As homo sapiens, we are vulnerable to overstating our ability to comprehend the world about us. Some of that hubris stems from our past record of success in unraveling numerous opaque physical laws. I am yet astounded by scientific feats that permit us to send a spacecraft on a multi-year mission to hit a small sphere traveling through space at thousands of miles per hour. Such feats of technical accomplishment boggle my mind, which is not difficult to do given that I struggled mightily with high school algebra.

To my mind, there are two dimensions of reality where our understanding of how the world operates remains stubbornly illusory. One is the subatomic dimension where strange phenomenon and inexplicable happenings yet surprise, and occasionally confound, the best of physicists. The other is at the societal level where social scientists struggle to explain and predict behaviors (both macro and micro) with at best marginal success. There may be third dimension that lies beyond the scope of our known universe of some 93 billion light years across and which contains some 2 trillion galaxies, each comprising billions upon billions of stars. The very concept of such a vast world remains meta-physical in character … at least to me.

I’m familiar with some of the hard questions addressed by social sciencists, having banged my head against some of them during my career. So, I was taken by a book I recently read for one of my three book clubs (yes, I need to get a life). It is titled Fluke and was written by Brian Klaas. I found his work a compelling read for the best reason of all … his thesis conforms to my own priors.

Klaas argues that life at the macro or societal level, unlike complex technical questions, are much harder to understand. Why? Basically, outcomes are the result of a virtually infinite number of interacting events that cascade foward in complex ways because of human predilection and immeasurable uncertainties. Looking for easy causal chains in such a chaotic environment is a fools errand.

His first vignette is instructive. In 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was involved in selecting the first Japanese target on which to drop an atomic bomb. At the top of the list given the committee was Kyoto, the former imperial Capital, now a major arms center for the Japanese military. Stimson refused to even consider this city. The other members of the committee were befuddled. It met ALL the selection criteria, the clear favorite. Why not Kyoto?

It turned out that Stimson and his then new bride had honeymooned in that very city some two decades earlier, when the cherry blossoms 🌸 were in bloom. He could not bear the thought of destroying a city toward which he felt such a sentimental attachment. Kyoto was thus spared, Hiroshima was not. On the second mission, the city of Nokura was the target. But when the bomber arrived over the site, an unexpected cloud cover was present. It appeared temporary, but the crew, fearing they were getting low on fuel, moved on to the back-up site of Nagasaki. On such idiosyncratic factors were the fates of thousands of lives determined. For many years, there was a common phrase in Japan … the luck of a Kokuran. This was the equivalent of the luck of the Irish.

We all have our favorite vignettes. Some 17 days before his first inauguration, a disgruntled immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara, attempted to assassinate FDR in Miami. Unfortunately for him, Anton Cermak, then mayor of Chicago, leaned into the open air car of the President elect at that moment, thus throwing Zangara’s aim off. Cermak died and five others wounded while Roosevelt lived to bring the country out of the depression, to successfully fight totalitarianism in Europe and the Far East, and to forge the U.S. into a global superpower. Had Roosevelt perished that evening, John Nance Garner would have held our highest office during this critical time. A staunch conservative and racist, this man was no FDR by a long shot. America (and the world) would not likely have fared so well (comparatively speaking). Perhaps we would all be speaking German now.

Then again, we have an incident during the height of the Cold War that could have altered history. It was 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. Navy had set up a quarantine line around the island to keep nuclear weapons from being operationalized some 90 miles from the American shoreline. A Russian sub had violated the quarantine line. Depth charges were dropped to get the sub to leave or to surface. Those on board this vessel were operating in 120-degree heat and had lost contact with the other Russian ships. They thought that, in all liklihood, World War III had started. The officers on board were poised to launch their on-board nuclear missiles in retaliation for what they thought was all our war.

In that moment, the world stood a breath away from nuclear disaster. Protocol demanded that 3 senior officers unanimously agree to launch their atomic weapons… the ship captain, the chief political officer on board, and the sub fleet commander (who by fate was on board this vessel). Two decided to launch. One held out. That single (and lonely) decision stood between the peaceful resolution that resulted and an unspeakable tragedy. On such thin threads is history held together.

Or take the time longer ago that the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was on a state visit to Sarajevo in the summer or 1914. Bosnian independence fighters were out to assassinate the autocrat-in-waiting. As Ferdinand and his wife were driven through crowded streets, a bomb was thrown at his car. Several bystanders were wounded, but the principles escaped unharmed. Soon, the Archduke impulsively decided to visit the hospital where the wounded were being treated. At this point, another providential accident of history unfolded. The driver of the car took a wrong turn, then stalled as he attempted to redress his error. Another Bosnian terrorist (Gavrilo Princip) had been sitting glumly at an outdoor cafe, believing that he and his comrades had failed in their mission. Then he looked up and, to his utter astonishment, sat his target just a few feet away in a stalled automobile. He calmly stood and fired, killing both the Archduke and his wife.

On this act, World War I unfolded. For many, this War and the Second World War were considered part of a single cataclysmic event that transformed our world. Monarchical dynasties disappeared (or were diminished in stature) as the world evolved into a bipolar contest between two competing philosophies. The price for all this change was untold suffering and some 70 to 100 million deaths (depending on how you count things). Of course, all of this may have unfolded had the Archduke’s driver not made a wrong turn, but who knows. Perhaps what happens is inevitable or nothing is inevitable.

When I was doing policy, I watched my colleagues try to find certainty in a highly uncertain world. They did gold standard experiments (random assignment methods), did sophisticated observational studies on large data sets, and performed clever investigations where natural experiments were possible (careful to statistically account for confounding noise). All was done in the pursuit of causal relationships. Did A cause B and in what ways.

Yet, understanding collective human behavior remains elusive. Even interpreting the research results is subject to idiosyncratic values and differing normative values. Social science is much harder than the so-called ‘hard’ sciences. I recall one ‘brown bag’ (of the hundreds I attended). The presenter offered dozens of research results on the crowd-out effect of expanding government run and financed health care options. That is, how many families would abandon private insurance in the face of a public alternative. The estimates apparently ranged from a 0 substitution estimate to something on the order of 75 percent. I can just imagine the response of public officials to such uncertain and inconclusive results.

My good friends in the dismal science (economists) provided me with the best laughs of all. They created homo-economus as a way to understand how the world worked. Essentially, complex humans were stripped down to stick figures motivated almost entirely by utilitarian-maximizing motives. In their simple world, money made the world go round. On occasion, I would do some work to show that the real world, and actual human behavior, was far more complex than pavlovian responses to alternate marginal utility regimens. This is why even simple exercises such as projecting public costs and/or take-up rates are often hilariously wrong no matter the sophistication of the models employed. You can’t always anticipate the unanticipatable.

This probably is why I enjoyed my career. It was part science, part craft, and a lot of imaginative feel and analysis. In the end, you knew there would be no final and right answers. Perfect for someone like me. The chase was always preferable to catching the prize.

I was going to move on from the theme of my recent blogs (reminiscences on earlier times). But then I had my most recent visit to the dermatologist yesterday. They dream of customers like me … those who provide a continuous source of high-cost work on patients with good health insurance.

Observing the scar from yesterday’s cutting and hacking at yet another bout of basal cell carcinoma (see photo anove), I mused on what got me to this sad 😔 point in life. Essentially, I am paying the price of the many good times that were enjoyed in my misspent youth. Back in the 1950s and 60s, no one told us that worshipping the sun was a bad thing. In fact, a tan was seen as a sign of robust health back in those days.

In that innocent time, few were aware that an excess exposure to the sun eventually would result in cancerous growths on the surface of one’s body. Nor did anyone mention that some forms of surface carcinoma might spread throughout the body in lethal ways. We are not simply talking aesthetics here. We are possibly talking life and death. However, we were ignorant of such consequences at the time.

So, we spent hours at the beach, on the golf course, and playing all forms of outdoor games. At best, we would rub on baby oil, which did nothing for you except provide a false sense of security. Well, it did serve a useful purpose if you were permitted to rub the oil on a girlfriend’s body, assuming you had one of these rare treasures. I was not so blessed. Hell, I could only dream of being so lucky. 😪

And yet, while I complain about the sins of my youth that ultimately led to numerous trips of late to the horror chamber known as my dermatologist’s office, I have few regrets. I watch today’s youth. They appear totally engrossed in virtual cyber worlds and thus full of crushing anxieties and debillitating neuroses. My peers and I, in hindsight, were much blessed. We came of age in a simpler time where we enjoyed the outdoors and, shockingly, one another’s company (at least for the most part).

