A lot of people have been speculating about the best thing we can do to prevent further school shootings. Some people say, “Vote Democrat.” Others say, “Study the problem scientifically.” But I’ve got the real answer.
Join the NRA.
I remember during the 2016 election some pollster — I think it was Nate Silver — joked that the best thing Democrats could do for Hillary Clinton was not to get out the vote, but simply to get out: move away from the urban, Democratic areas to red states where their votes would matter more. Another 400,000 blue votes means nothing in San Francisco or Park Slope. But in the Rust Belt? That’s an election. Go West, young hipsters! But not too far west. Stop somewhere around Des Moines.
Here’s my point: right now the NRA casts a long shadow. But its membership is only about 5 million. That’s just 6-7% of all gun owners. On the other hand, there are a lot of us. Out of 323 million Americans, I’ve got to believe at least 100 million of us are interested in sensible gun control. Yes, they’ve got the guns, but we’ve definitely got the numbers.
So here’s the plan: We’ll all join the NRA. We’ll show up at board meetings. We’ll pack the house, demand to be heard. We’ll take control. We’ll vote in new officers. Remember when people were joking that if Hillary Clinton got elected, she should nominate Barack Obama as her Supreme Court nominee, just to stick it to Mitch McConnell? We’ll do stuff like that. George Clooney for NRA President. Howard Dean as Treasurer. Maybe Lebron could be Secretary, or maybe Steph Curry, or — I’ve got it! — Draymond Green.
Future NRA leadership material.
What’s so strange about this? The NRA, like any organization, responds to its members. Plus, it’s happened before. Back in the mid-70s, the NRA was still largely run for sportsmen. But a hard line faction within the membership staged a coup and ousted the old guard, installing a new brand of “from my cold, dead hands”-style Second Amendment fanatics far more recognizable to today’s NRA fans.
So why not stage our own takeover? If you can’t beat ‘em, dilute ‘em. If you and I joined up, yeah, we’d be giving them our money, but we’d damn well be expecting something in return. We’d clog up their meetings with our talk about reasonable restrictions on magazines, bump stocks, and all that other stuff.
We’d say, “We love hunting. We love target practice. We love the responsible gun ownership — like the student of mine in Vermont who a few months back admitted to skipping school to go turkey hunting. We like those gun owners. We like those guns — you know, the non-Rambo kind. And we want that kid off shooting in the woods with his father — not getting shot up in his classroom.”
We’d say, “We’re scared of our government, too — but that doesn’t make us want to stockpile ammo. Besides, we don’t like our chances against the U.S. Army. Let’s say they turn on us. Would it matter if we have AR-15s, or just regular rifles? They’ll have the helicopters, the tanks, the warheads, the cool jackets, and we’ll have . . . our cherished assault rifles? I’ve got news for you: just because these weapons work against a roomful of fourth period trigonometry students doesn’t mean they could’ve beaten back Crooked Hillary’s Calvary, which I know you were worried about. Don’t be those Confederate boys at the start of ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘One AR-15 could lick six Yankees!’ As Rhett Butler pointed out to you gentlemen, ‘Wake the fuck up.’”
Plus, we like to smack our government around the old fashioned way: at the ballot box. Look at the last election. You won! You didn’t Lock Her Up, but you sure as shit got your man elected, the tangerine Idi Amin. You don’t need to stockpile weapons. You stockpiled votes (with a little help from Vlad and his bots). Democracy works, my NRA brethren. You don’t need to wave an automatic weapon in anyone’s face.
So, fellow Reasonable People, I say: Just stop. Stop having pointless Facebook debates. It’ll only entrench us all further. Some of us are just freedom-loving people, dammit — the kind who’re just fine forcing kids and teachers to walk through metal detectors and do survival drills and basically live under martial law. There’s no need to raise a stink on social media. That’s not where the money’s carved up. Let’s walk back into that cigar-filled room and light up our own stogies like we own the joint. Let’s be part of the solution — from inside. Let’s keep our enemies real nice and close.
There’s only one surefire way to beat back the NRA.
The other night, watching 17 year-old Red Gerard win a gold medal, man-hug the same two teammates at least 25 times each, then drop an F-bomb on live TV, it got me thinking: I am old. After all, this kid is only 17. I’ve got skis older than Red Gerard.
Teenage medalists are hardly unique, but it did get me thinking about what a strange experience this must be. I wonder, for many of these young athletes especially, how much of their Olympic pursuit is managed by parents or especially coaches.
There’s nothing wrong with coaches. I’ve had lots of great ones. I wish I’d had more. But it struck me that my own Olympic pursuit, as a canoe racer, was largely a coachless one. And that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.
Why? It’s simple. I discovered the joy of learning everything on your own. If you are training because a coach tells you to train — if you work on a certain skill because a coach tells you to work on it — if your last thought after a bad run is, “Coach is not going to be happy” — you’re missing the greatest part of being a training athlete in pursuit of a goal: taking responsibility for yourself.
The best part of the Olympic quest isn’t the victories. It’s the journey. It is the — to borrow a line from a former kayak coach — “fascination with the process.” And if you’re just along for the ride on the journey — if the process is being run by someone else — you’re missing the best part.
When I started racing kayaks seriously at 19, I knew I wasn’t good enough — and there weren’t coaches enough — for me to merit much of their time. Instead, I learned many of their skills for myself: setting a yearly training plan, setting my own weekly goals, seeking out my own training partners, and evaluating my own performance with an eye toward constant improvement.
On Sunday mornings in the mid-2000s, I’d drive out to the Dickerson whitewater course in Maryland and walk up and down the shore with my training partner, Steve Graybill, planning exactly what we wanted to work on and adjusting the slalom gates to suit our ends. We didn’t have a coach to set the gates for us, but that made us that much more astute critics of ourselves, and that much more invested in the workouts — because we’d set the goals ourselves, not a coach.
I never knew those things as a high school athlete, playing soccer and lacrosse. A coach scripted our pre-season training, a coach monitored our fitness, tailored our drills, responded to sloppy game play with targeted interventions, scripted our playbook, and configured the playing field, filling out the roster with each of us at whichever position he liked. We went to practice and did what we were told. The athletic fields were an extension of the classroom. We were students and the coaches were the teachers.
The idea of not being in charge of your training is so foreign to me now — not just as a former coachless athlete, but as a teacher whose job is directing the learning process of others. I can’t imagine being on the other end now. It’s almost hard for me to imagine playing a coached sport again.
Some athletes are lucky enough to have a coach who becomes a partner in this quest — more like a peer, a helper, rather than an authority. These can be incredibly meaningful relationships, but they can only happen for athletes mature enough and invested enough that they’d be training at 5 am even without a coach. If you need a coach to get you up early, that’s not an equal relationship, and you’re missing out.
