A Backseat Driver Fully Aware That The Person At The Wheel Is Not Listening

While my title is meant metaphorically, I do recall those days when I'd take one of the boys out to the country, so they could practice their driving without much traffic around, and that one time I took the younger one to the Assembly Hall parking lot on a Sunday when there was no event there, so he could practice while at the wheel doing figure eights.  In these cases, I was sitting in the right passenger seat.  I can't say that I was calm then.  But I did try to coach each boy as best as I could.  There was one trip to Door County I recall where I was sitting in the backseat behind the driver, the older boy.  I let my anxiety get the better of me more than once on the ride up there.  He felt the brunt of that.  Nonetheless, the family did reach its destination and I lived to tell the tale.  If there is a lesson in that observation, I didn't learn it well at all.

What I do want to talk about might be called micromanaging, if in the work context,  or Monday morning quarterbacking, such as in blog posts like this, where others who express their opinions are taken to task.  Part of this is a long ingrained habit, described in a post called Getting Closure as follows:

I have this habit/arrogance about me that in order to let go of an idea and move onto something else I must comment about it in a way that provides some insight. Once I get my two cents in I can refocus on what is ahead of me. Until then, however, I can't let go. I wanted to say something about why we love Mickey so much, but I wasn't sure what I should say. So I let the thought simmer. Yesterday, I did a Google search on Mickey Mantle versus Bo Jackson, thinking perhaps that would help. I found several links to fascinating content - this piece on tape measure home runs, who actually hit them, and the misreporting of how long the home runs actually were; a different piece from Baseball Digest about Bo's amazing feats on the diamond; and a YouTube video clip of Mickey with a rather young David Letterman, compelling to view. 

At the time of writing that post, I was retired, but for under six months, and hadn't yet found what I would engage in next.   I clung to the old habit of doing pleasure reading over the winter break.  In this case it was Jane Leavy's book called The Last Boy.  I had previously read her book about Sandy Koufax and enjoyed that.  But Mickey had a hard life and Leavy emphasized that through much of the book.  Reading the book proved not to be a pleasure, though it remained a compelling read.  And it generated a need in me to write the post I linked to above.

I re-post my my blog writing to Facebook.  At the time, I must have allowed my posts to be Public (now they are only available to Friends).  A classmate I knew from way back in elementary school found the Getting Closure piece, liked it a lot, and we reconnected as a consequence.  The Blogger Dashboard says the piece got only 32 hits and no comments.  When I re-post in Facebook I have no way of knowing whether people have read the piece or not, except through likes or comments.  I'm guessing that most people will read the preview if it shows up in their news feed, but not read the full piece.  I don't know if that explains what I say next or not.  I really do like it when I can see that a reader has made a personal connection to something I wrote.

When I was working, I found this sort of thing fairly regularly.  Very early on, this was via an online conferencing system called FirstClass, that was run by the SCALE project.  Indeed, I believe my posts there were a big reason why Burks Oakley invited me to be part of SCALE.  Subsequently, I had similar interactions on a variety of listservs.  The audience would be different from one list to another and the reaction would often come as a sidebar email only to me.   Then it came with my blog posts, where the connections would show up on the posts of others, such as here and here.   It certainly didn't happen with everything I wrote.  But my batting average was sufficiently high that I came to expect it with some frequency.  I believe that my analyses helped readers who were already thinking about a topic to penetrate it further.  In some sense, my ability to do this was a consequence of my prior economics training, which encouraged me not just to model things in a somewhat abstract way, but then to push for the implications of that model. Others, who hadn't gone through such training, didn't do this as a matter of course.

Providing analysis is one thing.  Correcting others who act in ways contrary to the analysis is quite another.  It's the latter which is the backseat driving I refer to in my title.  I find I'm doing more and more of that.  Yet the corrections are largely unwelcome.  Indeed, my readership overall has dwindled in retirement, as if my analyses are no longer relevant because I'm no longer "in the game." The readership is not quite nil yet, but it is heading in that direction.  So, to tweak a proverbial expression, I'm the one pushing on the tree in the forest to cause it to fall.  Should I continue to do that if I know it will not make a sound?  How do I reconcile that  question with the habit of putting my two cents in?

I will give a few illustrations below to demonstrate how the backseat driving works. 

