Last year I posted a short piece on 9/11, buried near the bottom after several other topics. I was hiding it down there on purpose—the emotions are still raw after all these years, despite how little my life was affected compared to many others. But I’m going to re-post, this time with feelings front and center, and with an introduction and afterword.

I moved from NY to SF 6 years ago, and occasionally in those 6 years a conversation will turn to the topic of 911. These are not turns of conversation I participate in; these are conversations that I silently endure with the feeling of “these people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and I’m going to wait for them to shut up about it”.

I wrote the following as a response to the classic question I’ve heard and overheard many conversations about: “where were you when you heard?” Asked so innocently and discussed so innocently by people far from events, sometimes in conversations including people too young to remember at all. In a way, 911 was a moment that changed everything for the United States. But for many of us, it was not a moment. We didn’t just hear about it. We felt it, and we felt it slowly, and painfully, throughout an extraordinarily long day, and the days after, and we still feel it now.

I still feel it now. But I tend to shut up about it, and not just because I don’t like talking about my feelings. I know that, just as I instinctively feel alienated by west coasters’ real and honest feelings about seeing it on the news, there’s those closer to events who don’t want to hear about it from me. Who am I to have an opinion, hearing about it and smelling it and seeing the smoke from my comfy position on Long Island, having only ever visited the towers as a tourist, not personally knowing anyone who didn’t make it out? I know people closer to events, and they don’t want to talk about it any more than I do.

But I want to talk about it just a little, because these things change us, and through us, they change policy and government and the world.

—

The bulk of my family lives in North Carolina, and so while I was in the state, last night we had dinner together. Given the date, we got to remembering 9/11. Where we were when we heard, what our day was like, and of course, the family stories, which are not mine to tell.

As I was telling my own recollections of the day, which I haven’t thought about in many years, I couldn’t help but notice the difference in technology and communication between then and now. I was in school, and this was back when kids generally didn’t have cell phones, much less smart phones, much less laptops. Most classrooms didn’t have a computer, much less an internet-equipped computer. There was a loudspeaker announcement that told us about the plane crashing into the tower, and that announcement didn’t tell us why or how big the plane was or how bad the crash was and we were left to speculate, with no other way of gathering information, while the teachers were hearing the same thing we were, expected to go about the day as usual.

Oh, I should mention: this is in New York. I grew up in New York, and almost all my family lived there at the time. We have family and family friends who were in and around those towers. But by the sound of the initial announcement, it wasn’t serious, it was probably a small plane that accidentally crashed because of an instrument failure or something. So if I were to tell you where I was when I heard the news, well, I heard the news for the first time slowly, in many places, across the day, with increasing horror. I heard the news without twitter (which didn’t exist) or YouTube (which didn’t exist), I heard it without an iphone (which didn’t exist) or facebook (which didn’t exist). I heard it in bits and rumors, it was forbidden knowledge, the teachers weren’t supposed to be telling us any news, and generally the administration was trying to get the school through the day.

But our 2nd period teacher turned on the radio (a radio, an honest-to-goodness radio!) and we sat listening quietly all period. I was listening when the first tower went down, and when the second tower went down, and those of us who cried did our best to cry quietly, and then the bell rang and we went to the next classroom and tried to pretend everything was ok so that our rule-breaking teacher wouldn’t get in trouble for not keeping us in the dark.

As the day went on, in rumors and speculations not unlike twitter today, we tried to sort out what was real. The pentagon was attacked? Really? Surely that’s something a younger student made up?

It was a long school day. It ended. I went out to the pay phone and called home and finally learned that everyone was, whether by accident or skill, alive. And then at home we sat by the tv and watched the news, the same footage over and over and over and over

I learned not to obsess like that over horrific news footage ever again.

Today I’m coming home from visiting my family. I wrote this on my flight back to the west coast, and we’ll be descending back into SFO soon. In the last airport, eating a sandwich before my connecting flight, I looked up and was shocked by the sight of the footage on the tv, the smoke billowing from the tower, the clear blue sky in the background. It hit me with a visceral force.

I remember smelling that smoke for a long time after. Our perfect blue skies never quite returned.

—

I left a lot out of that story, but I’ll add just a couple things:

On September 11th 2001, after school on my way to the pay phone, I overheard a younger student telling his friend: “I don’t get why everyone’s making such a big deal out of this. It happened all the way in the city.”