On days not in school, my parents would kick me out of the house, usually telling me not to come home until the street lights came on, or supper was ready … especially in the longer days of midsummer 🙃. We would go marauding through the streets while playing endless games of war, or cowboys and Indians, or brave astronauts exploring mysterious worlds, and other like adventurous diversions. Or, we made up simple athletic games that could be played in the streets. One involved a tennis ball and any available steps. By angling the ball correctly off the edge of a designated step, you could simulate a primitive baseball game ⚾️. It was all a matter of using your imagination. If you did that in creative ways, boredom was never an issue.

As we aged a bit, we would migrate to the local park, a 75 acre wonderland of baseball diamonds, tennis courts 🎾, and basketball arenas 🏀. Admittedly, the tennis courts were never employed for their designated purpose. They were perfect for another form of baseball called stick ball, a game played with a tennis ball and sawed off broom stick. There always seemed to be an endless supply of other kids who were available for chance games of athletic competition absent adult supervision. We interacted among ourselves and created our own world of fun. Today, I walk through parks with not a kid is to be seen, unless with an adult or participating in some formal program.

Yes, there was a structured Little League organization but that was a small part of our world. Our parents were not driving us to endless organized and over-regulated events. We were responsible for our own fun 😁 . We relied upon our own ingenuity and worked out patterns of collaboration and dispute resolution without adult oversight. As a result, we advanced rapidly toward adulthood with initiative and some confidence. Okay, it was disheartening to be selected by one of the team captains (the best athletes available) after the kid in the wheelchair but I would eventually recover.

Still later, I took up golf. As I mentioned, my parents drove me nowhere. So, I would heft my clubs over my shoulder and walk several miles to the nearest course, then play 27 (or perhaps 36) holes. And get this, the final mile of the hike to get there was straight uphill. At the end of this sun-drenched day, I would hike back home. You could play all day for one dollar. I could have been kidnapped and taken three states away before anyone would notice I was missing. But no one seemed concerned back then. Perhaps my folks were hoping a miscreant would abscond with me. But they were out of luck. Apparently, no one wanted me.

In my later teens, we might avail ourselves of vehicular transportation. We would borrow someone’s car from their parent (none of us teens had our own car). Then, we would drive to Cape Cod for golf and then some time laying about in the sun, perhaps hoping against hope of coming across some desperate girls with low self-esteem who might not find us totally repulsive. No luck there 😞. It seems that our fortunes on the course and in romance were equally dismal.

If there were a common denominator to all this, we were outside a lot. We were not attached to computer screens or smart phones. Rather, we were exposed to endless hours in the hot sun. My fate as a future dermatologist’s dream was likely set by the time I turned 24, helped along by spending 2 years in a Rajasthani desert in northwestern India. Now, that was a hot and sun-drenched place. My skin damage likely had already been done by my mid-20s.

Yet, all of life is a balance of tough choices. I could have stayed inside more as a kid and young man. But would I have exercised my imagination as much? Would I have developed the interpersonal skills so essential to later adulthood? Would I have toughened myself in endless competitions with my peers? I doubt it. So, maybe a little hacking and cutting in old age is a small price to pay for such a productive and adventurous youth. I tend to think so.

Then again, I am not totally certain of that. I have yet to experience the full measure of the penance I must pay for my exuberant youth. Time will tell if there is more pain to be exacted for my early sins.

No male of my generation came of age without facing the crisis associated with the Vietnam conflict and the military draft. It was an obsession for nearly all of us, dominating our young lives as we came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. Today’s kids, absent a compulsory military draft, cannot fully appreciate the angst we endured back in the day. Our young lives appeared to be at risk and, for too many, they were.

Yet, our existential dilemma was about more than mere survival. It imvolved a desperate and fundamental struggle to define our personal core values. For my generation, unlike more recent cohorts if survey results are to be believed, ‘formulating a personal set of beliefs‘ was a critical undertaking in those tumultuous 1960s. We sought to understand what we stood for and for what, if anything, we might be willing to perish.

Like many others born during, or immediately after World War II, I grew up embracing the United States as a beacon of hope and righteousness in a deeply divided world. From the defeat of fascism and state-militarism, totalitarian models that dominated much of Europe and the Far East by the 1930s, there emerged a bipolar world … a seemingly Communist monolith bent on world domination versus a ‘free‘ world led by the new American superpower. It seemed like a titanic struggle to the death.

As a working class Catholic kid, I had fully absorbed the cultural tenets in which I was immersed in those times. We were in the midst of the Cold War. It was a binary world to our minds. You were either on the side of God and truth or you had embraced evil. No neutral ground was permitted, no nuanced interpretation of events could be entertained. I was studying to be a priest in a Catholic Seminary when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. I can recall seriously considering leaving my studies to join the military, assuming I would return to my service to God when the good guys had triumphed (if I survived that is).

Within two years or so, my worldview had undergone a shattering transformation. Today, the ‘hard right‘ would argue that I had been indoctrinated after leaving the seminary and matriculating at a secular college. Yet, think as a might about those critical days, I cannot recall any professors or classroom discussions where anyone consciously attempted to shape my perspective. No, the process was way more subtle and based much more on learning to think for myself at long last.

I read widely and voraciously, absorbing all I could from history and current events. More importantly, I thought hard about what I was cognitively ingesting. Outside the classroom, I spent countless hours debating the issues of the day with other razor-sharp students. I found myself in a dizzying and exciting world of internal turmoil and self-discovery.

To my amazement, I uncovered a world that was quite nuanced, not black and white, not simply divided between evil and good. Soon, I became aware of our own domestic national sins, failings such as the system of legal apartheid that oppressed members of minority groups. I began to appreciate our own sins of commission (the overthrow of elected governments in sovereign lands that we simply didn’t like) and sins of ommission (the implicit support of heinous and murderous regimes simply because they supported our point of view).

Still, shedding one’s embedded cultural skin is not easy. In fact, it was torture and replete with self- doubt. I’ve recounted my final break on supporting our Vietnam adventure elsewhere. The final rupture came in a day long debate with a fellow student who, like me, had been awarded a summer undergraduate federal research grant. We spent a full day avoiding our work while hammering away at each other’s position. In the end, I realized he was right and I was wrong, though my process of change was well along by then. Soon, I was the leader of the liberal-left group on campus.

I cannot fully recount the character of the debate back then here. It would take a book, like the one I posted above, Oblique Journeys. Our best and brightest leaders, to my mind at least, made simple-minded errors like conflating the legitimate desire of the Vietnamese for independence with a presumed ideological attachment to the Soviet Bloc. The very notion of a monolithic block was already cracking apart if one were to look closely even then. In retrospect, nothing was more patently ridiculous than the domino theory employed to justify the killing of millions of Asians (if you include the Cambodian killing fields) and some 57,000 Americans. If the Vietnamese were to finally achieve independence after decades of fighting the Japanese, the French, and then the Americans, they were not likely to invade California. Thinking about their struggle objectively, they made our Revolutionary war (analogous to that of a small would-be nation taking on the world’s formost superpower) look like a walk in the park. And how did things turn out? Hell, Americans are now retiring to Vietnam because they like the weather, the people, the cost of living, and the food.

Yet, what does one do when one’s conscience demands that you refrain from participation in a conflict you feel is unjustified, perhaps evil, but are faced with a legal mandate to fight and kill? How far does one go in the name of principle? What price is one prepared to pay? That was the critical question that dominated my life over the next several years. It was a struggle that plagued many of my peers.

The goal for guys like me was to make it to age 26 without being drafted. As it turned out, I came very close to being swept up in the military net during my final year of eligibility. As the months slowly ticked by, I entertained many options. I consulted with lawyers, considered conscientious-objector status, and looked to Canada as an escape. Finally, simply refusing to participate, accepting jail as the necessary price for having humane values and a nimble mind, remained an option. Perhaps it was the most honest option. Such things swirled about me. Just what would I do if ultimately pressed to the limit?

