Not quite Panic at the Disco

Tomorrow: Supporters of Bernie Sanders plan to hold a 'fart-in' at the Democratic National Convention to protest the party's primary process

— AP Planner (@AP_Planner) July 27, 2016

"Temple University Media Relations, this is Dianne, how can I help you?"

"Yes, I need an expert for a story I'm working on,"

"We'd be happy to help you, what paper did you say you're with?"

"Oh, sorry, yes, this is Steve Jones with the New York Times and I'm here covering the Democratic Convention."

"Of course, we have many political science professors who would be happy to speak with you...."

"No, no, that's umm, that's not what I need."

"Sorry Mr. Jones, so what was it you were needing an expert with?"

"Well, I don't know if you heard, but Bernie Sanders supporters are planning a 'fart-in' on the convention floor..."

"Mr. Jones, we're a highly respected academic institution."

"Yes, yes, I know that Dianne, and I only bring this up because my editor wants a story on the fart-in. Believe me, I'm embarrassed that I've spent my life working towards my dream of being a writer for the New York Times and now I'm covering fart-ins, but life is funny, you know."

"Ok, so how, exactly do you want me to help you?"

"Well, I need an expert in olfactory to speak with."

"A what now?"

"Someone who studies smell. I need someone to tell me how many people would have to fart at once for it to make a difference in the arena."

"And this is for the New York Times?"

*sigh* "Yes, it is. I've already tried Drexel and Penn and both of them hung up on me. Please, Dianne, I just need someone who can help."

"Help you figure out how many people need to fart at once to have the arena smell like farts?"

*heavy sigh* "Yes, that's what I need. Do you have any faculty members who could help with that?"

"Let me see what I can do. Hold please."

The Elephant In the Room

None of what I'm about to write is anything new. You've likely heard or experienced it in one way or another over the past decade or so. Nevertheless, I'm going to write it because it's a good reminder for all of us.

There's an Indian story about blind men and the elephant. Each one touches a different part of the elephant and then tries to tell the others about the animal. Because each one had a different experience, yet each one true to them, they can't agree on what an elephant is like. Different versions of the parable have different endings and lessons, but most often it's used to illustrate how our experience can be true but also miss larger truths that we can't or don't see.

And that brings me to this. The United Methodist Church is holding their quadrennial meeting in which delegates from all over the world meet to decide what, if any, changes are made to the Book of Discipline, which, contrary to what I've told my kid, is not what parents consult to determine punishments for various infractions ranging from leaving your clothes on the floor (a reprimand) to breaking the tv (banishment from the family for bringing shame to our name). No, instead, the Book of Discipline is the set of rules and beliefs of the United Methodist denomination that gets reviewed and revised every four years at the General Conference.

Belonging to the UMC, I figured I'd follow along with the General Conference on Twitter. I thought I'd learn a little about the workings of the organization and, with luck, find some humor amid the drudgery of what is essentially a 10-day legislative session. I mean, I've been on Twitter for several years and it's an invaluable tool for making me a smarter baseball fan. I've encountered both smart writers who take the time to answer my questions to intelligent fans who have found the right balance between taking the games seriously but also realizing they're supposed to be fun. If I can find that for baseball, surely I can find that for church, right?

So I set up a search for all tweets related to the UMC General Conference while I was at work the first day and it appeared I'd walked in to the middle of a giant family fight. Instead of joy about all being in one place to work together and try to resolve the issues facing the denomination, there appeared to be lot of finger pointing and blame spreading. Over the course of the first few days, it felt more like I was watching the United States Congress debate rather than a church organization.

I don't say that to diminish the importance of the issues or the direction of the church. But for three days the debate seemed to center on how to go about debating and if there would be changes to Robert's Rules of Order. Three days. I'm pretty sure if Jesus had been killed on the first day, he'd have risen from the dead by the third day just to tell everyone to knock it off and their their ... together. As I'm writing this, there's apparently talk of a schism going on so clearly there are serious issues that need to be addressed.

And with heated issues comes heated rhetoric. And that leads us back to twitter, the land of overheated rhetoric. While the name-calling did seem to stay a minimum (unless you count "liberal" and "conservative" as name calling), everything else seemed to exactly as you expected. If I had more time, I would have played my favorite mental game and just retweeted various posts and adding "spot the logical fallacy" on so many things. But I figured that wouldn't have been all that helpful and simply make people more upset, which isn't exactly conducive to finding solutions.

So for days, I kept reading the tweets and eventually figured out which side people were on and the rhetorical tricks they would use to try to frame the issue how they wanted it framed. People locked on opposite sides were talking past one another instead of to one another. Often these were people at the conference. People who, if they wanted to, could say "hey, meet me in the back of Conference Room C and we can talk about this in person." But I didn't see much of that. People were more interested in making their point then they were in listening to each other, of which twitter is the perfect medium for that.