I continued on towards the pay phone, silently judging him for not thinking about the fact that we were within commuting distance, that many of us had friends and family in those towers, that some of us were heading to the pay phone so we could find out if they were still alive, and that some of us might find out they weren’t. He didn’t know one of his classmates lost a parent.

At the time I felt superior to that student because I was taking it very seriously, but I was almost as ignorant. I was thinking about immediate loss of life, and while I did not myself feel any fear, I couldn’t miss the fact that there was an organized group of people who would see me and everyone I love dead whether we live in the city or not, and it was only the inconvenience of committing mass murder in the suburbs that made us not a likely target. But I wasn’t thinking at all about the political impact. I wasn’t thinking about war. I wouldn’t have predicted that people across the country would also think New York City wasn’t all that far away, or that I’d be crying in the bathroom of an airport 15 years later.

I also couldn’t have prepared for what I would see on the news later that day when I got home, what I would watch over and over and over until I was unable to watch it ever again.

I did cry in the airport bathroom last year. After I looked up from my sandwich and saw that footage on the tv, I hid in the bathroom and cried. I held in tears as I packed up my sandwich and grabbed my bags, aware of the irony that I had to work to hold in tears for extra long because of the bags that before 9/11 I could have just left at my spot at the sandwich counter. I felt betrayed by whoever had the bright idea of playing that footage on the news, on tv, in a sandwich shop, in an airport, on 9/11. Why do they think anyone would want to see that? Did they not think anyone from New York would be here?

A year ago I would have never written that, never “admitted” that I cried in an airport bathroom stall because a picture hurt me. But it punched me right in a place I don’t know how to name, and sometimes when we don’t know how to name something we pretend it’s not real or that it doesn’t matter.

I’d avoided those images for years because they hurt, and when I saw it again it brought me right back, and I was already tired and stressed from weeks of travel, and I was going to cry, and I wasn’t going to do it in public where a well-meaning stranger would ask if I was ok, and then I would say that I’m from New York and seeing the footage upsets me, and they would be perfectly understanding, and then they would try to be nice to me, and it’d be a whole big deal or whatever, and of course it’s not a big deal, not for me really, just as so many other things are not big deals and so we don’t talk about them because then other people might act like it’s a big deal and then want to know why we’re making such a big deal out of something that’s not a big deal, as if we big dealed it by letting the fact of its existence escape from the realm of unacknowledged truths.

And I wouldn’t have written it on the internet a year ago, because I’m not interested in random stranger’s sympathy, or trolling, or armchair diagnoses. But, y’know. I’m trying to get better at practicing what I preach when it comes to feelings being ok to talk about, and that just ’cause you talk about something doesn’t mean you’re trying to make it a big deal, and if someone makes a big deal of it that’s on them, and that the reason we mark the day is so that we can safely small-deal them within appropriate parameters, and tomorrow no one will care how I feel about 9/11.

I said I wasn’t going to tell stories that are not mine to tell. I’d like, at least, to end this by saying my friends and family came out unscathed, but it’s not really true. Survivor’s guilt is a hell of a thing. Just as the dust works its way deep into lung tissue and slowly grows into a cancer that claims victims years later, the emotional damage is a wound that bleeds and bleeds, that left untreated can grow, become infected, can twist into other forms, can claim victims years later.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 did a far better job injuring us than anyone could have predicted. We talk about fear and anger and sadness, but none of those feel like the right words to me. To me it feels like an injury, mostly healed, and if I walk on it just the wrong way maybe I feel the pain for a moment, maybe suddenly and strongly enough to make me cry for a minute or two, not out of sadness or anger or fear but just because it hurts. I’d only describe it as an emotion because I can’t point to a place in my body where the injury is.

I don’t agree with everything the US government has done following the attacks, but I suppose I’m writing this partly to address a certain cynicism I sometimes see in response to 9/11 remembrances, and even to the phrase “never forget”, as if it were all about pushing political agendas and acting “patriotically correct”.

When I say “never forget”, this is not a statement of will, not a command or a purpose or a political vote. When I hear “never forget”, when I hear it from politicians or see it posted by random strangers, I don’t hear a statement of purpose, egging us on to seek revenge for the secret benefit of greedy motivations. To me, it’s an expression of this thing inside me that has no better name. I will never forget. I couldn’t if I wanted to. And I find it comforting that we have at least some expression of this particular wound that so many share.

Never forget.

