond Maintenance Conditioner” and “DEAYOKA Rose Quartz Gua Sha Tool - Asian Beauty Secret, for Facial Microcirculation/Removes Toxins/Prevents Wrinkles/Boost Radiance of Complexion - 100% Authentic & Genuine Rose Quartz” and “Facial Cleansing Brush by Olay Regenerist, Face Exfoliator with 2 Brush Heads.” As I always say, if you can’t love your bond maintenance conditioner, your gua sha tool or your facial cleansing brush, just what the heck can you love?

Point-of-sale displays for store brands at Lucky grocery stores say, “Quality You’ll Love” and “Love it or it’s on us.” Not to be outdone, Shinesty (proud purveyors of Ball Hammock Pouch Underwear) runs TV ads for underwear, promising, “Love your first pair or they’re 100% free.” These folks are actually guaranteeing love: putting their love where their mouths are, so to speak. What a breakthrough!

Of course, not just products but services are also marketed with reminders that we will or do love them. A TV ad for Chime tells us the service is “the # 1 most loved banking app.”

In bus ads, T-Mobile describes itself as the “most loved brand in wireless home service.” Comcast tells subscribers on its home page: “You're getting the ultimate experience on our next-generation Xfinity 10G Network … Enjoy everything you love with fast, reliable connections.” It’s mind boggling. And heart-boggling too.

On a TV ad for a nationwide cell-phone service, beaming customers can’t wait to answer the question, “What do you love most about Consumer Cellular?” (This company deserves extra kudos for another TV ad in which one of its representatives holds up what looks like currency cut into a heart shape.)

Ten Thousand Villages is back in the game with another email subject line for customers, saying, “You’re going to love these,” referring to such “must haves” as table clothes, clothes hangers, rain gauges, “good luck pigs” soap, earrings, baskets and scarves.

The computer-security company Norton said in a recent email message to customers, “Here’s a special offer we know you’ll love.” The special offer was a 10-percent discount on a “computer tune up.” The stuff that dreams, and love, is made of.

Some merchants go beyond simply predicting we’ll love what they sell. Instead, they instruct us to love it. Packages for Artisanal Pretzels by Eastern Standard Provisions Company, headquartered in Massachusetts, read, “Love every bite” and then, “… when it comes to snacking, we believe you should love every bite.” Gee, put that way, loving them is almost a moral imperative.

“Eat well. Laugh often. Love Mezzetta,” says a message on the bottom of lids for Mezzetta’s sun-ripened dried tomatoes.

“See the love” an ad for Bejamin Moore paints instructs us.

Trucks trundling Coca Cola across country say, “Love It Again and Again.”

“Come feel the love,” TV ads for Princess cruises say.

A bill from Bank of America orders us to: “Live your life. Love easy cash back.”

Falling in Love Again

In the old days, “falling in love” applied only to a romantic love for another person. But now that marketers have had a chance to work their magic, it can mean almost anything.

“Feels like falling in love on every aisle,” proclaims a Grocery Outlet truck.

A web service called Buzzfeed seems to churn out an endless supply of lists of products with which we will fall in love.

The first one I stumbled upon was titled, “35 Products You’ll Fall In Love With Right After The First Use.” The author started out by asking, “Did I fall in love with my Billie razor the first time I used it? Absolutely.” What greater credibility could I ask for?

The products included such gems as: seamless rib bike shorts “for a buttery soft addition to your daily routine”; Baker's Edge, “a brownie pan to ensure each piece has at least two chewy edges, so fighting over the coveted end piece will become a thing of the past”; and a car dip clip “so you can drive WHILE dipping your nugs and fries, because it's important to drive safe WHILE enjoying ketchup.”

And, again, there are companies that command us to fall in love with something, using imperative language.

A Los Angeles, California company called “Spread the Love” that makes peanut butter and other “nut spreads,” says “Fall in Love” at the top of its home page.

I recently got an unsolicited “notification” from the Sygic GPS Navigation service on my cell phone, directing me to “Open for the Sweet Deal and fall in love with Premium.” Who in their right minds could resist?

And again, Ten Thousand Villages is up to speed with an email subject line telling customers to “Fall in Love with handcrafted leather bags.”

It's not just companies that get in on this action. A city in Northern California instructs people to “Fall in Love with Novato!”

No product is too obscure to demand our love. “Fall in love with Danish chocolate coated licorice,” says an ad on Amazon.com for a company called Lakrids by Bulow.

They Love Us. They Really Love Us.

Tons of organizations say they love us. So, no matter what we buy from them, it’s pretty much a matter of our buying love.

“One Well Loves You” proclaims a sign for One Well beer in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A sticker next to a cash register at a bagel store in Berkeley, California says, “We Love Our Customers.” It’s unclear if the message is supposed to come from American Express, which has its logo on the sticker, or from the store itself. Either way, it’s the thought that counts. And the feeling.

A business that sells Korean-style BBQ sauces online actually calls itself, “We Love You.”

Some organizations also ask for us to love them or their products or services in a reciprocal “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship.

An ad for Xfinity makes the connection pretty obvious, saying, “Love Your Home Network and It'll Love You Back.”

Referring to its product “Love Sticks,” California’s Judy’s Breadsticks company says, “This isn’t bread, it’s therapy … Taste the magic…You’ll Love Them and We Will Love U!!”

The grand prize when it comes to loving companies has to go to Aspen Dental which says in its TV ads that it is “loving our patients unconditionally.” Sheer genius.

Whole Lot of Lovin’ Goin’ on

Some companies push the envelope when it comes to using the language of love. Sometimes their enthusiasm for love reaches an almost orgiastic state where it’s difficult to figure out exactly what they’re saying. But it’s all good. This kind of Dionysian ecstasy is where a lot of the world’s poetry is born. It just means the companies’ hearts are in the right place.

Here are a few uberenthusiasts that really caught my attention. I want to give each a big, beautiful, glitter-covered, heart-shaped award for going the extra mile when it comes to love.

The website for Harry Winston Inc., headquartered in New York City oozes love. It leads off with the headline, “Winston With Love,” and increases the voltage from there, saying,

“This exceptional fine jewelry collection chronicles the extraordinary phases of love with diamonds and colorful gemstones. Like an acrostic poem, each letter represents a different phase of love, from the first light of affection, to a passionate obsession, to the ultimate vow and an eternity together. With each phase, the feelings of love grow stronger and more meaningful. This gemstone jewelry collection offers a modern interpretation of the signature Harry Winston aesthetic and consists of 39 pieces separated into 4 unique chapters: L ─ Winston Light, O ─ Winston Obsession, V ─ Winston Vow, and E ─ Winston Eternal. Discover all of love's magnificent possibilities in this exceptional collection of gemstone rings, earrings, and necklaces.”

Los Angeles, California company GT’s Living Foods LLC, has this to say online:

“Buy Kombucha. It’s a gift of love.

“GT’s Kombucha

“Pure Love

“Blood Orange · Hibiscus · Rose

“Love knows no color, gender, race, or boundaries. It warms us up on a cold Winter’s day and radiates beauty from within. Our Kombucha is our greatest gift of love, and we’re honored to share it with the world.

