The waiting room

 I was checked in at the doctor’s office the other day – the chiropractor, really, because I’d been rear-ended by a truck on I-459 and my back was feeling it (but that’s another story for another day) – and the receptionist told me they’d get to me as quick as they could, but they were running a bit behind.

I took my seat in the waiting room.

There were no magazines.

That may not seem odd these days when everyone carries access to reading material in their pocket computers (known as cell phones), but for decades, old magazines were a staple of waiting rooms anywhere you had to wait for something – seeing a doctor, a dentist, getting new tires, even waiting for a bus. It was just courtesy, I guess; a way for businesses to help you pass the time and forget how long it was taking to get the service you were waiting to receive.

When I say “old” magazines, that’s what I mean. You’d find publications like “People” and “Popular Mechanics” and “National Geographic” and “U.S. News and World Reports” that were months, if not years, old. I never understood why, because you could look at the little label on the front and see that the doctor had a subscription, which means he must have received current editions. Maybe he took the current editions home to read first, and only brought them in when everyone in his immediate family was through with them.

I sat there the other day and watched the other people doing what people do now: look at their phones. Maybe they were reading emails, or playing games, or catching up on Facebook or twitter or Instagram, or news sites – all the stuff that I find myself doing whenever I’m in a position where I have to wait.

The thing is, when you go to your phone, you can download what you want to read, what you are familiar with.

In the old days of waiting rooms, you went through the stack of magazines – there never seemed to be one that you’d normally want to read – to try to find one that looked remotely, possibly interesting.

I actually enjoyed flipping through “People,’’ because there was always this section dedicated to paparazzi shots of supposedly famous people caught doing stuff. The thing is, invariably it would be someone “famous” that I had never heard of – some woman who because famous by being on a reality TV show who was caught coming out of a New York City workout class in sweat-stained tights and sports top, or an actor from a popular movie I knew nothing about who got caught leaving a Los Angeles nightclub at 3 a.m. with his arm around the daughter of some millionaire and an embarrassing trail of toilet paper caught on the bottom of his shoe.

Or maybe there would be a shot of a minor royalty from a Mediterranean country laying in the sun on a yacht. Or a drummer for a rock ‘n roll band trying to be inconspicuous while browsing through a used bookstore in some midwestern city.

The point is, I always learned something I didn’t know. If it was People, inevitable the next week I’d come across the name of that same “celebrity” in a dozen news stories and realize they really were famous after all. Or maybe I read about a tribe of Amazonian indigenous people whose lifestyle was being threatened by wildfires in the Brazilian jungle, or the history of some ancient kingdom in India, or an unusual combination of cheeses, combined with bits of bacon and some flavoring, to make “the perfect” macaroni and cheese.

In short, I very often learned something I did not know before. Maybe it even challenged me to want to learn more or re-think the things I had grown comfortable believing.

It further struck me how the more access to information we have, the less we really consume. It allows us to just read or watch what we want to read or watch, information brought to us by people we know we’ll agree with. Nothing is pushing us out of our comfort zone; very rarely are we confronted with a story that we read because we’re bored and there’s nothing else to read and it actually gives us something we didn’t know and maybe even raises our awareness or alters the way we think.

I mean, when is the last time you went to the search part of your cell phone and called up an old edition of Popular Mechanics or Archeology Magazine?

In the “olden days” we were limited in access to information. We had three TV networks (oh, there was a fourth: PBS, which nobody regularly watched), and two local newspapers, and maybe a magazine or two that your parents subscribed to. And you learned by talking to people about current issues or events they’d lived through or just hearing stories.

We live in an age when we have access to more information in that palm-sized device we carry with us everywhere than any time in the history of the world. But that also means we’re being lied to more than any time in the history of the world, with “fake news” and fake web sites and pictures that have been altered so well you don’t know what to believe.

We all laugh, knowingly, at the line “I read it on the internet so it must be true,” yet I’m as guilty as anyone of reading something on the internet and not challenging it to see if another source agrees or if there is a site that debunks the incredible story I just read and find hard to believe but feel I must share anyway.

The irony is, I could just as easily go on my iPhone and search for months-old versions of the magazines that used to litter every waiting room (if those publications still exist).

 But that would put the responsibility for my education back on my shoulders. And if there is one thing all my years of public education taught me, isn’t my education the government’s job?

Trick or treat

In my old neighborhood, we approached Halloween with the planning and precision of the D-Day invasion.

This was the old days, when you could get out and walk the streets of your neighborhood without your parents, because you most of the houses were owned by the parents of the kids you went to school with, and the occasional house that had old people with no kids in them either had a kindly old couple that gave out the best treats or else a spooky old man of whom we made up the most blood-curdling stories.