I wish we had better words, better actions. I wish I were more comfortable talking about my feelings. I wish I was one of the students who cried in front of the whole class when we heard the live radio coverage, when we heard the first tower go down, and then, unbelievably, unthinkably, the 2nd. I wish I was properly grim when I heard President Obama announce they killed the fucker who did this to us. I was happy. I cheered. I’m glad he’s dead, no matter how little it solves, no matter what my brain thinks about the whole thing.

Never forget.

I understand that many experience today’s 9/11 remembrances as a politicized thing that reminds them only of the worst of what became politically possible in this country following those events. That makes a good deal of sense, and I’m angry about those things too. But cynicism is easy and impresses no one. The fastest way to make a fool of yourself is by mocking someone else’s words because you don’t understand them.

Never forget, never forget, never forget.

Well, it’s 3/14/2017, time for the 7th annual Vi Hart Pi Day video:

This came after months of kinda obsessing over diagrams and Venn diagrams in particular. It started with reading Lakoff and Johnson’s “Philosophy in the Flesh” and deciding to try making embodied container schema of various sorts in virtual space:

During the research for the writeup I did on that project, I read John Venn’s original 1880 paper, and was inspired to try some embodied Venn diagrams, eventually creating an entire Venn Diagram House:

The writeup on the Venn Diagram House has more on the motivation and takeaways from that. Relevant for this post is that after creating the ovenn with venn burners, it seemed obvious to put a venn pie in there. Making one for real didn’t seem too interesting until Pi day started looming near, and I do have a tradition to keep, so that’s how that happened.

But first, I continued making virtual Venn stuff, including an entire interactive Venn Diagram Museum of Geometry, Topology, and Algebra. When working on the geometry section, doing an exhibit on the Reuleaux triangle seemed obvious because they’re so much fun, and as long as I’m doing intersections might as well do a bit on the Vesica Piscis, so that was in my head when I started working on the Pi day video.

Here’s the writeup on the Venn Diagram Museum and a walkthrough video:

The above virtual projects are public in Anyland for Vive, if you’ve got one. And if you’re interested in other virtual projects like this or want updates on these projects when they happen, check out elevr.com.

Happy Pi Day!

On the virtue of good habits, rather than anger and dramatic causes, for sustaining democracy.

If you wait for big motivating problems before acting, you’ll be comparatively ineffective both because of waiting too long and your own lack of practice engaging with politics, which makes you susceptible to those who would prey on your anger and disappointment.

Transcript:

Great musicians spend years learning to play, great writers spend years learning to read and write and tell stories. We love the myth of immediate success out of nowhere but the truth is that stuff takes work, stuff takes practice, and anyone willing to put in the work can gain some level of accomplishment.

This is advice that I hope you’ve heard before, but it applies to more than just personal success.

There are forces in the world that would like you to believe you are powerless, that your actions don’t matter. That your votes, your donations, your calls, your protests, don’t matter. That truth doesn’t matter.  That you can trust no one, not even yourself, that all choices are equally bad, the system is broken, everyone is corrupt, you can’t change anything, there are forces in the world that are actively trying to manipulate you into giving up your power.

But you are powerful, it just might take a little bit more time and effort than you were hoping for. Let no one convince you that your opportunity to use your power comes only once every four years, and only if the right candidates are presented to you.

There are those who would love to force Trump voters, many of whom were reluctant to vote for him, to become Trump supporters, pushed to the extreme by their constantly having to defend their own choice and by extension Trump himself, even as they start to realize he’s not going to keep his promises to them. I know there are those who voted for Trump and are already acting on their concerns about him, because voting for someone doesn’t have to mean supporting everything they do until the next election. You can vote for a flawed candidate and then work on the flaws.

I know people whose support for Bernie Sanders was both their first real political action, and their last. There are forces who would convince you not just that his loss was unfair but that the answer to this unfairness is to withhold your participation, to somehow punish the system by standing idly by, watching and criticizing your own democracy for making mistakes it could have avoided with your help, could still avoid with your help. What do you think you’re left with when no one participates in a democracy?

Question the motives of those whose cynicism promotes only inaction, those whose moral posturing demands only inaction, those who would tell you the way towards positive change is to do nothing. Be wary of arguments with self-selected strangers who engage with you solely for the purpose of disagreeing with you and telling you to stop. There are plenty of good faith discussions to be had with those around you, your neighbors your friends your family your community, who you might disagree with on some things or have different knowledge and experience but you can find common ground and be accepting of each other’s humanity and work together. Spend your time with those people, not with those who would target you as an opponent to be beaten.