My favorite dynamic from back when I was racing was the group of coachless competitors. When you had two or three guys, all very close in performance, all serious about improving, who came together to train, the dynamic was fantastic, because you’d be pushing yourselves to do things no reasonable coach could’ve ever asked you to. In some ways, it’s purer than a coached workout: athletes thinking things through for themselves, and bringing out the best in each other without intermediaries. Internal motivation — true motivation — is always the most rewarding.
Let every Olympic athlete, no matter how young, feel the joy for at least one season of taking responsibility of his own training, of targeting his own weaknesses, of developing his own strength and skills, of dragging himself out to the river on a cold morning at 5 am.
After all, ask any Olympic athlete and they’ll tell you: it’s not about the medals. It’s about the pursuit of excellence.
After spending most of November and December’s usable daylight (sum total: 4 hours) indoors, my Christmas vacation plans always carry a hint of desperation:
I’ll get up early and snowboard. Then I’ll cross country ski. Maybe after that I’ll hike a 4,000 foot peak. Then I’ll put my snowshoes on and walk around the house a bunch of times. I’ll use muscles I have forgotten about since October, such as those in my legs and arms. I’ll be outside! It won’t be dark out!
Then we get to Christmas and I remember that I live in New England — where the best laid plans of mice and men are always foiled by the Gods of Crappy Weather.
Christmas Break 2017 was no different. First, an East Coast-sized rainstorm conveniently appeared in time for my wife and me to drive to my in-laws’ for Christmas. We made the four hour drive in just over seven, dodging wrecked cars while negotiating roads that looked like NHL ice rinks after the zamboni has been across.
By the time we arrived in Maine, an inch-thick skin of ice coated the car. I peeled off pieces to bring inside to show my in-laws: a replica side-view mirror made of ice, a two-foot chunk that reproduced the contours of my car’s grill, Subaru logo and all. It was like one of those molds they make of your teeth at the dentist.
Two days later, our presents opened, my father-in-law and I rode out of the garage in formation behind two snowblowers. Clearing those 12 inches of new snow from the driveway turned out to be Christmas break’s only outdoor fun.
Because by the time we got home, the week’s temperatures were already looking like Donald Trump’s poll numbers: -5, 2, 8, -2, -3. And those were the highs. Meanwhile on the drive home we saw a classic Big Truck Guy being winched out of the ditch, one whole side of his rig — the passenger side, fortunately — dented in like it was paper mache.
It’s almost always Big Truck Guys who you see off the road. They think that just because they have tires the size of RVs, they’re not beholden to physics. In my experience, most Big Truck Guys are insecure. That’s why they drive such big trucks. Actually, Big Truck Guys aren’t even the worst winter drivers. That honor belongs to Crappy Car Girls. Big Truck Guys are overconfident, but Crappy Car Girls are oblivious, which is worse. You’ve got to watch out for Crappy Car Girls.
Last spring I watched one pass me in a snowstorm at double the speed limit, flip her car into the ditch, and land upside down and backwards. “She’s dead!” I thought. I put one foot up against the steaming wreck, wrenched open one of the horribly deformed doors, and watched a quivering hand emerge, then a face. As the ambulance took her away, the state trooper and I shook our heads, muttering to ourselves how lucky she was to live. Modern cars — even late 90’s Dodge Stratuses with bald tires — are so safe that we can get away with being oblivious.
(mediad.publicbroadcasting.net)
But more than the questionable roads, it’s the frigid temps that have quashed my Christmas plans. Bright sun and deep snow are cruel jokes to a skier when the temperature is -20 at 10 am this morning. And I’ve kayaked class V rivers in single digit temps. I wear t-shirts even when I can see my breath. But this week I haven’t left the house in three days except to break an icicle the size of a motorcycle off my roof. I haven’t even gotten the mail.
New England is known for its picturesque winter beauty — the snow-covered fields, the plumes of smoke wafting from snug, warm houses — but the fact is, New England winters are harsh. During my February vacation week in two successive years, first in Switzerland and then in Montana, I basked in sunny, 25-degree days, calm winds, and fresh powder under my skis. During the same week the next two years, I suffered through freezing rain, resort-closing winds, and 50 degree temperature swings back in New England. Today the high is -2 in New Hampshire, but in Aspen, Colorado they’re skiing in t-shirts: 50 degrees. Why, New England, why?
I should leave. My high school seniors ask about colleges and I’ll dreamily tell them to forget academic rankings. Look for beaches, palm trees. Go south, young man! Florida, or California — where you can leave your coat at home (in New England) and focus on higher thoughts than survival.
But as brutal as New England is, it’s our brutal. I just got the mail wearing only a sweatshirt and I’m still registering my extremities. That wasn’t terrible. Next week it’ll be fifteen above — balmy! — and I’ll ski in just a light coat. It’s like those runners who train at altitudes. You get tough in New England. You think, “I’ve got this.” You think, “It’s not that bad.” You don’t get to think that in Miami-Dade County, and that counts for something. There’s good in this ratcheting-down. It reminds you how resilient you can be. Hot temps make you lethargic. In New England, we’ve got our eyes on the Troll-in-Chief. We’re not taking a siesta. Winter keeps us sharp.
And adaptable, too. We don’t just endure, we roll with the punches. “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” A week from now it’ll probably be 45 and we’ll be on the porch in our t-shirts and then it’ll rain, and freeze, and pockmark the roads, and snow again, and cover our cars, and the wind will blow a tree down, and we New Englanders will just roll with it. We’ll wake up earlier, scrape the car off, leave earlier and drive slower and dodge Big Truck Guys and Crappy Car Girls. We’ll pack extra layers. We’ll go with it.
We’re good at that in New England.
And when it gets really nice this spring, we’ll have earned it, dammit.
The other day, my wife asked me how I’d remember 2017. My answer:
It was a great year for me personally. Great. That’s not what this post is about though.
It was the darkest year for our country of my adult life.
Now I suppose that if you spent the last eight years stewing that a Kenyan terrorist was putting his feet up in the Oval Office, you probably regarded 2017 as a time when the light flooded back in, but I spent the first few months abjectly terrified. For weeks after Donald Trump’s swearing-in, I checked the news compulsively, half-expecting to see the White House groaning under a giant gold “Trump” sign, Supreme Court judges ousted like reality show contestants, troll armies spilling open my bank account information online for daring to raise a verb against Donald Trump. It was all in play.
But when the courts smacked him down, when the press kept hounding him, when even his own supporters questioned his tweeting — I finally exhaled. You had to marvel at the founders’ genius for checks and balances. It was a Trump that they’d planned for. Now we had one and the seams were still holding. The American vessel was still watertight. Democracy (sort of) survived.