 As we got older and our parents let us roam further, we’d plot a course that often had us hitting multiple neighborhoods within the time-frame we were allowed to be out, and even involved cutting through the woods and across creeks to get to the “good” houses, the ones that had the reputation for just leaving candy out in baskets on the front porch in the belief that the honor system would work with a bunch of kids wearing masks.

 Masks – that was about the extent of our store-bought Halloween costumes. You could get a mask of Superman or Batman or a skeleton or a cat. Some were supposed to be scary; some were supposed to be funny; some were cute. Usually, the masks were so hot (this was October in the Deep South, where the temperature could still be in the 70s at night) and the eye-holes so misaligned you had to push the mask up on the top of your head between houses, adding additional strain to that piece of elastic that went around behind your head to keep the mask tight; a piece of elastic that invariably broke after about the hundredth push to the top of the head-pull back into place, and then you were forced to either hold the mask in place with one hand or tie the ends of the elastic around your ears in an effort to keep the illusion of identity in place.

 Beyond the mask, it was up to us or our moms to fill out the rest of the costume. Ghosts were easy, of course – you just got an old white sheet and draped it over your head so that it hung loosely down around your ankles. It could be held in place by the appropriate “Casper” mask, but boy was that hot – a sheet over your head, clamped in place by this mask-and-elastic contraption wrapped around your head. Some moms made costumes – red and blue Superman pajamas with a red towel cape, or a vest and holster if you were a cowboy, or even sticking cotton balls all over a white sweatshirt to try to resemble a sheep.

 If you played on a sports team maybe you just wore your football or baseball uniform or, if you were a girl, your cheerleading outfit but changed up the logo to a professional or college team. Part of the tradition was that when the parents answered the door, they’d exclaim “Oh, look! Superman and Casper and a Georgia Bulldog!” and act like they didn’t know who you were.

 I once decided I would go out dressed up as a “hood” – that’s what we called tough guys back then – and so wore what I thought was a convincing get-up of jeans, boots, a leather jacket, and white t-shirt. Much to my chagrin, we’d get to a house and the mom would answer the door and say, “Oh, look! Superman and Casper and a baseball player and – oh, Ray, you decided not to wear a costume this year?”

 But they still gave me the candy, which was all that mattered.

 When you got home, you emptied the sack to look at this amassed treasure, eat a few pieces, then decide to save the rest for later. The next day you compared notes on which houses gave the best candy and which ones gave out the dreaded apples and bananas (you avoided those houses the next year), and what houses you wanted to make sure you got to early the next year.

 Sometimes you hid your Halloween candy so well you forgot where it was; sometimes you would find your candy gone and your dad would swear he didn’t eat it even though you found candy wrappers in his bedroom waste basket. 

Somewhere along the way, Halloween became a holiday for single adults. Costumes got more elaborate or more risqué (otherwise prime and proper schoolteachers would dress up like hookers or sexy witches or nurses). I remember one year, after college, going to a local club on Halloween and there was this guy who was wearing a ring over his head like a halo, but he had a shower curtain hanging from it and a shower nozzle somehow strapped to the ring that actually could spray water. He was wearing a bathing suit and kept inviting these sexy witches/nurses/hookers to “take a shower with me.” 

There was no candy involved.

Then again ... 

 There were those people who told us that celebrating Halloween was an invitation for Satan to send his demons in to steal your soul. I don’t know about that. I only know a few of the kids I grew up with that I suspected of being demon-possessed, but I never made the correlation to their Casper the Friendly Ghost costume. 

Then came the time I forgot it was Halloween. I was sitting in the living room of the house I was renting with a couple other guys (this was right after college; the other guys may have been out chasing sexy witches for all I know) when the doorbell rang. I opened it, and there was a gaggle of boys, in costumes of some Japanese anime characters that I knew nothing about, who shouted the age-old greeting “Trick or treat!”

I had nothing. I was completely unprepared. I ran to the pantry and found a box of chocolate chip cookies. I came back and said, “Here, take this box of cookies. Don’t tell any other kids where you got it. I’m going to turn off the lights and pretend I’m not home.”

 Maybe that’s what they mean by “trick or treat.”

Celebrating our diversity all the way to war

We are a society that celebrates our differences.

Man-woman. Gay-straight. Progressive-conservative. Black-white.

And those are just the more obvious ones.

And that's OK. We are different. And sometimes those differences are worth celebrating. Heaven knows the world would not be a very attractive place to live if everyone was like me. There wouldn't be any electricity, because while I understand the principle of how electricity works, it would never occur to me to invent it. We wouldn't have telephones for the same reason (much less cell phones or hand-held computers).