In the end, I made it to my 26th birthday though it was a close-run thing. I did have to take my draft physical in Milwaukee. It proved a hilarious exercise. There was a question somewhere in the process that asked if you had ever been a member of an organization that advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. I raised my hand and asked if S.D.S. (a leftist group that became radical after I dropped out) counted. The Seargant replied ‘you bet your ass it does, buddy.’ So,I answered yes. At the end, when everyone else was permitted to leave, I was marched to another floor to be grilled by 3 members of military intelligence. That experience did afford me a few moments of humor in an otherwise sobering experience. They would ask … will you fight any and all enemies of the United States? I would gaze at the ceiling as if thinking hard on the question before responding with … I think we need to define ‘enemy.’

Nothing sharpens your philosophical core like facing adversity. And we all made our own decisions in the end. I recall having drinks with a fellow student in grad school during these trying times. He had been in ROTC (and on the football team) at Boston College. Upon graduation, he was off to Nam as a 2nd Lieutenant. He hit the ground wanting to ‘get those Commies.’ Within weeks, he understood the folly of his predicament and of the war more generally. Now, he simply wanted to get his men out alive. His agony ended when he was shot up on patrol wounds that left him with a pronounced limp. He had become a more virulent pacifist than I was.

In Oblique Journeys, I take some of my personal experiences and challenges and turn them into a fictional story of what might have been. Writing a frictional novel based a number of actual personal experiences and on my take of the issues of the day gave me a great way to talk through that critical period of my young life. At the end of the day, such dramatic choices push us, perhaps even make us better. But I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Here’s a quick recollection on how I stumbled into my life’s work. Now, one might think that one would give considerable thought to what would do in life. Serious people likely did so. For example, just last night I was chatting with the son-in-law of my good female friend (he and his family are here visiting). He is a Brit (my friends daughter lives with him and their family outside of London). In terms of occupational choice, he is in finance (a hedge-manager type, I believe) and doing quite well. So, I asked him (David) if he had always known that was what he wanted to do and be since he did not grow up in a wealthy family. He smiled and told me he started his own personal bank accounts when he was about 8 or 9 years old. Yup, he knew right from the beginning.

Not yours truly, I was still rolling around in the mud at that age. If I had any longer-term ambitions back then, it was along the lines of being a cowboy, an athlete, or maybe an astronaut. The last avocation was due to the popularity of a TV and book series hero … Tom Corbett (space cadet). Nope, like all else in my aimless life, I bumbled my way into a career by chance … absent any thought or planning. How did that happen? How in God’s name did I manage to avoid debtor’s prison and a life of penurious desperation? As best I can recall, it went something like this 😳.

In college, I had to pick a major. Psychology appeared a good choice, not because I had any particular interest in the topic, I didn’t. But it was the best academic department at Clark University. After all, this is where Freud gave his American lectures and where the American Psychological Association was founded. So, why not! Besides, it did not demand a great deal of math, an academic discipline I avoided like the plague.

I liked the classes in my major well enough. Apparently, I was even tagged as an up and comer in the field since I was awarded a summer NIH grant for promising undergraduates. This award paid me to do original research under the mentorship of a senior faculty member and were rationed out with considerable care … only 4 were awarded each year. How I got one remains another freaking mystery in my life.

But I knew soon enough that psychology was not in my future though I did get as far as asking my advisor where I might pursue a doctorate in the subject. He immediately responded … Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. I thanked him for his input and quickly exited his office. Did he have me confused with some smart kid? Wow, I never would have guessed he was taking hallucinatory drugs.

I kept thinking, being a psychologist? Really? If I were a therapist, I’d have to listen to people whine all day. I’d likely whack them across the face and tell them to buck up. Becoming a researcher or teaching psychology had some merit, though such an ambition seemed beyond my reach. The advantage of that route, though, was that I could avoid people for the most part.

But reality whacked me upside the head during an unfortunate ending to my summer research project. I had to kill off my lab subjects at the termination of the project. Fortunately, they were rodents and not humans. Unfortunately, some were rather large by this point. As I sent one reluctant subject to his heavenly reward by plunging a needle containing some kind of poison into his stomach, he struck back by peeing in my face. That put a definite damper on my psychology research dreams (and on my puss).

Still totally rootless and directionless, I drifted off to the Peace Corps for two years in India. As my tour unfolded, I got a bit serious about the future. I took the SATs (in Delhi) and actually submitted an application for a Master’s program at the University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee. I think I chose the school because that’s where I did most of my PC training. I never looked far beyond my immediate environment. I chose the subject area, Urban Affairs, by mistake. I thought it would help me score with urban women. However, it turned out to be a set of classes in sociology, economics, and political science that focused on cities. But that was okay. It didn’t force me into a pigeon hole and kept my options open.

At the same time, the program did not prepare me for any particular vocational path. If I was confused about what an urban affairs expert did, so was everyone else. So, it took me a while to find remunerative employment when I was finally forced to look for a job. One day, a professor that I had worked with asked me to accompany him to Madison, the State Capital. We met with some state officials on some long-forgotten issue. My unemployment problem came up over lunch, and our state hosts arranged to give me a civil service employment application, which I completed and returned (and then promptly forgot about).

Weeks later, and after a trip East still looking for work, I got a call from my professor friend. He said I had a job interview in Madison the very next day. But when I inquired about the nature of the work, all he knew was a time and a location. I dutifully showed up and discovered it was a 3-person civil service interview for the position of Research Analyst-Social Services. I laughed quietly … I knew little about either research and less about our system of social services. This should be mercifully quick, I thought.

Weeks later, I get a call from the hiring supervisor in the Wisconsin Department of Health & Social Services. I was number 3 on the hiring list. Go figure. So, I head to Madison again while thinking this will at least be a good experience. After all, wouldn’t they hire someone actually qualified to do the job? Stunningly, she called me back to offer me the position. I had just made the 3rd place on the list, the final candidate who could be interviewed by the person making the hiring decision, because someone else had dropped out. This hiring supervisor said the candidates got better the further down the list she went. I told her it was a damn good thing she couldn’t get to number 4, they must have been dynamite. Immediately after that, I was also offered a job back East. I always wondered how my life might have turned out had the sequence been reversed.

In any case, that’s how I got into human services and research. Essentially, it was an accident. After several years (and a couple of promotions), I was asked by my boss to assist a professor from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He was preparing a large grant proposal for a research project into welfare decision-making that only could be submitted for federal funding through a state agency. Few in the bureaucracy could imagine that an egghead could contribute anything of worth to their program efforts. Thus, they chose a low life like me to work with him. It wasn’t worth the time of anyone important.

For me, it was just another task. I rather enjoyed my State work. Civil service in the 1970s was respected (in Wisconsin). Most of my colleagues were dedicated and sharp. In addition, my agency was involved in several remarkable and revolutionary undertakings, some of which I played a role in initiating. Nevertheless, I got a call at the end of a work day several weeks down the line, long after I had forgotten the professor and his project. To my surprise, it was this very professor asking if I’d consider coming to the University to help him run this logistically complicated project grant he had just been awarded. I thought about it for 5 or 6 seconds before responding … oh hell, why not? I should note that not everyone thought this a smart move … I was giving up a civil service position for something that looked temporary and highly uncertain.

Now, I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specifically at the nationally recognized Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). By some miracle, I fell into the center of intellectual thinking on human service issues. Of course, without a doctorate, I was at the bottom of the heap. But I soon (more accurately, eventually) got the union card (a Ph.D.) and was on my way to an absolutely fabulous and fulfilling career.

And yet, as I wrote just a few blogs ago, I never embraced fully the academic world. I remained in academia but never embraced the culture. I went with my first love … being a policy wonk who found academia a perfect platform for doing what I loved in the manner that fit my idiosyncratic personality. I thought of myself as a free-lance policy tinkerer and a curious explorer of the toughest social challenges of that era. I also got to pick my own issues, function independently, and work with the best and brightest (in academia and government). It was like being in a candy store where I could indulge my intellect, satisfy my values, and cater to my innate disposition to make a difference in the world. And I got to pass on my ‘wisdom’ to the next generation of students. Perfect.