But it was a dark year. Presidents influence the tone of the country. Most of them radiate some form of optimism. Ronald Reagan sold “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton sold jobs (“It’s the economy, stupid”), George Bush had Compassionate Conservatism, and Barack Obama assured the country, “Yes, we can.” Sure, they whipped up fury against the incumbent. They had to in order to win the election. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that America was capable of greater things under their leadership. They were optimists, all of them.
But for Donald Trump, whipping up fury is the whole point, I think. He is a pessimist. “Make America Great Again” is just a slogan. Trump doesn’t believe in us. In fact, he thinks human nature is dark. He won by invoking an America I couldn’t recognize: a third-world nation ravaged by drugs, crime, and economic hardship. All immigrants were dangerous criminals, not innovators, not seekers of the American Dream. Anyone holding power was corrupt — from Republican elites (“Lyin’ Ted”) to Democratic challengers (“Crooked Hillary”). Any institutions he didn’t like were corrupt: the free press (“fake news”), the courts (“a Mexican judge”), law enforcement (“in tatters”), and even in the democratic voting process itself (“a rigged system”).
He even went so far as to equate the United States with one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt dictatorships, stopping no less a conservative than Bill O’Reilly dead in his tracks:
O’Reilly: “But [Putin] is a killer.”
Trump: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
There it is. That’s 2017 in a nutshell. In Trump’s mind, it doesn’t matter that we cherish the free press and hold fair and free elections, while Vladimir Putin kills journalists and bars opponents from campaigning against him. In Trump’s mind, we’re all corrupt. The United States was being rebranded by a master con man as such a fallen, lawless place that only a strongman could clean it up. It was dark.
Not only did Trump sow distrust in 2017, he sowed division. 2017 was the year of the Troll-in-Chief. It’s easy to forget that most presidents, no matter how slim their electoral margins, see it as Line 1 in their job description to unite the country. But not Trump. In just the last few months he has trolled the NFL (“Any player who kneels should be fired!”), the British government (posting racist videos from their fringe right), and an unstable dictator with a runway full of nuclear weapons (“Rocket man”). We’ve seen him tacitly support Nazis in our streets, openly support a pedophile running for Senate, and suggest, apropos of nothing, that a female senator would trade sex for donations.
Last year commentators called Donald Trump the Id of the Republican party. Now I think he might be the Id of our era — the crude, divisive, internet troll that lurks in all of us.
My, oh my, what a dark year 2017 was.
***
But strangely enough, I’m optimistic. Sometimes an era is defined less by a president’s tone than by the tone of our reaction. I strongly believe that 2017 taught us a lot about ourselves. It has taught us about our lowest impulses and about our most dangerous temptations. The simple fact that we elected a man like Trump — here, in our country — is making all of us take a good, long look in the mirror. And little by little, we’re dealing with what we see.
Didn’t the Trump era, with its apparent electoral embrace of sexual assault, lead to the largest outpouring of sexual assault stories in recent memory? You can’t prove the two were related, but I think they were. I think the women in our country could not believe we’d elected Trump, and it wasn’t long before a whole lot of powerful men, like Harvey Weinstein, who seemed untouchable, started to fall like dominoes. It wasn’t long before even the reddest-of-red states finally said enough.
Hasn’t the Trump era forced the whole ossified Republican party — the riders of the Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh populist tiger — to a crisis point over who they really are? Trump forced a decision. You could no longer look the other way when your base started talking crazy, while telling yourself it was worth it to pass tax cuts. The wolf was finally at the door. Trump started attacking his own party, crossing every line imaginable, and you started seeing principled red-state senators — Jeff Flake, John McCain, Bob Corker — publicly questioning a Republican president’s fitness for office and even basic sanity. Doesn’t a moment like this finally force the Republican party to reckon with what it has become? Is it overly hopeful, then, to expect the Republican party to emerge renewed — perhaps transformed — from this nadir?
And won’t the Trump administration — jowl-deep in scandal from the moment they deplaned in Washington — force Americans to reconsider whether they want a circus barker or an experienced public servant running the levers of government? Isn’t the outcome of this not more populist rage, but a collective coming-to-sense that what we want is an adult — not adult daycare — in the Oval Office?
And then there’s something deeper about ourselves that I think Trump is showing us. We free speech proponents always believe that it’s better to let the racists speak rather than to censor them. That way you can refute their arguments. Plus you know who the racists are in the room.
In 2017, we learned who the racists are.
I was never one of those Obama supporters who believed we lived in a “post-racial” society. The racism in our country wasn’t gone. In fact, it was probably as strong as ever, but it was less and less socially acceptable to express it — until Donald Trump came along and made it okay. Suddenly all the hatred that so much of the country felt at having an African American president, all the things they’d said in living rooms and bars and barbershops — it all flooded out. I know because I’d heard it. I’d heard it in a barbershop in western Maryland. I’d heard it in a bar in central Idaho. But it was never okay to say it in public during the Obama era. Yet you always knew it was boiling below the surface, just waiting to come out. Then along came Donald Trump and suddenly the crudest bigotry was out in the open: not just racism, but sexism, nativism, xenophobia, all the ugliness and intolerance of every kind that anyone who has ever been a teacher during a difficult conversation and heard tell of racist “uncles” and “aunts” knows lurks just beneath the surface even in the blue states. Suddenly it was pretty clear who the racists were in the room.
But I think that’s what we need. I’m not saying that the Trump era is a good thing. Like I said, I was terrified that democracy itself wouldn’t survive. But it has, and it will. And we know now for sure that simply electing a black president didn’t move us past our troubled racial history. Instead the Trump era has made us look more closely in the mirror, into our history, to reckon with who we are, warts and all.
I truly believe, as our former president did, that we are moving forward as a nation. I do not believe, as our current president does, that we are fundamentally corrupt. I do believe that progress often means one step backward for two steps forward. I believe that the Trump era is that backward step. It’s a temporary one, but a necessary one. Because Donald Trump, the oldest president we’ve ever elected to a first term, represents much about our past that we need to move beyond. He does not represent our future.
It won’t be easy. While 2017 was a dark year, I do not believe we have hit bottom yet. We will have to reckon with the fallout from Robert Mueller’s findings, which already suggest impeachment. We will have to watch Trump and his followers try to destroy our trust in Mueller by saying that the rule of law itself is biased and corrupt and should not apply to Trump. We may see violence in the streets. We may see our country torn apart as it has never been before. We will likely see America at its worst, even worse than in 2017.
But I have a feeling that even in the turmoil, even if we do hit rock bottom in 2018 as I believe we will, it won’t be as dark a year as 2017. Why? Because by then, the end will be in sight.
I know I’m about two weeks late posting about this, but I love Green Race kayaking footage.
