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Prepare to Send Christmas Cards

It's not a moment too soon to be thinking of sending Christmas cards -- next year's Christmas cards.

My favorite variant of the often tiresome annual ritual requires almost a year of preparation. This variation is not a common custom yet -- I know of only one person who has followed it -- but the advantages should be obvious, starting with furthering the inclusive camaraderie of the holiday season.

My introduction to this singular custom came decades ago when a holiday card arrived in the mail signed by a woman I didn't know -- let's call her Carol, because I no longer remember her name -- "and Charles."

The return address on the envelope was that of an inspiring high-school teacher and valued friend, Dr. Charles Goddard. That explained Charles' signature, but Carol, the primary signatory, was a mystery and there was no further explanation enclosed in the otherwise traditional Christmas card.

Charles was not only unmarried; he was gay. Had he taken up residence with the mysterious Carol, perhaps in a relationship of convenience in the dark closet of mid-20th century America?

The following December I received another holiday card, in a very different style, signed by someone else I didn't know ... "and Charles." Again there was no further clue on the murky domestic relationship between Charles and my newest Christmas card correspondent.

Charles was never one to explain excessively. He was a Socratic teacher, challenging his students to think for themselves through wry and glancing observations and understated, deceptively obvious questions. It worked again; that second Christmas season I immediately grasped his technique and the underlying ethic:

Charles was storing the Christmas cards he received each year and sending them out to others the following year, adding only "and Charles."

The device helped me to understand the importance of two cultural phenomena that became fashionable a number of decades later: recycling and social networking.

If you'd like to save a few trees and to join me in honoring a foresighted teacher and impish free spirit, now is the time to store the Christmas cards on your mantel for re-use next year. In December 2011, just append your name to the original senders' and mail the cards to friends, relatives and colleagues.

Feel free to add a third name to the list of senders: "and Charles."

Posted By: Peter Y. Sussman (Email) | Dec 29 at 02:30 PM

You Cannot Argue With the Earth

(Inspired by Haiti, January 2010)

You cannot argue with the earth.

You can lie back on the earth in the light or sleep there in the dark, waking to find it light again.

You can sleep with others on the earth, wrapping yourselves together and finding new peace and strength in each others' closeness.

You can light fires on the earth.

You can gather with others around those fires and huddle together for warmth and company.

You can tell stories around those fires -- stories of people you've met and things you've done, and you can retell stories you've heard from old people or those who have traveled far away.

You can sing around those fires and learn the songs others sing ... and stand, join hands, and dance.

In the daytime you can go off on your own and gather fruits and nuts and other food you found on the earth and bring it back to the fire and cook it and share it.

You can collect other materials on the earth -- sticks and rocks, reeds and sand and clay -- and use them to build shelters on the earth, near the fires where you gather.

You can bury seeds in the earth and watch them grow into plants that, in time, will provide new seeds.

You can pick fruit and nuts and other food from the plants that have grown from the seeds you placed in the earth, and trade that food with those who have gathered their own food that grew from seeds they placed in the earth or from plants they found there.

You can carry some of the food that's too plentiful to eat yourself or to share around the fire, taking it to others who are gathered together elsewhere on the earth, and you can bring back with you things you never dreamed of before -- and new stories, of course.

You can give your place on the earth a name, different from all the other names of places on the earth, a name that people elsewhere can remember, along with the people and the stories that come from there.

You can build new shelters on the earth for the young, when they grow and leave your shelter.

You can come together to help others, especially the frail and elderly, to build or improve their shelters so that they can continue to live easily on the earth.

You can build bigger shelters on the earth when others come from afar to join you, and you can teach them how you learned to build your shelter.

You can tell your stories around those fires on the earth to those who have joined you from afar, and they can tell you stories you haven't heard before.

Sometimes, with the help of others who have learned to do things you can't, you can build big buildings on the earth where no one lives, places big enough to dance, to sing, to tell many stories to each other, places big enough to trade your extra things with others who have things they no longer need to survive on the earth.

Sometimes those bigger buildings will fall down on the earth, but you will learn together how to build them better, and soon you will be building together great structures where no one lives, where you can teach the young how to build such buildings on the earth and where you can tell them the stories you know.

You can build buildings on the earth where people gather to find ways to help each other do complicated things that no one can do by themselves, the things the old people have learned.

When some of those who have gathered with you around the fires and in those buildings die, you can bury them in the earth, and build markers to remind others that they were here and what they have done.

In time, as more and more of you gather near your place on the earth, some will feel compelled to move elsewhere, perhaps to find the people who first told those stories that someone repeated in your own place on the earth, around the fire.

