Wildcard - Summer Solstice 2020

I am a big believer in participatory democracy. I always have been. Over the years, I’ve run into a lot of cynicism, which perpetually says that you can’t fight city hall. Politicians won’t listen to you anyway. Often that’s true. Except when you can and when they do. You just have to know how to approach it, and maybe get a little lucky.

In general, I am a crotchety old wizard. I live in my cave and like to be left alone. But when I emerge to engage the world, there’s often a well-timed spell involved. Usually nothing flashy but sometimes it inadvertently ends in pyrotechnics.

In previous essays, I’ve mentioned that one of the main reasons we bought this house was location. The property bordered on 400-600 undeveloped acres destined to become a county park. Just north of it was another large piece of property also optioned by the county that they were trying to figure out what to do with.

Everyone in the county wanted a piece of both of those tracts of land to use as recreational parks, a botanical garden, an art museum with studio space, sports fields, a wildlife preserve, locations for various county agencies, etc. The oddest request for space came from Pinellas County Utilities, the organization that supplies the county’s drinking water.

A short history lesson. This would have been in the late 90s. At the time Florida was involved in a water war with Georgia and Alabama, specifically over control and use of cross-border rivers. Because of an ongoing drought and increased development, as well as a diminishing aquifer, water was in short supply. Due to the shortage, that interstate infighting had spilled into internecine rivalries as counties around Tampa Bay struggled to secure water sources to quench the thirst of their growing populations. Our county, the most densely populated in the state, owned land in an adjoining county and proceeded to pump water out of the underlying aquifer, leading to a series of recriminations and lawsuits about who controlled what.

The overarching entity in charge of settling that conflict was Swiftmud (SW Florida Water Management District). Through their charter from the legislature, they have great power to mediate disputes. As a part of a tri-county settlement, our county agreed to several mandated actions so the state didn’t enter into a rob Peter to pay Paul scenario. That meant initiatives like conservation and constructing new reservoirs to capture rainwater as well as finding new sources of water if they existed.

The problem was, they really didn’t. The Florida Aquifer, one of the most productive in the world, was already strained to near capacity in trying to support the state’s agricultural base as well as major and expanding population centers such as Tampa/St. Pete, Orlando and Jacksonville. Over-pumping had already led to accusations of increased sinkhole development, a long-running issue in the state.

Without getting too mired in the technical details, there are several layers to the aquifer, each generally separated from the next by layers of partially isolating rock or ideally by isolating clay. Each layer rises and falls in an underground topography that often mimics but doesn’t completely follow the aboveground terrain. In some places, freshwater rises to the surface in the form of springs or rivers. In others, like beneath this county, it dives deep below, making water more expensive to extract.

To give you an idea, our well, which we use to water the lawn, taps a layer of non-potable fresh water near the surface (about 30 feet down) that gets replenished by rainwater and proximity to the ditch and the lake. It is considered a groundwater layer. Isolated below that is a brackish water layer, basically saltwater intrusion from the Gulf. Below that lies a freshwater layer that needs very little treatment because it is purified by the very slow percolation through the surrounding limestone. Beneath that is a second saline layer.

Each layer has a transmissivity, how fast you can draw water from without it running dry. Think of it like a water filter or a series of small pipes. You can only draw so much so fast no matter how hard you try. If you exceed that, you come up empty. Or sometimes you deplete the resource, weakening surrounding underground structures. Picture burying a balloon full of water beneath the sand at the beach. Then picture puncturing or draining it through a tube. If the balloon is close enough to the surface, the sand above can’t support its own weight. Like a poorly built dome, it collapses. You have just created a sinkhole.

In reality there is a lot more complexity to aquifers, water wars, and sinkholes but you get the idea. Sinkholes specifically only occur in very specific underground geologic terrain, not just anywhere. That fact becomes important in a minute.

So back to the county land where we started.

Because of the water wars, the county needed to show they were making a good faith effort to either conserve water or tap new water sources. On the conservation end, they began to design and implement a reclaimed water system that essentially cleaned water already available from the waste water treatment process and make it available for watering lawns, landscape and golf courses, the low-hanging fruit of county water consumption. The problem was that would take years to implement and even then, with the projected population growth rate, wouldn’t be enough.

That meant finding new sources of water within the county. The problem there was that the Florida Aquifer was pretty much already tapped to its maximum by our and the surrounding counties. Leaving aside that it would be expensive to drill deep enough to extract from it, it was the kind of zero-sum game scenario that Swiftmud didn’t really like. So, the county had to look elsewhere.

At the time, both Saudi Arabia and California, each short on water for different reasons, had developed and deployed innovative desalination plants. In both cases, their source water was an ocean or a saltwater gulf. One big problem with desalination plants is that even with the new technologies, creating drinking water from the ocean is a multistage process usually involving reverse osmosis. You may or may not recognize that term from a high school science class, but if you don’t it doesn’t matter. It’s just a process. But an expensive process.

Another problem with desalination has to do with the environmental impact of what to do with the super-salty waste water that is an inevitable byproduct. Typically, that has to be pipelined miles offshore into deep water where it won’t impact local fisheries. The outlets can’t be close to your intakes or you create a self-defeating feedback loop, which again makes for expensive engineering and infrastructure. With all that, at the time, you really had to have no other options before you went down the full desalination road.

Now because we live in Florida, which has seen a major population explosion in my lifetime and has long been short on water, there have been numerous groundwater surveys done over the course of decades. The gold standard are still the ones conducted and maintained by the federal government, specifically by the US Geological Survey. That name should ring a bell with many readers as where my wife worked for the vast majority of her career. But again, more on that in a minute.

Somewhere along the line, someone very clever looked at one of those surveys and noticed that briny layer we talked about wedged below the surface water layer of our well but above the freshwater Florida Aquifer. Brine is basically salty water, so not useful on its own, but not nearly as salty as the Gulf of Mexico where it seeped in from. Which means it wouldn’t cost as much to desalinate. And then this clever individual noticed that salt water layer deep below the freshwater of the Florida Aquifer, which also wasn’t clean or useful on its own. So, this clever individual, really a clever company, approached the county with a proposal.

They had developed an experimental technology that extracted freshwater from briny water at a fraction of the cost of extracting it from ocean water. How large a fraction I don’t remember but appealing enough for the county to consider. All they had to do was pump it out, which wouldn’t be too expensive because it wasn’t that deep, shallower in fact than the Florida Aquifer. But what to do with the waste water I mentioned? Well, why not just pump it back into the ground, into that already unusable layer below the Florida Aquifer? That would eliminate almost all the expensive logistical and environmental concerns.

The county really liked this idea. Mainly because they were under enormous pressure from Swiftmud, and by then the courts to find new water sources. Any perceived progress would do to buy them time for negotiations with the adjacent counties. Actual progress was somewhat less important.

But where to put such a project? I’ve mentioned this is a densely populated county. Land is just as scarce as water, and just as expensive to acquire without a developer’s deep pockets. But remember way back when you started reading that I mentioned the park land that had just opened up that everyone wanted a piece of? Sounds perfect right? The county already owned it. As it turns out, it wasn’t badly sited for what the company proposed. So, the county authorized some adjacent test wells and thought it was clear sailing. Done, done, and done. Problem solved as long as those wells panned out.

They did, at least according to the company operating them. So, they formally submitted their proposal. Because they had approached the county and not the other way around, there would be no competition. And because they knew the county was desperate, they crafted a sweetheart deal. The contract basically said they would construct and run the desal plant on land the county would lease to them for something like $1. The plant which would provide a minimum of 1 million gallons of drinking water a day, which the county would buy back from them at cost of extraction plus profit.

