Author: Sean Patrick Hughes

Kids These Days

Today is my oldest’s birthday. I’m now the father of a teenager. While I bolt down the furniture and batten down the hatches in preparation for all I’m told that comes with parenting a teenager, I thought it might be interesting to take some time to reflect on it means to that age in this age.

-If you look at science fiction movies prior to 2005 or so, the one thing you don’t see is a smart phone. It’s the most obvious thing that futuristic predictions got wrong. A touch screen and the types of resolution that make a smartphone possible just weren’t things people could wrap their heads around until they saw it.

In contrast, my son has never lived in a world without one. He has his own. I’m not sure what living until my 30s without a smartphone did to how I think and behave relative to someone who has had the knowledge of the world in their hands their whole life. It’s more immediate and available than the internet alone. And we don’t know what it means to that generation. We’ll learn.

-TV isn’t a thing. 13 year olds watch Youtube on TV instead of TV. The environment they are entertained by has people who simply start a channel and get famous beaming into their living room. When I was 13, it was such a remote possibility that I would be on TV that I never thought about it. It was a bridge too far and I didn’t really care to participate in things that made people famous. Today’s 13 year old lives in a world where they have clear examples of people doing just that on a wide variety of things that interest them. The expansion of the idea that it’s not “crazy” to simply go be someone that’s known and recognized is one that probably matters over the course of time. Though I’m not sure how.

-The gap between how interesting the things a 13 year old can do by himself, without leaving the house and what is available outside in the world within near reach and in the company of others has never been larger. It is no longer realistic to say, go outside and do something instead of just staying here and doing the same old stuff. Because the opportunities to do things in the world of atoms is relatively narrow compared to what is available in the world of bits. Aside from physical exercise, there is a monopoly on high level stimulation that drives creative thinking, problem solving and stimulation on screens. Again, that impact probably matters.

If we think of what it must have been like to live through the late industrial revolution and the shift away from agriculture, we might get an idea. It wasn’t the generation that saw it through that was impacted as much as it was the ones that came when the change was in place and never lived a world where it was viewed as more useful to farm than to work in industry.  That had impacts on nearly every aspect of life. It’s possible this shift is as dramatic.

-It’s also possible that my son will go from 11 to 19 with Donald Trump as president of the United States. The first election he can vote in may be after 8 years of Trump. I’m not sure what that does to a generation of future civic burdens.

-Medical coverage as is won’t survive until he needs it. Neither will social security.

-By the time he’s 25, 30-50% of the jobs that existed when he was born will have been eliminated or marginalized by automation. We have no idea what other human jobs will replace them.

I’m not sure the biggest challenge I’m going to be up against is sighs, eye rolls and forced disinterest. But what the hell do I know. It’s my first day…

Honest Thoughts on Military Service

There are more. Here are 13:

1- I’ve never duplicated the relationships I have that came out of serving together. No matter where or when, seeing someone I gutted out a deployment with brings a smile to my face and a feeling of attachment I don’t have with anyone else. Even though it’s been decades in some instances, I still feel an innate responsibility for those that trusted me to lead them. I hope that never goes away. I’m told it doesn’t.

2- Counter to common narrative, on the margin, I got more than I gave for my service. This is a common reality for those that served over the last 20 years.

My undergrad, grad school and my wife’s second grad school were all payed for by the DOD. The best medical care my family has ever received was in the military. I stayed in the reserves for five years after separation because care the DOD provided for special needs families was something I couldn’t duplicate on the outside. I transitioned out of the military twice and took substantial pay cuts both times.

By the time I was 26 I’d been around the world twice and had command of a combat element. I was financially independent and owned my house.

No benefit received was dependent on anything other than minimum service requirements. Not performance. Not number of deployments. Not pay-grade.

3-In 2004 I completed a deployment with no internet, no mail and only MREs for food.  It was the only experience I wish I could repeat.

4-Physics and my own judgement were the greatest risks to my safety on every deployment. Sometimes the bad guys got a say but that came and went. The other two were always there.

5-Chicken Cavetelli and Chicken with Tai Sauce were the best two MRE meals and I will fight anyone who says otherwise… No one did anything with the meal heaters except make explosives. Tabasco makes everything better. And by better I mean it makes it taste like Tabasco.

6-Being cold and wet is the worst sort of torture. Life’s whole purpose, any life not just human, is to stave off entropy.  We are complex systems designed for one purpose–to keep our cells organized. The first type of disorganization is to lose the heat that separates us from our surrounding temperature. Being cold and wet accelerates that. It’s entropy. It’s the great equalizer of man.

