When did they stop making bootstraps part of our daily ritual? I have recently become a devotee of Claude, the AI bot from Anthropic. It tells me, “From what I understand, the literal bootstrap (the tab or loop on boots used to pull them on) has never entirely gone “out of fashion” – they remain functional features on many types of boots today, particularly Western/cowboy boots. If you’re referring to the saying “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” that’s a different matter – while the phrase is still used, its unquestioned use as a positive metaphor for self-reliance has declined since roughly the 2010s. This shift came as more people began critically examining the phrase’s implications about individual versus systemic barriers to success.” Wow, with Claude by my side I learn something new every day…..many times a day, actually. I guess I am facing a systemic barrier to my success. I am an FDR liberal at heart, and I am WAY out of fashion. It is no longer a function of the broader goodness of man that is driving the world, it is the degree of our ability to overcome nature. Natural selection in a Darwinian sense has eclipsed grace, perhaps once and for all.
Today I awoke slowly and a bit breathlessly. I actually have a busy day of testimony and will be in Zoom court for five hours, so I have my game face and my suit and tie on, but behind my eyes lies a raging inferno of thoughts. I want to be judicious and not just howl at the moon, so I will likely not just blurt out a bunch of expletives as my reaction to this tectonic shift in American sentiment. As I am sitting here calming myself for my day in court (that sounds appropriately pensive, doesn’t it?), I see there is a weather warning for our area, what they call a Red Flag Warning. It seems that the weather in the northern plains is sweeping down over the mountains towards us here in Southern California and the Santa Ana winds are bringing the danger of dry and potentially wildfire-laden winds out of the hills and down to the coastal areas. How symbolic is that? Mother Nature is reminding us that those of us who feel so high and mighty living near the balmy coastal areas like San Diego are just as prone to the dangers of her wrath as anyone…maybe more so. The dry winds of the hinterlands are set to descend upon us and wreck havoc with our property and our lives.
I am certainly not a religious person, and I’m not sure many people should count me as particularly spiritual either, but I am a caring person and I probably have cared too much about too many for too long. But I have always realized this about myself and consciously decided that I do not want to change that about myself. I sleep better knowing that I have been as good a person to as many people as I can be, as often and as much as I can. There are plenty of people who give much more of themselves, but I have done my part. I have assumed that away as less about some innate goodness in my soul and more about what it takes for me to feel good about myself. That plays into my philosophy that everyone pretty much does what they do for themselves, its just that each of us have different levels of conscience that cause us to need to do more for others to appease our inner selves. I guess that’s my way of not suggesting that I am selfless, but rather that my brand of selfishness entails feeling that I am capable of and willing to care about others. Its a fine definitional line, I realize, but I do believe it. I do for others because it makes me feel good and me feeling good is a big priority for me. Sounds crass, but the end result is still better for the world at large, I believe.
I suspect that this all has a lot to do with an 8 billion person world. It’s hard to consider others in a group of 100, much less a world of 8 billion. I have argued that the scale of world population demands that we all incorporate that into our thinking so that we pay extra attention to others because there is more to concern us that goes sideways in the world and leveling the playing field is an important deterrent to civil unrest. But now I think I may have looked at this circumstance incorrectly. Maybe its the inundation of humanity with the needs of 8 billion souls that has desensitized large portions of us and made us withdraw into the comforts of nationalism and tribalism. But those comforts may be misleading in their lack of recognition that we have created a largely interconnected world from which withdrawal may be more painful to us than to the outsiders we seek to insulate ourselves from. The perfect example is the auto worker who thinks barring trade from Mexico may save his job, only to find that disrupting our largest trading partner by placing tariffs on their goods will not only come directly out of his own pocketbook through higher prices of a full range of products that employ many components that are long-since supplied globally. Furthermore, the inflationary impact of that will then dampen our economy and likely roil our interest rate markets in ways that harm our peace and well- being, not to mention our national debt. Furthermore, rounding up what are being deemed as illegal aliens will not only severely impact our federal and state budgets (both reducing tax income and increasing law enforcement costs), but will likely be ham-handed enough to wound our sensibilities on the evening news. In other words, our attempts to avoid the ills of an 8 billion person world may be harder to achieve than not.
So back to those bootstraps. Despite Claude’s attempt to dissuade me from using the metaphor to create a prescriptive for my individual failure to anticipate the outcome of yesterday’s election, I take this all very personally and do not wish to just shrug it off as a systemic problem with everyone else’s perception of the world. I actually feel that I have gotten it wrong and that I need to take corrective action about my worldview. I won’t be turning cynical or using this as an excuse to do so, but I will admit that I am forcing myself to reevaluate the soul of the American people as a majority. I am enough a believer in democracy that I believe majority rule is central to who we are at the moment. What I must say I wonder is whether the American people have enough factual and verifiable evidence to have fairly chosen the path that they have. It would be hard to suggest that they do not know a good deal about the character of the person they have chosen to lead our country, so I feel I must admit that the majority don’t view those character issues as disqualifying. That is certainly something I find myself on the other side of. But on policy issues of substance, I wonder whether the electorate has been given enough guidance to fully appreciate the likely full impact of their choice. There is a fair argument that none of us know the full impact with certainty, but I suspect that when that likely impact starts to get more clarification or hits home for them personally, they may have a change of heart. That seems to be what happened with Brexit in the U.K.. But here’s the thing, some changes are not able to be retracted or “done over” and are simply to be lived with whether in full enjoyment or regret. Remember that ad with the tattoo artist who accidentally places “No Regerts” on someone’s arm? Well, putting toothpaste back in the tube may not be possible no matter how much you pull yourself up by the bootstraps. So, American voters, put on your big boy pants and understand that you may be bootstrapping yourself into a world of “regerts”.