Maine is a small state. It seems like a world away to me, living in rural New Mexico. But Maine has accomplished something – by intent or by happenstance – that could lead the nation.

Independents in the Maine state legislature now hold the balance of power. A “fulcrum” of 6 independents and 1 Green Party member has denied both major parties a majority.
The 74 Democrats and 69 Republicans in the chamber must now work with either each other and/or the bloc of independents to pass legislation. Rep. Martin Grohman, a former Democrat, recently disaffiliated from his party because he thinks he can accomplish more as an independent. centristproject.org

One of the depressing aspects of the last presidential election was the pitiful choice given voters. I believed voting for a third party candidate or staying home was a waste of my vote. Maybe independents do offer a way out of our current partisan mess to a brighter future. And all hope is not lost for the traditional parties.

Maine Senator Susan Collins is a perfect example of the outsized influence that principled, centrist politicians could have. Collins is a moderate Republican who demonstrated the power of bucking party bosses.

Be sure to watch for independents in state and local elections, and for third parties and moderate ‘Pubs and Dems’ who may lose their primaries but run as independents. Sanity can return and moderates can regain their voice. I know it can happen because it has happened.

Another week, another under-the-radar lunatic goes on a killing spree with his AR-15, and another round of recriminations from gun control advocates leveled at Congress for not passing stricter gun laws, at the NRA for existing at all, and at law-abiding gun owners for not saying “enough” and remorsefully schlepping their weapons to the local police station to give them up.

Gun ownership advocates, as usual, managed to throw off this guilt and continue to insist that putting more guns in more places, carried by trained individuals, will deter the maniacs or at least minimize the carnage.  Each group cites statistics supporting its position, bringing to mind the old saw about statistics being used the same way a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination.

We do have a lot of guns – a recent NY Times article alleges that Americans own some 300 million – four out of every ten private firearms in the world.  We also have a lot of anonymous, deeply troubled individuals who are one fight with the in-laws away from going postal.  No law of God or man can be expected to keep all of society’s crackpots away from all those lovely, deadly weapons, and the gun argument is distracting us from another discussion that we desperately need to have.

Crazy people killing other people – not just with guns, but with rental trucks, homemade bombs or box cutters – is a relatively new phenomenon here.  The U.S. has always had a surplus of firearms and lunatics-in-waiting, but the growing number of high-casualty events seems correlated with our growing fascination with – and tolerance of – brutal, graphic conflict in every form of our entertainment, from TV and movies to the internet to video games to sports, even music. Today, more than ever, potential assassins are at risk of having their worst impulses constantly reinforced whenever they tune in or log on.  Less violence soaked cultures (including a fairly recent version of our own) have suffered fewer, and smaller, mass-casualty incidents, no matter how many guns (or rental trucks) their citizens have access to.  But today America has normalized violence to the point where a crazed assailant has to kill at least a dozen innocent people in order to get noticed.

Focusing on guns as either the root of, or the counter to, this savagery is a cop-out.  Those 300 million weapons are an effect, not the cause, of the culture we have allowed to evolve; a world in which “fake” violence is so pervasive that it has become background static.  Whenever some tortured soul decides to embrace the real thing, we seldom pause to consider his motivation. We are too busy arguing about his methodology.

We have to start recognizing the fake violence that surrounds us for the empathy suppressant that it is and seeing real violence as the insidious cultural sickness that it is.  Until we do there will be more – and given the glorifying publicity lavished on them by the media, worse – incidents of mass murder in our future.  If we really want to stop the bleeding, the discussion has to go beyond the “how” and the “who”.  We need to look in the mirror and ask, “why?”

*Rehumanize Yourself – Sting and The Police

One of the largest and most-venerable cooperatives in America has folded. I read about this in the Garbanzo Gazette, my own small-town co-op’s monthly newsletter.

Berkeley’s co-op was founded in 1937. Back then, many Americans looked favorably on communism with a lower case “c” and people didn’t realize, or denied, that every Communist with a capital “C” country was a dictatorship or oligarchy.

Berkeley was a “first wave” co-op, founded for political reasons but expanding over the years to sell food, hardware, gasoline, and more. On-site childcare was provided as parents shopped and there was even a co-op burial society.

Communes seldom survive much beyond their founders – subsequent generations aren’t as enthused and willing to suffer for the ideal. Perhaps some of that attitude affected Berkeley, but it survived for 80 years and at its peak had over 116,000 members.

There were clear reasons for the failure… Overextending in the Bay Area food marketplace was clearly one and the weirdness of the way their board operated (very contentious) another… [They began cutting programs to save costs.] It was all downhill from there. Garbanzo Gazette

My local co-op opened in 1974 in the “second wave” where co-ops were about “brown rice, organic pintos, tamari and things like that… a quaint little hippie store.” The political angle was still there, but food trends were more important.