Those people who have moved elsewhere on the earth can send back to you new stories from other places on the earth where they have gone -- and perhaps things they have made or bartered there.

Those people who have moved elsewhere on the earth can return to visit where they came from and to gather with those they left behind, perhaps around that fire on the earth, and they can laugh and remember old stories and songs, and maybe they will dance together around that fire.

Some of those people who have gone elsewhere can come back, years later, to resettle on the earth they left, accompanied now by husbands, wives, children and friends they met elsewhere, and they can build their own shelters on the earth -- bigger than those in which they grew up, sometimes made from materials you never heard of before -- and they can fill those shelters with unfamiliar things brought back from afar.

Sometimes the earth where you live can become too dry from lack of rain to grow food, or the earth itself may seem to rebel in other, unspeakable ways, ways you've heard about in old stories, and your fires can be extinguished and your shelters can fall back down onto the earth, along with the bigger buildings you have built on the earth with each others' help.

After you have had time to bury your dead in the earth and grieve for them, you can lie down together on the earth once again and draw new strength and comfort from each other.

Where shelters have fallen down on the earth, as they will, you can relight old fires and join together around those fires to mourn those whose own stories have ended and to plan how to build new shelters on the earth, drawing strength from the stories you remember that were passed down from those who first built the shelters on the earth and are now buried in it.

When rains return to parched earth, you can replant where once before you had buried seeds in the earth.

Other people on the earth, in places where it is not too dry or where buildings did not fall down -- perhaps people who once lived in your place and gathered around your fire, or people who have learned from others the name of your place and heard its stories -- can join you in your time of grief or send you something to help you survive until your place on the earth has had time to recover and you can rebuild your shelters and gather together again in the warmth and light of new fires to tell new stories about your ordeals and the people who did not survive them, stories that will be retold later to children and to people elsewhere long after you have died and been buried in the earth.

You can do all these things on the earth -- and more -- but

You cannot argue with the earth.

(First published on Huffington Post.)

Posted By: Peter Y. Sussman (Email) | Jan 20 at 01:11 AM

Gatesgate: A lesson plan

The police officer who arrested eminent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is said to be an excellent and sensitive cop. He teaches a class in racial profiling. Here are a few discussion points he might want to add to the syllabus. They come from a white layperson who has written often about criminal justice issues and given a good deal of thought to the sort of ambiguous confrontation that led to Gates' arrest.

These suggestions for the lesson plan are occasioned by the incident in which Gates became embroiled, but none is specifically intended as a comment on that case since there is no way for outsiders to accurately determine what occurred during the confrontation inside that house in Cambridge. They are advanced as points worthy of consideration in similar situations.

First lesson: If an officer arrests a citizen for an offense that is not the one he or she was investigating at the outset and arises solely from the officer's interaction with the arrestee, then there is an extra burden of proof on the officer. When the arrest results from such a personal interaction, in the absence of imminently dangerous and overt threatening activity such as the brandishing of a weapon, it likely represents a subjective and suspect assessment on the officer's part and not a clear-cut violation of the law.

Second lesson: Officers who enter a home or a tense encounter suddenly, as most do at some point, must realize that their presence will heighten animosities that have no necessary relationship to illegal activity.

Third lesson (an elaboration of the second): People get angry. When angry enough, they are likely to swear or shout or verbally abuse the officers whose very presence sets off such outbursts. This anger and acting-out are understandable (albeit not commendable) emotional responses and are not an indication of illegal activity. It is not illegal to be angry or to shout. The First Amendment protects speech, and there is no law mandating citizen politeness to authorities. It is the officer's duty to defuse tense situations with calming talk or such other means as would be helpful (see next lesson).

Fourth lesson: After the original cause for an encounter has been resolved -- as it apparently was when Professor Gates proved he was the resident, not a burglar, in his own home -- then the officer must urgently consider the friction his very presence is likely to engender ... and leave the scene promptly. His or her job after the original reason for the encounter is resolved is to avoid escalation or the creation of a new issue.

Fifth lesson: Altogether too many people who have been cleared of suspicion in a crime are nevertheless arrested for resisting arrest or disturbing the peace or interfering with an officer in the performance of his or her duty. An officer's hurt feelings may be legitimate and infuriating to him or her, but they are not an indication that a crime has been committed. The burden is on officers to do everything in their power not to incite such crimes or they become complicit in the infraction.