“Express Your Love

“Post a selfie with any @GTsKombucha bottle and someone you love using #GTsPureLove. Each month, GT's is gifting one winner a special weekend getaway to share with their loved one.”

The web site for a company called Scentsy, based in Meridian, Idaho, says: “We're completely in love with fragrance — and how it makes life better. Share the Scentsy love with inspiring fragrances and new ways to show off your style. Our products are sold all over the world by the best people ever: Scentsy Consultants. (You can be one, if you want.)” It also says, “Shipped with love.” Although that last part probably goes without saying.

Lovelight Solutions, based in San Francisco, is “a professional, experienced, and values-based contractor, supplier, and consultant specializing in developing turn-key lighting efficiency projects for commercial and multi-family properties.” What a mouthful. A mouthful of love, that is. The first four characters for the company’s phone number spell out LOVE. Its website says, “We strive to integrate our values of LIGHT into our work: Love, Integrity, Generosity, Hope, & Tenacity.” Its logo is … you guessed it … two light bulbs intersecting in such a way that they look vaguely like a heart. Adorable.

What’s Not to Love about Love?

Even if the word “Love” or “Luv” doesn’t appear in marketing materials, and even if the business or product or service doesn’t have any clear conceptual association with love, you can almost always find at least a heart symbol on their signs. A short list includes the online store Etsy, CVS pharmacies, Pampers disposable diapers, Burlington coats, Polk speakers, General Mills foods, Aetna insurance and Polly Pocket dolls and toys.

The practice has almost become obligatory as a sign of corporate good will. One can’t help being suspicious of a company that doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, in the same way that one has good reason to be suspicious of people who won’t wear American flag pins, take loyalty oaths or say prayers in public schools.

I optimistically look forward to the day when the word “love” or its graphic equivalent will be prominently displayed in every ad, email message, billboard, package, receipt, bill and website and will be repeated there many times.

To me, it’s indisputable that the way love has enfolded marketing in a great big bearhug is a good thing. A very good thing. It offers me hope for the future. It means that something just as important as money is moving business now. And love is only one part of this transformational trend. The same forward movement is happening with joy, pride, passion, unity, community and respect. Yes. Things are looking up.

Some social naysayers complain that love has been commercialized, commodified. Well, all I can say to such party poopers is, “If this is what commercialization looks like, then give me a double helping of it.” Of course, I’m not some overly educated East Coast leftwing secular-humanist elitist. I’m just a regular person who happens to be brimming over with love.

“Glass is half empty” haters suggest that the increase in the use of the word “love” for more and more applications has led to a kind of verbal “inflation,” in which the value of the word goes down as the frequency of its use goes up. If we followed that line of reasoning, we’d soon be trying to put limits on all the good things in the world: sunshine, sports spectaculars, ice-cream sundaes.

What those negativists don’t get is that this is not just a love-love situation. It’s a love-love-love-to-the-degree-of infinity situation. Everyone wins. It’s synergy at its best.

I’m so grateful I live in a society where I can eat, sleep and drink love. Be clothed by love. Brush my teeth with it. Long gone are the days when love was narrowly reserved just for a few special people or God or Country. Today love is a universal commodity. It’s for everything and everyone. What could be better?

So, come on, everybody, dig out your wallet and join me in a rousing chorus for our new anthem as we go marching starry eyed into a brighter future. O.K. Here we go. All together now: “All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love. To make a sale!”

Published in Blue Villa

Obituary Blues

By Kyle Heger

When my mother died recently at 93, having struggled with congestive heart failure and severe arthritis for years, I wasn’t surprised that the news hit me hard. Such losses and consequent feelings are a natural part of human relationships. What did surprise me was the nightmare I experienced trying to inform people in her community that she’d passed away. Using an obituary for this purpose was once fairly simple. But not today. The task turned out to be a case study in some of the worst sides of today’s communication technology. It has left me singing the Obituary Blues.

I wanted my mother’s obituary printed in her local newspaper to let the many people in her community who cared about her know of her passing. Living on the other side of the country, I didn’t have quick access to her address book to reach people by post or telephone or email. Because many of the people who knew her were in their sixties or older, I believed the time-honored medium of a printed newspaper would be the best way to reach them.

My first step along this journey was using an online search engine to look up the newspaper nearest to where my mother had lived. Let’s just call it “The Gazette.” She’d read it daily for decades.

Clicking “Obituaries” in the search engine’s first listing, I was uneasy at finding myself not at “The Gazette” but at something which I’ll call StateLive, the new owner of that publication.

I next clicked a button called “Submit Obituaries.” The page to which that led had no direct way to submit an obituary. Moving on, my next stop was a menu item named “How to Submit an Obituary.” That didn’t say how to take this action either. So I selected yet another menu item named “User Guide.”

You might have noticed that people don’t talk much about an “Information Superhighway” anymore. The reason why should be obvious: The web has turned into a maze of dead ends and blind curves through which users must spend a great deal of time picking their way to retrieve little nuggets of information. As they do so, they’re exposed to plenty of ads, product placements and other marketing messages. The providers of the sites certainly don’t want us to speed past these messages. After all, they make good money inflicting them upon us.

Finally, I found an overview of the process. It wasn’t until the end of it that I was informed this service cost money. I’d suspected as much because I’d been in the unfortunate position of arranging other family members’ obituaries in the not-too-distant past and had been required to pay through the nose. In the slightly-more-distant past, newspapers had run an obituary I’d written for my father without charging me a penny. They considered placement of such announcements a part of their public service.

How times have changed.

Disturbingly, no price was mentioned. I’ve begun encountering more and more websites that don’t give users prices until unconscionably late in the searching/ordering process, a way of manipulating them through investment traps in which they’re unlikely to waste the considerable amount of time they’ve put into the process by backing out at the last minute just because prices are too high. But I hadn’t expected a newspaper to give me the same mercenary treatment I’d received online when trying to buy tropical fish for my aquarium or book a snowshoe tour in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Next, I had to open an account. The first step was to prove, three times at least, that I was a human. This is a double standard we face too often these days. The system with which I was dealing, the system to which I was going to be paying money, wasn’t human. If I required it to prove it was human before doing business with it, neither it nor I would get very far, but, hey … them’s the breaks for today’s “consumers.” Who said businesses and consumers play on an even field? Nobody who knows anything about the market economy, that’s for sure.

Once I’d proved myself to the system, I went through the usual rigamarole of entering data about myself, agreeing to seemingly endless terms, and picking yet another in a voluminous collection of usernames and passwords which I must remember (fat chance!), write down (frowned upon by cybersecurity experts) or keep all in one place digitally (as if that’s really safe).

Then, I found myself at the first of six steps which had to be taken in order. In the first, I was required to choose which of six publications the obituary would run in. In the second, I had to choose a “package” such as a print-and-online combination obituary or an online obituary. Third was my chance to “create” an obituary.

How I longed for the day when I’d simply been able to mail in, and later fax, and still later email the wording I wanted printed, and maybe a photo.