Now a million gallons sounds like a lot of water, but in a county with nearly a million people, it really isn’t all that much. But this company said, don’t worry. Based on the surveys, we can scale it up to extract at least ten times that amount without a problem. As it turns out, 10 million gallons a day was a magic number. It was nearly the exact good faith progress the courts and Swiftmud wanted the county to show. Once you threw in the reclaimed water system, that gave them a buffer. Almost sounded too good to be true.

As most of you know, with all contracts the devil is in the details. And as I remember it, this contract said that the company would build the plant on its own dime. But that the county was obligated to buy a million gallons of water a day, whether the plant could produce it or not. The technology, after all, was clearly labeled as experimental. Which meant that the company had never implemented it in the field at least at this scale. There was a clause in there about the county covering the cost of the plant if it backed out of the contract later. Basically, all the risk was on the county and all the reward went to the company.

None of that seemed to matter. The county commission had stars in their eyes and was ready to sign up for about anything. Just hand them the pen.

Now there’s a tricky thing about county government in Florida. It’s subject to the Sunshine Law which at the time was one of the strongest government transparency laws in the United States. Which meant any contract, any project, any money authorized and spent had to be part of the public record, with time for public comment.

When this item was first floated at a commission meeting, buried as it was in all the various business the county does, the public didn’t take much notice. But a reporter from the regionally recognized local paper did. The paper had covered the water wars and knew there was a story here, especially with the proposed use of park land, which everyone was already talking about. So, s/he did his/her job, talked to the right people, chased down the details, and published the story. The commission again didn’t seem to care because they thought they were solving a problem, despite the shakiness of the proposed contract.

The general public did not agree. The story quickly blew up. People started scrounging up pitchforks and torches as they ripped their bodices in preparation for storming the barricades. Within days we had received fliers from a NIMBY organization that had just formed to oppose the project. They flooded the commissioners with angry letters and phone calls the point where the commission was forced to delay voting on the proposal in the routinely scheduled general meeting.

But the commission hadn’t given up. Being career politicians, they had seen this kind of reaction before. They understood the fervor often quickly died down as the public shifted its focus to the next daily outrage. So, they went on a bit of a charm offensive, scheduling three separate public hearings to pitch the proposal where the company and their consulting team would present their plans and be available to answer questions. And like any commission meeting, public comment would be accepted in the form of time blocks for any citizen to speak. They slated three of these informational meetings over the course of a couple weeks, one in the north of the county, one in the south and one central maybe half a mile from where the proposed plant would be built. That one was assigned to a room in a cooperative extension that we’ve since learned is the largest conference room the county owns.

The north and south meetings went off without a hitch. A few dozen people showed up and generally expressed their lack of support but in no numbers that might blunt the effort. You could sense the commission felt like things were back on track. All they had to do was survive the final meeting, vote the project through and deflect a little fallout. No significant problem.

Especially since the NIMBY organization I mentioned wasn’t exactly helping the opposition’s cause. Full disclosure, I am no fan of NIMBY organizations because in general they are more interested in killing projects because of their homes’ resale value rather than because they are not in the best interest of the community. The name says it all. Not In My Back Yard. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a desal plant, a Walmart or a fire station. In general, they dislike change.

Then again, I was no fan of this experimental desal plant either. Mainly because it didn’t pass the smell test. I also didn’t think the proposed location was the proper use of park land. But in the end, I believe in democracy. If it passed muster and the county voted it in, I would have to deal with it. A couple big ifs.

Anyway, the first issue this newly fledged NIMBY organization focused on in its literature was sinkholes. They painted a grim and inaccurate picture of our houses being swallowed up when the plant over-pumped the aquifer, as everyone rightly expected they might. Now remember somewhere near the dawn of this essay that I mentioned sinkholes depend on the underlying geology? Yeah, this part of the county doesn’t have that structure. Karen knew that from glancing at a couple bedrock maps. Not really a problem.

Which she told a couple neighbors who were semi-organizers when we were talking to them one day. Initially they didn’t want to believe her, even though she said she was a geologist, because they thought she might support the project. We cleared that up pretty quickly, and I added that as an engineer, I was more concerned with the plant’s proximity to the water. The lake in the park the county proposed putting right beside is a 100-acre reservoir that drains through a series of creeks and canals both north and south before meandering its way to the Gulf. Any saltwater intrusion would be devastating to the surrounding ecosystem, never mind out subsurface wells.

While they remained skeptical about the likely lack of sinkholes, they added environmental impacts to their list of grievances. Their continued skepticism meant we couldn’t sign on to their movement directly as it struck us as not just NIMBY but anti-science. Even back then, neither of us was comfortable with the kind of science denial we heard, and that was before it was fully in vogue.

At the same time, we weren’t ready to completely shut them down either. While their facts might have been wrong, their instincts were right. The county seemed to be trying to pull one over on the public. And without a public outcry, it was unlikely to be stopped. They were mostly harmless, anyway, in that Douglas Adams kind of way. But without them, there would be no way to stop this project if stopping it was warranted. So, we were stuck with somewhat unreliable allies. But allies nonetheless.

Now the key words in the above paragraph are “if it was warranted.” From my point of view, if the science supported the project, I was willing to begrudgingly accept it because I recognized the problem. Or at least fight it only on the grounds of inappropriate siting alone. As I said, I am definitely not NIMBY and am not focused on winning at any cost.

But when I do enter the lists, it’s always with an eye on the prize. I figured these allies might have a part to play before this drama ended. So, we left them to it while we investigated other avenues, neither joining nor disclaiming them.

The first step was determining whether the project would actually be feasible. When I asked my resident staff geologist, she promptly answered, “Dammit, I’m a sedimentologist, not a hydrologist.” Well, do you know any hydrologists, I prodded innocently. Narrow eyes, a light bulb sparking. May-be. Let me look into it.

Karen did a search of relevant research in her office, which came up empty. Not surprising since they were a coastal research center. But there was a hydrology office located across the bay. She dug up a contact and wrote them, asking for information, as a private citizen not a federal geologist. I’m a little foggy on exactly what happened next, but I assume it involved trench coats and a dead-drop in a dark alley near the airport somewhere around midnight with an admonishment that, “Should you or any of your team be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions." Or words to that effect.

What Karen came up with was two official USGS research reports on the underlying hydrology of this area near our lake. Turns out, they had been studying it for at least a decade. As a private citizen, Karen neither asked for nor received any interpretation of the data, just the reports as written. But one thing a master’s degree teaches you is how to read an official government research study, even if it’s not in your particular field of specialty.

Both reports said pretty much the same thing. The underlying geology would only support pulling about a million gallons a day at most from the brine layer. Which translated to less than a million gallons of fresh water once it went through the desalination process. Anything more was unsustainable, though the specific impacts of attempting it went unaddressed. As did the level of isolation between the proposed wastewater injection layer and the freshwater Florida Aquifer should that be attempted.

And the commission had requested and received copies of both reports. They might even have been involved in commissioning the second one.

Being extra cautious to make sure that she wasn’t missing something, Karen approached a hydrologist colleague in her office to confirm what she thought she’d read. Yup, that is exactly what those reports were saying. And no, the underlying geology hadn’t magically transformed in the decade between the two reports, despite anyone’s wishful thinking.