Remember there is such a thing as truth and reality. Remember that in the US we have the constitution, a foundational document that gives us common ground. It is not partisan to denounce unconstitutional actions. Everyone, including the electoral college, has plenty of good reason to reject Trump given his disregard for the constitution, his conflicts of interest and the conflicts of the people he’s choosing for his team, he never had strong Republican support, doesn’t have popular support, and is on track to be very destructive if people don’t step up and do more than just criticize each other.

By the way, the electoral college doesn’t vote until December 19th, and technically they can vote for whoever they want. And I mean anyone; a couple electors this year say they’re voting for Mitt Romney. Electors are chosen by the state’s winning party, and it’s possible that enough electors will stick to their morals and deny Trump a majority, in which case the vote would go to the house of representatives meaning your congressperson might be deciding this election. Maybe not, but there have been elections where entire states worth of electoral voters got together and voted for someone else. So there’s something you could practice engaging with politics about, whether it’s because you do want the electoral college to vote for someone else or don’t want them to or maybe you don’t like the idea of the electoral college altogether. If you don’t like the system, our system was built to be able to change itself, but only if you participate in it, and for those who work better under a deadline, it’s not so long before the December 19th electoral vote.

If you don’t think your actions can immediately cause the change you want, that’s fine, not all actions have immediate results, or obvious results. But participate anyway. Politicians can safely ignore those who don’t participate or who participate only once and then get discouraged. And if enough people don’t participate, they can ignore all of us, and that is how democracy fails. There are other powers in the world who would like to see us fail in exactly that way. But participating in politics gets easier with practice, and it’s something that everyone can learn how to do.

Step 1: Make a list. Paper, digital, whatever, give it a fancy title, this is the list that you can then populate with other actions you might like to take, and the goal is to do one or more of these actions… every Tuesday during lunch, for example, just for 5 or 10 minutes, during Action Time. It’s easy when it’s a habit, and if you can find a buddy to team up with for Action Time, that’s a good step 2.

The great thing about having a list and a time to act on it is that instead of constantly worrying about the state of the world or stressing over the news while you’re supposed to be doing other things, you can just put your worry on your list and get back to what you’re doing until action time.

Here’s some things on my list:

1. Call my Congresswoman to congratulate her on being elected House Minority Leader. I’ve called her before about other things but this is partly because it’s easy practice making congress calls and partly getting another call on the books so that congress knows that this citizen is paying attention. I will probably reach a very nice intern who will be happy to hear the support and to pass along my comments and if they have time I’ll ask them if there’s anything else that should be on my radar and they will be thrilled to tell me all about important political happenings that don’t reach tend to reach the headlines and we’ll both end the conversation happier and better informed.

2. Email my friends in Oklahoma and Texas and ask if they would make a call to their local politicians about women’s rights, this is on the list because I saw some scary stuff in the news that I wanna do more than just be mad about. 

3. Look up my local party headquarters and events, I’ve been meaning to check out what’s up around here and maybe there’s an event I’d be interested in, maybe not, I dunno.

4. Something about Education? I’m not sure what yet but I do tend to get dragged into education policy discussions and I’d like to help counter the damage DeVos could do to public education.

5. Call state governor and local politicians expressing a hope that our supermajority of Democrats will play nice with our state Republicans rather than getting infected by Trump drama partisanship.

6. Subscribe to a local news source. Because reading and supporting real journalism that answers to subscribers, not advertisers or clicks, is essential for holding politicians accountable, fighting corruption, and staying informed, and I’m not paying for anything local enough to care about my local politicians right now.

What else? If I lived in a Red state, I’d be calling my state’s Republican party to ask that our Republican electors vote for anyone but Trump. If I lived in Louisiana I’d be trying to get everyone around me involved in the current senate race. If I lived in the UK, I’d be making calls regarding the Brexit negotiations, if I lived in France or Germany or any other democracy I’d be paying attention and taking action while I still can. You can call with friends, letters are good too, you can gather a group and help each other, you can have a letter writing party, you can call on speakerphone with a friend who’s better at phone calls than you are, with practice it’s just as easy to complain to your representative as it is to complain to your friends on social media though you can keep doing that too as long as you’re not doing that exclusively.