I spent a lot of time at this stage. It featured a series of boxes to fill in with titles such as “Introduction,” “Personal Story,” “Family,” “Memorial Services,” “Final Connection” and “Other.” Each contained precise instructions. For instance, the one for “Family” contained the following cryptic instructions: “Preceded in Death (by and date of death). List in order of date of birth, spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings and any nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. Survived by: as listed above.”

“So much for self-expression,” I told myself. Earlier that day, I’d spent quite a bit of time writing and editing an obituary and passing it by my sister for input. Now, apparently, I had to chop it into raw data and fit the pieces into a format digestible by this system.

It wasn’t until I’d reached the last item that I discovered there was an option of simply pasting the obituary I’d already written. I couldn’t have seen that option from the top of the page, where I’d begun the laborious process. I consider myself lucky I saw it at all because it wasn’t highlighted in any way.

Clearly my time isn’t important to the company that runs this system. If it was, it would have given me the option of using my own words and own format right up front.

Moving on to stage four, I was allowed to choose a date for the obituary to run in print. Before picking a date, I looked at a little box that had finally shown up indicating cost. It said “$30.” For the first time during this grueling process, I felt pleasantly surprised. I’d been expecting the obituary to cost a lot more.

It turned out my pleasant surprise was short lived.

As soon as I picked a date, the price went up to $546.87. Bang. Wham. Boom. The investment trap had been sprung, and I was its most recent semi-willing but far from happy victim.

Along the way, the process had made my skin crawl. The system referred to me as a “customer,” rather than a “client” or “user” or some other, less commercial, term. It referred to the obituary as an “ad.” Yes, there I was advertising my mother’s death. That gives you a pretty good idea of the tone of the whole thing.

I was funneled along a profit-shaped course as if what I felt, what I wanted to say, was of no importance, as if my mother was of no importance except as an excuse for the company to squeeze money out of me.

Often, it was unclear what information I was required to give and what I was simply asked to give. Even though the obituary I’d written clearly stated we weren’t holding a funeral or memorial service, in a preview of the obituary, I saw a prominent announcement that a memorial service would be held at the funeral parlor. I had to go out of my way to delete that information.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t exercise the same free choice when it came to other built-in features of the system. For instance, although the obituary said we weren’t accepting flowers in honor of my mother, when people read it online, one of the first things they saw was an option for giving flowers. Guess why. I hope you won’t accuse me of being overly cynical if I suggest it has something to do with money paid by flower retailers to the service running the obituary. Even though the obituary said we were asking people to make donations in my mother’s honor to the American Library Association (she was a public-school librarian for 30 years) or her local senior center (in which she’d been an active participant), the site lists a great many other nonprofits to which people can contribute via embedded links, nonprofits that neither my mother nor any family members chose to include. These are listed with graphics, catchy typography and color with which my humble black-and-white plain text obituary cannot compete.

I wish I could say that, when I finally got the obituary up and running online and scheduled for the print edition of the newspaper, I was finished singing the Obituary Blues.

But no such luck.

For one thing, my attempts to complain about the process to a human being who works for the company providing this “service” were unsuccessful.

When I scrolled to the bottom of the page on which my mother’s obituary is listed, looking for contact information, I found I was on the site of a nationwide company providing online obituary services. In other words, trying to do business with “The Gazette,” I’d been taken to a site which had the name “StateLive” prominently displayed, but which was really run by something else, a third party that hosts online obituaries.

In today’s economy, despite the popularity of “transparency,” it’s harder than ever to find out who you’re dealing with online. For one thing, so many transactions are passed off to third parties. For another, organizations don’t facilitate communication between users and employees or even list employees’ names. For all I know, Walt Disney was calling the shots from a cryogenic tube somewhere, chuckling gleefully, cracking his frost-encrusted knuckles with satisfaction, making us dance like Pinocchio on strings.

I tried the “Contact Us” link. With a sickening sense of familiarity, I found that the obituary company made me choose between a number of “canned” topics. When I picked the most general one (because it sure didn’t include one called “Complaints”), I was treated to a long list of Frequently Asked Questions, none of which had anything to do with my purpose. Finally, I found a phone number and email address, but at this point, I’d decided I wasn’t going to get what I wanted there. I figured a company that specialized in commercializing online obituaries wouldn’t listen to complaints about the practice of commercializing online obituaries.

Instead, I decided to reach somebody directly at “The Gazette,” hoping whoever I contacted would have enough memory of the way newspapers traditionally operated that he or she would see how the publication’s ethics had slid. I take newspapers seriously. Or at least I used to. Not only because my mother was so devoted to them. Not only because I have a degree in journalism and worked as managing editor of a print publication. Not only because my first wife was a newspaper journalist. I also take them seriously because for many years they played a significant (if flawed) role in sustaining parts of our society that are at least somewhat democratic.

I thought maybe I could reach somebody at “The Gazette” through its parent company, StateLive, so I visited its main page. In its “Contact Us” section, a generic email address was given, but I didn’t want to reach some robot or an underpaid, overworked, uninvested employee. I wanted to reach somebody in authority who had some journalism background. There was no listing of staff members.

It didn’t take me long to give up the forlorn hope of establishing meaningful, human-to-human contact on this topic.

When I returned to the obituary online to see how it looked, I was immediately greeted by a message from the obituary company that I hadn’t seen before, saying, “We help to honor and remember.” It went on to say “(The company) brings people together to celebrate the lives and legacies of those most important to them. Help us provide the best services and resources to families in need. Please disable your adblocker and enjoy … (the) … full experience.”

At one level, the word choice was disturbing because it asked us to “enjoy” obituaries. It conjured up unwelcome images of people grinning from ear to ear and exchanging fist bumps, crying out, “Yeah. Break out the popcorn and Slurpees. It’s obituary time!”

Worse, the wording made it sound as if the company is motivated primarily by charity.

Of course it’s not charity that motivates the company to ask me to drop ad-block defenses when viewing the obituary.

It hadn’t occurred to me until I actually saw such a message, in addition to all the marketing come-ons the system uses for flower vendors, funeral parlors, nonprofits and other interests embedded in its pages, that the company might also stoop to using actual ads.

My ad blocker told me it had excluded 14 ads. Gritting my teeth, I disabled the blocker to see what was inflicted on viewers who weren’t using ad blockers. I found a motley assortment of everything from “Michigan's Best Breweries” to eye lubricants, from insurance companies to Miralax vying for business on my mother’s obituary.

Parasites.

What’s next? Ads on urns, coffins, tombstones? How about on remains themselves?

So much for honor and dignity as we see off the dearly departed.

Even after the obituary was online, the nightmare continued. Each email message I got from the company informing me of a new comment or photograph posted on the obituary also came with plenty of marketing pitches.

After enough months had passed that it seemed nobody else would be adding comments or photographs to the obituary, I figured it was time to include in a scrapbook I was making of memorabilia associated with my mother a hard copy of the 110-page obituary and peoples’ contributions to it.

I tried printing out what I saw online, but, quite unexpectedly, the photos kept changing order. So, for example, one time pages 1 through 10 might include photos A through J, and another time, pages 11 through 21 might include A through C and K through P. The task of assembling the pages in order without duplication being maddeningly frustrating, I decided to tolerate my disgust with the obituary company long enough to order a print copy I’d seen advertised on the website.