7-I struggle when people thank me for my service. I appreciate it, but it takes conscious effort not to correct them in saying it should be me thanking them for the opportunity to serve. I don’t say that to signal some kind of over zealous stoicism within me. I say it because there’s no competitive market for those of us wired with the urge to do the things one can only do in the military. That’s what it is. It’s an urge. It’s an urge to identify with and do the types of things one can only do in the military. There is no other way to do it.

I served most of my time in Special Operations around men who could do anything that they wanted to do. The only thing any of them ever wanted to be were SEALs, Green Berets or Rangers, or at least former SEALs, Green Berets or Rangers. If not for the unique opportunity of service, where does one live that life?  There is no alternative to SOCOM. Or Naval Aviation. Or the Marine Corps. Or 101st Airborne. None of us chose to play for America over another team.

8-I’m incapable of choosing where to eat.

9-Combat service and combat related mental injuries are rare relative to the broad scale of the military community. What is not rare are the impacts of deployment cycles and the rigor of normal military living. A life knowing you are never more than 18 months out from leaving your family or your home for months or years takes its toll. There’s an impending pain that one simply lives with. And there are things that shut off when one goes away that don’t necessarily light back up again.

Once the externalities of that cycle go away, the internal strife remains. The most common risk for vets when they separate is not what most think. It’s not the bad memories of friends dying in their arms, mostly. It’s the inability to spin down from the cycle and the order. It’s more Brooks from Shawshank Redemption than it is Deniro from Deer Hunter.

We do a terrible job of telling people it’s hard to stop. It leaves the overwhelming majority of service members spared from the worst of combat operations wondering why they’re struggling and feeling shameful for that struggle when they separate.

10-There is no short term beating like what an 11 Meter RIB can deliver to the human body. And there is no more grueling beating than life on a ship can deliver to the human mind.

11-The line between a culture that holds its military in high esteem and one that uses support for the troops to divide politically isn’t that fine.

12-There’s something to the dehumanizing of the enemy that’s more specific than dehumanizing an entire culture. Service in a war zone doesn’t create malformed views on other people and cultures. It magnifies what was there already.

13-Every operation I ever participated in didn’t matter to the interests of the United States of America ten years after it happened. All territory was either never in question or lost several times over after we won it. All wars have continued without end, America or not. No Americans, other than the ones executing the missions, were safer as a result of what I did.

I can’t be honest about the rest of this without being honest about that.

Appreciation for Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is the most effectively produced war movie I’ve seen in a long time.

There are a few things that characterize my time in the military but the one that probably was most consistent was that I was an “ops guy”.  When I wasn’t leading an element in a military operation towards an objective, I was planning, coordinating or driving it from a command and control center.  While I have no problem admitting that I wasn’t anyone’s first pick for a gun fight, it’s also fair to say that I was when it came to running an operation.

Nolan’s choice to show the miraculous retreat from the shores of Dunkirk in WWII from multiple, out of sequence perspectives, captured so much of the essence of what I remember from my time serving.

The trick to running a dynamic operation from the center, I always felt, was being able to hold multiple perspectives in your head. One needed to be able to see what those in the various elements of the operation saw as they were seeing them. To know what they knew and sometimes more importantly what they didn’t know. To feel the flow of the different parts, the urgency of the points of friction, both planned and unplanned. To see the whole problem, from the top down. All the while time and distance are a running clock in the background.

Dunkirk spends little on words and character development and everything on pace, perspective and a mathematical escalation of tension. The diminishing fuel of the pilot. The hidden, deadly enemy of the German torpedoes.

You see no enemy faces. Just the operational thermodynamics of time, pressure and distributed ignorance of the broader picture and hopes for success.

It’s beautiful.

Life Lessons from Parenting on the Autistic Spectrum

The human brain is a complex system. Over millions of years of evolution, we’ve developed a fairly narrow range of normal behavior despite all possible outcomes. There are many different ways for a brain to work outside of the paramaters of normal behavior. There are many less ways for it to work within the paramaters of normal behavior. The fact that the overwhelming majority of us are within specs is a credit to the vast, complex biological system that we humans are.

When things go wrong with the brain, sometimes there’s an acute, isolated issue that either can or can’t be fixed. When they are discovered the outcomes are somewhat predictable. When fixable, they are fixed. When not, arrangements for the consequences are made.

Sometimes, the problem is more obscure. Things aren’t clear. The root cause is in question or completely invisible. For the 1 in 68 children diagnosed with autism, this is very often, even usually, the case. Autism is, after all, not really an ailment. Its a description of symptoms that, once scaled to a level of disability, warrant a diagnosis.