Sixth lesson (and the first to address race or class at all): When dealing with a member of a race or class with an ingrained distrust of police officers, based on past, individual police behavior or historical social-control practices -- and even contemporary practices in some areas -- it is incumbent on officers to understand the reasons for the residual hostility they are likely to encounter and take extraordinary measures to calm the resulting tensions peacefully and sensitively. Whether the distrust is merited in the circumstances of the current encounter is irrelevant.

Seventh lesson: When officers are white and suspects are not, there is an even greater chance that extraneous resentments may greet even the best-intentioned officer. It's not fair that conscientious officers bear the burden of historical resentments engendered by others, but it is a fact that they must be prepared to address with a sensitivity that is based on imaginative as well as practical training techniques. They must be taught empathy, not just control, if they are to perform their duties equitably. And, once again, this is even more true when there is no longer evidence that a crime has been committed requiring any police presence.

Eighth lesson: With effective training comes a recognition that instinct is often suspect in dealing with "other" race and class groups, so methodical reasoning is all the more essential. For example, a reasonable assessment of a burglary suspect would certainly take into account that a middle-aged man who walks with the aid of a cane, wears rimless glasses and has a slight paunch -- and no professional burglary tools in his possession -- is most unlikely to be the culprit in a residential burglary. The burden of proof shifts to the officer, to prove his or her case.

These lessons are not a comprehensive list and they are not rules, but the kind of awareness they exemplify might have defused the tense Gates encounter short of arrest and would significantly reduce arrests of other innocent civilians nationally. Officers need to take continuing classes to familiarize themselves with the social divisions in a multicultural nation; they need to understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what their presence represents to others. Unless the police department itself is diverse, individual officers will not develop the deep cultural understanding they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

In the broader picture, Professor Gates' reported anger and hostility are unfortunate but irrelevant. There was no crime until the police presence itself created one. Therein lies an urgent problem that law enforcement must address ... urgently.

(This post was first published on Huffington Post a week ago, before the recent "beer summit" between President Obama, Vice President Biden, Henry Lewis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., Police Sergeant James Crowley. If issues such as these were addressed over beer at the nation's most hyped bull session, they were not announced to the public. The issues remain of critical national importance, whatever personal accommodation has been reached among the original parties to this dispute.)

Posted By: Peter Y. Sussman (Email) | Aug 01 at 10:45 PM

Meg Whitman: Save Marriage

Meg Whitman has a problem with our right to marry, but it's not at all clear what that problem is.

The billionaire former eBay boss, now running as a Republican for governor, spoke to a gathering of "high-profile high-tech Silicon Valley women," reported Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. According to Garchik's source, Whitman said she'd voted for Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, based on her religious convictions and her emotions.

Whitman added, as if to stake out an "above-the-fray" compromise position: "You know, I just wish there were one term for everything: civil unions."

Here's where I started getting lost, because there is currently "one term for everything." It's called "marriage."

For some reason, Whitman apparently prefers her own "term for everything," as a substitute for the one that has been universally recognized for ages, in this country and elsewhere.

Under Whitman's system, Garchik reports, "government would grant civil licenses only. It would be up to individual churches to decide who they would marry."

Again, that's the current system exactly: Government grants civil licenses, called marriage licenses. They are civil documents only, with no religious significance whatsoever. If churches wish to perform their own rituals using the civil marriage license, they are welcome to, and most have chosen to do so. They are free to perform that ritual for any gender combinations they wish. Civil authorities have no right under the Constitution to control how churches use the civil license in their rituals.

Similarly, couples who wish to be married outside a church, using the same civil marriage license, are entitled to do so, receiving the same civil benefits and responsibilities as those who "consecrate" their marriages in a religious institution.

Whitman's essential point seems to be that, although she wants to retain the nationally recognized civil license, she objects to it being called what it's always been called: a marriage license. She apparently wants all of us who were married years ago, as well as those who will be married in the future, to change the name of the license that was or will be issued for us. Why? Is she trying to disrupt traditional marriages like mine by changing the name of the license that first bound us legally and gave us and our children certain civil rights, privileges and obligations?

If any religious denominations want to discriminate against same-sex couples in their religious rituals, that is their right. However, it is everyone's right, including same-sex couples, to have equal access to the same civil marriage license that my wife and I had when we were married 38 years ago.

I see no reason why churches should be allowed to expropriate for their exclusive use the term that civil authorities have used for their license for centuries: a marriage license. If that name is too tainted for people in Whitman's church, they are free to change the name they use in their rituals. "Holy matrimony," perhaps? Whatever; it's their choice. I won't interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don't interfere in our civil affairs.

"Render unto Caesar ..."