The trouble was: I couldn’t find it after searching, searching, searching. I knew the company had such a thing because my sister had ordered one. Eventually, I ended up taking what for me was the desperate measure of clicking on a little popup window saying I could “chat” with someone to get “customer service.”

After I described for the person what I was trying to do, she proceeded to ask me to describe what I was trying to do, apparently able to digest the information only when it was spoon fed to her in the proper dialogue boxes. Next, she said she was going to turn me over to an “expert” and that I’d have to pay a five-dollar deposit with my credit card, which would be refunded to me after I’d been helped. That didn’t make much sense to me but I was so eager to get past this stage that I agreed to do it.

After I authorized the charge, the “expert” came on. I don’t know what happened with the background information I’d given the first customer-service person. Maybe it went into that special section of the void where all the information I repeat and repeat and repeat on voice-mail calls goes instead of being forwarded to the next phone-system gatekeeper. In any event, I had to repeat it all to him. His “help” consisted of telling me to look “here” on the obituary website for information on ordering, and when that didn’t work, to look “there.” Eventually it became clear to me that he knew nothing about the website in question and so must be working for yet another company, a fourth or fifth party. When I asked him this, he confirmed it, and I told him I was going to cancel our conversation because I didn’t think he’d be able to help me.

A few weeks later, a credit-card bill showed I’d been charged more than fifty dollars by the company for the chat. I guess that’s the going rate for having my time wasted. I wish it had occurred to me before the chat started that the company’s business model is built on taking as much time as possible to answer people’s questions so they it charge them more money.

I eventually ended up just saving the obituary and its comments and photos to a PDF file on my computer and printing it out that way without trouble. It was a work-around. It seems I spend more than half my life now resorting to work-arounds and “hacks” to get results.

This isn’t the way life should be.

***

As a public-school librarian, my mother enthusiastically helped lead her school into the computer era in the seventies and eighties. But she ended up retiring early in large part because of her growing objection to the way the education system was being shaped around the technology rather than the other way around. In the last few years of life, she grew so frustrated by the dysfunctionality of online technology that she stopped using email and the world-wide web even though this cut her off from some of the ways she’d become accustomed to connecting to the world outside her home. I’m sure she would have appreciated this essay as much or more than she would have appreciated the obituary itself.

When my time comes, I hope those who survive me and care enough to commemorate my passing will spread the news by tacking a written notice on the nearest utility pole. Or stuffing a note in a bottle and tossing it in the San Francisco Bay. Or using a bullhorn to announce the news from the Golden Gate Bridge. Doing anything except howling the obituary blues as I’m doing after being alienated, dehumanized and exploited online.

Published in Santa Clara Review

Goodbye to Hello

By Kyle Heger

If I don’t greet you as we pass each other, cut me some slack. After all, you’re a stranger. And I no longer make the first move when it comes to acknowledging strangers. After 64 years of engaging in the practice, I’ve decided it’s no longer worth it.

For more than a decade now I’ve increasingly found that when I greet people I don’t know in public (stores, sidewalks, lobbies, etc.), either they don’t return my greetings or return them grudgingly. And hardly ever does anyone else make the first move.

Before I describe this phenomenon and my reaction to it in more detail, let’s get a few things straight.

First, greeting strangers isn’t something I’ve done all these years because it’s so much fun. Usually, I did it automatically, almost subconsciously. More recently, I did it because I felt it was the right thing to do, a practice I couldn’t give up any more readily than I could washing my hands after using the toilet.

Second, I don’t expect every greeting to be returned. I know occasionally I’ll encounter people so preoccupied they really aren’t aware of my greeting or so involved with something else they choose not to respond. I don’t always object to such interactions.

Field Studies in Depersonalization

I began to notice an overall breakdown of greetings between strangers about 15 years ago, here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to some extent over much of California and the country.

At first, I questioned myself, wondering if I was doing something to cause this change. But I didn’t detect anything in my appearance, facial expressions, tone of voice or body language significant enough to alter people’s reactions to me.

To learn more about this trend, I started taking careful note of what happened out on the street.

Interactions ranged from the most fulfilling (both parties initiating a greeting at the same time, the public-encounter equivalent of a mutual orgasm between lovers) and the least (me giving the greeting my all and the other completely non-responsive, the equivalent of someone putting in an athletic sexual performance to be rewarded with a snore). In the “average” encounter, if I didn’t acknowledge the other person first, even with something as simple as eye contact, no greeting would occur. If I made eye contact, it wouldn’t be returned. If I made it harder for the other person to act as if he or she wasn’t aware of me by making a greeting out loud, the person would respond with a pained smile or a nod of the head. If I went all out, making eye contact, smiling, saying “Hello” and waving, the person might smile and say “Hi.” The point is that almost always what I got in return was less than what I put into the transaction, as if it came under protest with the unspoken message: “I’m damned sure not going to encourage this kind of liberty!”

People pretended they didn’t see me. They went to great pains to look everywhere but at me. Or look at me, but not at my eyes, or look at me as if were an inanimate object, say a fire hydrant. Sometimes, even when I included all the bells and whistles in my greeting, there was no acknowledgement I even existed. This was as likely to happen as we squeezed past each other with inches to spare in a crowded hallway as it was when we were the only two people on a park path.

Perhaps worst were the times they looked at me just long enough to decide I wasn’t worth interacting with, then looked away.

Considering Causes

Various explanations for this unwillingness to engage in basic courtesies with strangers have occurred to me.

Maybe population growth is responsible. People in densely populated areas such as New York City or Tokyo tend to interact less with strangers because there are just so many of them. The population where I live has certainly grown, and the San Francisco Bay area is urban. But incidents of the type that disturb me aren’t ones that only occur in crowded places.

Maybe it’s caused by an increasing proportion of people in my area who were raised in cultures that traditionally restrict eye contact more than the one in which I grew up in Michigan. My wife reminded me that in the part of China where she was raised, casual, public eye contact was discouraged. But this explanation can only be very partial. First because the behavior isn’t limited to people raised in such traditions. Second, because the lack of response goes far beyond eye contact.

Clearly our increasingly digital lifestyle is partly responsible by depersonalizing us in some ways. Certainly more people than ever are so absorbed in cell phones they don’t notice their immediate surroundings. In these situations, I don’t let the fact they’re “busy” exempt them from responsibility for responding to me. The private can extrude itself too far into the public, annihilating the public from people’s awareness, and me along with it.

This depersonalization extends beyond phone use. Apparently, people now hope to slide by each other unnoticed. They’re so accustomed to trying to control messages sent and received electronically they assume real-life people can be controlled this way. If I’m not on their speed-dial lists or a member of their online “communities,” I’m just a number that should be blocked, probably a spammer.

In any case, explanations only go so far in terms of justifying stinginess when it comes to greetings. I’m part of the overall society that shapes these people. Why don’t they “do” greetings while I still do?