When she told me what she’d found, I knew we had all the ammunition we needed. Locked and loaded, it was now just a matter of how to play it out. I knew exactly how to work it for maximum impact, but that required Karen playing an active role. While I could be the front man myself, and had absolutely no problem doing so, I knew she would be better for multiple reasons.

That prompted a second discussion on ethics and conflict of interest. Because they were USGS reports, and she was a USGS employee, she had to be very careful not to even hint that she was speaking in any official capacity. Which I absolutely knew wasn’t a problem as long as she didn’t mention who she worked for. I’d done my due diligence. Government employees maintain their right to free speech as long as they don’t overtly invoke their agency. The reports were in the public record, freely available to anyone who asked. Karen interpreted them based on her education, not her position with the agency. It’s a tricky balance but a pathway existed as long as she was careful.

To help convince her, I outlined my plan. Reluctantly, she agreed.

By now, we were just a few days away from the public meeting. Which worked out perfectly. With her onboard, I knew exactly how to set this up. First rule: Don’t talk about Project Mayhem. Second rule: Don’t. Talk. About. Project. Mayhem.

At this point, operational security meant strictly need to know basis only. Never trust especially sketchy allies with sensitive information if you want to maintain the element of surprise. If your enemy doesn’t have time to prepare, they can simply react. Use that.

So, when the public meeting rolled around, we stayed in our work clothes, shirt and tie for me, business casual for her, and drove to the meeting. We wanted to arrive a little early to make sure we could get Karen a time slot to speak.

When we pulled up, the county cooperative extension was already mobbed. Hundreds of people were streaming into the building. Two different individuals with clipboards tried to stop us and get us to sign a petition opposing the proposal. By then, I had my game face on. I simply waved them off and kept walking, my dress shoes hitting the concrete with a heavy heel. A third canvasser in support of the measure took one look, got my best “bring it” stare, and didn’t even try.

We got a lot of sidelong glances on our approach. No one was sure exactly who we were. Everyone suspected we were players by the way we were dressed and moving with a purpose, along with the papers Karen carried, but they had no idea on whose side. Exactly as I wanted it.

Inside, we found row upon row of chairs set out with aisles separating them. At the top of the center aisle was a microphone facing the table where the Commissioners would sit. To one side, near the entrance was a large table with a conceptual diagram of the proposed desal plant and where it would be situated. The consulting team hired by the company making the proposal hovered around in their suits, ready to answer questions. We only glanced at them on the way by.

Instead, we headed for the signup sheet for public comment. Karen entered her name. We sat toward the back near the center of the room where we could survey the crowd. Then we settled in and waited. I engaged the eyes that look right through you to ensure people kept their distance, seeing but not making eye contact or acknowledging anyone.

Eventually, the meeting was called to order. By then, every seat was filled with SRO in the back. Only three Commissioners had bothered to show up, the Chairperson and two others. Only one of them was interesting. He had been appointed by the governor to finish a vacated term. Not only was he the only Democrat on the commission in a decade, he was also the only, and perhaps first, person of color. All of which put him in a somewhat awkward position in this county at the time if he intended to stand for an elected term.

The desal plant was the one item on the agenda that night. The consulting firm for the company gave a brief introductory presentation of the proposal. A polished, professional presentation. Nothing new or earth-shattering. We didn’t pay much attention other than to note the overall contours of the plan remained unchanged.

Next, the Chairperson opened the floor for public comment. An official called the first name on the list. Each person had three minutes to speak. Karen had at least a dozen people ahead of her. By convention, the Commission did not address public comments, they typically just sat and listened. A few speakers in we could sense they were only there to make a good-faith showing, absorb any damage, and move on to a vote the next week. All they had to do was survive the meeting just like they had the other two.

Two of the commissioners sat stone-faced as citizen after citizen stood at the microphone to object to this proposal. The Democrat looked more sympathetic but only slightly. Most of the speakers were impassioned though not always eloquent, which is the way a democracy is supposed to work. Their facts were all over the board as we knew they would be. But we could see there were no new arguments. The Commissioners had heard it all before. Sometimes from the exact same speakers. A quiet boredom evolved behind their Easter Island expressions. They just wanted to get this over with. Even the crowd and speakers began to sense theirs was a futile rearguard action. When the clock ran out on the evening, it would be all over but the crying.

I was taking in the room again when Karen’s name was called. Specifically, I was watching the consulting team sitting up front, facing the commissioners. When Karen rose after the official called her name, I saw the only woman on the team snap her head around to look. Turned out, she recognized Karen from them both being members of the local Association of Women Geologists chapter. For an instant, this woman looked like she’d been poleaxed. Her expression quickly transformed back to neutral as she turned to face forward, staring at nothing in particular. That told me everything I needed to know. We had the initiative and had maintained the element of surprise.

The hall quieted as Karen strode up the aisle, papers in hand. All eyes traced her progress as she approached the microphone. After introducing herself by name and city of residence, she launched into her very brief geological review. As she did, the expression of two of the commissioners transformed from bored to apprehensive. The Democrat leaned in to listen more intently. Less than three minutes later, Karen concluded by holding up the pair of reports in her hand, slightly splayed so the Commissioners could see them both, as she pointedly asked her final question “Why are you even considering this proposal when you have two US Geological Survey reports that say it won’t work?”

There was a moment of stunned silence as Karen turned away from the microphone and headed back toward her seat. Less than a second later, the room erupted. A woman from the neighborhood, a member of the opposition, raised a hand in a high-five as Karen passed. She slapped it as she strode by.

The remaining speakers on the list spoke, but you could tell their remarks were pro forma. Everyone knew the argument had already been won.

The commissioners looked dismayed. Our ambush had been perfectly executed.

So perfectly, in fact, that the moment the Chairperson gaveled the meeting to a close, he and his comrade bolted from the room, not even pausing to shake a hand or acknowledge any constituents. Only the Democrat remained, and he sought Karen out. He only had one question for her.

“Are you a geologist?”

She smiled sweetly back at him and answered, “As a matter of fact, I am,” neglecting her affiliation. He nodded sagely before continuing to circulate through the room, obviously calculating how to exploit this newfound knowledge. We left right after, before anyone else could seek us out. Mission accomplished.

The following week, the Commission pulled the proposal from the next commission meeting’s agenda, awaiting further study. Karen was afraid that meant they’d try to bring it back. I shook my head. They were just saving face until no one else was looking. Sure enough, a few months later, they quietly strangled the proposal in its sleep with a formal vote and buried it in an unmarked drainage ditch behind the house.

By then, Karen had been transformed into a local folk hero, somewhat because of her high recognition factor. People we didn’t know and had never really met would wave and introduce themselves whenever we were in the park. They’d thank her for what she’d done. The neighbor couple we’d talked to early on smiled and reminisced every time they saw us walking literally for years after. No one would forget Karen’s fateful encounter with the Commission that night, charging like Uxbridge at Waterloo from behind the concealment of the crest to spike battery after battery of exposed French guns. By the time she rode back to the safety of her lines, unscathed in her case, the Grand Battery would fire no more.

So, what is the lesson in all this? Come now, if you’ve read the previous essays this year, you know there has to be one.

The first and simplest is the most obvious. You absolutely can fight city hall and win, but only if you know how to seize a moment and have all your facts in line and a little expertise with a little guts behind it. It helps immensely if your opposition is unprepared. Politicians often are.

But that’s not the one I wanted to focus on. The real lesson to me is more subtle. And that lesson concerns allies.