In fact, just about the only thing in November I welcome is my Facebook feed filling with Green Race videos. The most famous kayak extreme race in the United States is held every November — something they can do in Asheville because it’s actually a reasonable temperature . . . unlike here in New Hampshire, where any geese who haven’t flown south yet basically freeze in place like lawn ornaments.
This year my favorite Green Race footage was a four-way split screen of the top four finishers’ GoPro footage. It’s Eric Deguil, Pat Keller, Dane Jackson, and Colin Hunt — four world-class athletes running the Green Narrows faster than it usually takes me to execute the portage at Gorilla.
There were also some spectacular crash videos. Bobby Miller posted video of him swimming out of the big Scream Machine hole and then down the next rapid, while Tad Dennis — a C-1 friend — earned my everlasting admiration by not only racing the Green in a kayak, but by posting a training video of him breaking a kayak paddle — and then running Gorilla anyway with half a blade!!
While it was fun to make about 45 armchair descents of the Narrows over the last few weeks, it did get me thinking: How the hell did we ever survive before GoPro footage?
And how — now that we have it — has GoPro footage changed kayaking?
***
Back when I started paddling, the boating videos we watched were heavily edited. Of course they were — they were commercially produced, made to sell. The only Green Race footage we had was three months after the race in some well-filmed but deeply edited LVM segment. They only had a few cameras in a few places, so you tended to get short clips of Tommy Hilleke and Jason Hale dropping off Gorilla, or quick cuts of ten straight guys getting “yeasted” at Go Left and Die. But nowadays, removed from the pressure of having to sell the footage, and with uploading an entire video being so easy, GoPro users tend to post longer, less-edited clips — often uninterrupted race runs (something unthinkably boring in the age before the internet). Some of them don’t even have music. On the whole, these GoPro videos are, for lack of a better term, more “honest.”
And here’s the thing: a lot of the GoPro you tend to see comes not from good runs but from bad. For every blazingly fast Eric Deguil run, there’s a Rush Sturges carnage clip. I’ve watched some of the most harrowing beatings, swims, and rescues during the GoPro era. It really has become this whole confessional genre — the proverbial black box footage from the cockpit: “Here’s what went wrong — and here’s how to avoid what I did.” Compared to the old method kayakers had of accident analysis — posting written narratives — GoPro footage is not only more informative, but I think somewhat less prone to spark online name calling and controversy, largely because it’s so matter-of-fact about what happened.
That’s what’s great about user-posted GoPro: compared to traditional, edited video, it’s incredibly honest. Sometimes you learn how to do Go Left in three strokes, and other times you learn what happens when you don’t get far enough left at Go Left.
(Photo: Erin Savage)
And here’s another benefit of GoPro footage: it’s a great way to learn new rivers. Say you’re going to the Raven Fork tomorrow morning. You can spend your whole evening sucking down a few IPAs and watching one of fifty-odd easily-findable Raven Fork GoPro videos on YouTube. Then you have a cockpit view as boaters of various competencies escort you down Mike Tyson’s and Headless Horseman. It’s like getting to do a trial run without the danger.
Back when I started boating, most of the best rivers weren’t even in the guidebook. If we wanted to know what a run was like, we sucked down a few beers, then called (not texted — called) someone who’d run it before and tried to play it off nonchalantly like we were “just curious” (read: terrified). Or — if we were lucky — we watched some grainy DVD or even VHS footage shot from shore featuring four second clips of guys in Corsicas running rapids that could have been anywhere on the river. Nowadays GoPro footage is so high-quality, you feel like you’ve already run the river by the time you actually pull into an eddy above the big drop. That’s got to be a good thing, right?
Lastly, we all know that one of the best parts about boating is reliving your runs. Back when I started, we did that through these things called “still pictures” or even “memory.” Or if we wanted to capture mediocre video, we actually had to lug around a camera in a drybag, get out on shore, make our buddies wait for us, then get back in our boats. It was cumbersome.
Today? Taking and posting GoPro is so easy that you practically get home and you can find footage from your run already up online. You can relive that run of the Upper Blackwater almost instantly. Plus, it’s not only going to live on in your own mind, or in the minds of one or two buddies who were there. Now it’s easier than ever for you to share with your wider social media audience just what a daring, awesome person you are, or what it’s truly like down in the Grand Canyon.
Between the beautiful footage and the ease of sharing, their slogan really couldn’t be truer: “GoPro — be a hero.”
***
And yet — there’s something lost in all that sharing.
For one thing, doesn’t GoPro kill the mystique? I know, I know — you’re thinking, “Come on! More paddling videos = always better.” But hear me out.
Let’s say you’re an aspiring class V paddler hoping to make a personal first descent down a benchmark local run, like the Middlebury Gorge in Vermont. Back in 2003, when I first ran it, there was zero video of it findable anywhere, and maybe a handful of still shots on the old American Whitewater page. You had a droll, ten-word description in Greg Hanlon’s guidebook, but really if you wanted info, you basically had to buttonhole a local paddler at the takeout. I used to do this a lot. I was like Lyndon Johnson about to corner some poor junior senator. It was either that or you just selected your most trusted guide and lasered in on his stern. Because you hadn’t seen any of the rapids before, once you got into the gorge, it was all pretty mind-blowing.
Of course you can still do that, but I honestly wonder how many people do? Don’t you think it would take a concerted effort NOT to look up a new run ahead of time on YouTube? Sure, lots of rivers aren’t up on YouTube, but lots of them are, right? Especially the good ones. When I first published my river guidebook in 2008, I used to worry that I was ruining the sense of adventure for everyone because I was writing short descriptions and publishing maps and photos. How quaint! Isn’t the power to watch everything ahead of time now a pretty fundamental shift from just 15 years ago?
Back then, if anything, your first run was actually enhanced by the forbidding stories you’d heard. And that brings up another thing I think is sort of lost in the GoPro era: the power of storytelling. Ours is a sport with a pretty healthy tradition of tall tales, war stories, exaggeration, and bar-room bragging. It’s great. It’s our oral tradition, a time-honored way that boaters have bonded and also passed along important information: “No shit there I was . . .” What’s more fun than sitting around at the take out with your buddies swapping tales of how brave you all were?
Here’s the thing about GoPro — it doesn’t kill off the oral tradition, but doesn’t it kind of negate its power? The more we film, the less reason we have to pass on these stories orally or in writing. Like I said before, GoPro is nothing if not honest. That boof you did years ago off that waterfall — the boof you’ve always been talking about? The one that got bigger and bigger over the years? How much do you want to bet that if you had GoPro footage of it, you’d discover it wasn’t nearly as big as you’re remembering it?