Is it fear that stops them? Are they afraid that by engaging with me they’ll invite an unwelcome interaction, that I’ll ask for a handout or tell my life story or threaten them physically? I find this explanation unsatisfactory justification for an overall lack of responsiveness. In the first place, most of them don’t act afraid. Yes, I know fear can be hidden or even unconscious. But for the most part, people I’ve encountered who don’t greet or who under-greet radiate smugness and a sense of superiority much more than fear. And isn’t accepting a certain minimum level of risk part and parcel of being out in public? I take a risk by greeting them. Shouldn’t they take the risk of reciprocating my greeting?

Are they motivated by dislike of what I seem to represent: my race, my age, my sex, whatever? Again, the diversity of people who don’t respond to my greetings is such that this doesn’t strike me as a believable explanation for the overall trend.

I’m pretty sure that on an individual basis the reluctance to greet me results from calculation. People do a quick-and-dirty cost-benefit analysis, consciously or not. They conclude that possible costs of greeting me outweigh possible benefits.

I object to being summed up and spat out in this kind of market analysis, as if people are just another commodity to be accepted or rejected in an era of synthetic demand.

I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Say Hello. I’ll Say Goodbye

When I complain about this to friends and family members, I often get a response something like, “It’s such a small thing, you shouldn’t let it upset you.” But it’s precisely the fact that it is a small thing that makes it so objectionable. What I want is so little it should be easy for people to give. I’m not exactly looking for an I-Thou dialogue in these interactions, just a nanosecond of mutual acknowledgement. And consider this: Individual transactions are small, but the trend overall is anything but small.

Until now, I’ve resisted the temptation to simply stop taking the initiative in greetings, even though this would prevent me from suffering constant rejection. I don’t want to become “one of them,” to pretend, to avoid, to resist a natural and beneficial urge to reach out. I don’t want to tacitly approve of obliviousness, the kind that makes it easy for people to buy sweatshop products as long as they don’t have to see the workers, pollute the air if they don’t have to bear the brunt of climate change, stuff down mouths full of factory-farm meat provided they don’t have to witness livestock being tortured.

But the frustration caused me by all this rejection has become too great. I don’t believe I can change this behavior on the part of others or my reactions to it. On the other hand, I’m not ready to exile myself from public. So, I’ve decided to surrender to the extent of not initiating greetings with strangers. I’ve decided to become part of the problem.

If our paths do cross out in the great wide world, and you’re the one in a hundred who greets me, I’ll respond. Otherwise, I’ll just pass you by like all the other zombies and robots do. I just hope I’ll be happier doing that than I am now.

Published in Masticadores Canada

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way:

A time-travel Exercise to Weigh the Pros and Cons

of Your Digital Life

By Kyle Heger

With digital technology putting society through massive, unprecedented changes, we could all benefit from clarifying the role it plays in our lives. Hence the following brief mental exercise. Be forewarned: It requires a little time travel. But you’ll end up back in our current day … for better or worse. It also poses some questions that challenge your way of thinking. But, don’t worry, you’re up to the task.

So come on, take the plunge.

Cards on the Table

Before we get down to the nitty gritty, let me put my cards on the table. This is a rhetorical essay. I hope that by its end, you will have come around to seeing things my way, if you don’t already. But I won’t try to do this with facts and figures, anecdotes from my life or quotes from “experts.” I’ll try to reach you by calling upon your experiences: your memories, your imagination, your values, your feelings, your critical thinking. My biases should become clear if you continue.

I accept the risk that I might fail in my attempt. Will you accept the risk that I might succeed?

Step One:

The first step is picturing our world in a time far different from now.

This era has some digital technology, including personal computers, the internet, email and cell phones.

But imagine that your behavior isn’t constantly tracked and recorded through these devices. Neither are you spied upon by credit-card and ATM readers; video cameras; facial scanners; wireless health-monitoring body implants; and devices within cars, TVs, sprinkler systems, adjustable beds and heaters. Product manufacturers, service providers and anonymous recipients won’t store data on your information searches, the things you read; the pictures, movies and videos you see; the audio recordings you hear; what you say to people and what they say to you; where you go; what you buy; how you use appliances; even what your pulse, body temperature and facial expressions are. Algorithms won’t process this information to develop psychological profiles of you so anyone with enough money or authority can more effectively manipulate you behind the scenes: selecting the results you get on search engines, what appears on online maps, what ads you’re shown, what email and text messages you get.

Picture a time when ads aren’t being thrust down your throat wherever you turn. Do schoolwork. Read books; magazine articles; obituaries; invitations and messages from doctors, government officials, employers and schools. Make and receive phone calls, fill out surveys, buy tickets to performances and pump gasoline. All ad-free.

In this time, your decisions matter. Services don’t by “default” surveil you with “cookies,” put you on text and email lists, sign you up for recurring credit-card payments and subject you to unwanted “upgrades” of software. You aren’t forced to have a cell phone, credit card, email address or Facebook account to do business. Your mere visit to a website isn’t considered to be “informed consent” to its provider’s terms. Schools can’t subject your children to privacy-invading, commercialized, online “educational services” without your consent.

Devices accommodate you, not the other way around. Once you’ve learned how to use books, pens, typewriters, telephones, CD players, TVs, video players, postage stamps, envelopes, maps, telephone directories, cash and checks, you don’t need a lot of retraining. For the most part, these devices don’t break down, and when they do, they’re relatively inexpensive to replace. They don’t require frequent maintenance; a constant supply of energy; enough “bars”; or an ever-growing number of passwords, user names, pins and other methods of verifying your identity. You aren’t required to keep spending time and money staying “up to speed” and dancing to the tune of every “service provider.”

Business is a rather straightforward transaction. You give businesses money in exchange for products or services. Communication systems aren’t designed to squeeze everything they want from you (money, votes, compliance) with the absolute minimum of expense on an ongoing basis. In order to get what you want, you’re not forced to sign up for accounts, agree to usage terms, deal with third parties. There’s no need to spend half your life on voicemail waiting for help you never get while listening to marketing messages, sorting through menu options that don’t apply to you; and identifying yourself repeatedly. Service providers focus on “user friendliness” rather than “user manipulation.”

Communication systems aren’t all about control. They’re not hardened bunkers where authorities hide anonymously, sniping at you with precisely targeted information, while deflecting unwanted messages from you. They don’t require you to drop your electronic defenses (ad blockers, cookies-blockers, VPNs) when you do business with them, forcing you to run a gauntlet of marketing messages to get even a little bit of basic information, such as prices, schedules, business hours.

Best of all, this era is not haunted by artificial intelligence systems that render the self-actualizing, growth-promoting process of human creation obsolete. You won’t have these systems making decisions about your life using one-dimensional (albeit super-powerful) binary logic devoid of senses, imagination, emotion, conscience and consciousness. They won’t be lurking in the background, making it unclear who and what you should believe by creating convincing facsimiles. In this world, artificial intelligence won’t threaten our survival, regarding our emotions, imagination, spontaneity and instincts as an obstacle to its imperatives.

Step one is finished. Welcome back to the present moment. It might surprise you to learn that the world I’ve asked you to imagine isn’t plucked from some utopian future. It actually existed on earth in 1990. You might be too young to remember it. Or you might have half-forgotten it.