It’s good to have a long list you can work on even just for five minutes a week, avoiding the drama and pressure of putting all your hopes in one giant push for one person, one big rallying cry for the most dramatic political thing ever. Changing the world doesn’t require stress and anger and all-encompasing negative emotions. It’s a skill that takes regular practice just like everything else in life so make a list, schedule in some Action Time, and relax. We got this.

—

If you’re in the US, find out who your representatives are here: http://www.whoismyrepresentative.com/

You can search their name to find out more about them and their positions, or you can just call them and ask!

Hank Green’s excellent video about how to write a letter to your representative, with examples and info in the description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp4h-3vQafk

There’s tons of videos on the internet of people calling their representatives, so you can get an idea of what it’s like.

Want to know more about the electoral college? Mickeleh’s video series on the electoral college has uncommon depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zac-2V7CTs He argues against the idea that they should change their votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2vV9xBOSmY

UK person? Rosianna on post-Brexit political participation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLxzv6HmyHk

The internet is full of information for wherever you are and whatever you care about. Also talk in person to friends, family, and people in your community, to learn what they know and help each other take action!

On election night 2016 I had flashbacks to the 2000 election, staying awake late into the evening glued to the television hoping that Florida would come through for, well, in 2000 I was a kid and a total Democrat just like my parents. And I remember how deeply unfair it felt when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to George W. Bush.

Two things about that election stuck with me, that ended up transforming how I think about politics. The first was how close it was. Even back then I had a good enough intuition for statistics to know that if presidential elections consistently come up so close, within a few percentage points almost every time, that’s not random. The second strange thing was this whole idea of red states, blue states, and swing states. A lot of people focus on the swing states but what I found much more mathematically compelling is that there are red states and blue states. Why are there states that don’t change their mind?

The feelings from that election night followed me through the aftermath of 9/11 and the wars I didn’t want and all the way to the polls once I was 18, but in the mean time it was taken as a given in my entire liberal bubble that obviously Bush is stupid and Republicans are stupid and I went along with this way of thinking until those old questions started to dig at me. Why aren’t the Democrats, who are so obviously correct, winning by a huge margin? Why are there Red states at all? The standard answer in my circles seemed to be that, well, if Bush is stupid and Republicans vote for him it’s because they’re stupid, and if Republicans are stupid and half the country is Republican, then it must be that half the country is stupid, look at us the smartest teenagers ever, struggling to make our way through the land of the stupid.

The aura of logical language lends the voice of authority but it doesn’t make something true in real life. I learned that red states are red because they have more rural areas, and blue states are blue because they have bigger cities. I learned that whether you’re Democrat or Republican can be pretty accurately predicted by where you’re born, and no one chooses where to be born. I had to consider that if I were born in a different place with a different family I would be an uncompromising Republican who makes fun of stupid liberals and believes all the anti-liberal stereotypes, and I realized there’s also plenty of awful people who are Democrats just because of their circumstances.

I learned why elections are so close, that if one side leads by a lot, they can put fewer resources into campaigning, while the losing party shifts their platform to appeal to more voters, meaning that Democrats and Republicans are not two fundamentally different types of people with fundamentally different ideologies, but moving targets in a self-balancing system. I had to entertain the premise that maybe Republicans and Democrats are equally intelligent people doing the best they can with what they know, and as I got older and my world grew, I’ve met many very smart and wonderful Republicans who have led me to believe that, as usual, my younger self was too quick to judge.

That is the divide I want to heal. The divide that made my teenage self mock Republicans for their big gas-guzzling trucks while I enjoyed the invisible urban infrastructure that paved my roads, picked up my garbage, and delivered the gas I used to heat my home through hidden pipes. I want to heal the divide that makes some liberals not just mock but actually fear people who find personal and cultural value in gun ownership, the divide that makes us forget how easy it is to demand we all get rid of something that only other people value. I want to heal the divide that leads many nonreligious city dwellers to fundamentally misunderstand the social infrastructure roles of the church in rural communities, caring for the sick and the poor in places far from the offices of government-funded social programs. The shared infrastructure of cities makes it easier, more efficient, to improve quality of life with less money, to adapt to changes in the world, to recover economically.

That’s the usual divide, but with Trump I think there’s a different story, and it’s not one I’ve seen anyone else telling.