In recent years, I’ve heard a lot of talk about what it means to be an ally, whether regarding LGBT rights, women’s rights or civil rights, or even ordinary politics. Mostly from people who have little idea what they are talking about or what that word truly means.

An ally is not a subordinate, even though they fight beside you. They do not blindly follow your orders or slavishly defend your position. Those are people who have already enlisted in your army, who fight and die beneath your banner because they choose to for one reason or another. With them, you are all one unit, one organization. They are you in a sociological sense.

An ally is not.

An ally is someone whose goals and objectives overlap with your own. They fight for their own reasons, for their own causes, some of which you may or may not agree with or fully understand. Some are allies of convenience, others are more deep-rooted and dependable. But either way, they choose their own ground and make their own decisions, right or wrong. If your interests align, especially if you are outnumbered and outgunned, it is best to welcome them, even if you cast a wary eye toward a future where circumstances may change.

If all that sounds a bit Machiavellian, it absolutely is. It also happens to be the way the sausage gets made, to misquote Bismarck. For any of his faults, he was a man who fundamentally understood how politics and allies work.

Without the NIMBY crowd of opposition, we were unlikely to succeed. They did the hard work of crystallizing the opposition and getting people to turn out. Without an audience, without a pitchfork and torch wielding mob behind her, Karen’s facts would likely have fallen upon deaf ears. Just another bit of information to spin. Politicians are good at that and do it all the time. They usually only listen when you threaten them with votes.

In fact, this opposition’s efforts may have led to the slow transformation of the County Commission which had been dominated by a single political party for three decades at that time. In that, the Commission had become more than a bit arrogant in thinking they could do whatever they wanted without consequence. They eventually paid for that, one by one.

This opposition had the numbers and emotion on their side, two things we could never conjure up. We had facts, a strategy and a sense of timing. They knew where to strike, we knew how and when to direct the blow.

Each side didn’t want this project, each for different reasons. Our interests aligned. Which is why we neither joined them nor disparaged them early on. We needed them. Just as they needed us, though they didn’t know it until the end. We didn’t share an outlook and didn’t share tactics, or even information, just a common goal. When it was won, it was done and the alliance dissolved. But we both walked away happy.

And if our interests had aligned once more in the future, perhaps we could have worked together again.

So, as we talk about BLM, or LBGT, or renewed interest in ERA, please remember that while not everyone who stands beside you is black or gay or female, they still might be dying beside you for their own heartfelt reasons. Sure, you can attempt to educate and enlighten them if you are able, and likely should. But it’s better to honor them than disparage them, especially if you want them to continue to fight.

Or in Karen’s case, to pull the sword from the stone and unite the disparate tribes of Pinellas in an epic quest for good governance.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Homelessness – Beltane 2020

Thirty-eight years ago, I was standing in the driveway of the house where I grew up when a Rockledge cop said to me, “We can absolutely arrest her and charge her with battery right now if that’s what you want. She will go to jail. But either way, you need to find a new place to live.”

He had just finished examining my arm to confirm the teeth-marks that had resulted in my call. His partner was inside, talking to my mother, getting her side of the story. Ultimately, she heard the same thing, that she could be sent to jail immediately. All I had to do was say the word.

I didn’t.

Like many choices I made that day, I am not sure why.

I don’t remember exactly how the fight kicked off, or really what it was about. There had been friction between my mother and I since I’d turned eighteen a few months earlier, some of which stemmed from my father no longer paying child support even though I was still in high school. But I don’t think she liked me asserting any of my newfound independence.

What I remember is waking up with her screaming at me. I was on my feet when she burst into my room in a rage. I’m sure prompted by something I had or hadn’t done, though I can’t for the life of me remember what that might have been. Or maybe I’d been out late the night before and sleeping in, which she never liked.

What I do is remember standing in my underwear wondering what the hell was going on when she started pounding on me with her fists. This wasn’t the first time she’d gotten physical with me. A year or so before, she’d slung a frozen roast across the counter into my chest, cracking a rib or at least tearing cartilage, because she said I “was being sullen.” My father told me a horrific story that I only remember peripherally from when I was four.

Unlike then, this time I had a moment of crystal clarity. At the time I still had a very skewed impression of my mother, and the allocation of power and size between us. I remember having been afraid of her for a long time. Up until that very instant, I still saw her through a younger child’s eyes, as much bigger and more intimidating than she really was.

It was only as her fists were raining down on my chest that I finally realized that I was a 6’ 1” male and she was a 5’ 4” female more than twice my age. Though I wasn’t strong, I was stronger than she was, and had reach and at least 40 pounds on her. Even though I was barely awake, something clicked in my head that said I no longer had to take her abuse.

So, I grabbed her wrists to prevent her from hitting me anymore. I remember holding them firmly but not squeezing. I could stop her and there was not much she could do. With that epiphany, I remember feeling really proud of myself for having figured that out.

That lasted for a full second until she switched attack vectors and started kicking for my balls. Thankfully, most women overestimate this tactic. Most guys are really good at defending the boys unless they are taken by surprise. I was no different. I turned my hips to shield them, then outstretched my arms to full length.

Once again, I briefly thought I had the situation under control. I just needed her to understand it and calm the fuck down. Once again, I underestimated why in the Irish pantheon two of the three gods of war are female.

Up to now, she surprised me but hadn’t really hurt me, though that had absolutely been her intent. Her next move made that abundantly clear. She clamped her teeth on my forearm and bit down. Hard. The sudden pain got my full and undivided attention.

I still have no idea why I didn’t throw her into a wall. All I wanted to do was stop her, not hurt her. But this tested my patience. Instead, she got what she exactly wanted. I released her wrists, and took a step back, my fists now clenched to defend myself if she came at me again.

When she didn’t, I cautiously examined my arm to see what she had done. I was stunned to find the very clear, deep impressions of her teeth. Just short of breaking skin. This from a woman who was the teacher of sometimes young children and had zero tolerance for biting.

I glared up at her and said I could call the cops for that. She dared me to. She said they’d laugh when they arrived. She mocked that I’d been bitten and bested by my 42-year-old mother. Another mistake on her part in a series of bad decisions. I dialed 911 and told them what had happened. The dispatcher said a cruiser was on the way.

When it arrived, I recognized one of the two officers who got out of the car. He frequented the restaurant where I worked. He and I had talked a number of times. He’d pulled security duty at my boss’s wedding reception. He was personable but no-nonsense and showed no favoritism. He’d made that abundantly clear before.

He interviewed me in the driveway, his partner my mother inside the house. They separated us, per protocol, to see how our stories fit together, then compared notes. When he came out of that conclave, he told me my mother had confirmed most of what I’d said. She’d basically confessed, enough that they could charge her. But not me as he made it clear that I’d done nothing wrong. The marks on my arm were enough. They were still clearly visible after the fifteen minutes it took for the cruiser to arrive. His partner had informed her that her fate was in my hands.

As tempting as it was to have her thrown in jail just to make sure the message sank in, I knew there would be repercussions if I did. But I took his warning seriously. Domestic abuse never ends well where the abused and the abuser continue to cohabitate.

So, I told him they could cut her loose, got in my car and left. I had keys and planned to come back and collect my things the next day while she was at work.

But where to go? Where would I sleep that night?

Those were suddenly existential questions. I drifted around, still in shock, not knowing exactly where to go or what to do.