How many times have you seen someone post video of what they called an “epic” swim — only to see the GoPro and find out it was surprisingly short — maybe ten or twelve seconds?
And that really hard, really steep run you just ran at high flows? Doesn’t look so bad on GoPro. Looks sort of like class III!
It’s especially misleading if you sit up high in C-1 and have a long torso, so your GoPro is like eight feet out of the water. On me the Upper Blackwater looks like the Potomac in Georgetown. My point is that the same honesty that makes GoPro footage such a great teaching tool also drains some of the power from the usual lore and myth-making in our sport. Yeah, it’s great to have a clearer picture of what the Niagara Gorge looks like in a boat, but wasn’t it sort of better when you only heard second hand that the waves were so tall, in Chris Koll’s words, you couldn’t even tell the color of the sky? “Read my words well and don’t be a fool: the Alsek is unpaddleable!” wrote Walt Blackadar in his seminal 1971 Sports Illustrated article about running Turnback Canyon of the Alsek. Would this electrifying account have been dulled just a little bit if we’d had GoPro footage of Blackadar flailing his way down some muddy-looking waves in a 13-foot boat?
Plus, can’t I just ask — don’t we go to nature to get away from an increasingly invasive world of cameras and surveillance? Isn’t it sort of weird to think about everything you do being recorded because some guy in your group is running his GoPro? Believe me, I’ve been that guy, but isn’t that sort of an invasion of privacy when you think about it?
Sure it’s fun to relive your kayaking videos, but isn’t it somehow more special if you have to relive it in memory — if the only people who really know about it were the people who were there? Doesn’t that create a more memorable bond?
There’s a lot that’s been written in the last few years about how our experiences are becoming less about nourishing our souls than about becoming a show for others. Nature becomes “content” rather than something to be enjoyed. We live for the future moment (when we’ll post on social media) rather than for the present.
Isn’t there something lost when our crashes and our victories are all recorded, plainly, and posted the next day on social media — rather than lionized in tall tales and epic stories told for years around the campfires? Surely to some extent you can have both, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Instead of “No shit, there I was,” now it’s, “Yeah, it’s on my Facebook page.”
Years ago, when I was first kayaking, I learned about a life philosophy that I immediately adopted. One of the most accomplished men I ever met, an ex-kayaker, wrote that what separated the truly successful people he’d known — at Harvard, in the Marines, in the Olympics, and in the White House — was a specific mindset. He called it “fascination with the process.”
To be fascinated with the process means you’re doing things for the right reason. It’s not about the results, it’s about the pursuit. Ironically, you tend to get stellar results; you work harder, think deeper, and achieve more — not because you lust after fame and fortune — but because you truly love the work itself. You revel in the details. You enjoy the behind-the-scenes. You do the digging. You’re passionate not about racing in the Olympics, but about training for the Olympics.
Back in 2001, I was a young racer passionate about training for the Olympics, but living in the slalom backwater of Vermont, I had no idea how to go about it. So I was ecstatic when Scott Shipley, the winningest American kayak racer of his generation, published a how-to guidebook specifically devoted to winning whitewater slalom races. Finally — a book that would show me the secrets of the yearly training plan, of how hard I had to work, how often to train, and a thousand other details I couldn’t wait to dig into. My expectations could not have been higher.
But you know what? That book that I bought and hauled back to my dorm room to dissect, Every Crushing Stroke, turned out to be even better than I expected. It wasn’t just a training manual — it was a revelation. Sixteen years later it remains my favorite book about whitewater kayaking. Many boaters have never heard of it, and that’s a shame. Why? Because Every Crushing Stroke is that rare sports book that not only teaches you how to win, but how to live.
It’s is a book about “fascination with the process.”
***
Let’s start with the writing.
Normally jocks’ books — the ones who write their own books — are disappointing. They fall back on cliches and warmed-over game summaries and usually end up revealing very little of anything. So I was surprised at what an engaging writer Shipley, a jock and an engineer by training, turned out to be. Yet every page is alive with fresh, original writing, and burns with infectious passion, as Shipley sketches out his boyhood dreams:
“Not once in all that time did I crave the riches of a pro athlete or the recognition of an Olympian. I wanted to be like my heroes. I wanted to drive to Jonquiere in my green Cathy Hearn-style Pinto and I wanted to launch myself out of the starting gate like Austrian Norbert Sattler. I wanted to be the fastest kayaker in the world.”
Soon enough, he does — and Every Crushing Stroke is a coming of age story both for Shipley and for the sport of whitewater kayaking itself. Shipley is a paddling zeitgeist; he pops up everywhere in the last 30 years of boating history. He learns the sport in homemade gear from his father, a 60s-era US Team member who “believed in roughing it and learning the old way,” then enjoys a riverside seat for the 1980s innovations in slalom boat design and paddling technique — stern squirts and pivot turns — led by the new crop of dominating American racers like Cathy and David Hearn and Jon Lugbill. Later, Shipley’s there for two of American slalom’s high water marks: the 1989 World Championships and slalom’s dramatic reinclusion into the 1992 Olympics. A year later, he’s back again for the 1993 Freestyle World Championships — now considered a watershed moment in freestyle boating — where he finishes second, despite not having learned any new freestyle moves until just weeks beforehand. His career retrospective stops there, but many of the training workouts depicted in the book were refined during the middle and later 1990s, at a time when Shipley was again on the forefront of the Olympic-driven movement in slalom toward still greater professionalization in training. And of course after the book was published, Shipley has again been on the cutting edge — this time as designer of many of the world’s best artificial whitewater courses.
Scott Shipley
But back in the 1980s, Scott Shipley was not a normal kid. He was fascinated — obsessed — with the process. Most kids enjoy racing, but not the hard work of training (at least, not without a coach or parent around). But Shipley — largely coachless — *loved* to train. He begins hanging a single slalom gate on the sound near his house in Washington State, practicing unsexy technique drills over and over. His workouts become more regimented, more serious, and more and more honed in on turning weaknesses into strengths. “Every race was a test I invariably failed,” he writes.
What kind of teenager is that focused? One who is incredibly competitive, and yet totally immersed in the pursuit of excellence. Again, Shipley’s passion comes through in the writing itself, as he remembers his childhood training partners, a hodgepodge collection of Seattle-area boaters who stoke his competitive fire, yet nurture him at the same time:
“I grew up with an overwhelming desire to compete, to be faster, to beat people. Every workout and every race I was focused on attack, attack, attack. If I was slower than my target, I would dig deeper to paddle better and faster on my next effort. The great lesson I took from these early years was the respect we all shared despite how competitive these workouts were. At the tick of a watch we were desperately racing to beat our training partners, yet moments later, when the watch was off, we would help each other. We were teammates in the truest sense.”