You see, a lot of people were surprised by Trump’s victory, and this surprise has led to a lot of speculation regarding the polls and where they went wrong. Which they weren’t really that wrong because Hillary won the popular vote by a large margin so it’s not like there’s some mysterious chunk of Trump supporters we didn’t know about, but anyway. The difference between the polls and the outcome led to this obsession with pointing at different bits of the polls to try and explain why Trump won. It’s the standard fallacy of focusing on what’s measurable because that’s what is easy and incontrovertible. It’s evidence, it’s proof, and anyone with basic math skills can compare numbers in the completely logical agreed-upon form, and let’s combine that with my other favorite intellectual mistake: the one where you get what you measure. If you measure race, you get race, if you measure gender and sexuality, you get gender and sexuality. Media has been taken over with arguing about these things because it’s easy to pseudo-rationally argue about what number is bigger than what other number. The media is centering the conversation around identity politics because that’s what the data is, but it’s not what the data shows.

Like, Trump didn’t win because of lower black turnout, though voter suppression worked pretty good there. Trump won and also we measured black voter turnout. We measured lots of things.

So I took a fresh look at the data. Lots of data, in larger contexts, and weeks later I’ve finally come to a conclusion.

I was wrong. It’s not really about liberal vs conservative, city vs country, white vs multicultural, not this time. It’s really about old and young. Not vs, and not necessarily as individuals but also as communities and as a culture, ok here we go:

First the shallow data part. Edison Research, which does the US election exit polls, shows that over-45s voted Trump while under-45s voted Hillary, and other polls show other breakdowns, over-50s voting for Trump, the trend of all the polls is that the older you get the more you’re a Trump voter, while Hillary was strongly favored among younger voters. 18-29 most strongly, and 30-45 also. And voter turnout in those age groups looks pretty normal, though if younger voters turned out like older voters did Hillary would’ve won in a landslide, meanwhile Baby Boomers are getting older, lifespans increase, and the older you are the more you turn out to vote so this was a good election for appealing to older voters, and older didn’t used to be a Republican thing but Obama’s appeal to young voters set the stage to take the G out of the GOP this year. But it’s not the pure demographics that popped out to me, but the correlations.

Correlations like… that many rural areas are increasing in average age as young people seek opportunities in the city and the older population keeps getting older, industry changes, and they’re left without a job they’re trained for, and it’s not like there’s a university in town where they can learn new skills and qualifications. Which means this statistic is related to the economy, though remember people who make less than average voted for Hillary, and how much you make is also correlated with age, so while poor young voters voted for Hillary, Trump’s voters are worrying about retirement and healthcare in a system that is failing them on both counts. Age is correlated with race, and US demographics are getting increasingly diverse which hasn’t really hit the voter pools yet, and also consider religion. I don’t mean diversity of religion, I mean the middle-america sort of religion where the church isn’t just a community but the community, with a cohesiveness that trickles down from older members.

I want to talk about age not because it excuses anything, but because it changes how we should approach this. When people living in different places reject each other’s way of life, that’s something to compromise and come together on. But if it’s really that younger people are looking towards the future while older people want to go back to how things were, that’s a different conversation. Trump didn’t just lose the popular vote, he lost the younger half of America.

America has changed. Younger voters are multicultural, we have a diverse range of identity, we’re adaptable, we’ve had 4 different jobs in multiple industries, we don’t expect job security or abundant natural resources or to have the world our parents had. We adapt, and we care for each other, not just in the USA but around the world, because we are connected, we are informed, we have the world at our fingertips. We worry about how we’re going to deal with the environmental issues that have been handed to us, how we’re going to end the wars that have been handed to us. Everyone wants to leave a better world for their children and it would be natural for older folks to be a little resentful that we find so many flaws with the world they’re handing to us, but this isn’t the story of two Americas, it’s a story of new Americas, about a country that has improved and changed many times over. There’s no sides to fight and win. This is a gap you bridge by being kind to each other, by asking older America not to reject America’s youth and younger America to respect our history and our elders and make sure they are not forgotten in a world of new technology. There’s a difference between the young angry neo-nazi Trump supporters that have been so emboldened by him, so encouraged by his administration, and the voters who are older and disconnected and who I think actually make up his base.

Dark forces in the white house would divide us, Steve Bannon is pretending Trump’s win was about a culture war between nationalists and liberals, pc culture and working-class middle America, rather than a generational difference. The same think pieces the media was writing about millennials years ago are now being rewritten as pieces about liberals, but we’re still the same people and we’re not going away. Legacy media is obsessed with the idea of identity politics while we’re already over it, we’re just trying to understand and respect each other in a changed world. And maybe with all these new changes we did forget to include older people’s struggles. Maybe we fell into the fallacy of valuing the lives of hypothetical future people more than the lives of those already here in our communities.

