United States

“In the Future, the World Will Make Sense”

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I was taught at a young age that the world made sense but when I grew up I found that it made as much sense as we had made sense of it.

I suppose as a child being made comfortable with the idea that the world made perfect sense made me easier to deal with.

Some people never seem to get past the need for the world to make sense. The very idea that we don’t understand the world is too much for most of us. I wake up every day wondering about something I don’t yet have the answer to – at least one thing. Every morning when I wake up there’s an implicit acknowledgement that the world doesn’t make sense and it’s fun learning new things.

Some people don’t see the world that way. Some people fear new things. Some people prefer the comfort of belief that they do understand everything. These people trouble me. In fact, they trouble other people who believe different things. No, I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about politics, which effectively is another religion. If I point out weaknesses in a candidate, these people default to thinking I must be on the ‘other side’. That’s almost never true.

People pick their own narratives, and there is nothing wrong with that. The only side anyone should pick in a democracy, in my humble opinion, is their own. You’re supposed to vote your interests in a democracy.

In this past election, some people voted for the building that they sought comfort in. Some voted for the wrecking ball because that building bothered them for some reason, though there are no plans to build anything in it’s place. This election is a reset on a lot of things in that regard, and the next one could be better, or it could be worse, and everyone will have an opinion on that and some will be told their opinion by people with impossible hair on their favorite news channel.

All you need to be a pundit is to get people to believe that they are less intelligent than you are, and it’s alarming how easy it is. Cherry picking facts, painting with a broad brush, and hair that defies the body it’s on.

Part of getting past that is understanding our own biases. Someone in an urban setting sees the world one way, someone in a suburban setting sees it another way, and someone in a rural setting sees it in yet another way. Each one grows up in a different culture and while we like to think they have the same values, there are small differences because of the different cultures.

If you can step outside of your biases long enough, the world is not the same. Yet political pundits like you right there where you are. The systems, many of which seem broken, are designed to keep you where you are – that’s the role of bureaucracy, to stall change. And the people who profit from it all? There you are.

Does it make them bad people? Nope. Being ‘bad people’, too, has a lot to do with culture. Famously, the Greeks called anyone who wasn’t Greek a barbarian, and here we are still waiting for the barbarians.

…Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy

For lack of actual barbarians, maybe the political pundits should be who we call barbarians.

That would make more sense to me.

Democracy Is About People, Stupid.

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what the hell?

There’s little that hasn’t been written or said about the U.S. Presidential Election. When asked about it, I have been saying that there were two bad candidates and one of them had to win.

This pisses off people who are emotionally attached to one of the two. I’m ok with that. One represented individual oligarchy, one represented corporate oligarchy, and if you can’t tell which is which then maybe you’re part of the problem.

The people whose candidate won have been pretty happy. The people whose candidate lost have been trying to figure out why. It’s gotten so bad that LinkedIn has become a toxic waste dump of curated perspectives on… well, that, the Democratic party, and all the other stuff that probably shouldn’t be posted by people who want to hire someone or be hired by someone. It’s become further polarized because of it.

And that’s what helped get the result. People are viewing ‘those people’, whoever they are, as all sorts of negative things without understanding things.

Jon Stewart and Sarah Smarsh had a conversation about it… and the content probably should have been spoken about decades ago. It’s almost an hour long, but some people really need to watch this.

Identity, class… things that I hear progressive democrats talk about a lot and yet they somehow miss the boat consistently on that.

America is a big and diverse place, and it’s bigger and more diverse than most perspectives I’ve seen expressed. I have friends across the spectrum. I don’t have to agree with them, but I do have to understand their perspectives.

When looking at politics, people look at the narratives provided and if it fits their personal experience and identity better than the other narrative, they choose that one. Rationality might be discussion before voting, but voting is emotional for a lot of people.

It’s about people. Stereotyping them in a negative way ain’t gonna make things better. Understand the people who a democracy is supposed to represent, don’t depend on data analytics.