I hope this little trip back in time shows that today’s digital technology isn’t intrinsically necessary for our survival. We managed without this level of it pretty recently. In other words: It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s important to understand that this exercise pertains only to the world as it’s shaped by digital technology. It doesn’t refer to other ways in which the contemporary world compares to the one in 1990, for instance: on one hand, the rise of white supremacy movements and an increase in climate change, and on the other hand, the rise of movements to empower marginalized populations and protect the natural environment.

Step Two:

The next step in this exercise is to ask yourself: How do I feel about the time I’ve visited?

Probably, you feel pretty good about it on one level because absent from it is so much that’s wrong with today’s world.

But on another level, you quite likely would prefer not to live in such a time because you believe you’d need to give up too many benefits attributable to today’s digital technology.

Step Three:

Now, the third step: a simple cost-benefit analysis to of living in the world described above and living in today’s world in terms of digital technology. The pro-side of today’s digital technology is vociferously expounded daily by teachers, employers, reporters, advertisers and friends and family members proud of their latest “accomplishments.” The con-side is suggested above.

But, as you perform this analysis, please ask yourself some important questions regarding how your views of our present digital culture have been shaped.

Question: Is my mindset based on inevitablism, a belief our current technological system will exist whether I want it or not? Inevitablism is rooted in the idea that this technology is necessary. But as our time travel shows, just a few decades ago, we managed to survive without our current type of digital technology. Only for a tiny slice of hundreds of thousands of years as a species and thousands of years as “civilized” creatures have we relied on it.

It’s not just a matter of sheer survival either. Can’t the argument be made that overall, in those days, human life was at least as worth living as it is today, that our lives were at least as gratifying?

Even if you answered “yes” to the question immediately above, you might think something like this: “OK, we didn’t require this type of technology then, but we do now to survive and live gratifyingly because the world is more complex and our needs are so much greater.”

But consider the possibility that some of life’s most important parts, including loving relationships, critical thinking, acts of conscience, social solidarity, justice, insight, self-expression and sustainable practices, don’t require our current type of digital technology.

Identify a current problem in our world. Take climate change for example. Sure, current types of digital technology can help identify some causes of this problem and give us information on how to slow or reverse it. But even if we were using the technology of 1990, we could still end and reverse climate change. Just as was the case then, so is the case now: We can burn less fossil fuel, we can stop chopping down rainforests to grow palm-oil plantations and grass for cattle to eat, we can reduce the amount of livestock we raise and so reduce the amount of methane emissions from their gastrointestinal wastes, etc.

Technical knowledge cannot replace wisdom. Indeed, sometimes it runs counter to it.

Question: How big a role does the sense that “everybody’s doing it” promote my use of current digital technology? Whether or not we want to admit it, most of us are susceptible to peer pressure and the not-unfounded belief that to be accepted at school, at work and even in less rigid social situations, we must show we’re comfortable with or even enthusiastic about the latest technology. This sense can also be closely linked to inevitablism, leading us to feel that, even though we wouldn’t choose to have our current technological system, it’s so popular that it isn’t going away, so we might as well get what benefit we can from it. Also, the sense can stem from the feeling that because people and organizations you know and respect use them, these systems cannot be very problematical and the realization that by avoiding such widespread systems, you make work more difficult for yourself.

Question: Do I assume digital technology is synonymous with “progress”? Much of people’s attachment to our current digital technology and the way it will likely grow more powerful comes from a belief that it’s inextricably linked with progress, an overall betterment of human life. I’m far from being the only person of sound mind who questions the whole idea of progress, (as distinct from change), but I won’t wage that battle here. But I will suggest that there are many more types of progress than that represented by digital technology. What about progress of love, justice, insight, creativity, parts of life that can’t be measured in pixels, gigabytes or megahertz?

Question: To what extent has my mindset been shaped by the incremental way today’s technology has grown? Although the use of digital technology has increased rapidly, it’s also crept forward in stages, each stage accepted as a “new normal,” because it’s not that big a change from yesterday’s normal. Unfortunately, it can be a huge change over the normal of a decade ago. Eventually the accumulated changes can be catastrophic.

Question: Do narrow or short-term benefits from our digital system make me continue to support it despite my understanding that its wider and longer-term risks aren’t worth it? We all know that people are prone to continuing behavior that ultimately costs more than it gives. Just ask the third grader who can’t resist stuffing down more cake even though she’s already on the verge of vomiting or the consumer who buys another bottle of household cleaner made with palm oil because it costs a few pennies less than a brand without it, even though he knows the palm oil was produced on land that once contained a rain forest. Immediate gratification can be a slippery slope.

Unselfish motives for using digital technology don’t exempt people from falling into the same penny-wise, pound-foolish trap. Pay heed, nonprofit administrators who use cookies to spy on supporters, send no-reply text and email messages, and work hand-in-hand with Google, Facebook and Amazon. Do your ends justify using these means when you have alternative methods available?

Question: Is it possible that email, social-media, computer games, and retail sites skew the way I subconsciously think and feel about these services, reducing my ability to view them rationally? These technologies rely on various methods, usually without users’ knowledge or consent, to keep people “hooked” on their services. It’s called “The Attention Economy” for a reason. Consider the extent to which you’ve been conditioned to stick to websites, check your email constantly, respond quickly to every notification on your cell phone. Pavlov’s dogs might have felt something similar.

Having looked beneath the surface of why we feel and think the way we do about digital technology, it’s time to decide which world you prefer and then proceed to the next step.

Step Four:

Now, you’ll decide what you want to do about our current digital world.

If in step three, you concluded that you prefer living in today’s digital world, then you probably don’t want to do much of anything about it.

If you’re one of these people, I wish you luck, but, sadly, I can’t predict it because I’m convinced that unless the current state and direction of digital technology is stopped, the world will become a much worse place to live: more dehumanized, exploitive and alienating.

If you ended up concluding that you preferred living in the 1990s, then you probably hope I’m right when I say it doesn’t have to be this way. But you also probably don’t have many ideas of what to do to improve our digital situation.

If you’re one of these people, I also wish you luck, but sadly, again can’t predict it. Although the growth of digital technology’s control over our lives isn’t inevitable, stopping it will be an uphill battle.

However, for those of you who voted for the 1990s, I hold out hope on two fronts that something positive can be done to return us to those conditions.

On a larger scale, perhaps, as more of us suffer from results of techno-trends, a mass movement will arise to slow, stop and reverse the trends. It’s a long shot, but it’s possible. In this eventuality, as a culture we would backpedal furiously away from the brink of digital disaster. We could turn our backs on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. We could stop investing in, engineering, maintaining, selling, buying and using digital products and services that exploit and control us. We could start voting for people who want to roll back digital technology’s stranglehold. Think of a bigger version of the grassroots campaign against cigarettes. Or the one against the Vietnam War. If that doesn’t work, perhaps at least a few individuals and groups of people will find ways to resist the trends and hang on to some independence and humanity for an indefinite time … little organic islands of life and civilization in a wasteland of mechanism.

