Month: February 2020

The McGowan

For almost thirty years I managed a high school and middle school Cross Country meet in Central Ohio, the McGowan Invitational.  Cross Country is the sport where kids run for miles, 3.1 miles for high school and 2 miles for middle school.  But unlike track, where they loop lap after lap, in Cross Country the race is over fields, hills, and in the case of our meet, through forest paths.  It is running at its essence; without the controls of lanes and all left turns.

Our meet grew through the years.  It started with a couple of dozen teams, a few races, and a picnic when it was all over. But by the 2000’s it turned into one of the biggest meets in the state, with hundreds of school competing in what ultimately became nineteen different races.  We started at nine in the morning and ran races until six at night.

It’s pretty simple to “administrate”.  The kids in each race line up at a starting line, the gun goes off, and 3.1 miles later they come across the finish line.  To “score” the meet, the finish order, first to last, is recorded along with their times.  No big deal.

5000 Runners

But as the size of the races grew, the sheer volume of kids crossing the finish line at the same time increased.  When it reached hundreds of kids per minute,  crossing a narrow finish line to get “lined up”:  some falling down, some throwing up, all struggling for breath; maintaining that order was a challenge.

Our finish line crew was amazing.  Of the hundreds of races, and tens of thousands of athletes crossing the line, they kept order almost every time.  They were so good I can talk about the two times it didn’t happen, when all of the backups and safeguards simply failed.

The first time was absolutely my fault.  We had far too many kids, over five hundred, in one race.  When two hundred hit the finish line within a minute of each other, there was no way to move them through the “chutes” and get their information.  The line stacked up, out of the chute, into the field, and back down the course.  We did end up getting “the order” correctly, but their times were lost.

We never ran a race that large again.  Adding races made the day longer, but we realized that our “forest” paths couldn’t handle the crowds, and neither could our finish.

Wrong Path

The second time wasn’t our fault.  Some high schools kids from a “guest” school thought it would be fun to change the “gates” that directed kids along the paths.  I got a radio call: the race was in the wrong place, running the wrong way.  We had hundreds of kids running a different path in the forest.

We re-directed them, kept the race moving, and ultimately got them to the finish line.  Those poor middle schoolers ran 2.4 miles instead of 2.0, and while we got all of the order and the times, those times were meaningless.  

The next year, instead of ropes and flags, the gates in the woods were metal posts and steel fencing.  No one would alter our race again.

We never had the colossal disaster, we never completely “lost” a race.  We switched to electronic timing, RFI chips tied into shoes and video camera finish line, and kept on going.  While I no longer manage, the McGowan still continues as one of the best meets in the state.  In the end, kids love to run in the woods.

Last Night in Iowa

Iowa had their “meet” last night.  Iowans love the caucus system of choosing their candidates, they love the community coming together to talk through their choices, rather than the cold solitude of the ballot booth.  The Caucus is like Cross Country, it’s freeform and open and infinitely transparent.  Supporters all sit together, cheering and talking, and seeing the choices that all of their neighbors make.   A primary is like track:  ordered, disciplined; easily controlled.  No one changes the gates in a track meet.

Last night Iowa “lost the race”. 

They were striving to satisfy the media demand for information, the public demand for speed, and the party’s demand for transparency.  Instead of reporting a single result, how many “delegates” each candidate earned in each precinct, now they were reporting raw results, from the first count, and from the second count, and from the final count; and then the delegate apportionment.

Iowa had a system that was essentially pencil and paper.  The precincts wrote down the numbers, then at the end of the night called them into a central “scoring” office.  At the office, there were lots of people ready to tabulate the results.  When it was that single result, it took about two hours to tabulate the 1700 individual precincts.

Too Much Information

But this year, with all of the extra information coming out, the Iowa Democratic Party decided to use  modern technology.  They had an “app” developed for phones, and asked the precinct captains to download the “app” and report using it.  The problem, in our era of Russiagate and hacking, using the “app” opened the opportunity for the system to be infiltrated.

The Iowa Dems decided to hold onto the reporting “app” until the last moment to protect it from attack.  But when it was finally released to the precincts, it didn’t work as they expected.  So precinct captains went back to old-school paper system that they knew so well.

But the people weren’t there to take the phone calls in central headquarters, the Party was counting on the “app”.  So now they’ve got a mess.  Hours waiting to give results, and no one there to tabulate them.

The paper trail is there, and we will know exactly who did what in Iowa.  The media, sitting on their hands for an entire Monday night, is making a huge deal of the failure in process.  But the process didn’t fail, Iowans selected their candidates.  We just don’t know the details, yet.