At some point, I called my grandparents in Cape Canaveral. My grandfather, my father’s father, made it clear that I could not go there. I sensed my grandmother was less than pleased. But it wasn’t in her nature to defy her husband. My other grandparents were fifteen hundred miles away, with the rest of my extended family. My sister was three thousand. My father at least a couple hundred, but I had good reason to doubt he would welcome me.

All my high school friends still lived at home. I could picture none of them being able to offer me a place to stay. Most of them had no inkling of my situation. Some still didn’t until just a few years ago. I’ve said before that when I was younger, I’d learned not to discuss life at home because of the long looks, the awkward silences and the distancing I’d received when I had. Society often values and rewards secrecy over safety in that regard.

Eventually, I ended up at my friend’s place in public housing. Yeah, the one from the 2 o’clock news. By then it was dark and I was desperate. I begged him to crash on his couch just for one night. Hell even a few hours. My only other option was sleeping in my car on the street outside. I didn’t know where else to go.

In the last essay, I alluded to the vagaries of public housing. Here’s a more concrete example of their Byzantine, if well-intentioned, rules.

As kids, most of us remember sleepovers. You know, where you and one friend or many get together for a night at one or another of your houses, either in guest beds or in sleeping bags on the floor. Usually you stay up late playing games or watching movies, then whisper even later into the night until a host parent somehow convinces you all to go to sleep.

Most people see it as a completely unremarkable childhood activity. When we were very young, staying a night away from home was a kind of rite of passage. Most parents I’ve talked to view it as a small, sometimes necessary break. Unless, of course, they are hosting.

That wasn’t really a thing in public housing. It couldn’t be. By rule of the Public Housing Authority, having anyone unregistered stay even a single night was a violation that could see the entire family evicted. Immediately.

My friend’s mother informed me of all that in no uncertain terms. I had no desire to put anyone at risk but, like a child, I was already shutting down mentally, unable to think clearly. I desperately needed time to reset and regroup. I’d run through every possibility I could think of.

My friend’s mother was torn in a way I’d rarely seen. She called me an adoptive son and I knew she meant it. I could see she truly wanted to help but felt constrained by circumstance. She quizzed me to see if I really had exhausted every other possibility. She looked stricken and horrified when I told her my grandparents had refused me shelter even for a single night.

But she was one of the few adults in my life who was familiar with my situation and not uncomfortable with knowing about it. In the past, she had called my mother, and talked with her woman to woman, trying to help smooth a situation out. She had been told, in no uncertain terms, to mind her own business and to never call again. She understood the anguish, the fear, the complete uncertainty I was going through.

That’s when she made a decision. I could see it on her face. True to her unique, pragmatic style, she turned away from me, looking instead at her son and informed him that she was going to bed. That she would be getting up at a certain time in the morning, which I’d never heard her do. That she wouldn’t come out until then. My friend nodded and repeated back the time. That was her tacit permission for me to stay as long as I was gone by then.

It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever witnessed. She put her family at risk. For me. It’s only with time that I’ve fully understood to what extent. Not something I am ever likely to forget.

But one night was all I needed. The next day, through good fortune and a little generosity, I signed a lease on a basic, furnished apartment. I received a small donation of bedding, towels and other household goods. I adjusted my hours at my minimum-wage job from part-time to full-time. That summer, I cooked and cleaned and paid my bills, day to day and month to month. In the end, my finances were roughly even, no more saving than I’d started with but no debt either. Not exactly the way I intended to spend the summer between high school and college, but life is what happens while we’re making other plans.

Some people will read this and say, it was only one night. Well, I would respectfully point out that’s hindsight. I didn’t know how things would turn out a priori. And I will never forget that feeling of uncertainty and heart-freezing fear. And I know that not everyone has that choice. If you wonder why so many people continue to live with abusers, to an extent many have no other good option.

“We are all just three bad breaks away from seeing throwing scud missiles as a valid career path.” (author unknown)

More importantly, we are all just three bad breaks away from being that person so many in our society like to look down on. That person caught in a downward spiral. That person who struggles. That person who needs help.

That could be from your attention wandering for a split second too long in a parking lot with a pedestrian, your birth control failing under normal parameters in high school or college, or that lump that you thought was a sebaceous cyst instead being something malignant. It could be an identity theft. It could be getting laid off from your job. It could be the family or circumstances you were born into. It could be a mental illness. Stack three of them together and you could be almost anyone.

Your life and circumstances can change in an instant, not always because of poor planning or poor choices but rather because sometimes random things happen to random people. If you've avoided them, you are exceptional in that you're lucky, not superior.

The day you forget that is the day you put your first foot into the grave. Because your sense of compassion and empathy has begun to die. And with it, your humanity.

Three bad breaks. My first was being assaulted. I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t intend it or provoke it. It came to me. In my room. In my underwear. My second could have been not having found a safe place to stay for a night and shake off the shock so I could decide what to do next, what needed to be done. Because I did, I got a shot to turn things around. My third could have been not finding help in nailing down a place to live that I could afford. Without it, I would likely have had to crawl back home. Had that happened, one of us living there might have eventually ended up dead.

My outcome was only possible because someone took a chance and gave me a night to catch my breath.

So when I see that homeless person crouched beside my local Outback, or get accosted by a vagrant in St. Pete on my way from a restaurant to my car, or I hear about people in desperate need of a social safety net, my first thought isn’t “hey, I bootstrapped myself, and so should you.” No, even if I don’t always spare a dollar, I spare a direct look in the eye and a nod of acknowledgement. I spare a vote to get society pointed in the right direction even if it impacts me. I spare a donation to a local shelter.

I know it’s not much, but more than some. Because I’ve been there, if only for one night, and remember how it feels. I walked away with a lesson and a lifelong perspective. A lesson I was lucky to learn so cheaply.

But having that lesson defines the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, thinking about how they might feel and acting accordingly. Empathy is relating to their situation by drawing on your own experience, even tangentially. Sympathy is an important part of the social contract but sometimes drifts into unproductive pity. Empathy is more powerful, yet often more difficult to maintain. Fundamentally, the difference is one between imagination and experience, no matter how small or remote.

I suspect that when the coronavirus crisis ends, a number of people who started with a bootstrap attitude will have a broader understanding of what three breaks might mean. While I wish nothing ill upon anyone, I hope we as a society will use that newfound perspective wisely.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

2 O’clock News - Spring Equinox 2020

When I was growing up, friends and I occasionally played D&D in a sporadic free-fire zone. Not out of any sense of desire or excitement. Rather because that’s where our best, most imaginative DM happened to live.

My friend lived in public housing. I’m sure a few of you are now nodding your heads as if that explains everything and is all you needed to hear. This was in Cocoa, Florida, not Cabrini-Green outside Chicago. But that didn’t mean there weren’t issues most of the players in our gaming group had never dealt with before, or likely since.

First and foremost was the 2 o’clock news.

Being in high school, we tended to keep late hours. Many of us worked part-time in restaurants, so our weekend free-time rarely overlapped. When it did, we would sometimes game late on a Friday night. Often, we would game at my friend’s place because his was the most warm and inviting, and tolerant of our odd, extended hours.

His family’s unit was on the end of the row which meant it faced two streets, with a common green space behind it between their row of apartments and the next row over. All the streets in this section of the neighborhood were named with either a number or a letter, which even then struck me as either unimaginative or contemptuous. When I’d first met my friend, he’d lived in a slightly larger unit in a slightly better section where the street was named after a flower. His family had been forced to move when his sister had moved out. The family was apprehensive about the new area as it had a worse reputation than where they had been. To my middle-class ears, that trepidation spoke volumes.