I joined (though our co-op is open to non-members) for the bulk dried food and bulk spice sections. The hippie atmosphere continues – incense is a big seller – and some members never step foot in the local Walmart, but that’s not me.

I suppose that’s why our co-op is in financial trouble.

Organic. Non-GMO. Free trade. Cage-free eggs. Quinoa. Supplements. Those trends succeeded throughout America. Huge corporations like Walmart embraced these emerging consumer demands and there are even chains like Whole Foods that specialize in them.

Companies have learned to watch for trends, and buy-out or simply take-over new ideas like meal kits. Blue Apron’s stock is worth half of its IPO and I can buy frozen meal kits at Walmart – fresh kits can’t be far behind. There’s less space for upstarts to persist in the highly-competative grocery marketplace.

My co-op is losing its niche in foods, and the niche of people-who-hate-Walmart simply isn’t big enough. The board is looking for a way to survive, but a recent attempt to add a restaurant failed. Maybe local-sourced food can be a winner, but we’re not a big farming region. Besides, I see one of the smaller, non-Walmart, groceries is selling local meats, so the niche may already be filled.

Berkeley’s demise points to pluses and minuses. More people have access to food trends, and trends will be more standardized than in the past. Crazy trends will spread more quickly with corporate power behind them, but so will beneficial ones.

Of course, when a trend runs its course and is dropped by Walmart (which, for example, has very little bulk dried food today, and when’s the last time you saw a giant-chain-store salad bar), small competitors don’t benefit because they’re long gone.

You can’t fight progress. At least, not for long.
Read more about the Berkeley co-op.

I’m probably not the first and certainly not the only person to observe that as smartphones get smarter, the people using them seem to be getting dumber. We have all witnessed drivers weaving along as they fumble with a text or pedestrians barging into traffic with their noses glued to their screens.  Annoying, and all too often tragic; casualties among drivers and walkers are up dramatically nearly everywhere.  Also not surprising.   The draw of a palm-sized device through which one can access everything and everyone all the time is difficult to ignore, even when its use threatens our physical well-being.  But the bigger threat posed by smartphones, and the insidious marketing strategies they enable, may be to our minds rather than our bodies.

Smartphones have placed more information at our disposal than we can possibly use, and many human brains find this data avalanche perplexing, if not overwhelming.  Some form of filtration might be useful, and the clever programmers at Facebook, Amazon and a hundred more Big Media companies stand ready to help.  Their algorithms scour your browsing history and analyze your reading habits, your media consumption, even your grocery list, to compile a dossier of your personal preferences. Through ads, suggested websites and “those who looked at this also might enjoy seeing that” prompts, they turn you into a demographic of one,  a “one” that can be specifically targeted by marketers every time you log on.  In the process, you are subtly encouraged to ignore any influences that might broaden your taste in books, clothing, cars, organic produce – or news outlets.  Of course there are a thousand other sources of information out there, but the algorithms don’t want you to bother with those.  Your time is too valuable.

The unintended (perhaps) outcome of this assistance is a populace that is becoming  accustomed to letting computer programs perform its due diligence. An app may be a great way to shop for underwear, but do we really want Facebook to choose which political or economic commentary we want to absorb?  Because while some marketers only want to “help” you decide which brand of running shoes to buy, others want to “help” you decide which news stories best fit your political leanings and which ones are fake.  A few (rhymes with Prussians) may even be using your predilection for indifference to influence your vote.

The ability to sort through reams of data and separate the good stuff from the background noise is like any skillset; if you don’t use it, you will lose it, and the evidence of our disuse is pretty stark.  Something like 95% of Google searchers never make it past the first page of results.  Is Google really that good, or are we just getting too lazy to look at page two?  Most readers of newspapers – remember newspapers? – glance at a story’s headline and skim the first couple of paragraphs.  There’s a reason it’s continued on page 9, but in the Age of the Smartphone brevity is king.  And speaking of brevity, there’s Twitter.  If erudition is a sign of intelligence, what to make of a medium wherein proper spelling and capitalization are MIA, punctuation marks have facial features and the deepest exchanges are more shallow (and shorter) than a 6th grader’s book report?

Google, Twitter, Facebook, now Siri and Alexa – they are all waiting for us on our smartphones, waiting to answer questions we didn’t really ask, waiting to tell us what they want us to know.

Our personal devices may not literally be sapping our intelligence, but they are certainly making us less intellectually rigorous.  In the long run, that may amount to the same thing.