Somehow, without any sense of direction or planning, I managed to end up in a perfect spot in life. How did I get so fortunate? I’m not sure. Perhaps just going with the flow, not forcing things or overthinking, has merit. Typically, I went with those things that simply felt right. Either that or it was the luck of the Irish.

I’m still musing a bit about the old days. That’s what you do when you become an octogenerian, if you get that far. And there’s the rub. You look back in wonder … just how in the world did I survive? Given my lack of skills and talent, coupled with a propensity to make disastrous decisions, longevity hardly seemed a sure thing. But, as a famous sports announcer always said, that’s why they play the game. You never know the outcome until the contest is completed.

I started out my personal memoir, A Clueless Rebel, with recollections of various moments when I realized that yet another vocational path was beyond my pay range. You know, things like almost slicing my ear off in my junior high shop class. No career for me working with my hands. Or losing money on my paper route, which takes considerable talent. Better scratch business tycoon off my list of potential vocations. Professional athlete? That delusion ended when I actually stole second base one day. Then, I was tagged out when I inexplicably started back to first base assuming the batter MUST have fouled the ball off. After all, how else could I have beaten the throw to second? I still cringe at that memory.

There were many other such disasters. The list of potential future vocations was dwindling to zero. Eventually, by the process of elimination, I concluded I better try learning something in school. My prospects there were hardly bright, but marginally better than the zero which I had assigned to all other possibilities.

I started out my schooling in a run- down elementary school in a struggling part of my hometown … Worcester Massachusetts. I do remember crying when my mother left me on the first day of kindergarten … not exactly an auspicious start in the academy. Even at this point, I showed little promise even though I did excel in the cookies and milk they gave you in kindergarten. I do recall getting unsatisfactory warnings in penmanship and compartment (whatever that is). Somehow, when I entered junior high, I was put in the advanced class (must have been a clerical error). Only 5 boys made the cut while there were some 20 girls. All the girls seemed smarter than me though, in truth, I can not recall any of them by name or image. But I knew where I ranked among the five boys … tied for third place. Only one boy struck me as intellectually slower. That was a sad showing indeed.

Nevertheless, I took the exam for a selective Catholic boys high school. Not sure why I did so since I was hardly salubrious about my prospects. Perhaps my parents pushed me, though I do not recall any such action on their part. Shockingly, I not only was accepted but placed in the top class … one’s class assignment was based on how well one did on the entrance exam. Again, I assumed a clerical error had been made. And once again, my actual classroom performance showed little intellectual promise … managing to settle somewhere in the undistinguished middle of the pack.

Given my lackluster performance in the classroom, my feelings of concern about the future seemed warranted. I remember wondering how I would survive as an adult. Who would hire me? What skills and talents could I employ to secure a paid position? I thought my future prospects bleak at best. Seeing a bleak future on the streets as an unemployed bum, my best hope lay in the possibility that the army would take me. They took anyone, no? Then again, I seriously doubted I could make it out of basic training without shooting myself.

After high school, I entered a (college-level) seminary that prepared priests to do foreign missionary work. That seemed like a kind of army to me. Later, after that ill-fated effort to become a man of God, I stumbled into college. I went to Clark University in my home town because it took 2nd semester applications which the local top Catholic College, Holy Cross, did not.

Going away to school was out of the question. There was no money for that since any discretionary funds available to the family went for beer, cigarettes, and gambling. However, this was before Republican orthodoxy exerted a stranglehold on the national perspective. The American dream still was alive and well. While higher education was still a stretch given that I received virtually no financial help from my folks, I could easily (with scholarships, loans, and working 11-7) make it through a decent private school. After that, eventually getting a masters and doctorate were relatively easy.

As I detail in A Clueless Rebel, I blossomed in college. I did well in the Catholic Seminary I attended for a year plus, once again being assigned to an advanced academic status at the beginning of my second year by the officials in charge. I could never quite figure out why people kept concluding that I was smart. In my own head, I was average at best, though I did have a special fondness for English Literature and any kind of history. Anything involving math, however, was the kiss of death. Besides, I dismissed the seminary as not a real college, even though it’s academic reputation was quite strong.

In any case, Clark University took me in the Spring Semester of 1964. In the working class Catholic cocoon in which I had been embedded to this point, Clark was known as a den of atheists and Communists. I’ve written about what happened there elsewhere (likely more than once) but the musings of a blog beg for some redundancy.

The bottom line is this, my days at Clark were transformational. I entered as one person and left several years later as someone quite different. Some good friends recently pointed out that Clark was mentioned in a book about exceptional colleges as a place that takes in B level students and turns them into intellectuals who later survive and even prosper at elite research universities. That would have perfectly described my experience. [NOTE: Eventually, I ended up as a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin and the administrator of a nationally recognized research entity.]

But here is the thing. I never planned on anything. I never had a goal, other than not to starve and to keep out of the cold. I never saw myself as an academic or a university teacher or a policy wonk who would be at the center of the national welfare reform battles that raged toward the end of the last century. It all just happened, as if by serendipity. Then again, there seemed to be more opportunities back in my day. I do feel very fortunate to have come of age when I did.

Many a times I have mused on the seemingly random circumstances that shaped the trajectory of my life. What if I had not detoured into the Seminary after high school? I surely would have gone to Holy Cross and stayed within my Catholic cultural cocoon. What if I hadn’t stumbled into Clark almost by accident? What if others hadn’t kept insisting that I was smart in spite of my own personal view and my lackluster class performances. What if I hadn’t come of age in the 1960s, at a moment of when encrusted cultural and normative beliefs were being questioned. Most important of all, what if I had shown any skill at anything as a young boy. Perhaps I would have led a conventional life. Perhaps I never would have enjoyed a life of intellectual exploration and the pursuit of social change, and all by default.

Wow, what powerful words … what if?

In the previous blog, I explored the zeitgeist of that era in which the Peace Corps volunteer experiment emerged. Freed from pressing economic want, and spurred on by a lessening of both financial insecurity and inequality, the youth of America (a reasonable number at least) turned their minds and hearts to nobler aspirations. With that peculiar and illusory optimism only found in the young, they (we) believed an even better world was possible.

After all our training and preparation, I can still recall my first moments in Delhi. The July heat was like a blast furnace. But we were able to ignore that momentarily in light of our recent brush with death. The cowling of one engine fell off our Air India flight as we entered Indian airspace. This unsettling incident warranted a news article in the next day’s Times of India. What we were less able to ignore were the cacaphony of sights and sounds that assaulted us. You can be told over and over what to expect. Reality, however, is always much more real.

We spent a few more weeks trying to become farming experts. My group (India 44-B) was initially trained to be poultry experts. Then, half way through, we were switched to agriculture. That should have been clue number one that the planning for our exciting adventure might have been a tiny bit flawed. Despite the rather obvious confusion at the top, our training staff was superb. The preparation we received was intense, innovative, and remarkably immersive. In the end, we all learned an extraordinary amount about who we were and what we might accomplish in our service and, more importantly, beyond. I think, all things considered, we experienced far more change than anything we effected in India or the sites in which we were placed.

Some 50 years after the formation of the Peace Corps, there was an anniversary celebration in Washington. The Indian Embassy had an event for all former PC volunteers in town. The top Embassy official noted that the PC contribution to India (which came to an end in the mid 1970s) was less in terms of any technical improvements and much more in terms of cultural connections. We learned from our hosts, and they learned from us. Despite our shortcomings and mistakes, we showed Anericans and America in a better light. Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.

For example, before heading off to our villages, we played several games against a team from the local Udaipur college. (See pic below). Arguably, we held up the honor of American round ball before enthusiastic local crowds until they brought in some ringers from a military unit. On that day, we lost big time, both on the scoreboard and in the physical punishment we endured. The locals were delighted at our being thrashed, but we all ended on good terms. In fact, the local ball players invited me (along with two others from my group) to join the Udaipur team to compete in the all-India tournament to be held in Jaipur. The local team erroneously concluded that adding the hot shot Americans would improve their tournament chances. Alas, not to be. Soon enough, we found out that the rest of India could play the game at a high level (we were out quickly). But we all had a great time.