Go outside and listen. Respect people enough not to treat them like spreadsheet.

How Democracy Died.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

Danger Polls.

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The world is a strange place. Something captured my imagination. Being a pollster in Gaza and the West Bank. This, apparently, is a real thing.

I found out this morning that people did polls in Gaza and the West Bank after October 7th, when Israel started Israeling after Hamas Hamassed1.

There were pollsters running around after October 7th2 in Gaza and the West Bank (the West Bank has it’s own troubles). That seems a very brave thing to do, wandering around while things are exploding and asking people their opinions.

Being a pollster there sounds like a pretty exciting job in that area – a job for young people, hopefully with health benefits. Dental would be good too, though it seems that hospitals are at a premium at this time. Do you get to march in front of the line and say, “I’m a pollster, I have a headache” in front of the line of people with missing limbs? I doubt it. Health insurance rates must be high, too.

What do you do when you’re not polling? What do you do if you’re wounded? Do you find a pigeon, scribble a note with the appropriate findings and say defiantly with your last breath, “The poll must be completed!”

Gaza and the West Bank have been very scary places for some time. This does not mean that random exploding things falling on parts of Israel makes for Israel to be ‘safe’, but it’s more reasonably safe than the occupied territories because there, you get both the IDF and Hamas 24/7. No election since 2007. Only the people who shouldn’t have guns have them.

How would it be to be born in an occupied territory? To have no rights that can’t be taken away? To see in the distance, above a wall, a modern nation funded by another modern nation? I *might* think that it wasn’t fair. Maybe a friend gets killed by that modern nation’s people. Maybe a family. Maybe I feel injustice with no outlet, no real representation. Or maybe I just don’t care, wandering around and eeking out a living, but it seems that I would care. Would you? I’d probably feel a little angry, honestly.

I might kick a can really hard, then get detained for littering. Things probably would not go well for me, for I have been spoiled by a better illusion of freedom.

I joke a bit in this post, but that belies what I’m trying to do: Add context to a world that screams should the wi-fi get sketchy. We are all just staring out of our caves through our flat screens, not understanding the starvation being twistedly enforced in unforgettable ways, ways that the world has now seen in imagery that cannot be forgotten.

It seems that during all of this, the somewhat simple task of simply doing a poll – something that we take for granted in much of the world – is so very different there, in a war zone, but there are people there doing it because they clearly think it’s very important, more important than the two lizard argument being presented to US voters.

Anyway, if someone applies for a position at your company who has been a pollster in a war zone, I’d say that you’d want to hire them. Actually, anyone who has found a way to survive there should be advanced to the top of the stack of those applications just based on resilience.

  1. We have two new terms to use. I remember when going postal was new, and we humans have made it so we have new ways to express groups of individuals going postal in the same direction. We need a word that combines the two, the dance of complex history. Until then, we’re stuck with the cumbersome phrase, “Gaza War”. ↩︎
  2. The poll can be found here, on the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research website. ↩︎

Another Other.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I came across something in the vein of ‘others’ yesterday when I was researching ‘TikTok, History and Issues‘.

It was in ‘Young Americans are defending the U.S. after TikTok videos criticizing it went viral‘ (emphasis mine):

“…Shami, who grew up in a multi-language household with a Syrian father and Irish-Catholic mother, said she often feels she’s labeled as “other” because she’s an American who wears hijab. She said Sara Falcon’s videos struck a nerve with her because they played into the idea that the U.S. looks, acts and speaks exclusively one way.

“My grandparents raised cows and corn,” Shami said. “I don’t know how much more American you can get.”…”

So this is likely an example of another ‘other‘. That would be about the only commonality I would have with her, but that’s the beauty of being an ‘other’. She’s multicultural, clearly. I don’t know that I agree with her take on things in that article since in my lifetime it’s been black or white in the United States.

She must have a very interesting perspective on things. We all do, with our own mixes of identities and cultures, lacking the monotone of the pseudo-science of race that racism is built on.