Twitterfeed of #UMCGC is an in depth study of narcissistic personality disorder.  But then, so is the institution.  #walkaway

— Dorothy (@Maja1218) May 17, 2016

But here's where the biggest issue for me comes in. I have no idea if what I'm seeing on twitter represents a true representative sampling of the delegates at the conference of if they're just the loud extremes on either end. I don't have a context to put the conversation in the larger picture of the United Methodist Church discussions. I have some general ideas that I've gleaned about the situation, but my guess is for me to try to draw any conclusions only from twitter would likely mean I'm missing a large segments of people at the conference who are either not on social media at all or are avoiding it for the duration of the conference.

So what am I supposed to do? At this point, I have no idea. I'm not likely to follow this debate once the conference ends and after seeing three days of debate on how to debate, there's not a chance in hell I want to ever attend any of these conferences. In a way that probably makes me part of the problem as I'm not actively seeking to be part of the solution. The best thing I can find to do is remember that I'm only seeing a sliver of the debate and remind myself that I'll never have all the information. That doesn't absolve me from making decisions, but it's a reminder to me not to cling tightly to decisions when additional knowledge is still out there for me to learn.

Housing Bubble: How Our Neighborhoods Affect Our Friendships

So I went for a walk around my neighborhood last night. We'd just gotten home from dinner and I had just enough time to walk the 1.2 mile loop around twice before a combination of dusk setting in and the Cubs game starting. It was a nice evening out, not like in Summer when going for a walk at 7:30 means coming home drenched in sweat from the unrelenting south Georgia heat and humidity. No, this was still what passes for Spring with the humidity not being oppressive and the heat relatively non-existant.

And with it being such a beautiful evening, there were other people out too in our middle class neighborhood filled with three and four bedroom houses and two car garages. There was the woman jogging, the husband and wife walking their dog and the guy riding his motorcycle. I couldn't tell if he'd just purchased it and was learning to ride or just out for a night ride, though I suspect it was the former because anyone out for a night ride would presumably not be riding in a residential neighborhood. There was also the family of one of my son's classmates outside playing together. In this instance, the dad was racing his 7-year old daughter down the street with her younger sister hold her arms outstretched to be the finish line, with mom cheering her daughter on while the puppy looked confused and wasn't sure who to chase after.

I enjoyed seeing so many people out enjoying their evening. But as I walked, I paid closer attention to the houses that I'd passed hundreds of times before. Much like my home, most of these homes didn't really have a front porch and those that did didn't have much room for more than a chair or two. There was no convenient gathering places for neighbors to get together and talk while watching their kids play in the front yard and waving to passersby on the street.

This thought has been kicking around in my head for a while. Really, ever since I read "How Friendships Change in Adulthood" in the Atlantic and this "How our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult" on Vox. The truth is, at least for me in my little corner of the universe, we've set up housing and    and recreational activities in a way that we can easily be isolated for much of the time. Even something like my son's baseball or soccer games requires a 15 minute drive to the park where it's just my wife, son and I in the car. We've basically designed our society to minimize chance encounters with anyone we don't know or don't want to interact with.

But bumping in to people, especially the same people, over and over is how friendships develop. Removing the opportunities, either through our housing design or land use or our own tendencies to keep to ourselves, takes away opportunities to meet new people, experience new things and have a more fulfilling life.

Rereading that last paragraph, it sounds lofty, especially for me who is quite content to sit inside on a nice Spring night and turn on a ballgame and make dumb jokes online. I'm not extroverted and it's often easier for me to just keep to myself and do the things I know I like. And there's something to be said for how, for many people, their online life is a rich and rewarding to them as offline life is to others. But we can and should strive to be a little better about at least knowing the people who live around us. Not just their names or the names of their kids, but about what's going on with them.

Then again, during my walks I have the familiar white cord stretching from my phone up to my ears with my earbuds in blocking out the world and my neighbors and potential friends so I can listen to a podcast about fantasy baseball.

If sports were covered like politics

"That's all for the weather, let's go over to Jake Kershaw with sports."

"Thanks Wendy. A busy sports night all around, lot of action going on so let's get right to it. In baseball action, the Orioles took 3 innings, the Rays 2 and they tied in the other four innings. In other action in MLB, the Cubs took 4 innings while the Cardinals took 2 with a virtual tie in the other three. Moving on to football, the Ravens won in a blowout, taking three quarters while the Bengals got one...."

"Ummm, Jake, that's all well and good, but what about the final scores?"