I can’t relate the actual Peace Corps experience in a blog or two. Only a few impressions can be touched upon (or you can get a copy of Our Grand Adventure). In the pic below, you can get a feel for our situation in the field. I was stationed about 45 to 50 miles south of Udaipur in what can only be described as a desert wasteland. I lived in government housing attached to the local Panchayat Samiti (government development office). All the other officials chose to live in town, for reasons obvious to me. I never had running water, electricity was only installed after 6 months of promises, and I crapped in a hole located in a room attached to my humble abode.

The experience was challenging in many ways. We all were struck with a variety of physical ailments … some in my group became very I’ll (either hospitalized or medically discharged). I had giardia, ringworm, and lost so much weight that my mother (seeing pictures of me) was tempted to call our Congressperson to have me rescued. But health wise, I escaped relatively unharmed, encountering relatively few bouts of dysentery and no serious ailments. I did live in fear of the dreaded guinea worm. These started out as cysts to be ingested from local well water which grew into long worms that eventually would pop out of an arm or leg. All these years later, I still have nightmares.

The real challenges were the isolation, the loneliness, the heat, and the demands associated with an inscrutable culture. There was no way to negotiate the complexity of the social rules there without error. At the least, one had to consciously think about what to say and how to behave when in public. You have no idea how hard that is. Normally, we rely upon well-worn social scripts and rules yhat are well understood. It was not until we were back in the West on our way home that we comprehended the cultural pressures we had experienced.

In addition, the isolation seemed crushing over time. There were no cell phones or visual media or easy ways of contacting the outside world. There were a telephone or two at the government facilities, but one could not escape the sense of being totally on your own. I recall realizing how much I missed the college sweetheart I left behind (being quite commitment-phobic). I wrote often, but she wound up marrying a post-doc at Harvard where she was working at the time. Who could blame her? Decades later, we reconnected. It was only then that we realized we had loved one another back then but were too damaged to recognize that fact. She speculated how different things might have been had there been modern communication technologies. Roads not taken and all.

Most disconcerting is that we volunteers never felt confident in our primary role. You can’t become a farming expert in a few weeks (especially when expected to learn a new language, cultural nuances, and the complexities of village life). Most of us never escaped that nagging sense that we were frauds. What rendered that sense particularly critical is the awareness that our mistakes might have profound consequences.

On the other hand, we got to experience something unique. The town located about a mile from our isolated accommodations was called Salumbar. It was of decent size (though still a comparatively smaller town) that was situated amidst a harsh and unyielding desert. While some affluence was to be found, many farmers in the area ecked out a marginal existence on tiny plots of land. It was a level of want and vulnerability I had never witnessed in my young life, nor since.

I could never quite escape the sense that I was living in the past. To me, Salumbar looked like a western frontier town of the 1870s. On occasion, farmers drove their water Buffalo through the streets or rough looking men would ride though on camels while sporting rifles and wearing cartridges across their chests as if off to war. Was Pancho Villa preparing a raid?

But mostly we did try to ply our trade as best we could, trying out several ideas we thought might prove useful. We erected a chicken project demo, raised money from my college back in the States to restock the local school library, and developed a home garden demo, among other initiatives. Mostly, though, we tried to convince local farmers to try new forms of hybrid seeds that would greatly enhance yields. This was part of the ‘green revolution’ launched in the third world by Norman Borlaug. It was seen as a possible rescue for an India facing exponential population growth with constrained resources.

We did have successes. You can see in the pics above a successful demo plot along with me tending our demo home garden. Frankly, being a well-known klutz, I cannot believe I erected a chicken coop on top of our home. Astonishingly, I successfuly raised several vegetables. Who was that guy?

Still, the challenges were many, too many to recount here. One will suffice. These new hybrid seeds demanded that the farmer adhere to a set of strict protocols including how to plant the seeds correctly, how to fertilize the crop, when to water, and so forth. In the past, these marginal farmers could throw out some seed left over from last year yield and (usually) get a crop that would enable the family to survive.

These new hybrid seeds we were hawking held the promise of previously unheard of yields. To obtain this bounty, however, the local farmer had to make an upfront investment of money and follow a set of practices that demanded unusual care and attention to detail. Even then, success could not be guaranteed. For example, the promised wonder seeds might have been adulterated along the way (good seed stolen to be replaced by crap). Corruption was endemic.

That left us volunteers in a dilemma. Should we work with the poorest of the poor. I wanted to. But they spoke a local dialect (Mewari and not Hindi which I had learned). The chances of miscommunication were great. Worse, if something were to go wrong, there was no plan B. There was no crop insurance nor a government safety net. Which of us could bear the guilt of pushing a marginal farmer (and his family) over the financial edge. So, we tended to work with better educated, hoping that change eventually would trickle down to all. In the meantime, we risked exacerbating local inequalities.

Did we do any good? Who knows? I will say that India was a grain importing nation in 1967 when we started our tour. It was exporting grain by the early 1970s. Of course, that turn around was more likely due to the return of the life-giving monsoons than to our poor efforts.

I can recall feeling very pessimistic about the future of the country back then. I could not imagine how these marginal farms would survive over the next generation or two. Most farmers had large families. In the past, they needed many offspring so that there would be surviving males to support them in the future. But with improved public health, many more children were surviving to adulthood. The existing family farms were too small to split any further. How would these children survive? What would they do?

Was an apocalypse in the making? Fortunately, that did not happen. The bottom half of the picture of our local home above presents what that same place (our government site) looks like today. The desert has been replaced by growth, new buildings and developments, and green fields brought to life by irrigation. India is taking its place among the more developed countries in the world.

Above, we have most of the survivors from India 44 (A and B) taken at a reunion some 40 years after our return in 1969. By way of explanation, India 44-A was a public health group (mostly female) who were assigned to the State of Maharasthra (near Mumbai, Bombay back in the day). We guys in India 44-B were yhe so-called Ag experts. We were dropped in the arid land around Udaipur in southern Rajasthan. But we all trained together and formed a common bond.

I doubt whether our brave band who ventured forth in 1967 can take much credit for any observed successes. But we all know that each of us took so much away from that experience. As mentioned, the accomplishments of these volunteers have been remarkable. It is hard for me to decide whether Peace Corps did a remarkable job in selecting talent or something about the experience added value to our subsequent lives. Perhaps someone else can solve that conundrum.

I can yet recall sitting on top of our house at night, the roof could only be accessed via a rickety ladder. Nothing but desert could be seen from our vantage point. The evening would be most pleasant after another scorching day with temps oft pushing 110 or higher. But the night air was refreshing, and the sky would be blazing with stars. The pace of life about us was glacial … so much time to read and think and simply appreciate a world that we (so busy in our western, adult lives) tend to ignore. All in all, it truly was a time out of time.

It is too bad that more young people do not have access to such an opportunity.

In June of 1966, close to 100 eager young college students gathered on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They were part of an experimental Peace Corps program that would expose them to an enhanced preparation regimen. These wanna-be volunteers would tackle a rigorous training ordeal that summer, return to finish their degrees, then be subject to more preparation the following summer before heading to India for two years. Many, actually most, would never make it. Some would be asked to leave. Others self-selected out during training. Still others withered in the challenges offered by India or succumbed to illness or disease. By July of 1969, at the end of our tour in one of Peace Corp’s most challenging environments, around two dozen tested volunteers would finish up their service. For these survivors, it was to be a Grand Adventure. (Check out the book below for the full story.)

In the picture below is a partial shot of the young and eager college kids who signed up to spend two years in far off India. Little did they know what awaited them. If you have any interest, I am the geeky-looking guy with glasses in the second row on the far left. As I look back at these faces, I am reminded of how different the world was back then. This all happened when the very concept of overseas volunteering was still fresh and a largely unknown venture. Peace Corps, as a concept, was yet evolving through trial and error. Those early years would later be called the wild west era of the program.

There was a sense of institutionalized naivete that permeated that early program. It was assumed that smart American kids could be recruited off college campuses, given some training, and then dropped into remote sites without any resources other than their wits and good intentions. Oddly enough, in hindsight, officials actually assumed we kids actually could change the world. Some of us did … a little at least. But any small accomplishments were accompanied by frustration, disappointment, and often a sense of personal failure. India, for many reasons, was widely known to be one of the most difficult Peace Corps sites. Of course, we did not know that on the day this photo was shot.

