Mr. Smith goes to nowhere.
Last night, I stood in front of my Congressman and read him a short speech I had written minutes before while sitting in the auditorium waiting for him to speak. The proceedings were filmed by various cameras, including one from my own employer, although they were not rolling during my turn. One of our mics with it’s square ‘mic flag’ emblazoned with our logo sat at my feet, presumably to capture audio of those who rose to ask questions.
Later, sitting on the floor, the microphone would take on a bit of metaphorical meaning when I mic-dropped the shit out of my Congressman.
Or at least I hoped I did, anyway.
I should probably take a moment to make it abundantly clear that my opinions are my own (unfortunately) and this has no connection to my place of employment.
At the start of the meeting, the ROTC presented the colors, performing a short exhibition of patriotism, flipping rifles as if they were parade batons before presenting the symbols of our representative Democracy. We constituents stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
After Representative Scott asked if anyone had accidentally dropped their keys in the parking lot, he led the crowd through a fairly lengthy powerpoint of the key issues facing our country from his perspective.
Mr. Scott repeated several times this was a ‘nonpartisan event’ though the room unquestionably skewed left, but I’m sure that’s how every congressional district is —Actually representative of its constituents. I, uh, think that’s kinda the way it’s supposed to be.
I hastily scratched out and revised my words, which turned into a longer statement followed by a shorter question. This should come as no shock for anyone who has ever read my writing or heard me speak.
When the time came for questions, I positioned myself in line to insure a chance to speak, far enough back to allow a few more minutes to clarify my thoughts before it was my turn.
A woman in front of me bemoaned ‘the scourge of gerrymandering’ as a problem facing our country, but perhaps didn’t understand the irony of Virginia’s 3rd district being specifically drawn to insure a black representative for this region. Gerrymandering cuts both ways, trading a balance of demographic representatives in congress for skewed partisan balance. Everything is horse trading, and we are all the horses.
I stood through a case for pot decriminalization, an emotionally driven plea for true healthcare reform and then the young woman in front of me, who earnestly asked for congressional honors for those who died in Benghazi; It was more touching and less partisan than it sounds. Then it was my turn.
I’d taken an extra Klonipin to quiet my anxiety, proscribed ‘as needed.’ It was definitely needed. I was on edge for many reasons — and by the time I got to the front, taking deep breaths, I was surprisingly calm and focused.
I said a polite but terse, “Thank you Mr. Scott” (or Representative Scott, I honestly don’t remember)
With some levity, I asked him to cut me off if I went on too long, and I’d jump straight to the end. He replied jovially that it wasn’t him, but the crowd that would cut me off, and I turned to scan the audience and ask them the same thing with a nervous laugh.
I read the following scribbled paragraphs from the page at a rapid clip, but raised my head to make eye contact at what I felt were the key moments.
This is not a perfect transcription, as I continued to revise as I spoke, but this is almost exactly what I said:
During the Pledge [of Allegiance], I was struck by the word ‘indivisible,’ for it is clear that our nation hasn’t been indivisible for quite some time.
There are clearly many issues at play, but from my perspective, the primary cause is an accidental collusion between the fundamentalism on the right and pollitically correct safe spaces on the left.
We are stuck making cliched arguments repeated and simplified year after year, and it’s past time to have some very important conversations barreling down on us such as the automation and technology which will put a giant chunk of our already underpaid workforce out of work far sooner than Washington seems to realize.
Just think about automated cars alone. Not just the truckers, delivery and cab drivers that will be out of work. It’s also the mechanics, the insurance agents, dock workers, valets and even lawyers and ER Doctors. Detroit will slide even faster.
AI can already beat humans at chess and go. It’s ludicrous to think we can retrain [ourselves] fast enough.
The dominoes are ready to fall and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Geopolitically, it’s clear this last election was about Energy [more than anything else.]
It was heavily influenced not only by russia, whose primary export is energy, but also Saudi Arabia, our supposed allies, the country from which the funding for 9/11 was supplied, and from which 15 of the 19 hijackers came.
And even though they have one of the worst human rights records, Obama bowed to their King, and our oafish reality star of a President flipped from criticizing them to visiting them on his inaugural overseas visit to put his hand on some weird glowing orb.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and they’ve become the third largest buyers of American made arms, even while they jail dissadents and cut off people’s heads — one of only 4 countries in the world that does so.
They are one of the largest contributors to the Clinton foundation to the tune of 10 million dollars.
When will our representatives in Washington show the bravery, intelligence, and big picture vision to talk about the existential crises that face our nation? All of this powerpoint will be meaningless when the tsunami of unspoken issues overtake us far sooner than we realize.
Somewhat miraculously, I managed to get all this out in just a bit over 90 seconds. Frankly, I was impressed with myself.
Representative Scott addressed both policy issues with the thoughtful tone but rote speech of a politician who already knew how he would respond —
With a sly grin to the audience, he quipped “I’m not sure how many people are going to want to get in those cars.” To which much of the largely baby boomer audience laughed. Cute, sure, but if you polled most of those 40 and under, we’d have no problem doing it the moment that technology seemed relatively safe enough.
About the rapidly approaching global digital disruption, he said that this is something about which he talks with ‘people in Silicon Valley’ regularly, and implied that it would take longer than the imminent threat I presented — politely of course. He’s probably right, but this ship turns remarkably slowly, not unlike the Titanic.
