In Portland, Oregon, where I live, we are in the midst of a major mayoral scandal.¹ To bring you up to speed: Brand new mayor named Sam Adams. Openly gay. Everyone thrilled! Three weeks into term, a local paper prepares to expose him for having had sex with his 18-yr-old mentoree named Beau Breedlove² a few years back. Adams preemptively confesses. Local papers print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys!³ People are at first upset about the sex. Then indignant about the fact that he denied the affair during his campaign. The sex! No, the lies! No, the sex! The lies! They launch an investigation to determine whether or not Adams and Breedlove consummated their relationship before Breedlove was of legal age. Adams apologizes to his constituents in a humiliating press conference during which he gives what I believe to be a reasonable explanation for why he lied about the affair:

He says, in essence, that during his campaign, his opponent was out to slander him by sensationalizing the details of his completely legal, completely consentual (albeit ill-advised) affair. He is acutely aware of the public’s lingering perceptions about gay men. He knows that some still think of them as pedophiles or hunters who pray on young men. He knew that once word got out about the relationship that the newspapers would print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys! and that the burden of proof would rest entirely on him. He says that it is almost impossible to disprove a negative and that if he hadn’t lied, his chance at being Mayor and his career in public service would have been ruined.⁴

As with most political scandals, we are failing to look beyond the sensationalism to discuss more nuanced matters that profoundly affect our culture. Let’s start with the most obvious and work our way down:

The Sex
I think politicians need to agree to a new approach when asked questions about their sexual lives. It would look something like, “It’s none of your business. Next question.”⁵

By expecting our politicians to discuss their sex lives with us, we force them to lie. And when they do so, we unleash our fury upon them. If their sexual behavior falls within the bounds of legality, it should remain a private matter. If they are having sex with minors or with prostitutes who supply them with meth, than I am all for an investigation. But it should be clear in those instances that we are not investigating their sex lives per se, but their illegal activities.

Sam Adams did not have to apologize to us, which he did many times at the press conference, for having sex with an eighteen-year-old. He kept saying that he recognizes how inappropriate the relationship was given their two decade age difference. If it is true that he waited until Breedlove was eighteen, it is none of our business. And I find the need for a statement like that puritanical and hypocritical. Older men regularly court much younger women–often thirty or more years their junior–and as a society we look the other way because we see it as the natural order of things.

I understand that our statutory laws serve to protect our children. But the numbers are fairly arbitrary. If Adams had sex with Breedlove a day before his eighteenth birthday it would have been rape. One day later and it’s a fling. Also, a seventeen-year-old of today is much more savvy than a seventeen-year-old was when these laws were written. If Adams had slept with Breedlove while he was seventeen it doesn’t arouse any different feelings in me than if he’d slept with him when he was eighteen or nineteen.

The Lying
With the election of Obama we have reached a new era, one in which we demand transparency and authenticity from our leaders. I don’t like a lying politician any more than the next person. But I agree wholeheartedly with Adams that if he had not denied his relationship with Breedlove he would have lost the election because the media machine would have spun something sensationalist and torrid from something entirely legal.

The most salient thing Adams said in his press conference was how impossible it is to disprove a negative. That is the kernel we should be taking away from this debate, what we as a culture should be meditating on. We live in a world where people will believe anything. By the time it hits paper or LCD screens it is as good as gospel. No longer is it enough to be truthful and forthright. Public figures must wage constant offensives against the slander and liable hurled at them from every direction. Anyone can end anyone else’s career in the blink of an eye with a few well-chosen and well-placed lies. And this creates the need for public figures to lie even when they shouldn’t have to.

The Really Important Stuff
Adams is the mayor of the 30th largest city in the U.S., a city that has long lead the way in sustainability, green infrastructure, and energy independence. He has been elected during a watershed period for America when the country has the chance to make huge advancements in our energy policy and during which, hopefully, Portland can act like a beacon for cities that are reticent to adopt a new way of life.

That said, Adams’s most egregious crime–far worse than the sex or the lies–is his choice of Amy Ruiz as his sustainability and strategic planning advisor. Ruiz, 28, is a former reporter for one of Portland’s alternative weekly newspapers and “has no experience in sustainability, planning or government,” according to an article in the Willamette Week about her.