This really was a special time in many ways. America was in the midst of such dramatic change. The conformist, conventional 50s had begun to crack open in the early part of the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement, with scenes of Blacks being persecuted for seeking an end to racial apartheid, was followed by Kennedy’s assassination and then the escalation of a far-off conflict in Southeast Asia. Such shocks drove many of us out of our personal torpor.

While I was quite political by the time this photo was snapped, many of the others undoubtedly were at the onset of profound personal changes. I was well along in my own transformational journey. Just three or so years earlier, I had been studying for the Catholic Priesthood (a foreign missionary order) after being raised in a conservative working class environment where independent thinking was frowned upon and divisive prejudicial attitudes the norm. God and country were paramount. Not surprisingly, I entered college as a product of my cultural cocoon. Change did not take long. By 1966, I was a veteran of antiwar marches who led what amounted to the leftist organization on my campus. I even joined the far-left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), at least before it went over the radical edge.

Each of those kids pictured above had their own stories. Many (like me) were first-generation college students. They benefitted from a booming economy and a virtual explosion of new opportunities. A number went to the best schools … Berkeley, Columbia, Yale, and so forth, virtually all on scholarships or with easily accessible financial assistance. The costs of higher education in that period were laughably cheap. I could easily afford a private college with work, scholarships, and loans that were not back-braking. Others came from dirt poor backgrounds like share-cropping families who would make their ways successfully into mainstream society. As I look back, the talent found in this group was amazing … the accomplishments of the ones I know about have been astounding. Among the group survivors, it would be impossible to randomly select such a talented and accomplished group.

Many of us talk about the 60s with a kind of hushed reverance. In truth, it was a special moment in time. Not only did African -Americans wrest a degree of dignity from a reluctant majority, but several other ‘rights’ movements emerged … for women, for migrant workers and Latinos, for Native Americans, and for the disabled (along with movements for the environment and nuclear disarmament, etc.). The young questioned our military adventures abroad. Our national government declared a war-on-poverty. The arts went through an explosion of innovation. Everything was questioned. Most importantly, the search for a fair and just society was a-foot. Many in this pic traced their decision to apply to PC back to President John Kennedy (JFK) and his iconic challenge … ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The cultural zeitgeist back then was decidedly different. When college students were asked what was most important to them, developing a personal philosophy topped the list. Making money was much lower down. Some one-third of Yale law students tried to volunteer for crusader Ralph Nader’s consumer interest organization. The SDS organization I mentioned above only declined into nihilistic self-destruction in later years. It started out as a few University Of Michigan students sought a more meaningful future (see the Port Huron Statement). They were searching for a just cause about which to structure their futures.

That search for larger meaning is reflected in the early response to the Peace Corps concept. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the concept was first publicly presented by Candidate JFK during a late night stop in Michigan after a TV debate with his opponent… Richard M. Nixon. Dick had gotten under JFK’s skin by asserting that the Dems had been the war party while the GOP favored peace. In response, Jack stewed in the plane ride to his first post-debate stop, Ann Arbor Michigan. He challenged the mostly student crowd (it was near midnight when he landed) to be willing to sacrifice a year or two abroad to make the world a better place. It was a throw-away line at best, totally off-the-cuff.

Jack could never have imagined what happened next. That suggestion roared through the imaginations of the youth in that audience. In those days of primitive communications, word spread of this new volunteer opportunity … by posters on college kiosks, via early telephones, and through face to face conversations. Still, the word spread like wildfire from campus to campus. Even while the campaign was in full throttle, Kennedy’s staff was overwhelmed with requests from students and young people trying to sign up for this new program that did not exist. The response was so overwhelming that, when elected, JFK felt compelled to create the Peace Corps by executive order on March 1, 1961.

That enthusiasm had not abated when I sent in my application in late 1965. The D.C. central staff were still being inundated with applications, way more than they could possibly accept. The youth of that era (my era), while making many poor decisions in retrospect, were generally driven by the better angels of their natures. Many truly wanted to leave the world in a better place. Those were the prime sentiments that drove me. That was why I tried to become a missionary priest, why I worked with poor and disadvantaged kids, and why I became an orderly on the 11-7 shift in a large, urban hospital. Even during my college years, I wanted to make a difference.

Sure, we lived during a golden economic era. Poverty and inequality were falling. The possibilities, even for relatively poor working-class youth like myself, were getting better. While we worried about nuclear incineration for sure, we somehow believed a better world was in the offing. We simply had to ensure that it happened.

If you had been there that day in June of 1966, you would have felt that faith, that optimism. I taught college students for many years. Sure, many impressed me with their idealism, intelligence, and commitment. But nothing matched those heady days when we were eager to set off to the ‘other side of the world‘ to make things just a little better. During that era, there existed a philosophical leitmotif that was quite special. Moreover, I suspect we were among the best of that unique generation.

I will pick up this theme in future blogs. Stay tuned!

I just finished the excellent memoir by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Most will know whom I’m talking about, but not all. Tony, as his friends call him, was a top doc in charge of a key federal agency responsible for keeping us safe from viral and other biological threats. Though he achieved a certain amount of notoriety himself (especially during the Covid crisis), he is one of the (normally) unsung heroes who usually labor in obscurity to ensure our safety during uncertain times. Because of unique circumstances, though, he did become a celebrity.

Tony grew up in New York in an immigrant Italian family of very modest means but with strong values. As a kid, he loved both basketball and his studies with equal passion. He was intellectually prepared by the Jesuits in high school before leaving for the Jesuit run College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Mass since, according to him, it had a great pre-med curriculum and gave him an enticing scholarship. As an aside, I personally could see Holy Cross from my back porch as a youth, and would have gone their myself were it not for a detour into the Catholic Seminary after high school.

From there, Tony matriculated at the Cornell Medical School from which he graduated 1st in his class. My eye doc, who was on the University of Wisconsin medical school faculty, once told me that medical students were generally organized into thirds. The top third often went into research and teaching (combined with clinical practice). The middle third made the best clinicians (you want them as your own doc). The bottom third made the most money since that is what drew them into the field initially but whose skills and motives might be questioned.

Tony was the top of the top. Back then, most medical school graduates owed Uncle Sam some time (like patching up bodies in Vietnam). The brightest often were assigned to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) or the National Institutes for Health (NIH). My good neighbor (Dennis), like Tony, was at the top of his medical school class back in the 60s. He thought he might go onto surgery but was assigned to the CDC and that experience led him to become a top infectious disease doc. Dennis is still working long hours well into his 80s. He is utterly devoted to his craft.

Over some five decades, Tony remained on the front lines of the nation’s ongoing fight against various insidious medical threats. He was there when the AIDS epidemic burst on the scene in 1981 and still at his post four decades later when the Covid pandemic encircled the globe. In between, there were a series of real threats including SARS, ebola, anthrax, smallpox, and biological terrorism after 9-11 (among numerous other threats). The ongoing battle against a largely unseen and constantly mutating enemy composed of viral and bacterial foes never ends.

Tony, it must be said, was the kind of person whom I admired and who populated government back in the days when I first entered government service and later academia. They were people motivated, not by money, but rather by the ideal of service to others and to the public good. His talents were remarkable, and he rose quickly in the public service hierarchy. One day, President George Bush (the dad) called him into the White House to offer him the position of head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is a pinnacle position for a scientist, one that most would give their right arm to get. Tony turned him down. Power and money held little charm for him. He wanted to stay involved with both the hands-on research and clinical experiences that he felt saved lives.

On exiting the Oval Office, Bush’s chief of staff muttered to Tony, ‘Why you son-of-a-bitch, no one says no to the President.’ But Tony did. Apparently, President Bush didn’t mind. Once, before a national audience, the President was asked whom he admired, who his role models were. After a couple of familiar names, he prefaced his next offering by noting that few would recognize the name of his next idol. Then he mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci, who epitomized the ideals of public service for the President.