To the geopolitical issues — starting with Energy — he pivoted or missed the point. Like almost all other politicians these days, he didn’t mention the words ‘Saudi Arabia’ at all. The silence is deafening.
Though he mentioned absolutely nothing about Saudi Arabia or our relationship with them, he pivoted to ‘and that is why energy independence is so important,’ namedropping regional utilities and developers, talking about wind-farms and such, implying that energy independence would give us the upper hand and reduce our reliance on these foreign powers.
But he wasn’t thinking deep enough chess. When he’d finished his pivot, I ad-libbed my final comment:
You might want to consider the possibility that Russia and Saudi Arabia have already figured this out.
I immediately turned around and walked away. To me, a rhetorical mic drop even if 99% of the room missed the point. I hope at least one aide saw the implications of what I was saying.
From where I sit, the technical apocalypse has already begun, and my Representative — Bobby Scott of the 3rd District of Virginia seems content to kick the can down the road ‘to see what happens.’
Self-driving vehicles alone are probably enough to crash our economy.
After all, 40,000 people died in automobiles in The United States last year. Forty. Thousand. That’s 5 times more deaths in a single year than all civilian and military deaths in the 16 years since 9/11.
Those are only the fatal crashes — scores more fender benders and debilitating non-lethal accidents pay the salaries of car manufactures and repairmen, salesmen, those who make car commercials and the television stations who together receive over 1 billion dollars annually from Geico alone. There’s lawyers, insurance adjusters and agents, the pharmaceutical companies who sell muscle relaxants and pain killers and also the primary care physicians that prescribe them. There’s the pharmacists and workers which support them, physical therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists dealing with these tragedies, funeral directors, cemeteries… And this doesn’t even begin to consider all of the second-tier businesses supported by the money these people would have spent… Right down to your favorite Starbucks Barista.
This is just one industry, one string of dominoes. My own industry — video production — has seen a plummeting decline in salaries, even as the skill requirements have increased dramatically thanks to technology. I am paid the same now at 40 as I was at 20, considering inflation, with a much broader skillset and significantly improved knowledge and talents. Sure, I’m “less special” now, but that’s exactly my point. We will all be “less special.” Very soon.
People don’t seem to be worried at all about hopping in the front seat of an Uber with a complete stranger and opening up their lives to them while the driver barely makes minimum wage with no benefits — we don’t have to wait for automated cars, that revolution is in full swing, as people work second jobs because they can’t live on one, contributing to the very cycle causing their shortfall in the first place. This rabbit hole has no bottom.
I just need someone to SEE it. None of these piles of regulations will matter at all when the fundamental economy of the planet fails, and it will fail rapidly.
That politicians will rarely if ever speak the words Saudi Arabia in a critical light says volumes. While this odd partnership continues, the declining price of oil thanks to US domestic production and energy technology, and the stresses are increasing in both Saudi Arabia and Russia as their entire economies are based on energy prices.. And while the United States economy is precipitously balanced thanks to impending technology, our largest foreign competitors are even more precariously balanced in the present and the short term. This is thanks to the triple threat of US technology, post 2008 domestic shale production, and our ability to politically and militarily affect the lives and economies of the middle east, even as tensions grow in Syria and Turkey.
Our populous doesn’t really know what is going on behind the scenes — what the real battle lines are. We don’t know if we’re represented by fools or secret schemers, or terrified bureaucrats. We’d be foolish to look at Russian meddling from a cyber security standpoint as well as a propaganda standpoint and not realize the affect on domestic discord — it makes far more sense to set us against ourselves, leverage influential people with hacked, embarrassing secrets than to take us on in a hot war.
We’d be even more foolish to think our own intelligence agencies aren’t attempting exactly the same thing.
During the height of the 2016 election drama — the two conventions in July, DNC in panic mode, Trump’s nomination now official — the government quietly declassified and greatly downlplayed the only part of the initial 9/11 report that had remained classified for fourteen years. While we were captivated by the hacking, Wikileaks, and the Clinton, Trump, and Bernie reality show going on, these pages repeatedly linked the 9/11 attacks to Saudi Arabia, though two years later, additional investigation was unable to “find anything more substantive.” There was no smoking gun, but there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence.
There is no way these could all be false leads — far more likey many impossible to investigate clues.
I stood in front of my Congressman and hopefully bit of what I had to say was actually heard. I will send this to Congressman Scott’s office. If they wish to contact me to continue the conversation, I would love nothing more, but I will probably receive yet another form letter.
It’s a long story to tell, but I know the Democrats are as much to blame as the Republicans for getting us into this mess — that is, unless you like the present state of affairs. It’s a knot that’s difficult to unwind, because we live in a world where it’s become nearly impossible to speak the truth — there are too many hidden skeletons, Too Many Secrets.
And that’s what I asked Edward Snowden when I stood nervously in front of a microphone in another auditorium in front of a projection screen at Johns Hopkins University almost 18 months ago today: “Do we live in a world of Too Many Secrets?”
Snowden also dodged the question, but my question and my realizations immediately following turned out to be near prescient in the 2016 election, and before I can unwind the rise of the Fundamentalist Right and the Politically Correct Left, I will tell that tale. There are more important and louder microphones yet to be dropped, and I’m not done dropping them yet. Whether anyone will hear them besides me is yet to be determined.
Appendix: Excerpts from the declassified 9/11 report.