I imagine she might be asked “Where are you from” a lot when she meets new people. Well, she’s clearly from the United States. What more has to be said?

We “Others”

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‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic as I mentioned yesterday. Had I not been given as much resistance in discussion, I would have gone along thinking that

A Colorful History

The United States Constitution (Article I, Section 2) established representation in the U.S. House of Representatives was based on population determined by census. It’s a very interesting read – I encourage the reader to follow links I provide to get a feel for the broader picture. In writing this, I am writing specifically about the growing demographic that is of ‘Some Other Race’, or ‘Other’.

Of course, the census was quite different in 1790. The questions asked were:

  • Name of head of family
  • Number of free white males age 16 years and upwards, including head of family
  • Number of free white males under 16 years old
  • Number of free white females, including head of family
  • Number of all other free persons [free African-Americans]
  • Number of slaves

This basically slotted everyone into one of 3 categories: free whites, all other free persons and slaves. To date, while there are discussions about other races, the one that pulls all the oxygen out of the room is just the same from the outside looking in. There is reason for this, but with such a growing demographic as ‘Other’ has been, the choice to use ‘some other race’ is increasingly a larger minority made up of many types of people.

‘Free Whites’ was a part of the 1790 Nationality Act. Only white, male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens. Women, people who were not recognized as white and indentured servants could not. In so doing, a legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was created and racial restriction for citizenship was not completely eliminated until 1952. If you were not eligible for citizenship, you weren’t permitted to own property, be represented in court, have public employment and voting. At this time this affected a lot of Asians.

Mulatto was added in 1850, bringing the categories to 4, and it was all based on whites and blacks. By 2010, there were 63 possible race categories. Of related interest and reading is the ‘One Drop Rule‘, which culturally still seems to be used. We’ll get back to that.

From 2016, we have this:

“Something unusual has been taking­­­­­­ place with the United States Census: A minor category that has existed for more than 100 years is elbowing its way forward. “Some Other Race,” a category that first entered the form as simply “Other” in 1910, was the third-largest category after “White” and “Black” in 2010, alarming officials, who are concerned that if nothing is done ahead of the 2020 census, this non-categorizable category of people could become the second-largest racial group in the United States…”

“The Rise of the American ‘Others'”, Sowmiya Ashok, The Atlantic, August 27th, 2016

It’s awkward to say that ‘Other’ is a racial group, which presents the inherent bias in a system designed to track people by race – a cheap attempt at color coding humanity into things to manage. As Kermit the Frog might say, it’s not easy being green.

From 2018, we have:

…The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics…

“The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018.

It ends up that there may have been some padding in the statistics, too.

“…It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency…”

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018. (ibid).

The article goes on to say that to claim to be either Hispanic or Middle Eastern in the United States is a political act. I don’t know about that. I don’t know how many ‘Other’ are this and that or the other or something completely different. It’s completely different based on what someone is willing to identify as to a government, to offices, and to apply for grants at a financial aid office.

From 2021:

“…What was once the country’s third-largest racial category in 2000 and 2010 outpaced “Black” last year to become the second-largest after “White” — and a major data problem that could hinder progress towards racial equity over the next 10 years…”

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021.

That article goes on to give the history of ‘Other’ in the U.S. Census. First used in 1910, it was the job of census workers who assigned people to a race by observation, and were instructed to label those that they couldn’t recognize as ‘other’, and write down the race. One of the bureau’s 1910 census reports even included Hindus as a race: These would be East Indians, from India, in an era when Native Americans were still called ‘Indians’, the Columbus idiocy that would not die quietly.