In his memoir, Tony spoke kindly of virtually all the Presidents under whom he served perhaps with the exception of Reagan (largely by ommission) and (of course) Trump, whom he called a complicated man to say the least. Tony tried to stay above partisan politics and always looked to the vital tasks before him. But things were going askew around him late in his career. He relates that Republicans began rejecting essential public health resources merely because the other side (Obama) asked for them, something that seldom happened in the past (though requests were sometimes revised downward for substantive reasons).

During the Trump years, government functions virtually ceased to exist despite the most glaring public health disaster since the 1918 Spanish Flu, a long-ago pandemic that killed more than died on the WWI battlefields. Science, however, came to the rescue since quality people like Tony remained at their posts. But they spent too much time fighting the worst possible politics where disinformation and outright dangerous actions took place for the most transactional partisan advantages. It was a nightmare for any principalled man. So many amenable deaths occurred due to political meddling and pure spite, an unacceptable outcome to public servants motivated by high ideals.

The cost to Tony and his family were enormous. Trump’s acolytes continously vilified and threatened him personally, his wife, and his offspring without mercy. They were subject to the most vicious attacks imaginable, including sexual threats to his spouse and daughters. He, himself, was called a ‘mass murderer’ and is still threatened with jail for specious allegations by Republican members of Congress. Their hate knows no bounds.

This raises a serious question. Why would anyone enter public service these days? Surely, Tony could have made loads of money being a top doc. He could have enjoyed a comfortable personal life. As an aside, I recall Joseph Califano saying the following after accepting the position of Secretary of the (then) U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare back in the late 1970s … “I’ve taken a position that pays me a fraction of what I make as a private attorney and which leaves me no time for my family.” Like Califano, Tony devoted his life to doing what he thought was the right thing. His career was totally consuming, leaving no time for the pleasures typically associated with success. He was always working 14 to 16 hour days (or more) as he confronted one health emergency after another. He made such sacrifices for his love of healing and from a sense of duty … not for power or gold.

I can remember when the best and brightest went into public service as a matter of pride and patriotism. They wanted to make a difference. In my arena, social policy, the office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in HHS once attracted top Ph.Ds in economics and related disciplines. The staff in the 1970s could compete with the intellectual firepower of a top research university, though they had other alternative career paths. When I spent a year at ASPE during the start of the Clinton administration (on leave from UW), they had some very smart people on staff but no longer could attract intellectual luminaries.

What happened? Conservatives had spent years denigrating civil servants with withering attacks. As partisanship and polarization increased, it became increasingly difficult to attract top talent. That became especially true when available alternatives paid a lot more money and offered less hassle. Why put up with the grief for so little reward?

Who wants to work around the clock for less money and be accused of atrocious crimes for their efforts. No one can make a firm estimate, but several Presidents (from both parties) have intimated that Tony’s professional work may well have saved millions of lives, not just with the big crises like global AIDS and Covid but by responding quickly to other emerging threats before they got out of control. His thanks at the end was a mix of much praise and honors along with the grossest villification imaginable, including threats to himself and his family.

We need people like Tony in government as we look to the future. We need smart young people to enter public service based on a desire to serve the common good as opposed to seeking private gain. If we attack such people, and demean their professional choices, where in God’s name will we find them? Who will step up to save us?

Some aspects of American life disappoint me. Now, that is rather an astonishing understatement. Often, I am furious. One aspect of our contemporary scene that pisses me off to no end involves our slow abandonment of progressivity in our tax system. Since the Reagan revolution, we have shifted the burden of paying for public goods from those who easily can afford the bill to those middle and working class folk who cannot easily carry this fiscal burden. My cynical view is that that trend was quite intentional, designed to erode support for government among the middle classes. And what has this erosion of progressivity bought us … hyper- inequality and internal divisions.

If you broke the U.S. population into quintiles, you would roughly get the following distribution of household incomes. NOTE: the brackets to the right are the proportion of survey respondents who typically claim that they are 1 (upper class), 2 (upper middle class), 3 (middle class, 4 (working class), and 5 (lower class).

Top 20% $153,001 and above [2%]

2nd 20% $94,001 to $153,000 [14%]

3rd 20% $58,001 to $94,000 [38%]

4th 20% $30,001 to $58,000 [35%]

5th 20% $0 to $30,000 [11%]

A disproportionate number of those surveyed lump themselves in the center as either middle or working class types where working class is a polite way of saying lower middle class. The median household income usually is pegged somewhere around $70 to $75,000 dollars (it varies marginally from year to year). The average HH income is in the six-figure range, but that estimate is skewed by the outliers at the very top and thus tells us little. The median figure is more helpful since it represents the 50th percentile with half the population above and half below that income figure.

Now, somewhere above the median income figure lies an important psychological point. It estimates the perceived income needed to meet basic needs … a subjective but important line. While that figure differs across surveys, the typical estimate usually is set at a few thousand dollars above the actual median figure.

This point in the distribution is important. Below that line, the so-called marginal utility of each extra dollar earned is seen as quite important to the family. Above that line, this utility at the margin (or for next dollar earned) begins to fall. Thus, an extra hundred bucks to someone making $200,000 per year is less consequential than that same hundred bucks to someone making $50 grand annually. What benefit is the next billion dollars when you already have $100 billion or more?

Now, let’s go back to the difference between median and average estimates of central tendencies. Averages respecting income distributions are typically much higher since those at the tip of the pyramid really are outliers. Their income and wealth figures are astronomical, thus tending to disproportionately distort any averages calculated. And America is one of the most econominally unequal nations across the globe. Our averages are inflated by the outrageous disparities associated with those at the very top.

It turns out that some 800 American billionaires hold 3.8 percent of all U.S. wealth while the entire bottom half of the population only controls some 2.5 percent of the entire pot. The higher one goes in the distribution, the more skewed things get. The bottom quintile has a typical income of $16,000 annually. The top quintile sees $278,000 per year. That figure jumps to $336,000 for the top 5 percent of earners, then to $820,000 for the top 1 percent, and then to $3.3 million for the top tenth of one percent. Small steps up to the top of the distributional pyramid translates into huge financial windfalls.

Wealth is even more unequally distributed than income. The top 1 percent of Americans control 26 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom quintile controls a mere 3 percent. This makes even more sense when you realize that the same 1 percent at the top control 54 percent of all stocks and mutual funds. The problem with such a gross maldistribution of the nation’s treasures is that power follows the gold. As the oft-cited play on the golden rule goes, he who has the gold makes the rules.

Absent some unknown countervailing force, only the national government has sufficient leverage to correct the tendency for unfettered free markets to inevitably spiral toward more and more inequality. Quite clearly, the rules are continually tweaked (in the pursuit of self-interest) to reward those already at the top. There are few incentives nor many natural mechanisms to diminish obsequious and ravenous avarice.

It is axiomatic that the government can help here. It has, in the past, redistributed resources from one group of Americans to another. The right inevitably screamed that it was unfair to those who were successful in life when their taxes would go to less fortunate citizens. But that older inage of redistributional schemes from rich to poor were more appropriately associated with the pre-Reagan era. Since 1980, the distributional flow has been more from the middle of the pyramid to the top. Thus, it should surprise no one that those in the top quintile generally receive a larger return from the federal government in terms of subsidies, credits, and other benefits than that they pay in taxes. In fact, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the rich now pay proportionally less in taxes than working class stiffs … a far cry from the post WWII era when the top marginal income tax rates ranged from 70 to over 90 percent, and corporate taxes were much higher.

We did a lot of good during that older era during which the affluent paid their share, if not more. Among other things, we built our internal infrastructure (highways and airways), invested in science and higher education, protected our democratic institutions here and abroad, and built up our middle class by expanding opportunities and supporting labor.

With the dawn of neo-liberalism and the ascendancy of the hard right, we now have new definitions of basic societal constructs such as fairness and opportunity. It is now a winner-take-all playing field based on the ethics of a no-holds barred Darwinian struggle for survival and supremacy. Some level of struggle may well be advantageous to progress, but excess competition ultimately erodes the communal fabric essential to a level of collaboration fundamentally necessary in a modern society. If we don’t work together, we perish separately.

The U.S. has fallen out of the top 20 countries in surveys of national happiness. In part, this is due to the stresses and despair felt among our youth. Epidemiologists point out the spike of ‘deaths of despair’ as opiod use skyrockets along with suicides. The happiest nations, no surprise here, are found among those nations that tax their citizens at higher levels while providing extensive public services to support families and smooth out the uncertainties of life. Unceasing struggle with only a tattered safety net available to the non-winners eventually takes a toll.