But at the same time, there are enough people who have something in common with me that we can enjoy books, ideas, sports, faith, cowboy boots, movies, long drives (both in a car and on the golf course), music, well-turned and thought-out phrases ... you get the idea.

I have always believed that all of humanity shares the same characteristics. It's just that we share them in such wildly disparate degrees that at times if feels like we have nothing in common.

But we do.

I thought of this while I was thinking about the current state of division in this country.

"Different" has always sold well, which is why we're constantly bombarded with new styles of clothes, cars, computers, homes, TVs, music, medical care.

And in the last few decades, what we refer to as 'the media' (which is perhaps better identified as "the news business") has found that building up our differences is a successful business model. One side is going to agree with whatever position the news business takes, while the other side objects. But both sides read (or hear, or watch) for the same reason people slow down to see a wreck on the highway. Outrage sells - or creates clicks. But it's not just outrage. In the face of outrage, hearing a voice that supports my view also sells.

Thus the success, for example, of the widely divergent Fox News and MSNBC. We can't help but be drawn to a certain amount of outrage, so the viewers of one will sometimes turn over to hear the views of the other - in small doses - just to reinforce their opinion that they are right and the other side is wrong.

We often talk about having raised kids who earn participation trophies and don't really understand winning and losing, yet we get into things like politics and you see the outrage that occurs when one side loses. In the past, there didn't seem to be that much difference between Republicans and Democrats, but not any more. While there may still not be that much difference between the men and women who are elected to office representing those parties, these days it almost seems fatal to suggest maybe they have something in common, that maybe they are not that far apart in their views.

Moderation does not stir the masses or bring in donations or create movements.

So Candidate X is a lying cheating racist who is trying to keep minorities down, while Candidate Y is a lying cheating bigot who is trying to turn the country into a Soviet gulag where only the rulers have anything and the majority is left with nothing.

I have said this before and it's not original to me, but we are a people with incredibly easy access to more information than any people in the history of the world; yet at the same time we are the most lied to people in the history of the world because not all of that information is correct. However, if what we read agrees with my views, and reinforces my belief, then I keep coming back for more.

It's not that the "facts" are all that different. It's how we interpret those "facts" and make the connections between then. We get a piece of a quote from a leader and suddenly decide that one sentence defines the true character of that person. Then we get snippets of other sentences, maybe even what was meant to be a joke or a private, off-hand remark, and add it to that first sentence we heard, and because we don't like that leader anyway it all adds up to that person being a lying, cheating, bigot, whatever-phobe.

Meanwhile, there is often just as much evidence about that person to the contrary, but because it doesn't fit with what we want to believe, we don't pay attention to it.

But then we hear people on both sides say, "He could be a hero if he'd just reach out to the other side and compromise!" That always seems to come from the supporters of the party that is not in power, however; the people who conveniently forget that it takes two to compromise and as soon as one of their leaders actually seems on the verge of "giving" something to the other side, he is branded a traitor and is threatened with being voted out of office.

The question is often asked, "Why are we so divided?"

Maybe because we're so caught up celebrating our differences.

And forgetting how to appreciate the differences in others.

I think we used to spend more time on trying to find what we had in common. This country - the United States of America - is unique in that it was not formed by people who based citizenship on speaking the same language or worshiping in the same church or having the same ethnic background or being bound by geographic boundaries - the things that turned people into "people groups" since the beginning of time.

In the United States, people left behind the folks that they looked like and sounded like and worshiped like and who enjoyed the same foods and music and traditions, and decided to put all those things aside for an idea.

It had never been done before - a nation formed on an idea rather than some physical or geographical commonality. It resulted in a brand new creation of a group of people called "Americans."

Yes, people came to this country and lived with people who were like them. That's why, particularly in the Northeast or the far West, you had the Italian neighborhood or the German neighborhood or the Polish neighborhood or "Chinatown." But even with that, the longing was for the children of those immigrants to become something new: Americans. And even though they were not all equal, they believed those words that said that "all men are created equal" and they couldn't actually go on to becomes whatever they dreamed of being, perhaps their children could, or certainly their grandchildren.

I fear that one of the problems we face today is that we're hyper-focused on our differences. We're told to celebrate what makes our neighbor different than ourselves, and if we don't then we're bigots or racitss or small-minded or "deplorable." Don't get me wrong - we do need to accept people who are not like us, and welcome the traits they bring that can make us all better.

But the goal to become that one thing that is unique in all the world; to take our genetic and geographical and language and religions differences and blend them into something new, something we call being an "American."

When we have no basis for agreement upon what that means, though, then we are simply fighting with no resolution in sight.