There are allegations against Adams that he offered her the job as hush employment so that she wouldn’t continue her reportage on the Breedlove scandal, which she says she put to rest years ago after being unable to mount sufficient evidence to write a story.

Frankly, I don’t care why he hired her. I care that he hired her, that he put an inexperienced person⁶ in arguably the most important position of his administration. It hearkens back to Bush’s misguided appointment of Sam Bodman to the post of energy secretary, his only previous experience having been as deputy secretary of commerce and deputy secretary of the treasury. This was at a time when the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation encouraged the administration to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Swap out “loyalty” for “enthusiasm” and we seem to have Adams’s model.

Maybe if we spent less time worrying about whom our politicians are screwing, we’d be better able to make sure it wasn’t us.

My husband is in his fifth year of medical training to be an emergency doctor. And as yet, not one of his patients has died. ¹

They have a term for this. In the hospital they call him a white cloud.

When a new batch of interns comes in each June, it quickly becomes evident to the nurses and other doctors whether a particular intern is a white cloud or a black cloud. When a black cloud comes on shift the patients tend to be more agitated, require more medication, their vital signs drop precipitously out of nowhere. Black clouds see a lot of action during their shifts: an unusually large number of accidents come into the Emergency Department (ED), existing patients require further intervention; they spend their time at the hospital putting out one medical fire after another.

White clouds, on the other hand, tend to have a calming, stabilizing effect on their patients. Their shifts are boring. People get better, need to be discharged. White clouds struggle to get enough experience performing the different procedures they are required to master, because when they’re around patients don’t need them as much.

It is not uncommon for me to receive an email from Joshua after a shift in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), perhaps the most medically stressful place in the hospital, that says, “All’s quiet in the ICU tonight.” Hours later, after my white cloud has signed off to a black cloud, a patient that was firmly out of the woods takes a nosedive.

Though the medical community acknowledges this phenomenon, they treat it as coincidence, fairy tale, ghost story. ² They do not see it as I see it: an opportunity to witness the powerful effect someone’s energy ³ can have on the well being of others. Imagine if they used this information for healing purposes, if they trained doctors not just to do procedures, but in how to be centered, calm, and hopeful when interacting with patients.

And, of course, the white cloud/black cloud phenomenon extends beyond the walls of the hospital. Don’t we all have people in our lives who cause us to exhale when we spend time with them? And people who stress us out just by being in the same room with them?

It is my experience that the black clouds of the world don’t realize that they are black clouds. They don’t have the benefit of the hospital’s heightened circumstances to get feedback about themselves: when they walk into a room people don’t drop dead. ⁴ As humans we have a tendency to look inward to figure out what kind of people we are. But Joshua’s experience at the hospital has taught me that if I want to know what kind of energy I’m putting out into the world, it’s best not to look at myself, but rather at the people around me.

And the truth is there are days when my cloud is white and days when it is black. On the latter type of days, everyone I come into contact with upsets me in some way: they flake out, they don’t live up to expectations, they are confrontational, they hurt my feelings, they cause me anxiety. I used to blame it on them. But now I know that it is me, that if I shift my perspective and the way I interact with them that their behavior will follow suit.

So I try. I try to put positive thoughts out into the world. I try to put positive messages in my writing. I try to be positive when I interact with people, even when they hurt my feelings. I try, I try, I fail. I try some more.

I was raised in a Jewish family that is staunchly pro-Israel. I also live in the U.S., a country that has been a strong supporter of the Israeli Zionist movement since long before I was born. All the voices that have ever reached my tiny ears have always been from the perspective of what is best for Israel.

Fortunately, I am married to a man (also a Jew) who encourages me to examine every issue, to seek out the truth in every situation even if the truth challenges my beliefs. So for the past six months I’ve been reading up on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and watching every documentary I can get my hands on in an attempt to understand the motivations on both sides.

I have been trying to figure out what can make two people h@te ¹ each other so much that they are willing to sacrifice their own children in order to destroy one another.

