johnmaconline

Climate change isn’t happening in Eastern Pennsylvania. 

How do you know? Show up and look around. 

None of the forests are burning out of control and threatening neighborhoods. Farmers aren’t starving, nor have they had to adjust their crops or livestock. We haven’t had any “out of the ordinary” droughts, floods, or winter storms (every few years, we get a banger summer or winter storm or have a month or two of drought — as always). We don’t have a coastline, so nothing to see there.

So this climate change crisis is a hoax, right? A non-crisis marketing scam propagated by a particular tribe to instill fear, increase their control, and extract finances.

A big nothing-burger.

Maybe.

But before we jump to conclusions about climate change — or COVID, racism, MAGA, crime, academia, etc — based on personal experience alone, let’s remember it’s a big world out there.

We all have a story we tell ourselves. One of the biggest inputs to that story is your personal experience. Personal experience is always a valid input but doesn’t usually tell the whole story. 

But if climate change is your biggest personal worry, maybe you should consider moving to Eastern Pennsylvania. There is no climate change here. 

Anti-vax or anti-science?
Anti-socialism or anti-capitalism?
Anti-smart or anti-dumb?

The tribe demands you pick a side. The algorithm rewards it. The mouthpieces celebrate it.

Here’s the truth: you don’t have to pick a side.

Once we realize that the sides were fabricated, and the answers lie within the humanity between, we can finally move forward.

In 1975, the third fight between Ali and Frazier (dubbed the Thrilla in Manilla) was seen by an estimated 1 billion people. The UFC earns close to a billion dollars each year. 

The right. The left.
The right versus the left, or the left versus the right.
Good versus evil.

No wonder our public platforms and channels amplify the fights between good and evil. 

Fights sell tickets. 

Just like each of us (yes, you, too) should be required to play baseball or softball as a teenager, here’s another mandate I’m putting in place when I become king:

Mandatory living (i.e., service time) in each of urban, suburban, and rural communities.

Between the ages of 25 and 40 (assuming you make it that far), you will live in a community within each type of housing zone. That’s five years in each, baby.

I’ll be very generous with the implementation — you know, because this is a free country, after all, and you are free, sentient human beings. And I’m a benevolent dictator.

You are free to choose the order. You are free to choose the geography (don’t worry, we’ll tell you which communities qualify for which label). You are also free to move around within those communities or from one geography to another.

The only other rule is that your service time must be accumulated contiguously — i.e., you must live in each for five years in a row. 

I can see only one other way to avoid this mandate.

That’s if each of us can find the generosity and empathy to realize that geography and community add to our personal history. And our personal history informs the story we tell ourselves. And the story we tell ourselves becomes the lens through which we see the world.

Our story doesn’t make us dumb or smart. It just makes us us.

I’m a geek in technology. 

But that makes sense, right?

a) I work in the tech industry.
b) I’ve always loved technology. Ever since I first touched and smelled that TRS-80 Model I in the library of Lower Milford Elementary school in 4th grade. 

In a world where one can choose a path, you could argue that the tech industry was my destiny.

The same is true for my colleagues. When tech crosses the membrane and leaks into the world, we’re like little kids on Christmas morning. The world wide web, smartphones, self-driving cars — these are super bowls for tech geeks like us. 

And boy, do we love to debate their effect on the world. Sometimes we have useful insight, but most times, we overvalue our expertise. We need other non-geeks to stand above and behind, with different perspectives, to truthfully assess technology’s effects on the world.

Many professions have a similar crossover between a person’s geeky interests and vocation.

Take meteorology. One becomes a meteorologist because one loves the weather. And how do meteorologists act when an extreme weather event is imminent? Kids in a candy store. It’s their super bowl.

Public health is similar. Public health officials geek out on public health things (thank God). And when a new virus, bacteria, or behavior threatens the general population, it’s their super bowl. 

Like with myself and technology, the experts’ voices are important, but it’s critical to get the perspectives of the non-geeks when making decisions for the entire group. 

The tribe wants you to vote for it.

So it plays on your emotions with its platform, issues, and philosophy. It wants you to vote for the philosophy because the philosophy is for smart and caring people.

It doesn’t want you to vote for the person.

The person is dangerous. The person may not stick to the agenda. The person may have their own ideas. The person may have a relationship with non-tribe members. The person may care more about their people rather than keeping their tribe in power.

What if we voted for the person rather than the tribe?

The children’s play area at the King of Prussia mall is an interesting sociology and psychology lab. 

I spent one arduous evening at the mall over the holiday season, and the children’s play area, filled with 30 or so kids and their parents, was by far the most interesting thing I saw all night.

This was the runup to Christmas — the big day. I suspect Santa was watching. 

Here’s what I saw.

First, the obvious — kids at play. Some were running around and crawling on the overly safe animal-shaped equipment, and others were playing in calmer, loose-knit groups adjacent to the equipment. No electronics. I did see, however, many lonesome kids stationed all around the mall, on benches or at food court tables with their faces glued to screens. 

Second, I noticed that DEI seemed to take care of itself. All without special interest groups, mandates, rules, victims, or adult intervention. 

Third, kids in the wild are pretty good at organizing themselves and working out differences and issues. All it took was an occasional raised voice, a grab or smack on the arm, or simply ejecting from the group. Not exactly a calm or rule-based public discourse, but effective. 

Fourth, all of the adults — all of them — were sitting around the outside, heads down, necks craned, eyes glued to the 2.8×5.78″ gorilla glass. Some were probably spending their outrage budget on why the world is such a terrible place.

Look up. 

We overvalue ideas, and we overvalue our personal contribution to their creation and discovery. 

Ideas aren’t dangerous. Ideas don’t have any power. They can’t hurt you, nor can they help you. 

Nor can they be stolen.

We do all kinds of silly things to protect our ideas. We build a legal system around them. We speak of them in hushed murmurs behind closed doors. We sign meaningless pieces of paper promising not to discuss them outside of the room or with the wrong people. We argue over who owns the idea.

We love to inflate our egos with our brilliant ideas.

But an idea has no power or value unless and until someone does something with it. The idea must be born into the real world. It must move from abstract to concrete. 

Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, they’re worth less than a dime for a dozen. They are worthless. Unless you…

Build the thing.
Gather the tribe.
Write the story.

If you want to make a difference, stop worrying about someone stealing your idea and go do something with it.