Still, theirs was a place I could drop by unannounced at midnight, as long as I followed two simple rules. First, rap softly on the back door to see if my friend or his brother was still up. Second, step back and to the right, into the light his mother’s bedroom window looked out onto and wait until I saw the curtain move. That meant she’d identified who I was. I’d been told in no uncertain terms there was a loaded .45 on the other side of that curtain so not to mess around. His mother had a well-earned reputation in the neighborhood that meant she could guarantee that no one would mess with the random white boys who darkened her door at all hours. Her precautions stemmed from how she’d earned that reputation. But that’s a story I may have already told.

One particular Friday night, the stars had aligned. All of our merry band of adventurers had piled into my friend’s tiny living room. It was just large enough for a couch and a coffee table with a couple chairs dragged in from the kitchen. Most of us were content to sit on the floor. Behind the couch was a head-height window that looked out onto the street facing the front door.

This Friday night was unusual. For whatever reason, we’d gotten started early, something like seven or eight o’clock. Which meant my high school girlfriend was with us. She had just recently joined our group and was only an intermittent attendee. While the rest of us had been hanging out here for years, public housing was a completely new experience for her.

Once we started playing, our exact location didn’t matter. It wasn’t quite the large dining room table most of us had started around but we held our character sheets in our laps or rested them on notebooks. We rolled dice on the coffee table or the floor. Little did some of us know that this was good practice for when we moved into college dorms a year later. By those standards, this location was palatial.

I don’t remember the adventure we were on, or even who was running it. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. All I remember is that we’d all gotten into character and were enjoying each other’s company. We knew we didn’t have much time as my girlfriend had to be home by midnight. Our surroundings faded pretty quickly as the fantasy world sprang up in our minds.

Sometime around 11:30, in the middle of what we knew was likely our last encounter of the evening, we heard first one sharp bang outside followed by a couple more. Pop. Pop-pop.

I was sitting on one end of the couch, another friend on the other, my girlfriend between us. Without even looking up from our character sheets, both he and I slid to the floor to get our heads below window level like synchronized swimmers diving underwater. Nothing new, nothing that needed comment. Almost no one else reacted except for a quick instinctive glance to check that we all had cinder block between us and the street. We knew the routine.

My girlfriend didn’t. She immediately turned and popped her face into the window, peering in the darkness outside intently, scanning the street for what had just happened.

“Were those gunshots?” she asked.

My friend at the other end of the couch and I again reacted simultaneously. We turned in tandem and each grabbed a different shoulder, physically hauling her below the window.

“Yes, those were gunshots,” we confirmed in stereo. That it wasn’t really a good time for prairie-dogging went unsaid.

The friend whose living room we were in casually added, “I guess the two o’clock news started early.”

The rest of us just nodded sagely and turned back to our characters. We knew we’d just been granted a little bonus time. Then we noticed that my girlfriend’s face had gone somewhat ashen.

“Uh,” she said uncertainly, beginning to pack up her character sheet and dice, “I think I’d better go.”

We all just smiled and shook our heads, not realizing that she hadn’t been through this drill before. Like walking into Mordor: one doesn’t simply wander outside in the middle of the 2 o’clock news.

Like many people, we all worked the kind of jobs that got paid on Fridays. As did the people in my friend’s neighborhood, many from regular, low-wage jobs, some from public assistance. Like any working-class neighborhood entering a weekend, that meant people had a little jingle in their pocket to unwind from the stresses of the week with a little alcohol or other mind-altering vice of their choice.

But unlike our middle-class neighborhoods where most people preferred to get their party on behind closed doors, this neighborhood was more social. People liked to hang out on stoops and in driveways, catching up on the week’s events. Picture a southern version of Irish Boston, or Italian New York, or any other somewhat closed community of your choice.

And like people everywhere, once tongues were well lubricated, people began to gossip. As their filters wore off and their self-censoring inhibitions disappeared, rumor and inuendo began to fly. Like the worst kind of high school whispers behind the bleachers or in the bathrooms most of us are familiar with.

My friend said you could learn everything you needed to know about what had gone on in the neighborhood during the week just by listening on any given Friday. Who was into what, who was fighting with who, who had cheated which deal, whose kids had broken into what car, who had good drugs or bad, who had a new job, who was back on public aid, who was in or out of jail, and who was sleeping with who. Kind of like a PSA meets CNN Headline without any of that pesky double source confirmation. Think Fox News.

Sometime after midnight, the long knives came out from old grudges or new grievances that had been stropped to razor sharp. Inevitably, tempers flared when someone crossed a line until someone else decided it was time to issue a few retaliatory warning shots, which often brought the street party to an end. Often, but not always. That crescendo usually came around 2 a.m. just when the juiciest bits of gossip were being served.

The 2 o’clock news.

“You’re stuck here for the duration,” I informed my girlfriend. “We may as well keep playing. It could be a while before things clear up outside.”

“What do you mean?” she replied with a mixture of suspicion and incredulity. “Won’t someone just call the cops?”

We all looked at each other uncertainly. How to explain that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Or in her parents’ Indiana where they literally shot prairie dogs from the front porch for entertainment.

My friend stepped in to salvage us. Someone may or may not call the cops. Likely not for a variety of reasons if no one had gotten hit. Even if someone called, CPD wouldn’t arrive for at least half an hour, after they rounded up a couple two-man cruisers from more important duties. They didn’t waste much patrol time in his neighborhood. If they didn’t just do a drive-by, they would likely hassle everyone indiscriminately. No one would talk to them, at least that night. If they did, it might end up as a community bulletin next week. But in general, very few people trusted CPD, who at the time had a well-earned reputation for being racist, indifferent and heavy-handed. Kind of a rock and a hard place situation.

Once my girlfriend figured out that we weren’t trying to scam her into breaking curfew, she settled down. We convinced her to call her parents and tell them she’d be an hour late. That we were in the middle of something. Generally, our parents only wanted to know where we were, when we’d be back and that we were safe. In our minds, she was definitely that. As long as she waited for the street to clear. Which it would in about an hour, one way or another.

When it did, we would all escort her to her car, and convoy her out of the neighborhood if she wanted. Hell, I could drive her father’s truck and have someone ferry me back. That was extreme. In an hour people would have calmed down and gone to bed. The excitement was over. Again, this was Cocoa not South Central. We were just waiting for the all clear, which was a little more art than science.

She eventually called her parents and we kept playing. But by then, the game spell had been broken. When we disbanded for the night, we admonished her not to tell her parents exactly what had happened fearing she wouldn’t be allowed into my friend’s home again in daylight or in darkness. She didn’t listen, with predictable results.

But that’s not the point of this story.

At a party a couple months ago, a friend and I got talking about gun control.

When I told this friend that I had been in neighborhoods where guns were necessary to protect yourself because you couldn’t rely on the police, his immediate answer was, “Sure, but don’t export it.”

I found that statement troubling but didn’t pursue it. It was a holiday party after all.

But that answer niggled at me. The longer I thought about it, the more I found it to be the worst kind of pearl-clutching privilege (and in general I despise that word). To me, it implied that we just need to keep that over there, wherever there is. Those poor neighborhoods. Not in my suburbia. Or god forbid my exurbia.

Ok, that’s probably more than a bit unfair.