Dems Own It

I know, I heard it all last night.  How can we convince voters to let Democrats run the country when we can’t even run a caucus in Iowa?  Trump is laughing, Don Jr. is goading, the Party looks foolish.  We should “own” the problem.

We do.  We “lost” the race, and maybe Iowa won’t lead off the electoral season anymore.  But in the end, the results will be clear, and defined, and dependable.  It’s not a question of accuracy, it’s a demand for instant gratification.  And that’s the lesson we should learn from Iowa.  Every election, caucus or ballot box, should have a paper system that can backup all of our “fancy” electronics.  Why?  Because disasters happen, and the one thing every election has is time.  Time to count paper ballots, time to make sure it’s right, time to be accurate, not just fast.  

Folks can argue whether a caucus system is a good way to determine candidates, just like they argue about whether Cross Country or Track is better.  I would argue there is room for both:  like in running, each brings out a different set of  skills from the candidates, and from the communities.  Sure the Iowa Democratic Party screwed up, but they’ll get it right.  

Maybe it’s just more paper and pencils.

It’s Monday, February 3^rd, 2020.  It’s the day that many Americans have been waiting for since the early morning hours of Wednesday November 9^th, 2016; when the Trump Presidency became a nightmarish reality.  It’s the beginning of the Presidential election cycle, and for Democrats, it begins in Iowa.

Different Ways to Choose 

If you know anything about the American electoral process, you know it’s eccentric. We have the Electoral College that gets selected to choose the President.  And we have differing ways to choose who are the Presidential candidates for the political parties. 

Here in Ohio it’s pretty simple, you ask for a ballot for the Party of your choice, and then you pick one candidate from the list on the ballot.  It’s an election, and though the winner doesn’t “take all” this year, there definitely is a “first place”.  That primary chooses delegates to the nominating convention, divided by the candidates’ ranking in the vote.

Four states, Alaska, Kansas, Hawaii, Nebraska, will make their Presidential candidate selection using “ranked choice” voting.  Voters rank the candidates by preference.  The “first place” votes are counted, and the candidates with less than 15% are dropped.  Then the ballots are recounted without those candidates, with those that had the dropped candidates at first now counting their second choice as first.  The delegates to the nominating convention are then apportioned by those final results.

The Caucus

And then there are the caucus states, leading off tonight in Iowa.  In caucus states you don’t go to your precinct to vote – you go to meet (caucus).  At the meeting, held in a big room (think high school gym) you walk in, and go to the section of the gym designated for the candidate you support.  So go to the “Biden Corner”, or the “Bernie” section of the bleachers, or the “Yang” center court.  When everyone is organized, they count the people in the sections.

No, it’s not over.  When the first count is done, any candidate that doesn’t have at least 15% of the total no longer counts.  Those who were in their “corner” are now free to go to their “second choice,” any other candidate still in the count.  So in that brief reorganizing time, there’s a tremendous amount of persuasion as neighbors try to convince neighbors to come over to “their” corner.  After the second count, the results are reported, precincts are added up, and the delegates apportioned.

Stand UP

In the caucus, neighbors have to literally show up and stand up for a particular candidate.  Unlike the secret ballot in the voting primaries, in the caucus states neighbors get to see where everyone in the neighborhood stands, literally.  By the way, there are no eligibility rules, if you show up to participate in the Democratic caucus, you are a Democrat for that night.  This leads to some concern that Republicans might try to “candidate shop” to choose a weaker candidate to oppose President Trump.

But that can happen in any primary.  Even here in Ohio, where you have to declare a party to get a ballot, you are allowed to switch parties.  Generally though, Republicans take a Republican ballot, and Democrats get their Democratic ballot.  Most people don’t get hung up in trying to “rig” the general election.

The Start

So, after a year or more of debates, discussions, plans and pledges; we finally begin the process of choosing.  It is “just” the beginning, the primary cycle will continue into June.  And even then, there’s no guarantee that the Democratic Party will have a “winner”.  There may still have to be another “caucus”,  the big one at the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee in July.  If you understand the Iowa caucus method, then you have a pretty good idea how a “contested” Convention might turn out.  A first ballot with no “winner” would then start a “re-sort” like the gyms of Ottumwa, or Davenport, or Limoni.

The Democratic Party is raucous. “Bernie Bros”, “Yang Gangers”, nervous Biden backers, Warren planners, fresh-faced Mayor Pete followers and all the rest are fighting it out.  Except of course for Mike Bloomberg, who’s buying up all of the television time. They will test each other, raising questions about policies and attacking past records.  Don’t worry:  they won’t reveal any secrets that the Trump Campaign didn’t know.  