Older voters didn’t grow up with the idea of climate change, it’s not about liberals being smart and Republicans being science deniers, the numbers tell me it’s about age. Statistics tell us Trump voters are uneducated but remember education levels have increased with time and that’s a good thing, and also maybe we have some work to do in bringing education innovation to people who aren’t in school, and don’t come into contact much with more recently educated people.

Older voters didn’t grow up with the internet. The numbers show that older you get the more time you spend watching television, that’s where information comes from for a lot of people, and legacy media, in their efforts to be fair to the other side and get ratings from their audience are completely missing how pro-Trump they sound to younger demographics, whether they—or Trump—think they’re being pro-Trump or not. Maybe when young people rejected old media and went to the internet, we didn’t think through all the side-effects.

Maybe we can spend some time teaching older folks about climate change and how to sort out hoaxes on the internet, and they can spend some time teaching younger folks about the importance of turning out to vote and how to use telephones to call representatives.

Trump played to people’s fear, not just to general economic anxiety but about retirement and their legacy and their own mortality. Fear of the existential threat posed by imaginary invasions. He knows how to speak to people his age, to white people who grew up during the cold war, and in places where support will trickle down because of community structure.

There’s an important difference between those who fear the unknown and those who hate the known, between those who avoid someone because they don’t want to be hurt and those who engage with someone because they want to see them suffer. The former behavior might not be acceptable, but it’s approachable. You can talk about it.

I don’t make excuses for bigotry but maybe we can change how we approach it for the large share of Trump’s voter base who might be active in opposing it if we give them space to. There’s plenty of older folks who are excited to be challenged and engaged by the young American culture, who are willing to admit they’re wrong when they’re wrong, even if it challenges their authority.

 But from what I’ve seen of Trump and Bannon, they enjoy seeing the suffering of those who disagree with them, they seek to punish those who oppose them, and you can’t have a successful dialogue with someone who would like to see you hurt. Democrats won’t work with Trump, but Republicans can’t work with Trump. They could obey him, but they can’t work with him. Whether the white house reflects it or not, there is no future in Trump. The world already changed.

Some of Trump’s voters just want to burn it all down but most of them have shown that they care about the future of our country, they are engaged, they want to work hard, and maybe we can find a direction for that energy that we can agree on, rather than leaving older generations behind. Because we’re going to have this same problem when we’re old and future generations are fluent in technology we can’t imagine, that connects them to information and understanding that we can’t access effectively. Let us learn now how we bridge the gap of age in a world of increasing information technology.

Can we call our older friends and family and tell them our concerns, tell them about the world we see? Can we listen to their stories? Can we remember that our representatives and senators are also mostly older and didn’t grow up with the internet and aren’t reading our twitter feed and give them a call to share our concerns? Can we reach out personally to those who get their information that way? Can we find a way to disagree in our opinions but agree on the facts? Can we ask those who grew up in a different time to support us? Can we ask those who grew up in a different time how we can support them?

I feel mostly hopeful but there’s a certain bittersweetness to it and I can’t help think of my grandma. I lived with my her when my mathematical work started becoming popular, I respected her dictatorial authority in her home and I forgave her the occasional comments that one would call “old fashioned” when said by your own grandma. But I often think about the fact that when she was ill, she made a conscious decision to die rather than leave home. It’s not an uncommon choice. We are defined by the things we value more than ourselves. My grandmother made a home; and as frustrated as I was with her unwillingness to use the internet or accept a broader range of identity, she made me welcome in the home that was worth more to her than her own life. 

And so, to the future generations who value the lives of all of us equally, I entreat you to remember that life is to be honored universally but spent individually. Be kind to those who truly define themselves as Americans first, those who would whole-heartedly welcome you into the country they would give their life for. That is a kind of nationalism to be respected, and I think we can find a way to come together in support of America’s new culture while still honoring those who got us here.

[This post, including video, is Public Domain CC0]

I made a video! Again! It’s just a thing that happens sometimes.

This one is a true story about when I got mad at a taxi driver that skidded through the crosswalk in the rain, and why they were DEFINITELY DOING MATH WRONG.

Part 2 will be out next week, maybe?