Soon Shipley is the best junior in the country, then in the world. After winning the Junior Worlds — the first American kayaker ever to do so — he’s 18 years old and lasering in on the top few grown men in the United States — one truly great one in particular — and that’s where this book gets really good.
Sometime around 1990, Shipley moves to the small town of Chilliwack, British Columbia with the goal of winning the 1992 Olympics. Chilliwack is the kind of place where young men have gone to transform themselves for hundreds of years. For some men, it’s an army barracks. For Shipley, it’s a dead-end town with a big river, a rough-and-tumble environment that Shipley can’t help contrasting with many of the modern facilities his European competitors enjoyed:
“This was our gymnasium, nothing less and nothing more. We lacked any sort of conventional clubhouse or training center. We changed our clothes in the dirt beside our cars, and we trained in the stadium that God gave us. What a stadium it was, though . . .”
But it’s not about the amenities — it’s about a man named Richard Weiss. In Chilliwack, Shipley serendipitously falls in with the kind of training group we all dream about: a bunch of up-and-coming Canadian and American racers who just happen to move there at the same time, all of whom want nothing more than to put aside everything in their lives to dedicate themselves to winning a berth in the Olympics. They live the way broke boaters have always lived: they sleep in treehouses with no running water or lights, cook outdoors, and brave the Canadian winters in leaky drytops and shorts — all for the chance to train on Chilliwack’s world-class whitewater and nip at each other’s heels in the increasingly sadistic workouts they put themselves through. The dynamic among the boaters quickly becomes a once-in-a-career mixture of fire-breathing competition yet mutual support, a spawning grounds for innovation, with all of the boaters bringing different things to the table, and bringing out the best in each other. U.S. Team member Brian Brown is there. So are Canadians Larry Norman, Patrice Gagnon, and David Ford, the man who’d go on to become a World Champion and a many-time Olympian.
But it is Shipley’s relationship with his one-time mentor Richard Weiss, the American champion, that really gives the story poignance. Shipley is training to be great. Weiss already is, having garnered second place at the recent Worlds. Up close, Shipley is even more awed by his commitment, his humility, and his super-human strength. Keeping up with Rich Weiss in a kayak was not easy, even for Shipley, the most gifted young paddler of his generation. The first time they train together, Shipley is stunned: he becomes so exhausted fending off Weiss from passing him that he has to climb out on shore to rest. “That was when Rich offered to design the next course. I kid you not, Rich was only half done with the workout.”
These two men, training to beat each other, end up bringing out the best in each other — and they are both thoroughly fascinated with the process. Shielded from what Shipley hints is the groupthink of many other top American racers, Chilliwack becomes the laboratory where this young group questions everything they know about paddling, takes it all apart — from forward strokes to draw strokes to race day procedures — scrutinize it as a group, test hypothesis, and they put it all back together again. Meanwhile they’re indifferent to the harsh winters, seemingly immune to exhaustion, and — this is meaningful — largely coachless. This is significant, writes Shipley, because it requires they assume responsibility for their own training — and soon enough they’re asking of themselves sacrifices that no coach would ever reasonably expect. They become, as Shipley calls it, “the purest form of fanatics.” Sure, they’re chasing Olympic gold, but it’s about more than that. They’ve stumbled onto something even better than winning: a perfect group for pursuing excellence together. It’s something that few of us get to enjoy in our lives (and which Shipley freely admits he spends the rest of his career trying to recapture). It’s a vision, an ideal. I know it’s stayed with me ever since I first read about it here, and I’ve tried to find it for myself in both my slalom training and in my professional pursuits ever since, but I’ve never gotten quite as lucky as Shipley and Weiss.
As I mentioned, this is a poignant book. Shipley doesn’t just relate his fascination with the process — he also evokes the dramatic highs and lows of an Olympic pursuit. For example, he writes of the “coldest, most inhumane and most definitively final event in sports” — the 1992 Olympic Trials, with the “kill or be killed” mentality that sees Shipley win his Olympic berth, but several of his hard-working teammates miss the Games. Later he describes the exuberance of making the Team, the orgy of fancy dinners, plane flights, free clothing, and Hilton stays courtesy of Team USA, followed by the utter agony of missing a gate on an otherwise flawless run at the 1992 Olympics — then having a host family he’s staying with shortly afterward question his dedication when he (for once) decides to sleep in. It’s hard to read, knowing how much the guy put in.
Then there is the fate of Shipley’s great friend and rival, Rich Weiss. After the 1992 Olympics, their training group disbands, and Shipley writes of how the stress of constantly competing against each other subtly pushed the two men apart without their realizing it. Before they can truly reunite, and not long after finishing sixth in the 1996 Olympics, Rich Weiss drowns while practicing for an extreme race. “I hope his legacy shines from the pages of this book,” writes Shipley. As a reader who’d never have known any of these memorable Rich Weiss anecdotes except for this book, I’d have to say Shipley’s goal was successful.
I remember getting chills over and over again while reading this book for the first time. I still do. Great books leave you with lasting visions, and some of Shipley’s have stayed with me for my whole racing career and beyond. I think of the great British champion Richard Fox “charging through the pack with little or no resistance” during crowded Savage River training sessions, the crowds of paddlers “seemed to part like the Red Sea in order to allow the champion through,” or Shipley, Brown, and Weiss swapping sides in their slalom boats on the giant Skookumchuck wave, “soul surfing” in the evening light, or perhaps my very favorite passage in all of whitewater literature: the moment at the 1989 World Championships when the unbeatable American C-1 team suddenly emerges into view on the Savage River in front of thousands of American fans:
“The mist was especially heavy on the Savage that day and the entire race had been plagued by a thick fog low to the river. The fog was so thick that at first we saw nothing. This was a two hundred second long course, and all we could sense were the cheers of the crowd as the gang drew steadily nearer. Those cheers became a roar around us, even was we squinted into the fog for any sign.
“The first thing to break the low-lying fog was Jon (Lugbill)’s fist. It was his top hand protruding above the mist and it hammered angrily into and out of the fog with each pounding stroke . . . Finally the three of them surged out of the fog on a full speed sprint, deftly wove through the three or four gates within view, then disappeared into the fog on their way down the course.”
That description still gives me chills. There it is: the exact moment when American slalom hit its absolute apex. Lugbill lays down the Ultimate Run, then the Americans take a victory lap and come out of the fog like the superheros they’ve become.
And then, just like that, it’s over:
“With their passing, so too passed the peak of their era. They belonged to another time, they were champions of the old school. With the finish of that day’s race began a new era. No longer were we concerned with World Championship medals; all eyes focused now on Barcelona and its Olympic Games.”