"Jonathan, it only matters how many innings or quarters you win. I used to think final scores mattered, but then I started watching you and the other news anchors talking about the campaigns for the democratic and republican nomination and all you talk about is how many states each candidate won. All along I thought it was delegate totals that mattered, but all you and the other news anchors and analysts talk about is the number of states won, not the delegates, in those states. So obviously me, being the lowly sports guy, learned from you and now just report how many states, errr, innings or quarters, that teams win."

"Jake, that's not how it works, you need to know the score."

"You keep saying that, Jonathan, but didn't you just get done telling me it was a big night for Bernie Sanders because he won Michigan? You didn't tell me the score, just that he won Michigan and Hillary Clinton won Mississippi. So they tied 1-1. But if you look at the delegate count overall, Sanders won 69 and Clinton won 87. But you and your colleagues keep telling me the score was 1-1. So when I say the Ravens won 3-1, it makes just as much sense. And sure, if you want to count total runs, the Rays beat the Orioles 7-4, but they only outscored the Orioles in two innings while the Orioles outscored the Rays in three innings, so using what I've learned from you, I've converted all the sports coverage to saying who won certain periods or innings rather than final scores."

"Jake, people need to know the final score, that's why they tune in."

"You would think, Jonathan, you would think. But watching you news guys cover this election, it's pretty obvious that people tune in for the drama. Saying Clinton picked up roughly 20 more delegates is fine and accurate and all, but saying Clinton and Sanders split the two states and it's a closer race now, well that's drama. That will get people to tune in. And while 7-4 seems close in the Orioles game, 3-2 is much closer and creates much more drama and it's also factually correct."

"But it's not the innings that count, it's the runs. Come on Jake."

"And it's not the states that count, it's the delegates. So when you change your coverage and start talking about delegates, I'll go back to giving people the final score. You know, the useful information people need and not something useless like who won what state."

Trump is an Awful Person - That's Why I'm Voting For Him

Donald Trump is a loathsome, offensive, brute.

He's unfit to be elected to be a small town dogcatcher, let alone to the highest office in the country.

And yet, I can't wait to vote for him.

I should clarify here that I am opposed to everything Trump stands for, from his policies to his demeanor to his arrogance and everything else about him. I don't think all Mexicans are rapists and drug users. I think John McCain, whatever you think of his politics, is an American hero who deserves to be saluted an honored for his service. I think the idea that we need a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to be absurd and it's even more crazy to think Mexico would pay for it.

I think a total ban on Muslims entering the country is among the dumbest things ever proposed by a serious candidate for President. I find his treatment of women to be offensive. And while I don't find his lack of belief in the Christian God to be offensive, I find his pandering and attempts to make it look like he does to be completely unconvincing.

And yet, come Super Tuesday, I'm going to stroll in to my local precinct, request a Republican ballot, and proudly cast my vote for Trump to be the Republican nominee and standard bearer for the Grand Old Party.

A Trump presidency would be a disaster. I know this and you likely know this too. And so do nearly 60 percent of Americans who have a negative favorability rating of Trump.

So why would I want to vote for him?

Because it's not only about the presidency. A Trump candidacy would be an unmitigated disaster for rank and file Republicans, who by and large can't believe Trump  has gotten this far and also can't or won't find a way to stop him for fear of alienating his supporters who they need to win in November. But those supporters, as many as there are, aren't enough to carry him to victory in November.

A Trump nomination forces Republicans to either vote for Trump, who opposes key platforms that the Republican establishment holds dear, vote for the Democratic nominee (which, for those who place party before country, they would never do), vote third party, or stay home. Most of what I've seen suggests that voters would stay home rather than vote for Trump. (And you don't have to stay home guys, go out, have dinner and support the local economy).

But staying home has the added benefit of reducing Republican voter turnout for key Senate races for those senators who were elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave, thus increasing the chances of Democrats taking the seat and possibly flipping control of the Senate away from Republican control. And there lies the beauty of voting for Trump. It won't change one thing about my state. Georgia is going to vote Republican in the November election for president. It's highly likely that a Republican is going to win the senate seat in Georgia. But other states aren't nearly as certain, and Trump at the top of the ticket hurts down-ballot candidates by depressing Republican voter turnout.

Having said all that, I'm well aware and constantly push the idea that my vote doesn't matter. Not that democracy isn't a great idea, but statistically, my one vote out of hundreds of thousands cast won't make any statistical or actual difference. But since I live in a state that pretty solidly Republican, doesn't it make sense for me to cast my vote in that primary so I can at least have a voice in who will represent me?

Despite that fact, I'm looking forward for the chance to vote for Trump on Tuesday so I can vote against him in November. After all, isn't the whole point of elections to vote for what you want to happen in the future?