The more I learn, though, the more I see how much the Israelis and the Palestinians have in common: they share the same Mother Land, they consider the same sites to be holy, both prize a pious and disciplined life, both love their families, both fear Hamas, both want to live in peace and safety. (They also both know what it is to be a victim and a terrorist.) ²

When the recent attacks started in Gaza my obsession to understand the situation became heightened. I had planned to write a post about my thoughts, my questions, and my confusion, in an attempt to sort through some of them.

But then someone left a note on my windshield.

It said, “Learn how to park, you fucking pig!” The author of the note also went to the trouble, in a carcinogenic coup de grace, to put out his or her cigarette onto it. ³ When I surveyed the damage I’d done, I saw that I had absentmindedly parked my car slightly over the hash marks on the road the previous evening in the dark, which made the space in front of me smaller and more difficult to get into, and about which I felt bad.

Later that evening I discovered a new person I wanted to follow on Twitter. I’d read a blog post of hers about her inability to finish knitting projects that charmed the hell out of me. I sent her a message, making a joke about what all of us knitters could do if we put together all of our half-finished knitting projects. She responded by sending out the following tweet (not to me personally, but to all of her followers):

“You make a mistake if you try and make inside jokes with me and we’re not close enough to have them. I’ll get awkward and hate you for it.”

How can the Israelis and the Palestinians ever hope to make peace in the face of religious strife, occupation, violence, displacement, and murder when people in America h@te each other for how they park their cars or try to reach out to one another with an inside joke? How did this happen to us?

I am just as guilty of thinking negative things about other people as the next guy. I assume that the man who cuts me off in traffic is a hideous person who beats his wife, and that the woman who confiscates my tweezers before I go on the plane is married to her twelve cats and hates her life. I also sometimes think of very unneighborly things to do to the cops who issue parking tickets.

But lately when I find myself in these situations, when I’m thinking terrible thoughts about someone I don’t know, I imagine my husband, Joshua. Whenever anyone is rude to him, treats him unfairly, or is generally wretched, he turns to me, usually scowling indignantly on his behalf, and says, “They must be having a really bad day.”

A friend of mine has been encouraging me for months to start marketing my writing. According to her, no one can find out about your work if you sit at home in your pajamas and never go outside or talk to anyone.

      ”But I don’t have anything to promote,” I told her. “The book’s not finished yet.”
      ”If you wait until you have something to promote, it will be too late. You need time to build up a following.”

I always wanted a following.

So I did what she told me. I signed up for Facebook. For Digg. For Red Room. For Twitter. ¹ And I have not done any writing since. It turns out that marketing your work is more time consuming than working on your work. But it has given me the chance to dip my toe in the sea of self promotion, a deep and terrifying place.

What I have seen is humbling. The world is awash in talented people who all seem to have more time to self promote and more moxie with which to do so than I. Some even have secondary blogs to promote their primary blogs, which in turn promote their radio show, which helps to keep their speaking engagement dance card full.

But I am just a writer, a person who can only figure out her place in the world by sitting in front of a typewriter for six hours a day. I am not particularly telegenic, my voice is not mellifluous, and I don’t thrive in a crowd. I have only one blog, and its sole purpose is to interest people in the things I find out while sitting in front of that typewriter.

So how does someone like me cut through the clutter? With so much content floating about it feels like a daunting task. I wonder if we aren’t approaching a state of supersaturation. I myself have become so consumed with building an audience that I sometimes find I have little energy to be a good audience for other interesting people I meet along the way.

It begs the question: Is our attempt to share our creative endeavors with as many people as possible having a paradoxical effect? Is the barrage of information numbing and narrowing all of our potential audiences? One can’t help but notice that in a time when it is easier to disseminate one’s work than ever, it is harder than ever to get people to notice it.

I discovered the word Retrotech on one of my favorite blogs. I have not been able to find a proper definition for it on the interwebs, but I don’t believe I need to; I reckon it means different things to different people.

For those of you who Tweet from your iPhones, Mac OS 10.5.3 is retrotech.

For my fellow Luddites and nostalgists, I offer my favorite examples of retrotech for your consideration:

IBM Selectric I
Pong
Handwritten letters
Tin can phone
Lite-Brite
Shrinky Dinks
Photo booths
Skeleton keys
Records on vinyl
Books

If you have any of your own to add, kindly letterpress them onto a sheet of papyrus and send them to me via post. Or you can leave a comment below (sigh).