And by Thursday, July 16^th we will have one candidate, and one mission: to end the Trump Presidency.  It’s not that big a deal, just the fate of the American Republic and maybe the whole world.  After all the fighting – Democrats will be one.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press… First Amendment, US Constitution

Wedge Issues

We are living in an era of political divisions.  While there have always been disagreements and differences among voters; today we have refined the art of “wedge politics”.  Candidates, parties and interest groups profit and grow by finding ways to divide people.  Those divisions motivate their supporters to vote, and more importantly, donate.

So we find that the rural impoverished in our nation somehow choose to support the political party that officially represents the wealthy.  It’s not about the money, or the growth in the stock market; those folks never see any of that.  No, it’s about the “moral” issues:  the artificial divisions created to encourage citizens to see each other as “them and us”.

Divide and Conquer

Those groups use the explosive issues of our time:  guns, faith, gender, race.  It isn’t random chance that Fox News, both local and national, with mind numbing frequency, show story after story of “regular people” being attacked.  Who ever heard of the term “home invasion” twenty years ago.  But today, we are told “be armed” to protect ourselves, be prepared for the “stranger” (probably of a different race) coming through the broken window or smashed front door.  Be scared, of strangers who look or act differently and be armed for defense, we are told.

We are told that progress for “others” must be at the expense of “us”.  Our population has almost doubled in sixty years, but we are told that our world is a “zero sum” game.  What we’ve got someone else wants to take, and we should use every legal and social trick to keep it.

It makes it so easy to give into the fear within us, the dread of something different.  So many forces in our society are saying “it’s OK”.

Identity

I spent forty years of my life as a high school track coach.  For forty seasons, I had the privilege of working with young athletes, helping them improve, teaching them the techniques to maximize their efforts, and supporting them through success and failure.  Today in my former profession, there is great unrest over the concept of “gender”.  

When I was a young man, homosexuality was barely discussed.  It was literally placed in the closet.  It took immense courage for a gay person to live in the open, in some places in the United States it was still illegal.  “Straight” folks couldn’t imagine why a person would be gay.  For me it took the willingness of gay friends to talk and explain that just because I was “straight” didn’t mean that I was “right”.  Normal for them was gay; that was their life, even if it wasn’t mine.

Now we know that identity isn’t just gay or straight.  We know that there are folks who are born physically one gender, but are mentally the other.  “Normal” for them is the gender in their brain, to live any other way is to masquerade a lie.  How we can demand of those “trans” folks to live that lie, so that “we other people” can feel “comfortable”?

The Trans Athlete

In track and field today there is controversy of what to do with “trans” athletes.  To some it’s all about competition and “advantages”.  How can an athlete born physically a male dare identify and compete as a female?  “It’s not fair” they say, and in three states, Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, laws have been proposed that would require athletes to compete as their birth gender, or not participate at all. 

They never bring up the other side, the athlete who identifies as a male.  They don’t have the inherent “advantage”, I guess, so they can compete without the same threat.  But the laws don’t make that exception.  There are ways to “balance” the differences, the advantages, so that competition can be “fair”.  If athletics is education, not just competition, shouldn’t it be about encouraging all instead of banning some?

Essentially those proposals tell transgendered kids that they are not welcome in athletics.  All of the benefits of being on a “team”, the very real lessons in learning and life, are denied, even by public schools that are governed by the First Amendment prohibition against establishing “religion” or abridging free expression. Denied because adults are “threatened” by the concept of the transgendered.   Since their mind can’t conceive it, they don’t believe it.

And this is a larger lesson in our current society.  Americans are being told that “our” culture is threatened by these changes.  They are encouraged to take steps to protect “our right” to maintain our own beliefs and prejudices.

WE, THEY and US

WE are allowed to believe what WE want, and to see others as WE wish.  But what WE don’t have the right to do, is tell them how THEY should believe, and how THEY should act.  WE have the right to our own religion, but not the right to enforce that religion on THEM.  In fact “WE and THEY” is the problem. 

It should be US.  WE should have our own beliefs, but recognize that differing beliefs aren’t wrong, just different.  WE need to accept US, a diverse population, differing in religion and gender and race, as all part of a WHOLE.   

Why?  Because we are seeing what division does to our country.  Because we know what we can do as a diverse people who are whole.  And because we face crisis upon crisis, that will take ALL of US to solve them.