Fortunately, choices for our digital lives aren’t limited to these two years. Each year has a different level of digital technology. We can accept parts of those eras and reject others. Any way you cut it, the real challenge is to confront the underlying technocratic paradigms and social structures in which the dangerous sides of digital technology are rooted.

The real question is: What will you do? Will you continue to perpetuate this technology? Or will you work to return us to a more human, more organic culture? If you’re still on the fence, consider not just the past and the present but the future. Do you have a sense of where this trend is leading: wireless ads during funerals, inaugurations and trips to the toilet? RFID tags and bar-code chips implanted in people at birth? QR-code tattoos? Facial-recognition technology and audiovisual systems recording every step you take? Mandatory brain-computer hookups? These things might seem like science-fiction to you. But a lot that’s happening today seemed that way back in the 1990s.

Published in Cardinal Sins

A Warning from the Future: Digital Dystopia

By Kyle Heger

Hello, it’s me. Or perhaps I should I say, “It’s you.” This is your future self from the year 2025.

I’ve come back to 1995 because during your 35th birthday party you’ve just made a wish to know what technology will be like thirty years in the future and have blown out the candles on your cake.

You’re at the peak of your optimism about digital technology. As managing editor of a magazine, you’ve parlayed desktop publishing into big cost savings for your employer. You’ve begun to put issues of your publication on the worldwide web and to discuss them with readers via email. Cell phones are exciting novelties. If prices comes down, you might get one for emergencies. For the most part, voicemail has only shown its good side as a somewhat fancier version of convenient answering machines most people and organizations use.

Unfortunately, I must tell you that, in 2025, digital technology won’t live up to your positive predictions. In fact, it will be creating the kind of dystopia you’ve seen portrayed in books, TV shows and movies.

Privacy invasion will have taken on nightmare proportions as massive amounts of information about the public are vacuumed up digitally. Much of the invasion will happen by default, in the background, without people knowing it, with everyday items turning spy.

Voice-activation will be one culprit. Marketed as a great convenience that allows users to operate devices without having to push buttons, it will allow cell phones, computers and other devices with microphones, even when you’re not actively using them, to automatically record your voice and the voices of people in your immediate environment and send these recordings to the devices’ manufacturers or service providers. Sometimes, you’ll be able to request that this spying stop, but there will be no guarantee it will.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg: Many email providers, including the most popular, G-mail, will automatically record the content of all your incoming and outgoing email messages.

So much for privacy.

But the problem will go way beyond that. Information sucked up by digital devices will include: the names, phone numbers and email addresses of people with whom users communicate; the messages people post on social-media websites; how much money people spend, what products and services they buy, who they pay; where people live; locations they’ve visited; what internet searches they make; what technology they use, how often they use it, what they use it for; how fast they drive; what TV shows, movies and videos they watch; what songs they play; what they do on their jobs; what schoolwork students do; what online games people play and how they play them; what banks and insurance companies people use. It’ll even include information on people’s facial expressions, eye movements, tones of voice, body language, heart rates, blood pressures and blood chemistries.

The internet will host a feeding frenzy for those who want to profit from personal data. Most websites will use cookies and other tracking technology to gather information about visitors, often even after they’ve left the sites.

And cell phones will be just one of the many “smart” devices that spy on users, sending information about them to manufacturers and service providers, thanks to the “Internet of Things,” which will include: cars, televisions, children’s toys, electronically-adjustable beds, home heating systems, burglar alarms, wrist watches, eye glasses, devices implanted within the body for health-maintenance or convenience or security purposes, and, tying many of those “services” together, “virtual assistants” with names like Alexa, Cortana and Siri. I guess marketers steered clear of the name “Hal,” suspecting it might conjure up to many images of the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

This vast pool of data can be used by any private, public or nonprofit organization that can pay for it (or that can use a subpoena or other legal means to extract it). It can be used to determine whether or not you’re a good “candidate” for all kinds of things: insurance, loans, employment, government surveillance.

This data will also be used for mind control. Organizations will cull through it, using algorithms to build psychological profiles of you. These will indicate what kind of messages will motivate you to make desired behaviors (spend money, vote in a certain way, sign a petition, give a positive review, comply with various rules).

Privacy invasion won’t stop at extracting information about you. It will also involve inflicting you with a constant stream of manipulative messages based on your profile, delivered by email; cellphone text messages; websites; and, of course, over the phone, radio and TV; in the remaining print media; and by the postal service.

Sometimes, these messages will be undisguised ads, many customized for you based on your profile. Ads will be delivered in all the ways used in your time but also will insinuate themselves, almost inescapably, into many other social interstices: cell phones, websites, internet videos and music, credit-card and ATM payment stations, even schoolwork and official messages from schools and government agencies.

Often, however, these messages will take the form of marketing pitches disguised as “courtesy notices,” confirmations, surveys and constant updates on deliveries (“Your order has been received.” “Your order is being prepared.” “Your order has been shipped.” “Your order is in transit.” “Your order has been delivered.” “What did you think of your order?” “Is it time to re-order?”)

Online sites will have plenty of product placements to subliminally direct purchasing behavior. Searching online for the best way to get from one place to another, you’ll get driving directions, but you’ll also receive plugs for businesses along the way (ones that have paid for the privilege).

Even information people get online that they believe is based on unbiased logic (for instance as “news” or as responses to search-engine requests), will often actually be based on marketing strategy. This information will commonly take one of two forms. In its most obvious attempt at manipulation, the content will directly plug products or services. In its more deceptive form, content won’t directly plug products or services but ads and other marketing messages will target users while they’re reading the information. This content won’t be selected on the basis of its truthfulness, accuracy or usefulness for users. Instead, it’ll be picked on how well it keeps their attention, for instance by flattering them or confirming their preexisting opinions. This will increasingly trap them in “filter bubbles” that exclude messages that challenge them or expose them to a range of facts, arguments and viewpoints.

News media in your time certainly has flaws, but from my vantage point, it looks pretty good. It conforms to some journalistic standards. It acts to some extent as if it had public responsibilities. Although it’s biased in favor of its corporate owners, advertisers and the social status quo, these biases are obvious and can thus be taken into account when trying to get to something approaching truth. Perhaps most importantly, because news media are so few, they form a common ground upon which public argument can occur.

In contrast, news media in my time will be filtered to keep viewers or listeners engaged rather than being edited to meet journalistic or public standards. It will often be anonymous, its biases frequently hidden, and confined to separate “silos” so people won’t be able to easily cross-check news to which each other is exposed.

While digital manufacturers’ and providers’ control over information they get about you and send to you will have increased dramatically, your ability to get information about them and send information to them will have withered away to almost nothing.

Digital technology will make you play hide and seek to receive information you take for granted in your day: product-operation instructions, prices, the availability of products and services, the times of performances and activities. To get this information, you’ll have to visit websites, open accounts, come up with usernames and passwords that conform to providers’ standards, log in and search for the information. Even getting the names of contact people, provider postal addresses, phone numbers and direct email addresses will be like pulling teeth. With increasing frequency, “customer service” will amount to conversations with “chatbots” that take you through excruciatingly long gauntlets of pre-programmed questions and answers before finally announcing that they can’t help. You’ll spend an obscene amount of time on voicemail, listening to marketing messages, identifying yourself, and choosing from options that don’t apply to you.