The book is all the more poignant knowing how it ends for Shipley. Although he basically leaves off his own story after the heartbreaking 27th place at the 1992 Olympics, I bought the book in 2001, maybe six months after I’d watched Shipley again “lose” at the Sydney Olympics and then give one of the saddest, most downtrodden interviews I have ever watched on television. I remember thinking, “The guy finished fifth in the world. What’s so bad about that?” But a year later in Every Crushing Stroke, Shipley meditates on what the stakes really are at the Games:
“Perhaps in the eyes of . . . those who truly matter in your life — you have accomplished something. To the rest of America, any result outside of the medals is a defeat.”
It’s quite remarkable for me to go back and watch his runs from Sydney, or even his runs from the Atlanta Olympics, where he was the favorite, but finished outside the top ten. Scott Shipley was really freaking good, and I always felt bad for him that he was never able to win the Olympics or the Worlds — given the way he devoted his life to it.
But after reading the book, you get the sense that he’s trying to teach you that, even though it still hurts, somewhere deep down it doesn’t really matter. Although he writes beautifully of the agony of Olympic defeat, it’s pretty clear from the rest of the book that the value he derived from his years chasing pure excellence alongside his friends went far, far beyond gold, silver, or bronze to some deeper place that not even defeat could touch:
“Like the D-C C-1s, my time has come and gone . . . In the sum of my career I was never an Olympic Champion as were none of those paddlers I idolized so early on in my paddling . . . Like them I take pride neither in the results themselves nor the medals I’ve brought home, but in the efforts that preceded them. I hang my hat not on that final destination but on every crushing stroke it took to reach it.”
This is where you realize that this book is not just about kayaking. Scott Shipley was fascinated with the process, and after reading this book, so was I. To be in a constant pursuit of excellence is a lesson that I took with me first to the race course, then to writing, and later to a career in education. I think of the daily lesson plans, the conferring with colleagues, the early mornings and the late nights grading essays as just another extension of the passion to succeed that Shipley, Brian Brown, and Rich Weiss first showed me from their days in Chilliwack. This is a wonderful coming of age story and an illuminating how-to guide. I think that all paddlers, not just slalom racers, should read it. Because it’s not just about the best way to race — it’s about the best way to live.
In addition to having to worry about online predators, cell phone addictions, and an Oval Office resident who is basically a 70 year-old poster boy for every behavior we hope children shed by the time they’re seven, you’ve also got to worry about American corporations trying to drive you insane.
This past week I showed a fascinating, scarring documentary called “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood” to my Media Literacy class. Although it was made back in 2008 and although I’ve seen it before, it has somehow become more revelatory for me with time. Here’s the basic premise: babies are born innocent and pure . . . until the ad industry gets hold of them. Then they try their damnedest to turn beautiful children into hysterical consumers lusting after an increasingly expensive parade of mindless games, toys, and junk food.
Last weekend, for the first time in almost thirty years, I turned the TV off during a good football game. I felt sick to my stomach. And it had nothing to do with Colin Kaepernick.
It was a college game, and in the span of about 20 minutes, I watched two different young men get hit so hard that they had to be carried off on stretchers. Both times the game stopped for ten minutes, as players circled around and dropped to a knee — a gesture that’s explosive during the national anthem, but dead-somber during an injury stoppage. Some players clasped hands. It was like a prayer vigil. I’d seen gesture before, but never really thought about it. But now it was clear: It was like they were praying their teammate wasn’t dead or paralyzed.
A few years ago, I was eating lunch on Mt. Lafayette when I looked up to see a small plane bearing down on me.
Normally you hear a plane long before you see it. But this time the only noise — other than the din of forty hikers gone quiet — was a gentle swish.
Just as I was about to lunge behind a boulder, the plane banked right in front of us, cutting an impossibly tight, searing radius. Then — swish! — it was gone, tearing back down the Franconia Ridge.
“What was that?” the man next to me asked, open-mouthed. “A drone?”
A few weeks ago, five high school students posted to social media a picture of themselves wearing KKK hoods in front of a burning cross. Not surprisingly, Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa/Nebraska NAACP, one of the oldest civil rights organizations, came out forcefully against the photo.
What was odd was a single but important phrase she uttered in her denunciation. It’s one I’ve heard a lot over the past few years, always in response to controversies like this one. She said:
“We have to be really careful in crossing that line when free speech does become hate speech.”
Hate speech. On the surface, it’s not an odd statement. The image is hateful. But the problem is that here in the United States, “hate speech” and free speech are one and the same. In fact, you could say that “hate speech” doesn’t actually exist.
So why is everyone talking about it?
***
Maybe it’s because hate speech is a crime in a lot of other countries.
Consider the following:
A British man was prosecuted for carrying posters saying “Islam out of Britain — Protect the British People” and “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.”
A Belgian man was found guilty of passing out leaflets urging, “Stand Up against the Islamification of Belgium.” This was not an ordinary man, but a member of the parliament! His punishment? Community service and disqualification from holding office for ten years.
These people didn’t bomb any churches. They didn’t lay hands on anyone. Their crime? Expressing negative opinions toward protected groups.
Hate speech.
Maybe the prevalence of hate speech laws in other countries is one reason why so many Americans assume we have those laws on the books here too. Maybe that’s why you hear things like, “That’s not free speech, it’s hate speech” every time there’s a controversy. Maybe it’s a confusion with hate crimes (which are illegal in the U.S.). Or maybe it’s just simple ignorance. Some people actually think we have hate speech laws here.
As I’ve been learning in my reading over the last few weeks — they couldn’t be more wrong.
***
I got the anecdotes above from two books I’ve been reading: Floyd Abrams’s fascinating new book, The Soul of the First Amendment and Aryeh Neier’s masterpiece, Defending My Enemy.
Abrams, a widely respected First Amendment attorney who has litigated cases from the Pentagon Papers to Citizens United, had me — an admitted free speech junkie — hooked from page one.
Neier’s story is even more remarkable: a German Jew saved from certain death in a concentration camp by a matter of days, Neier was president of the ACLU at a time when they famously defended Nazis’ right to march in the Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. His 1979 book, published a year later, has become a modern classic in the free speech realm.
What both books taught me is the sheer improbability of the First Amendment. The United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries promises citizens protections for speech almost unheard of in the world’s history. Ours is the government that protected the rights of the Westboro Baptist church to picket soldiers’ funerals. Ours is the country that just last year protected a music group’s right to trademark an ethnic slur as a band name (“The Slants”). Ours is the country that not only allows people to make hateful slights toward ethnic groups, but elects that man president. It’s quite remarkable protection compared to most anywhere else in space and time.
But it wasn’t always like this. It was fascinating, for instance, to learn that up until the mid-20th Century, the First Amendment was largely toothless. Newspaper editors were routinely sued and jailed for libel. Men like Eugene Debs went to prison merely for speaking out against the government. A man in Minnesota got jail time for questioning the war effort, telling volunteer knitters, “No soldier ever sees these socks.” The excesses of the McCarthy era are well known.