This was not what you would call a safe neighborhood. My friend didn’t. It was a poor neighborhood. It grew out of a legally mandated, segregated neighborhood. This was a neighborhood where the annual MLK parade drew angry KKK protestors on the way in and the way out. A neighborhood where many of its students were bussed to distant elementary and middle schools but couldn’t get proper funding or maintenance for their own schools within walking distance. A neighborhood where the cops were more likely to hassle you for the state of your car as you drove to work than to protect and serve. A neighborhood where if you called said cops, they might or might not show up in a timely manner for what most neighborhoods would consider pretty serious crimes. Or if they did alone, on a very bad day, they might find themselves trussed up in a closet by a local drug dealer who would then issue very serious threats against whoever called. A neighborhood where you could be working your second job restocking a walk-in freezer in a convenience store and emerge to find your cashier freaking out because she couldn’t remember how to open the register while someone was screaming at her and pointing a gun at her face.

Do I want to export all that to my neighborhood or any other?

Obviously not. In fact, I don’t want it to exist at all. But I know it did and still does. And likely will in places for the foreseeable future.

It’s not about exporting it, it’s about correcting it, one piece at a time as we are able. But as we do so, those of us inclined to do so, we need to remember there are unique circumstances which we may not share, understand, or really be able to relate to. And yet they are real and must be taken into account.

It only took our circle of friends a couple years to become inured to the situation. The 2 o’clock news had become normal to us, not even particularly threatening. Just something that made you slide to the floor without comment and keep going with whatever you were doing. But we were young and we were tourists, only visiting on evenings and weekends. We may have internalized it but we didn’t live it, not 24-7-365.

So, what do you do with that?

Here’s the thing. I witnessed my friend’s family struggle. I caught all the veiled prejudice and not so silent judgement directed their way growing up, some unenlightened, some very purposeful, all of it unrelenting. I also heard the tales of the levels of bureaucracy they were up against on any given day. That’s not an excuse. It’s a reality. One that you and yours have hopefully never seen.

What we call Welfare isn’t a monolithic, overarching program. There are dozens of federal, state, and local agencies, each with their own bureaucracy and regulations. To give you an idea, there was federal housing administered by a local authority (not free, supplemented down to your income level), programs for winter heat (but not summer AC), various nutrition programs (including SNAP, WIC, free and reduced lunches), pre-k and kindergarten programs, public assistance (what we call Welfare with various limits and restrictions), mandated busing (for his neighborhood, not mine) plus all manner of other social services (some of which you do not want to run afoul of if they show up at your door).

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Each program was intended to address a specific problem. But no one had an advocate to ensure they were being treated fairly, or even received any benefit they might qualify for. Everything was DIY and OJT. Most of it is Byzantine by design to discourage people from accessing the aid they need.

I’ve just barely scratched the layers of intertwined complexity. There is no way to fix it all at once, not by passing a single piece of legislation or addressing a single aspect of the problem. We’ve been trying for fifty years with only moderate success. In the context of gun control, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for my friend’s mother that would have made her safe.

Did owning the gun make my friend’s mother safer? You can bet your life it did. When that curtain moved at midnight, I knew she was dead serious because of the stories she or her sons had shared with me. She and her family had been threatened by some very sketchy people in her life. People she rightfully feared, with no one to protect her. But I also knew I was safer in her house than I sometimes was at home.

In short, my friend’s situation was bigger than the 2 o’clock news. Addressing that alone works at the symptoms, not the underlying condition.

So, as we try to untangle this situation, and many other hot-button issues in this country, we need to be mindful that our solutions do not to make the problem worse for people just trying to get by. Because some of them are unlikely mentors. Like my friend’s mother and brother have been for me. Without a doubt, I would not be the same person without them.

And that, my friends, concludes this very middle class, suburban, equinox edition of your 2 o’clock news. I am Noddfa Imaginings, and you have found sanctuary.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Switching Sides - Imbolc 2020

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an early experience in my engineering career. Specifically, about teambuilding and leadership, and how it relates to the events I’ve seen unfold within the federal government over the past several years.

I was hired at my former company as a systems engineer, part of a team that would integrate various hardware subsystems and software in a new, networked communication system for the US Navy. The program was somewhat unique at the time as it used rapid development and prototyping.  Which meant in my first two years with the company, we had to field and demonstrate two iterations of this data delivery system, the second to be temporarily deployed aboard a pair of Navy cruisers to test.

Those two years were hell. Not because of the deadlines or engineering challenges, though there were plenty of both. Not because of the mandatory unpaid overtime or the steep learning curve. No, it was hell because of other people.

Up to this point, the company had been primarily known for its hardware design. This was one their first major software driven systems. Not to say there wasn’t cutting edge hardware involved. There was. A phased array antenna springs to mind. But in the end, the big push would be getting the hardware and software to play nice to create a network.

Normally, that would have been the job of the Systems Engineering team. In a standard development cycle, we would have written the requirements and specifications of the system based on the contract, handed them off to the Hardware and Software teams and overseen their implementation, integrated all the pieces into a final working system, tested it, and deployed it for final certification and signoff. If all went well, we’d get to do it again, and again, until we had a fully functional system ready to be deployed throughout the fleet.

Like most plans, this one did not survive first contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was within.

The director in charge of this project, the man whose baby it was, was an old hardware designer, an engineer born and bred in the heyday of heroic defense contracting in the 60s with all that implies. Think a mildly toned-down version of Mad Men. I was familiar with the archetype. My father was cut from the same engineering cloth. I’d heard all his stories along with those of the older generation I worked with in my first job. By the late 80s, defense contracting had transformed like the rest of society, only somewhat more slowly.

I quickly developed the impression that, to this director, software was an add-on. A fad that just wouldn’t go away. Real engineering was done on breadboards, not in code. And Systems Engineering? That’s where real engineers were sent to die. At best, they were good for doing the scut work that real engineers had neither the time nor inclination to do, things like documentation, fieldwork and final testing. Ideally, all done after the hardware engineers had moved on to bigger and better projects.

Adding to the dynamic, I got the sense this Director firmly believed all engineering was a trial by fire. To mix several metaphors, cream rose to the top. For everyone else it was sink or swim. Mentoring and instruction was for literal pussies.

By the time I dropped into this organization, it was already divided into three armed camps, Hardware, Software and Systems, each occupying its own floor of the off-campus building the project was housed in. The cafeteria was balkanized into territorial cliques worse than any I’d seen in high school, table by table with jeers flying between. The work environment was a toxic brew of insults, undercutting and inter-team rivalry. Not the good-natured ribbing that all team sports seem to breed. No, this was the kind of interservice rivalry that nearly ground World War Two to a halt in the Pacific theater before FDR intervened to put an end to it.

We had no FDR, only a Trump who seemed to thrive in the entertainment of this environment with the hedge of protecting his favored hardware engineers. They were allowed, if not encouraged, to distribute but not necessarily endure the abuse. Most of their team leads sat outside the chain of command. They did not answer to the hardware manager or up through Program Management but to the Director himself. The definition of prima donnas.

Again, these weren’t the kind of locker room, “boys will be boys” antics I’ve never really had any use for or seen as productive. I mean the kinds of behavior HR, the company’s Ethics Department and the EEOC take a vested interest in, or are supposed to if they are doing their jobs.

In the best case, if we asked a question or explanation of a hardware engineer or design lead, we were simply ignored, flat out. I mean like elementary school: I don’t see or hear you so you don’t exist.