In 1960, the bureau allowed U.S Residents to self-report their racial identities, and in 2000 the checkbox came along.1

…”For a long time, there was the sense that there wasn’t anything wrong with the question, but rather that Hispanics didn’t understand the question. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” says Clara Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University and author of Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. “‘Some other race’ was something to be taken seriously, not to be dismissed as a misunderstanding on the part of the Hispanic population.”…

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021. (ibid)

I have no doubt that some people who identify themselves as ‘other’ are of Hispanic origin, but it’s hard to say that all of them are. In fact, there may be some, like me, who just think it’s an insulting question, but there would be many other individuals with their own reasoning. What’s the incentive for filling out a form and telling them what you identify as? This seems to be an application of the ‘One Drop Rule’, as previously mentioned.

Generally speaking, people like to belong. People announce their love to the government through marriage licenses, so announcing their tribe to the government makes about as much sense. Yet, the numbers of ‘Some Other Race’ have been consistently growing, and I have yet to be invited to an ‘Others’ meeting.

The one thing that connects ‘Others’ is the one thing that divides them: The U.S. Census and it’s use of race. It underlines how silly the system is, where people either can’t or won’t claim a race in the census. Humanity is a melting pot.

It is mildly disturbing that in it’s bid to be more granular, the U.S. Census Bureau is finding nationalities in ‘some other race’ respondents. A Brazilian could be any combination of heritages, but since I know Guyana a bit better and they are mentioned, the majority of the population of Guyana is of a mix of African descendants (from slavery) and Indian (Indentured Laborers), and so those reporting themselves as Guyanese could be either one, both, a mixture, indigenous, or even of majority European descent. During World War II, many people blended into South America in various nations.

The system is as cleanly cut as what race is – a social construct that was originally created to allow some to be ‘greater’ than others.

It begs the question of whether race is itself still a pertinent way to track people. It only benefits those that already have purchase or the capacity to purchase, not those who do not. It’s clearly an administrative nightmare, built on the politics of the moment. To what end?

It ends up that ‘Other’ is a pretty big data problem for a system built on counting how many of each race as well, something that potentially can skew a lot of other things.

We Gotta Do Better Than this.

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Joe Trump, effectively the main presidential candidate in 2024.

I don’t know how we got here, with Presidential Candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden as presidential candidates.

Well, actually, I do have an idea, but I don’t know that it’s right or true. What I do know is that both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are not attractive in any way. I remember a similar time with Gore and G.W. Bush, and look how well that turned out – we invaded Iraq for no good reason, the manufactured consent being about weapons of mass destruction and the only ones we found were the ones we brought with us.

Many of we veterans were against that. Nobody really listened. Look how well that turned out.

Trump is… well. An ambulatory legal disaster. Biden is… at best, conflicted. Both candidates can’t keep things straight because they are old. There’s a line somewhere between experienced and old that they have both crossed some time ago. One harnesses the anger at an establishment that doesn’t work for them while doing nothing about it, even making it worse, while the other is running on not being the other guy.

Reproduction rights – oh, who are we fooling, they’re women’s rights – will be a part of the campaign. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade does not make sense to me. If you’re religious, you believe in God, and God is supposed to sort out things at a personal level according to a variety of scriptures. Legislating away choices that are supposed to be between a person and their deity of choice or lack thereof seems peculiar to me. I don’t have to agree with someone else’s choice that doesn’t affect me.

In fact, that particular choice regarding abortion only impacts taxpayers when there is no abortion. That’s where we then have the need for social programs for humans that one day will become adults for at least 18 years. Do I agree with abortion personally? Sometimes, sometimes not, but it boils down to it not being my choice and I won’t force someone to have a child they don’t want or cannot support. That just sounds like a bad mix. So in my mind, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems… stupid. Meanwhile, in Alabama, things got really weird.

People do things I disagree with all the time. I’m not special enough to dictate to anyone else how they should do things. I wouldn’t want to be. My own life is weird enough. And how is this an election issue?

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has no real oversight, which is just astounding when you see how much lobbyism impacts the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is hardly ‘supreme’ unless in a Taco Bell Burrito sense, with similar effects to the dietary tract.

What else is there. Oh, growing socioeconomic divides that neither candidate speaks to in a meaningful way.