When I did policy work, we often noted that budgets were values oriented documents. They reflected the kind of world we wished to have. Perhaps it is time to reexamine that question. Just what kind of future world do we want? What type of world do we want to leave to our grandchildren? I surely hope we decide to leave a better world than the one we currently have.

I’ve been focusing on political topics of late. Perhaps it is time to drift back to more personal musings. And no, I have not overlooked the exciting news in the Presidential race. I’ll just let that percolate for a few more days.

I noticed the book I wrote a number of years ago titled A Wayward Academic: Reflections from the policy trenches. It is a memoir about my professional career, mostly as a policy wonk and fake academic. When I noticed this page-turner lying on a coffee table strewn among a pile of my other great works, it got me musing about my past. To be totally honest, it doesn’t take much to activate a dialogue in my head, this hyper-active place where the discussions are so bright and stimulating … at least to me. Self-delusion is one of my enduring strengths.

In this instance, I was struck by a rather odd aspect of my life. I was, by conventional measures, a spectacular professional failure, at least according to the ordinary rules by which academics are evaluated. On the other hand, I believe I was a remarkable success by my own rather idiosyncratic standards as well as by the feedback from peers and colleagues in the social sciences. In some ways, I lived in a professional no-mans land by functioning as a policy wonk while remaining in a scholarly institutional setting even though most peers (especially the economists) really seemed to respect what I did in my job.

While never being naturally disposed to a scholarly life, I loved being in the academy. It gave me several inestimable gifts: the freedom to pursue what caught my interest, a ready made patina of respect and ersatz authority, an environment populated by super-bright people from across the country, an institutional framework devoid of ordinary hierarchy, ready access to experts and authorities in related institutions, and an opportunity to share my thoughts with the next generation of students as well as with the audience of greatest interests to me … the policy world. I often pinched myself at my good fortune.

Still, being in the academic world (but not of the academic world) took some finesse to negotiate and did incur some personal costs. It wasn’t always easy. This bifurcated sense of failure and success perhaps can be traced to a disconnect embedded within my internal wiring. I was a person who ostensibly played by the rules while stubbornly rejecting conventional norms.

As a young Catholic, working class kid, I both embraced my religion seriously (studying to be a priest for a while) while arguing internally against so much of the dogma which that religious institution fed to me. Later, I would be a college student who appeared buttoned down and conventional while organizing the left-wing organization on campus and (for a while) joining the more radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Finally, as an adult, I functioned within the higher reaches of the academy (even managing a nationally renowned research entity at the respected University of Wisconsin) while never becoming a formal academic. At each stage, I appeared to conform while quietly rebelling, even doing things my way.

Irving Piliavin was a UW professor who recruited me from a state service job (my first professional position as a social services research analyst for the State of Wisconsin). He lured me to the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, the nationally recognized think tank on social policy questions created as part of President Johnsin’s War On Poverty. (He needed my knowledge of how government worked for his research.)

He liked me personally, but I know that I frustrated him terribly. He could never understand why I didn’t want to be a scholar like him. He would suggest topical areas in which I might become a recognized intellectual authority within the academy. Pick one substantive area? That very notion appalled me as stultifying. At one point, he told me that I had trouble with authority, with convention, and with the accepted rules. Perhaps, but my read was that I simply had to do things my own way.

I never started out to be so rebellious. I mostly thought of myself as someone who just wanted to get along and be liked. But there is this old saying … you can’t take out what God put in. Some elemental dispositions, I suspect, are wired into your DNA. I could never stop questioning the tenets of my culture and religion. I kept embracing thoughts (e.g., for racial justice and for a global government) at a time when NO ONE around me had such convictions. As a student, I was always asking questions and pushing my professors, a trait I finally realized could be irritating when, years later, I was in front of university classes over which I was in charge and exercised authority. When I entered the work world, I seldom just did my job but kept pushing the envelope. I was never satisfied with the concept that we’ve always done it this way.

Most of these early experiences are included in the memoir of my earlier years, titled A Clueless Rebel. Between this work and A Wayward Academic, all my skeletons are laid out in detail, and with considerable humor. If you can’t laugh at yourself (and the world about you), what is the point of living.

At the end of the day, my direction in life was driven by some rather simple ends, nothing really out of the ordinary. First, I wanted to make a contribution to the world about me. The same impulse that pushed me initially toward being a Catholic Priest remained with me after I left the Seminary. It always struck me that a person’s life cannot be worth much if he or she doesn’t at least try to leave the world a bit better in some way.

Second, I craved novelty. It turns out that I had the attention span of a gnat. I was always looking for a new issue or problem to attack. And over my career, I touched on just about every major social policy issue feasible. As I said in my professional memoir, my career was like playing in a policy candy store. I always wondered what delights were in the next aisle. Success in an academic culture, on the other hand, normally demands drilling deep into a given topical area. That would be intellectual death to me.

Third, I craved challenge. I responded to those issues that were inherently difficult. Not surprisingly, I became heavily involved in welfare reform and related social questions at a time when they were front page news and political hot buttons. I was always being called by the press and often in hot water with politicians. Great fun, but not for the weak of heart. It was oft said (back in my day) that welfare reform was the mideast of domestic policies, meaning that like mideastern foreign policy questions there were no easy answers. While many academic foci are technically difficult, the policy issues I engaged involved normative conflicts which rendered them especially problematic.

I was attracted to questions that were difficult partly because of my innate curiosity about how society worked. Another way of thinking about this is that I wanted to attack questions in ways that would lead to a deeper understanding of the world about me. This intellectual curiosity drove me through life. I felt blessed to be able to, as I oft said, fly about the country to work with the best and brightest on problems that appeared unsolvable. And better yet, I was paid to do this. Not much, to be sure, but enough to be comfortable. Besides, money never really mattered to me.

Finally, I hoped to do no harm. This was my greatest worry that, in trying to make things better, I would make them worse. I had few illusions that I would solve the bigger social issues of my day. But at least I might contribute something without imposing some net harm on society. That would be good enough.

What I discovered is that I could best balance these diverse goals by finding my own niche as a professional. I simply needed to find a way to remain within the academic world while not being trapped by the scholarly culture which was a bit mind-numbing to my tastes. Now, that is a tightrope that is difficult to traverse.

It turned out that I could do most of the expected academic tasks with relative ease. I was an excellent and popular teacher. I was good at raising research money (I was mostly self-supporting throughout my career). I was in demand as a consultant throughout the U.S. and in D.C. I was popular as a giver of talks and in serving on panels and at conferences. I was respected in the collateral worlds of my content area … with think tanks, the philanthropic institutions, with evaluation firms. And I was a damn good administrator who helped keep IRP alive during some dark days.

What I didn’t like doing was the very thing that academics were supposed to dedicate their lives toward…publishing peer reviewed research articles. Sure, I get the value of that process, the rigorous and anonymous reviews of research methods and content. Those protocols are invaluable to science. For me, though, they meant a kind of intellectual death. The process of focusing on peer reviewed publications, in my estimation, led one in the direction of narrow and provincial topics that were approached via overly quantitative methods (in a display of technical virtuosity) and written up in ritualistic and formulaic ways. Moreover, they were directed at an audience of lesser interest to me … other academics. That feature of the academic culture (impressing this narrow audience of peers) struck me as overly incestuous. I wanted to reach a broader audience.

Of course, I did publish in peer reviewed journals but almost always in co-authored works. I typically did so to help out a colleague. At the same time, I know I influenced thinking in my profession and in the policy world, which was always my primary audience. I did that through policy oriented outlets and through my many public talks. That gave me great satisfaction. What I wrote and talked about impacted not only my fellow colleagues but also the legions trying to solve our social problems. The cost of my professional choices … I never was fully admitted to the academic club.

If you are interested, I did collect some of my thinking in one final collective work titled Confessions of an Accidental Scholar. Through my teaching, my consulting, writings for broader audiences, and my many talks, I left a small legacy. Better yet, I did little harm while having a great time. It is not really a job if you would do it for free.