Posted By: Peter Y. Sussman (Email) | Jul 18 at 01:40 PM

Confessions of a Cyberscab

The invitation to join SFGate's new corps of bloggers called City Brights offers the opportunity to reach a substantial audience, a prospect no journalist or professional writer turns down easily. But it carries troubling implications.

The Gate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, compensates its bloggers in the currency of the web, hits and links, instead of dollars and cents, which is how writers used to be compensated for similar commentaries on the Chronicle's OpEd page. "Hits and links" is another way of saying "for free," and blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

What the Gate is offering its bloggers is the norm in the online world, but the timing of its offer is fraught with irony. The Chronicle is in deep trouble, groaning under accumulated losses caused, in part, by competition from online sites, including its own.

The Gate will increasingly serve as the Chronicle's face to the world, and if the paper folds, as currently appears possible, the web site may well be its only outlet. My blogging colleagues' distinguished credentials notwithstanding, the Gate will likely substitute some of the amateurs' free musings for the more informed, better researched news and analysis published in the newspaper. One-shot flashes of emotion and insight can never adequately replace the professional journalist's persistent but less glamorous news coverage, day in and day out.

"Information wants to be free" is the Net's rallying cry, but the traditional content providers and their families expect real remuneration for their labors. As for the readers ... well, you get what you pay for.

Therein lies the tragedy of American journalism today. It's a tragedy both for journalists, who were able to earn a living by holding a mirror up to their world, and for the nation that relied on those newspapers, however misguided at times, to help establish our communal agenda and provide much of the data by which we (bloggers and the rest of us) could define our culture and assess the operation of our governments. Even for its critics, in whose ranks I often found myself, the Chronicle has been the closest institution we have to an area-wide forum. It was a place where -- in potential, if not always in execution -- this gloriously diverse and inventive area could show it has more in common than a shared spot on the map.

The Chronicle served as an uncompensated wholesaler. Other local news media -- including those on the web -- based much of their local news coverage on what they read in the Chronicle. In the media food chain nationally, commentary, which makes up an ever larger share of our online diet, feeds on news stories usually developed by print journalists. As those print publications cut back and, increasingly, go out of business, the bloggers will be feeding on an ever more impoverished diet.

The Chronicle, like most other newspapers, has handled poorly the transition from print-only to a more varied information environment. Overwhelmed by an epochal information revolution -- and often burdened by the debts of acquisitive media conglomerates -- newspapers seem intent on acting out to the final curtain an outmoded economic model.

I share the sadness of those who mourn the layoff-by-layoff decline and potential demise of the Chronicle, more for what the newspaper sometimes has been and what it could have become than for what it seems fated to be with a fraction of its news staff.

Without the Chronicle, and barring the emergence of an independent, local white knight or a new killer app for news, the people who live here will have to subsist increasingly on McNews -- perhaps served up by short-order cooks at a franchised fast-food outlet like Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. The MediaNews chain has already gobbled up most of the local suburban newspapers and seems intent on realizing "economies of scale" by pruning staff and publishing the same generic, centrally edited news stories in all its local papers. MediaNews appears to be the ultimate beneficiary of a monopoly exemption favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The disappearance of the dominant metro paper is likely to atomize the local population further into islands of special interest, probably in the form of competing and little-trafficked web sites, each with its own formula, bias, subject areas and constituency.

Those of us who have felt that too few local voices -- of all races, interests and income levels -- were reflected in the Chronicle must now face the prospect that without the paper we will have convenient, common access to still fewer voices. Although those voices will find expression somewhere on the web or in print, we will lose the forum where they could most constructively meet.

The cult of the amateur blogger is satisfying to the amateur -- and in many ways informative for the reader. Amateurs serve as a crucial check on the corps of officially sanctioned "authorities," and many have undeniably useful expertise. I celebrate the two-way pipeline that the Net facilitates. But few bloggers have the resources to research stories in far-flung areas or to dig deeply into affairs of state and local governance. In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

I start my SFGate blogging with the hope that more of us will realize that we have a stake in the Chronicle's survival and the retention of as many as possible of its skilled professionals. And I hope that both the newspaper and its web site come to realize that they stand a better chance of thriving by engaging openly with the community in devising strategies to preserve what used to call itself "The Voice of the West."

Ultimately, the solution to newspapers' woes, both locally and nationally, lies in finding new ways of merging print and web, new ways of becoming relevant and essential to their communities and new ways of "monetizing" news and informed analysis, not in "demonetizing" those who provide it.

Posted By: Peter Y. Sussman (Email) | Mar 25 at 08:00 PM