Sending information to digital manufacturers and providers won’t be any easier than getting information from them. Often, it’ll require you to use the same chatbots and voicemail systems you visited to get information. Sometimes, the only way you’ll be able to reach providers will be through their canned email systems that control which person or department gets your message, what the message’s subject line will be, how much time you can spend writing it, and often how many words (or even characters) you can use.

It won’t be difficult to discern who controls traffic on the much-vaunted “Information Superhighway,” or as it would more accurately be called, the “Information Stranglehold.”

To do business with providers of digital devices service, you’ll have to jump through all kinds of hoops. Flaming hoops. Of course, to do business with you, they won’t have to jump through those hoops. They won’t have to prove they’re human (not artificial intelligence systems), accept your cookies and ads, agree to your privacy and usage terms, open and sign into accounts you control, be shunted to third parties of your choosing, or waste time on your voicemail.

The digital world will be strictly a sellers’ market where the advice “buyer beware” will take on new urgency. Sellers’ communication systems will be weaponized. Users will be dehumanized, treated at best as a barely tolerated inconvenience digital providers must overcome to extract renewable resources.

Opting out of this Kafkaesque system will be almost impossible. More and more business (including government transactions) will be done only online and will require users to have email addresses and to use certain hardware and software. These will vary from provider to provider and change frequently, making consumers spend increasing amounts of time and money “staying up to speed” technologically. People will be required to make payments electronically and to carry cell phones to scan QR codes, send and receive text messages, enter buildings, make reservations, keep their places in line and identify themselves.

Partly, people will be kept in this meatgrinder by functions in the “Attention Economy.” You’ll see people all around you, everywhere you go, all day long, fixated zombie-like on cell phones while driving, biking, crossing streets, pushing baby carriages, guarding banks, piloting ferries, at religious services and public meetings, in schools, doing homework, eating meals. They’ll race to pick these devices up whenever they make a noise indicating new input has arrived, practically salivating ala Pavlov’s dogs. They’ll check their email and social media sites constantly. Even the president of the U.S. will be known to visit his social-media platform one hundred times in a day.

Many of these people will know they’re addicted. They won’t feel gratified by their online time. They’ll feel the opposite. But they won’t be able to stop because … guess what? … they’re addicted.

Of course, they won’t start out this way. They’ll have to be trapped by a system not unlike that used to funnel cattle into slaughterhouses without alerting them to the danger ahead. When applied to people, behavioral psychologists call it the “architecture of choice.”

Almost everything about services provided on these devices will be designed to use what researchers have discovered keeps users “engaged,” including colors, graphics, fonts, sounds and site “mechanics,” compelling goals that are tantalizingly out of reach, unpredictable but desirable “rewards,” and the feeling they’re making “progress” as they interact.

News items, search-engine results, social-media messages, videos and other messages will be filtered to give priority to those with maximum engagement power: telling users what they want to hear; exciting them through references to sex, violence or the grotesque; or making them angry.

Engagement tricks will include threats that products or services available online are in short supply, the use of popular brands and characters, and the chance to create and “inhabit” self-created avatars.

Online “community” influence will be brought to bear on visitors of social-media and group games, compelling them to spend more time there.

Online games will be wildly popular and particularly addictive, partly because they’ll be so immersive, partly because many will coax players in by being easy at first then growing more difficult to keep them challenged. Leaderboards will show comparisons of how well players have done in different categories, appealing to their competitive urges, urging them to stay online to catch up or stay ahead.

This persistent redirection of people’s attention to digital devices will result in poorly informed people with shortened attention spans; narrowed ranges of education and opinion; a penchant for polarized, angry and intellectually shallow messages; an increased expectation of immediate gratification; a lack of skill in interpersonal transactions in the non-digital world; and a reduction of abilities to spell, construct grammatically correct sentences, compose, calculate, translate languages, and navigate physical environments.

And, with the growing popularity of virtual reality and the emergence of a “metaverse” in which users will go from gaming to shopping to social-media sites all without leaving what feels like a three-dimensional world, people will be even more immersed in a digital system than ever.

I’ve saved the worst for last: the rise of artificial intelligence as a real-life power.

One of the most obvious problems with this technology will be the way it takes jobs from people. The many jobless will include blue-collar workers, customer-service providers, retail salespeople, medical-care providers, lawyers, writers, visual artists, teachers and even people in tech industries themselves. Not only will they lose the ability to support themselves. Many will also find themselves deprived of a way of life which was a means of growth, education and self-actualization, a cornerstone of identity, a pathway to self-esteem and reputation.

As if those social costs weren’t enough, consider what will happen to government services (providing education and medical care; maintaining infrastructure; and protecting workers, consumers, marginalized populations and the natural environment) when deprived of tax dollars once paid by these people when they were employed.

Also, consider what having artificial intelligence instead of people perform work will mean for consumers. Would you prefer buying products and services created by fellow humans, who can be held accountable to a social contract, most of whom operate according to at least some moral code, and some of whom even take pride in their work or those created by anonymous systems that can’t be held accountable and that don’t care if you live or die and aren’t even aware you exist? Would you rather buy goods and services made with feeling, imagination, conscience and good intentions or ones that are simply rolled out to fit an algorithm?

Artificial intelligence in control of key social systems such as finance, medical care, utilities, transportation, the news media, law enforcement and the military, could bring about great destruction if damaged by accident or misused by governments or other factions.

To the extent that artificial intelligence reflects human values, it can be awful, for instance by unintentionally codifying and magnifying its creators’ racism, sexism and other prejudices.

But to the extent that it doesn’t reflect human values, it might be worse. Some leaders in the development of this technology admit that super-powerful artificial-intelligence systems able to program other artificial-intelligence systems or to reprogram themselves could threaten the very existence of society or even all life on earth, seeing us as either active threats to their goals or at least as overly inconvenient impediments to efficient functioning.

Electronic technology reaching that level will be the ultimate triumph of scientific objectivism, a paradigm based on the assumption that only the quantifiable has reality or importance. Of course, it will also be the defeat of our species, and the death knell of phenomena such as I am

Ironically, many of the problems this paradigm purports to solve (such as hunger, climate change, despeciation, cancer, pandemics) are largely caused directly or indirectly by the paradigm itself.

On that note, I will leave for now. I hope you’ll take steps to reign in digital technology or to set up ways for you and your loved ones to escape the worst of its ravages. Even if the laws of physics won’t permit you to change the future from which I’m speaking, you might be able to do something in the intervening years to change futures following the one I inhabit.

This message has taken just a few seconds, although it has felt longer to you. You’ve been good about avoiding expressions of dismay. Other people in the room haven’t noticed anything wrong. The smoke from your extinguished birthday candles still hasn’t fully dissipated. Cut yourself a big slice of cake and while they all sing, “Happy Birthday to You,” try to smile.

You’ll have plenty more birthdays. Just keep making those wishes and blowing out those candles.

Someday, I might be able to reach you again from a future beyond this one. Let’s hope I can bring you better news then. But don’t count on it.

Published in The Ana