But then, sometime after the Red Scare quieted down, the Supreme Court began protecting speech more and more strongly — just in time for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, when the First Amendment protected, for example:
. . . One hundred and eighty-seven students arrested for demonstrating racial inequality outside the South Carolina State House. The state claimed they’d committed a crime — breaching the peace — because they’d angered onlookers.
. . . Twenty-three black students arrested in Baton Rouge for picketing segregated lunch counters. They’d apparently produced “muttering” and “grumbling” from white onlookers — which again amounted to disturbing the peace.
. . . The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. when he and fellow demonstrators were beaten by cops on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama — who neatly claimed they’d do so to stop protesters from entering a dangerous area where they’d be unprotected from the white mob.
Each time, the state tried to prosecute the minority group, and each time the First Amendment blocked the measure. Something that opponents of that disgusting KKK photo would have cheered.
Sensing some irony?
That’s right: when Betty Andrews of the NAACP — one of the country’s most venerable civil rights organizations — cited a difference between free speech and “hate speech” the other week — she tacitly endorsed weakening the very same First Amendment protection of a minority voice that had once allowed her cause to flourish. Both Neier and Abrams teach that censorship happens from both sides of the political aisle. To be born human is to be born wishing to censor your opponents.
***
We live in a time and place that simultaneously protects our right to say offensive things to an unprecedented degree, yet demands a higher and higher social cost for doing so. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from “gay” and “fag” being routine put-downs to a time when using either word in the workplace could be cause for termination. We’ve gone from Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor hurling ethnic slurs at each other on a Saturday Night Live skit to a time when jobs are lost for much less (such as a Silicon Valley engineer fired for making a joke about laptops with giant “dongles.”) We live in a time that is ever-more sensitive to the nuances of discrimination via language. We live in a culture of online shaming. You say something offensive nowadays and more often than not, you’re going to pay a steep social price.
But we also live in a time of unprecedented social transgression. There is an entire wing of our country that delights using the most taboo, the most crude, and the most offensive language possible. Donald Trump won the presidency in part by thumbing his nose at “political correctness” — the types of word-watching that many in his base have grown tired of — but also by simply saying the most crude, shocking things any politician for president has ever said.
The two sides are completely at odds, and the fights rage over the use of language.
But you know what? I’ve spent the past year thinking that this was a bad thing. And of course it is — if we’re not listening to each other. But as far as hurling words, as far as debating what’s okay to say and what isn’t, even as far as name-calling and vilifying — in some sense, it’s not as bad as I thought. Why? Because, as I’ve learned from studying First Amendment history, one mark of a liberal society is that we do our fighting with words, not with violence. We need unfettered free speech in order to get it all out there. The First Amendment is grounded in an understanding that the stronger idea will usually win in competition in the marketplace. From unfiltered speech, from the clash of divergent viewpoints, no matter how crass, comes truth, or at least consensus. We need to be able to fight through our speech — our words, our public expression, our banners and signs — so that we don’t have to pick up real weapons. It’s the ultimate steam valve release for a vibrant, vigorous democracy.
Right now we have that ability. Yet speech restrictions like hate speech take that away from us — they muzzle the debate, force some ideas underground where they can’t be seen in the light, where they can brood and fester.
But even more than that, people who call for speech codes or who invoke “hate speech” scare me because they seem all-too willing to toss censorship authority to our government. College kids acting on administrators to serve as petty censors under a corporate-academic framework is one thing (like the Emory students who insisted the words “Trump 2016” be banned from campus). But grown adults advocating for hate speech protections on the part of the government seem to me dangerously myopic. Because who’s going to decide what’s hateful and what’s not? It won’t be an enlightened tribunal of spiky-haired hipsters from Park Slope with Buddy Holly glasses sipping craft beer. No, it’ll be the U.S. government. And I don’t think I understood the extent to which our founders didn’t trust government to determine truth until I read Abrams’s book. The founders, Abrams points out, specifically worded the First Amendment in the negative: not “All citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech” but instead “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The Constitution isn’t in the business of making sure that marginalized groups aren’t bothered by people’s speech; it is in the business of ensuring that government doesn’t try to limit anyone’s free speech — lest next time it be your own.
What really worries me when people start talking about hate speech is the idea that these people — most of whom are committed leftists — want to toss the authority of policing people’s speech to a government led by Donald Trump. Do you really want to trust Donald Trump to decide who is offensive and gets thrown in jail? In fact, Trump’s politics demonstrate the tenuousness of free expression. Trump’s base has taken particular delight in flipping the script on identity politics, casting themselves into the role of white victimhood. Looming behind any righteous censorship coming from the left in the name of protecting minority groups is the clamor of the right, citing the very same victimization and wishing to censor right back.
Abrams writes of a Canadian citizen who was tried for protesting a local public school’s teaching about homosexuality. He was found guilty under a law that prohibits speech that “ridicules, belittles, or otherwise affronts the dignity of any person or class of persons.”
Stop and think for a moment. “Ridicules any person”? Can you imagine that law in Donald Trump’s (tiny) hands? I’d be in jail for that last joke.
Saturday Night Live? Illegal!
Alec Baldwin? Deported!
The New York Times editors? Minimum security out in Utica!
That’s why we don’t mess with hate speech laws in this country: it sounds noble, but one crack in the concrete and the whole dam bursts open and suddenly you’ll be getting sued or jailed if you criticize your neighbor, your senator, and especially your president.
Aryeh Neier lost a lot of friends and a lot of supporters when he — a Jewish Holocaust survivor — insisted on defending his sworn enemy, the Nazis. “Is this what free speech is for?” his detractors asked. “To let them stand up and say Jews should be killed in ovens?” But what Neier knew is that actually the First Amendment is the best insurance policy that Jews or any other group could have. Time and time again the First Amendment has protected groups fighting on behalf of the Little Guy. Any weakening of the First Amendment free speech protections could come back and bite you. That’s precisely why Neier chose to defend the very people who’d tried to kill his family and he himself: because to defend his own future rights, he had to defend those of his enemy first.
Perhaps it’s a quote by Thomas Jefferson, from his inaugural address, that really sums up the magnanimity of what we’ve built in this country, a place that does not prosecute hate speech, but seeks for a higher standard of conduct and of tolerance from its citizens. Jefferson said:
“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
What an immensely hopeful statement. Abrams and Neier have made me acutely aware of how much unpleasant, even threatening speech one is forced to hear in America. All the same, when I read statements like that and reflect on how robust our free speech protections are, I realize there’s nowhere I’d rather live.