We have the “I wish Israel would listen” issue with 65% of Americans against what Israel is doing to some degree. Neither party wants to take on that, and when most decisions cannot be explained in politics it usually becomes about money. Around the world where the wars are, we see corporate needs. Ukraine – oil, minerals, and farmland. Where the Palestinians are – were, hopefully still are – oil. Let’s not forget what’s going on in the Congo.

I like capitalism. I do. The system we have now, though, is overreach without a reach-around. There do not seem to be checks and balances. The masses, upset, are told what the issues are, the candidates are told what the talking points are, and the lobbyists keep everything lubricated to get the interests of those with more free speech than others to center stage.

Dystopian fiction doesn’t have a market when we live it, so unless you plan to do some time traveling to sell your book, forget it.

There are third party candidates. The major parties will have people decrying them about splitting the vote, but I have something to tell you. Voting for a bad candidate to win is just that. That is a wasted vote, and if you don’t like your candidate, you’re telling your political party of choice that you’ll keep taking it. That you like it. And they won’t change.

I know the blind followers of political parties. The rhetoric is the same, the names and issues changed or inverted to just keep the herds going on the paths chosen for us. I do not like their choices, but like abortion, it’s not my right to tell them how to vote and in the same vein, it’s not their right to tell me how I should vote.

Somewhere along the way, people might vote for their interests again rather than playing a fabricated tug of war on issues that goes out of it’s way to dehumanize the ‘others’. ‘Trump Supporters are stupid’, ‘Libtards’, etc – not the way to have a meaningful discussion about the future of a nation, and implicitly, the world – a world that is watching, with enemies that are probably laughing at the whole thing.

They should. It’s idiotic.

Whatever part of the political spectrum that you fall on, all I have to say is that you should do better with your candidates – and I’ll throw the third party candidates in there as well.

If you can’t be critical of all the candidates, you’re not a voter. You’re a sheep.

That’s what I have to say about the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t expect to write about it because I’m not interested in politics, I’m interested in doing better, and it doesn’t seem like politics is a part of that.

Shades of Grey’s Anatomy

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There’s been a lot of talk of diversity that I’ve experienced since the 1990s, and what is accused of being diversity is just an addition of more labels and managing interactions.

I can say that from where I sit that it’s all been pretty stupid.

I like medical dramas, and when I get an opportunity, I watch them because there are quite a few things I miss from my days of being a Navy Corpsman. ‘House‘ remains my all time favorite, followed by ‘ER‘. ‘Greys Anatomy‘ has managed longevity and has some interesting stuff in there too – and as it happens, it’s what prompted this post.

In speaking with someone here in Trinidad, I brought up a surgery enacted in Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t recall the details, but the person I was speaking with is an East Indian1 doctor. That doctor told me he was disgusted with Grey’s Anatomy because they don’t represent Indians often and when they do they go to the less preferred stereotypes.

Being half East Indian myself, I was curious. I don’t really identify as East Indian or any other race since I am mixed, but I acknowledge that a lot of people had sex that lead to me and they were pretty diverse. Still, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, because of my name, in some circles I’m seen as East Indian and all the stereotypes that come with it. It’s good to be aware of how one is perceived.

What’s funnier is that Indians, particularly those in the United States, generally have had a snobbish attitude with me, which is particularly amusing because they’re upset that some of my ancestors left India before their ancestors did. Worse, being of mixed descent, I’m not of any particular ‘race’, so I’ve found some of the sneering Indian ‘would not wipe my feet on your back’ sort of rhetoric almost normal and comical from that section of society. When someone tells you who they are by how they behave, don’t ignore them.

So I watched Greys Anatomy a while, and I saw what was meant. There was a glaring lack of East Indian representation and, when when they did show up, they were fired. Meanwhile, LGBQT is trendy on the show, mixed marriages, empowered Americans of African descent are sharing power with their former masters, Asians get a little better than token representation (Dr. Christina Yang left after some seasons as I understand it), the little Mexican representation was a single bisexual character and the Mexican Day of the Dead and… having seen the last season’s episodes, everyone is getting represented except Indians.