In a recent post called Lamentations about our Politics, I gave three different critiques.  The third one was about the coalition of people who typically vote for Democrats.  These voters have different interests.  What can hold them together?  In the analysis, the solution was described as a bargain, where each group in the coalition gets something but then also gives up something else in return.  The challenge is in identifying a bargain that will hold.   Alas, the politics of Left, Right, or Center doesn't enable thinking about a bargain.  It casts things as essentially zero sum.   Consider this recent column by Charles Blow, who contrasts the results from the Nevada Primary with the results from the South Carolina Primary. 

First, if the results in Nevada and South Carolina are harbingers for the rest of the nation, this primary season will further explode the people-of-color, intersectional interests argument. It is completely plausible that black and Hispanic voters could consistently and repeatedly pick different candidates, Biden for the former group and Bernie Sanders for the latter.

Blow doesn't consider in his piece what sort of bargain would preserve the people-of-color, intersectional interests argument.  As a result, he can't get at this question.  If your preferred candidate in the Primaries is ultimately not the winner, will you nonetheless participate in the general election?  Is the get-rid-of-Trump sentiment sufficient?  If not, why doesn't Blow contemplate how the winner can can garner the support of the group who didn't get their preferred choice, while not having that viewed as a betrayal by those who had been for the winner in the primaries.   We know that in 2016 Sanders supporters were lukewarm at best to the Clinton candidacy.  If something of a repeat of that now seems likely, the evident question is how to avoid it in 2020.

I'm seeing a similar issue with some of my Facebook friends, who supported a candidate who has since dropped out of the race.  (As I'm writing this, Elizabeth Warren announced today that she is suspending her campaign.)  While I have some friends who are Bernie boosters, most are looking for a reason to support the current front runner, Biden.  Indeed, I'm not enamored with Biden and had hoped we'd have a younger candidate as the nominee.  But I've found the justification that friends are using to make this pivot wrongheaded.  It is entirely backward looking, at what Democrats typically advocate for, without considering the circumstances of the moment, which seem dire indeed. So yesterday I wrote this post, Parallels with 2008.  That Mario Cuomo quote, about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, still has salience.  But we voters need to be more forward thinking about the prose that lies ahead, after the campaign is over.  Otherwise we are bound for disillusionment.  Even if the get-rid-of-Trump fever is sufficient for the Democrats to sweep in the November election, subsequent disillusionment that allowed the Republicans to win in the 2022 midterm elections might be a disaster, one we should anticipate now. Forward thinking of this sort is a way to temper the idealism that we use to motivate us.  But my Facebook friends don't seem to want that now.  There is already disillusionment from my women friends, who bemoan that the remaining candidates are old white males.  Immediate disappointment that a favorite candidate has dropped out is understandable.  But it can't persist if the Democrats are to prevail long term.

My last example is not about national politics. It is about instruction in the wake of the coronavirus.  I'm aware that there is a lot of planning going on about all university operation in the current circumstance.  But this sort of planning tends to be on the administrative side.  Are individual instructors thinking about these issues as well and how they might have to alter their teaching as a consequence?  I don't know, but I'm afraid they aren't.  At least so far, the planning by the support units doesn't include communicating with instructors now on this topic (at least not at the U of I).  It seems to me it might be necessary for instructors to segue from on-ground teaching to online teaching, within the same course being offered now. So I wrote this post, Teaching a Class Session Online in a Pinch - Some Suggestions.  I can anticipate this happening only at the last moment for many instructors.  That will surely lead to panic and congestion of available support services.  Perhaps there would be some downside risk in communicating about it now.  But if more instructors can take precaution now, that definitely would be a plus.  I think the upside trumps the downside.  Apparently others in a position to do something about this disagree with that assessment or they haven't thought it through.  The real issue is that disagreeing with the assessment provides an excuse for not thinking it through. 

Let me wrap up things here.  The backseat driving emerges as a consequence of worrying about things.  I don't think I can stop worrying, though it's obviously the simplest answer if I could.  So I need a next best solution, one that helps with managing the worrying.  Over the years, writing these blog posts has been useful for that.  The question is whether it can remain useful, even if there is no audience for them.  I don't have any answers for that now. I haven't written blog posts two days in a row for quite a long time. Let's see whether tomorrow there still is an urge to produce another.