Also, obviously I started writing this script a long time ago because it hasn’t rained in ever. But I still think if California focused more of its policies and funding towards higher quality math education, it would make our streets safer.

Transcript:

Today, I was walking across the street and this taxi comes zooming up to the crosswalk at a red light and slams on the brakes and skids across the crosswalk a foot in front of me and I’m like, dude, it’s raining, do you not realize how that affects the derivatives of your position over time, my goodness, I was one foot away from being turned into a pancake by your bad math education.

Now, every driver knows that speed is what happens when you change your position over time (such as the changing position of your car as it approaches the position of the crosswalk) and that acceleration is a change in speed over time (such as, y’know, how even if you change your speed by decelerating as much as your brakes and road conditions allow, you will still be going a positive speed by the time you reach the crosswalk, ). What many drivers don’t seem to know is that these changes are related by mathematical laws. Some drivers are like, you’re here, and then later you’re there? No one can explain this.

And, I can understand that. The idea that anything ever goes anywhere is kind of tricky if you’re Zeno and calculus hasn’t been invented yet. I mean, say you’re 20 meters from the crosswalk. How does one hit pedestrians if before you can get to the crosswalk you have to drive halfway to the crosswalk and then you have to drive halfway between there and the crosswalk and then halfway between there and the crosswalk? and so on. If each of these steps took the same amount of time, then that would be quite an interesting deceleration, you’d never hit anybody like that. But say you drive those first 10 meters in one second, and those next 5 meters in half a second, and the next 2-and-a-half meters in a quarter of a second, it doesn’t matter how many infinite bits of distance you’re adding up, you can break apart those 2 seconds and 20 meters in whatever way you find interesting but 2 seconds later you’ve still gone 20 meters and 2.1 seconds later you’re still trying to ruin my day.

There’s this stereotype about California drivers that whenever it rains, which is rarely enough these days, traffic stops because all the drivers are freaking out like what is this substance all over the ground, we don’t know how to do math to it.

The common wisdom seems to be that when it rains, you should just drive slower. A classic error of calculus, because it’s not really the speed that’s the problem with rain, but how it affects acceleration.

It’s like this: you’re goin’ along at a constant speed, uh, this is time and this is speed and this line is nice and flat so no change in speed is occurring, you’re just driving at 50 miles an hour. But then, oh no, there’s something in front of you, so you slam on the brakes. Now your speed is decreasing, decreasing, until you hit a speed of zero and stop. If you’re at a slower speed to begin with, then this line intersects zero earlier, you can stop faster. So far so obvious.

The slope of this line changes depending on your car and on road conditions: maybe you come to a stop real quickly, or maybe your brakes are bad or the road is icy and you just kinda glide for a while until finally you hit zero. Your car might be able to decelerate real fast when it’s dry, but not so fast when it’s raining, and then even if you start out slower it might take longer to actually stop. You can’t just drive slower, you have to leave more distance between you and the car in front of you, and start braking earlier when you’re coming up on a light, which is why that’s what they tell you in driver’s ed. Whereas if you’ve got lots of room and can decellerate for a long time, you can start at a greater speed even if it takes a while to decelerate to zero. Which is the part they don’t want to tell you in driver’s ed.

Of course, this is graph is kind of misleading because it’s not like the crosswalk is here, this axis shows time, not place. And when we need to stop, we usually don’t care about when to stop so much as where to stop. This graph shows the speed of a taxi that needs to stop at a crosswalk, but let’s overlay the position graph in red, same time axis, different y axis, so we can show where the crosswalk is . Here’s where the Taxi is when I see it coming towards the crosswalk, here’s the crosswalk, 20 meters away. So the driver is going along at a constant speed, that’s this nice linearly increasing distance, realizes it’s a red light and slams the brakes here.

It’s slowing down, and the distance over time starts this nice deceleration curve. Of course, in my case it doesn’t reach the flat zero slope of a stopped car until it’s gone through the crosswalk. Wish it could stop sooner, but once you decide to stop, there’s a max decelleration, you can stop faster if you have better brakes or less momentum or if the ground is dry but there’s always a max slope your speed can drop, which means a max curve your position can take so there we are in the crosswalk. 

Accelleration, speed, and position, these things are related so don’t run me over in the rain. Lookin’ at slopes.

But the story doesn’t end there. We’re leaving off with the taxi driver stopped in the crosswalk but what happens next will surprise you. Or, not really so much, but I wanna talk about hover cars? Anyway see you next time for part 2.