I don’t care, really. It’s not as if Indians have been particularly nice to me – quite the opposite. However, I do also know that not all Indians are like that, my experiences notwithstanding. Across the Internet, I’ve interacted with many from India who just view me as ‘another human being’, which is all I have ever expected of anyone, and all I try to offer.

It bugged me and so I did a search on it to find that I was not the only person to look at this, and that I was also quite late in looking into it. One of the better articles I found was from May 2020: ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘.

It’s the United States, where 8.5% of physicians are of Indian descent – so if there are 10 doctors on the show, almost 1 of them should be of Indian descent to be representative. They even have an association – the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, founded in 1982. Nevermind the nurses.

Now, there is a culture of East Indians. Famously, Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate) was passing through Trinidad and Tobago and had a taxi driver take him around Port of Spain. The taxi driver, according to Feynman, observed that the East Indian parents would lose their teeth to send their children to get an education. This, however, is not a stereotype of Indians as much as a stereotype of immigrants.

People who leave one bad place to get to another generally appreciate that they have it better and they generally want better for their children, enough so that they make sacrifices like that mainly because they’re starting at zero – or even below zero. Despite stereotypes of crime, partially earned I expect, there are immigrants I have seen who just work hard.

In Costa Rica, I saw it in Nicaraguans who were disliked in Costa Rica. In the United States, I saw the Mexicans, and later more Puerto Ricans and later still those from Republica Dominicana. I saw it in the 1970s with East Indians from Trinidad of my father’s generation and earlier in the United States. It’s not about race, or any culture other than immigrant culture. These are people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children and showed how much they wanted it.

So, Grey’s Anatomy is pretty annoying in this regard for people I expect are East Indian, and judging from what has happened in the show since 2020, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t seem to care much about it.

What’s most interesting to me is that there has been a lot of focus on ‘non-binary’ gender, but not enough about ‘non-binary’ race. In the United States, you’re pretty much white or a shade of brown that is still treated as black.

…Diversity has been at the forefront of the Hollywood discourse in the last few years, but it shouldn’t be confined to black and white. When certain minorities are excluded from the conversation, it is the same problem.

Meehika Barua, ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘, DigitalSpy, 18 May 2020

There’s a lot more to black and white in these conversations that should be outdated, and I’ll get into that with the next post.

1 In the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘East Indian’ is used to distinguish from ‘West Indian’, and in acknowledges the orphaning of the Indian diaspora who left India during it’s period of British Rule to attempt a better life somewhere else as indentured laborers.

Memorial Day.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

In the United States, Memorial Day is a public holiday, and a disturbing amount of people mix up Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is about those who served and never returned.

I’ve spent a few Memorial Days in the U.S. visiting the vast military graveyards, knowing that for many whose bodies are interred had painful last moments. We who have served sign up for this, though it’s not in the brochure and it’s not something spoken or written of as often as it happens.

To make matters worse, “supporting the troops” has become a football for some politically loud sections of the United States, thinking those that do not support the decisions of the government to send people to war cannot support the troops – but then, is supporting the loss of life and quality of life for reasons that are questionable ‘supporting the troops’, or is it ‘throwing the lives of troops away’?

Take a look at what Russia has been doing with it’s troops. Forced conscriptions sent into a meat grinder for… what? Trying to reclaim territory of an entity that no longer exists (USSR)? We look at that and many of us draw in a breath and shake our heads, even as we cheer for Ukraine’s drawn out victory with their forced conscriptions, all men, with women volunteering. To what end?

For Ukraine, it’s a battle of defense – a battle of autonomy, a battle of identity, a battle of their way of life. This is something that is easily relatable to. Russia’s offensive reeks of a failed painter with a very small mustache: Conquest with 19th century tactics and 20th century weapons in a 21st century world.

In Sudan, the same thing is happening, though the lines are not as clear though the blood is just as red, and the scale is smaller from what we see reported, but it’s still happening.