In the worst case, we were insulted with impunity, directly to our faces. We didn’t have the intelligence or IQ to understand, never mind critique any hardware engineer’s design. And by critique, I mean troubleshoot and point out when it wasn’t working. As in, our job. My degree in Electrical Engineering? A worthless piece of sheepskin not fit to wipe a designer’s ass. Race, religion, gender? Nothing was off limits. Who was sleeping with who and how, who grew up where and why they were traitors not citizens (which we all had to be to get a clearance), racial or ethnic slurs. Every day for almost two solid years.

Anything reported up the chain, even to program management, died at the director, dismissed as the whining of incompetent engineers.

Like grade schoolers everywhere, we adapted to our situation. We endured and deflected the attacks, defending the vulnerable where we could. We sussed out who might be willing to exchange information, and who might be willing to act as proxies or mouthpieces to get problems solved. We developed networks of contacts with the few outsiders who might talk to us or answer questions but only if the cool kids weren’t around.

When hardware engineers refused to supply the basic design documents we needed to debug the system, things as fundamental as up-to-date schematics and interface documents, we resorted to clandestine, nighttime raids. We searched workbenches, riffled desks, broke into file cabinets, and illicitly obtained combinations to cypherlocks to gain access to private labs. We made copies of everything we needed, down to the designers’ notebooks, all of which showed up in our lab without preamble or explanation.

Remember, as the Integration team, our job was to make this system work so that everyone could get paid.

But that’s all just background to what this essay is about.

At the end of the two-year, dual prototype cycle, the hardware was mostly set. The next phase, the phase where the true money of the contract was to be made, would end with the system being deployed throughout the Navy. That was fundamentally a software design effort, not hardware. But in order to preserve the expertise in the overall system, key hardware leads were transferred to Systems late in integration as design efforts were winding down. These were the people the company wanted to keep but didn’t have any new contracts to absorb them directly.

One of our problem children, a hardware engineer I will call Kevin (not his real name), got transferred to Systems approximately two months before we were scheduled to deliver units to the field for testing. The leadership of his team was taken over by his second, a hardware engineer whose arrogance was matched only by the mediocrity of his design. A man who had adopted the worst superior schoolyard behaviors of his prima donna boss without even a minimal level of competence. If anything, Kevin was a master of ambiguity, mouthing the right words to the right people to imply cooperation without actually following through. His second had all the subtlety and nuance of the sidekick to a bully.

Kevin’s lab was one we’d broken into. We’d acquired the combination from a former Systems colleague who’d been given access for related work. We’d pillaged it mercilessly, though not maliciously. We’d stolen and copied every scrap of documentation we could find. But rather than concede defeat and embrace a veneer of cooperation after discovering we held the informational keys to his tiny kingdom, he changed the combination to the door and refused to give it out. By then, we didn’t really care as we had enough information to piece together what we needed.

Needless to say, there was some uncertainty and trepidation the first day he showed up for duty in our lab. He was senior to all but the integration lead and one or two others on our team.

That day, like most days, Kevin was cheery, which I took to be part of his passive-aggressive nature for deflecting criticism. He asked what we were working on. Well, we’re debugging the digital part of your subsystem as it turns out, trying to get it to communicate to another terminal without success. What are you seeing? This, we gave him snapshots from a digital systems analyzer. Hmm, that doesn’t look right. Let me see the schematics. Hey, these are two revs back. Before we could address that comment, he says, you know what, I’m going upstairs to tell the new lead of my team to get his ass down here right now, and bring updates to these schematics.

And off he went. Within fifteen minutes, he dragged his former second to the lab, then proceeded to berate him publicly, telling him to get the problem fixed, in the exact tone and words just a week before he would have directed at us for bothering anyone on his team about a perceived problem. He was still an asshole but apparently now he was our asshole.

We all just stood there looking at each other, stunned, wondering what the hell had just happened. It was surreal.

This wasn’t one-off behavior. He did the exact same nearly every day for next six weeks. It didn’t matter if he was talking to members of his previous team or other engineers in Hardware. Except the other prima donna hardware design leads. There he softened his tone to something more like a smug satisfaction of pointing out an issue with their design, like he was keeping score.  But he used his contacts to update our documentation to the most current all the while.

The situation struck me very much like he was a professional athlete who had been traded. As soon as he was transferred, Kevin was playing for his new team, using all his talents to help that team to win, in the way he defined winning. As if it was all a competition to him. As if he honestly believed that abusing an engineer publicly was what we were doing when we filed problem reports during debug. His personality and tactics hadn’t changed, just the team he plied them for. Very much like he had changed jerseys, but continued to play full speed, full contact, now with his former team as his opponent.

Which a month or so later became even more surreal when he submitted his resignation and two-week’s notice. Come to find out, the moment he was transferred to Systems (which he viewed as a demotion and betrayal), he started looking for a new job, which he quickly found. So, the whole time he was abusing his former team members and Hardware compatriots, he knew he wasn’t going to stick around.

To him, this was all just the way you did business, the way things were done. Was it personal? Absolutely it was to anyone on the receiving end, because Kevin and his kind went out of their way to make it so. To him, that month was just a fun way to turn it around on his former colleagues, almost as if to demonstrate what it might have been like if Systems team had been staffed by competent (read ruthless) engineers. Like him.

He could have ridden out his last couple months without contention or rancor, just eased into a new company, a new chapter of his life. But looking back, I am convinced that he knew no other way to act. No, that’s not quite right. He knew. I could see that. He just wouldn’t voluntarily choose to use that knowledge even for a few weeks. Somehow that would have diminished him.

So why have I been thinking about him lately? What dredged up all this in my mind?

Until recently, I hadn’t really witnessed a repeat performance of Kevin’s behavior, not to the extent or the intensity I remember from those two years.

It strikes me that right now Kevin’s last name could be Pompeo or Mulvaney, or half a dozen others who, while in Congress, have completely switched positions. They, also, value team over institution. All the perceived injustices they went at hammer and tongs while in Congress during the previous Administration, they currently deflect. Executive overreach, lack of oversight, obstruction, corruption, criminal activity, any perceived misconduct they railed against as Congressmen, they now defend as prerogative and privilege. With the same tactics, the same lies, the same personal attacks and abuse they used before, whether directed at their peers or their subordinates in the departments they control. They would rather burn down the government than lose a fight, regardless of what’s right or wrong, regardless of what’s best for the country. While ignoring or compartmentalizing the irony and hypocrisy of their own actions. Bullies led by a bully.

To them, like Kevin, it’s all a game. And like any game, if you play, you play your damnedest to win, by any means possible, no matter the cost, not matter the carnage you leave behind. It’s an elaborate, lifelong fraternity hazing constantly paid forward only because you can. In the end, if you are talented enough, or powerful enough, or have influential enough friends, you will never be held accountable for your actions. Or for the damage you cause the overarching organization whose interests and employees you are supposed to be looking out for. It’s all about the individual or the small-t team, not the institution or the greater good.

It’s the rest of us downstream, and our government, and our democracy itself, that will pay the price when they move on to bigger and better gigs as the lobbyists they’ve so long lobbied against. Leaving the next Administration to clean up the morass they’ve dug deeper. In part because the easiest way to win in their minds is to undermine the institutions they swore an oath to uphold, then demand that they be blown up precisely because they no longer function. A Machiavellian strategy to its core.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, all this represents a fundamental failure of leadership, in this case at the very top, as much as any individual moral or ethical deficiency.

But valuing party over country always does. And there’s no correcting that. At least as long as these individuals remain in power.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III