This all came to mind as I was watching Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, which is based on real events but is not a true story.

It’s a story we want to see and hear because we want the good guys to live happily ever after. Not everyone does, and in the movie only one from the team makes it back – the premise for the whole story. Those that did not make it back, though, died in support of their orders which is what Memorial Day is about – based on the idea that the government knows what is best to defend the ideals expressed over hot dogs and hamburgers on Memorial Day.

Where I have lived, where I do live, Memorial Day isn’t a holiday. Where I live presently, in Trinidad and Tobago, there’s not even an equivalent, and seeing fellow veterans is a rare thing.

Yet I remember what it’s about. There are no hamburgers or hot dogs this long weekend, a break in the death march of work we subject ourselves to. We lose people in uniform, we lose people, and we hope that we did for good reasons and better judgement when that’s not always the case.

Saying, “Happy Memorial Day” seems peculiar to me. Memorial Day is a day of reflection for me, as you can probably tell, and for it to be happy… well, I don’t think it would exist.

Memorial Day is the reminder of the price paid by others and their families and friends. In this way, I hope Memorial Day carries just a small amount of the weight we balance any victory or loss against so that we do remember – and do not lose meaningful lives over meaningless things.

The Reason, The Move

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

The Sunset Over The Hercules' GraveI have a simple rule in my life that may be right or may be wrong, but it has always been a guide. The rule is, “Don’t do anything for one reason.”  I’m a strategist.

When I decided to move to Trinidad and Tobago, I felt a little insulted by the idiots (ok, I felt very insulted) in the U.S. and in Trinidad and Tobago who made this into an issue about Trump winning the election.

A close friend asked me if I was sure it was the right thing when I told him my decision – “so many are trying to get out of Trinidad and Tobago, and you’re coming back?”

I responded, “It may not be a good decision, but it’s the right decision.” What does that mean? It means even though he may think it isn’t a good decision or isn’t sure, it’s the right decision for me. ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ are subjective.

Politics

When I made the decision to move to Trinidad and Tobago, most people made a leap to this somehow being about the U.S. Presidential election in the United States. That had something to do with  it, but not in the way that most people thought. The harsh reality was that I did not like either candidate, and that whoever won I saw either a continuation of the mockery of the American dream or a new one being born that wasn’t what I needed. And that stemmed from other reasons, all of which revolved around the way you have to live in the U.S. if you want to, at the least, tread water.

And the American public insisted on having the debates that they were fed instead of discussing the actual issues. It was a sharp contrast of unrealistic idealism on one side backing a candidate who was not an idealist, and the unrealistic want for change by many who need change on issues with a candidate who was outright scary in his used car salesmanship. Where I was in Florida, it was a war between those who had met Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and those that were fighting to continue treading water in that arena. Some will argue that, and they have a right to, but in the end it wasn’t as much about skin color as it was about socioeconomic classes (though it wasn’t advertised that way).

The U.S. wasn’t what it used to be, and making it ‘great again’ was as vague a direction as one could have. It’s all crap anyway.

So, no, it wasn’t Trump. It wasn’t Hillary. It was about the decisions people were making and refusing to make, it was about the decisions being made about the economy and income levels with my years in technology – where the landscape is on the cusp of making a quantum leap that the bureaucracy doesn’t seem aware of. And my own life was changing, too.

And Trinidad and Tobago politics? That doesn’t even deserve mention because ultimately it’s a zero sum game. As the saying is in T&T, “Same khaki pants” – which is odd, because they keep voting for the same khaki pants.

I digress.

That Tech Life.

There are three key aspects to a job in technology for me. My priorities are:

  1. Doing things of worth.
  2. Getting paid adequately.
  3. Having a life outside of the technosphere.

Most of the work I’d ended up doing over the years was superfluous in the grand scheme of things. It didn’t immediately appear that way in my younger days but as I grew more experienced it grew more apparent. Being able to do something that was better had to become a business case, and the business case almost always took away from the value.

That seems very negative as I write that and there’s no defense. I know I worked on things that mattered but they were few and far between all the things I had to do to get paid adequately. I had dangerous things called ideas. I continued to read more and more widely, understanding things better and better. And Thoreau’s quotation, “Men have become the tools of their tools.”, seemed more and more appropriate as the years went by. I tried brushing off the negativity, even thinking that I had become jaded, when in fact – no, empirically, it was getting more and more difficult to both meet (1) and (2), which left (3) hanging in the wind.

Well intentioned people told me to move to California. Specifically, to Silicon Valley, where things always seem to happen. But Silicon Valley had become the epitomy of what I believe to be wrong in technology (another post, sometime), so I stayed in Florida. And, paying attention to tech as I do, I had a sense that big changes were and are coming to the software engineering field in ways that people still don’t yet understand. AI using object oriented practices to write code coupled with poor human design and technophile narcissism is an indicator.

This will lead the majority of software engineers into a precarious existence, lacking in predictability and job security. This is precarity, and I saw myself as a part of that particular precariat. There’s a lot of denial about this in the field and it suits business because business will need software engineers until they don’t.

The long-hour sedentary lifestyle was also taking it’s toll. A visit to a hospital in 2015 had doctors extolling the virtues of not being a software engineer – indirectly. Exercise. Better diet. Less stress. The fact that my employer at the time ‘suggested’ that I take unpaid time off for my hospital visit, or we could ‘work something out’, highlighted the issue. It wasn’t that I was bad at what I did, or I wouldn’t have a job. It was because they were so bad at what they did. And they wanted me to pay for it. Again.

It was time to move on, but I hadn’t plotted a course yet – though I did have a general direction.

Personal

I had personal reasons to go and not to go. The personal reasons to go revolved around work, and the reasons not to go revolved around a surprise relationship that had formed in early 2015 and abruptly ended in late 2016. Untethered in late 2016, it was time to make a new decision.

Options

I’d somehow gotten the label of Business Analyst at one particular company I worked for. When I started programming, business analysis was a major part of doing the work – but it had broken out in the 20+ years, and I happened to be good at it – part natural ability, part medical background where leading questions were avoided and the art of listening was necessary, and part incisiveness. I am also good at documentation, because that was a part of formal software engineering and it had been a weak area that I strengthened to the point where I stood out.

I also wanted to develop something cool, so I worked on some Natural Language Processing code and, about to release, found Google had released something similar for Google Docs. I sighed. It wasn’t the first time a corporation would beat me to the punch, and I’m fairly sure it would not be the last. I have the ideas, but with only two hands to implement, I’m usually behind those with more capital and resources.

People were beginning to buy prints of my photography. This simply blew my mind, that I had gotten good enough for people to offer to by my prints. I’m still not sure how this will work out, but it’s something I enjoy, so I’ll continue that… but continuing that doesn’t require much for me other than enough money to buy cameras and lenses.

And… I have land in Trinidad and Tobago that is really the only thing I truly got from my forebears that is tangible. It has it’s challenges, but in early 2016 I found that work I had done between 2001 and 2010 would pay off well enough to fund my own projects, if only for a while,  and so I did. And then, seeing the market changes in technology and the oncoming precarity, I came to the realization that it was time to get back to working on the land.

Personal Level: Toska

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

Toska best describes how I had come to feel about technology, the field I had spent decades working and playing in. I had grown bored. And this extended beyond technology since most of my life revolved around it in one way or another. I would watch people staring at their phones as I spoke to them, or reach for their phone to do simple math… it had become so mundane, and where once calculators and other devices were crutches it seemed like I was staring at a world full of people who upgraded to bumper cars and were busy slamming into one another with the wild abandon of teenage lust.

I should write about that. I digress. This ‘toska’ has been on my back for at least a decade, and it’s time to put it to rest by changing things and taking more control of what I have.

So, for you, gentle reader, this may not be a good decision. But it’s the right one for me.