The cause is immaterial to that diagnosis.

We now know things about the impact the environment has on child development. We understand the role that the immune system can play in dealing with things. Our guts feed our brains and therefore develop them over time. We see this in rare diseases where the inability to metabolize proteins leads to severe impairment and death.

But we don’t know what causes autism. And we don’t know how to cure it.

We do know that sometimes it’s cured. And we know the types of activities and environmental characteristics that correlate to higher instances of a cure. But nothing is certain. It’s within this insight that the great metaphor of life that is autism is found for me.

My 11 year old, diagnosed with Autism a month before his third birthday, takes a dozen dietary supplements a day.  He attends hours of therapy—neurostimulation, neuro-feedback, applied behavioral analysis, music therapy, chiropractic therapy, speech therapy—every week.

It costs a small fortune in time and money to do it. And he is not cured.

The lesson of life and autism is one of regret. Or better yet, a lack thereof. I don’t and likely never will know what impact what we do for my son has on his life. Even if he wakes up tomorrow cured, I’ll never know if it were simply natural development or all that we’ve done. I do know, that based on all the latest information, we’re doing the things that yield him the best opportunity to succeed within the bounds of the resources we have available.

The notion that it could all be for nothing, and that one day we may look back at it and wonder aloud to ourselves what else, besides try to help our son, could we have done with the resources we once had, is not one I spend much time on.

It has been my experience in a life surrounded by people who have accomplished great things in vague and ambiguous worlds, that those who make a difference in anything— society, government, science, industry, other—don’t either.

Thoughts on the Helsinki Summit

Political opinions, like most opinions, aren’t sound evaluations of puts and takes on any given societal issue. They’re personal preferences that require some form of matching to an ideal. Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman did great work on how we decide things.

Two good books if interested: LINK , LINK

As someone not raised in a politically minded household who served in the military and was therefore limited in my ability to engage and express political views well into my 30’s,  I was relatively late to the game in paying much mind space to politics. I didn’t form a “world view” at a young age for which I sought to match my perspectives to. There wasn’t an ideal state that was in question that needed to be defended. What political awakening I’ve experienced over the last three years has been a realization that’s simply not the.

For many finding themselves now caring more than they did before, their reason may be explained similar to mine. By virtue of being born when I was and growing up in America during the latter third of the 20th century, post Civil Rights movement and concurrent with the end of the cold war, I’d grown to rely on the ideals of western liberal democracy.

Equality of opportunity. Fair and open elections. Global community. Rule of law. Free press. Free Speech. Due Process. Free markets

These were stated, shared goals for which we evaluated performance against. We didn’t achieve them uniformly. And yes, I’m aware that not everyone believed in them. But they were American platforms for which we would at least try to lead the world towards.

It follows suit then that my exposed bias is towards views that further the values of western liberal democracy. That those views are now only one side of an American political debate is what troubles me and therefore moves me to act when once I was more comfortable spending time on other things.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are meeting today in Helsinki. One reasonable question to ask may be which side of the ledger in the new American political debate to put the Helsinki summit on.

In government, a belief that the ends justifies the means can be problematic. Not understanding the ends nor trusting the means more so. It’s not obvious what’s on the table nor is it likely that we can have open and productive discussions with Russia while more and more evidence that Russia is meddling in American elections comes out. It’s also not obvious when China is the clear check on America for the next century, what role Russia plays in America’s future.

I’d settle for Russia losing a cyber-war with us and staying out of our elections. I’d also settle for the eroding global community ring fencing Russia into poor outcomes if they keep up the shenanigans.

I’m not sure that’s on the agenda for today.

Minimum Viable Trust

“I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn what they have accomplished for their working people”

That’s a quote from Bernie Sanders from an October 2015 presidential primary debate.

President Trump is alleged to have said, in a closed meeting, that he wants more immigrants from places like Norway, instead of “shithole” countries. That quote was leaked to the press so whether or not he said it is reasonably debatable. Whether it reflects the administration’s immigration policy choices is not.

My point in bringing up both quotes is that there is some consistent opinion from differing political perspectives that places like Denmark and Norway are places to emulate. Denmark, is after all, the happiest country in the world according to people who track that sort of thing. When we American’s live in a country founded on the right to pursue happiness, it’s not unreasonable to believe that benchmarking happy places is a worthy activity.

Alas, striving to be like Denmark is a hopeless cause though. As political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out, getting to Denmark societally by doing the things that Denmark has done requires that one start in Denmark. And by Denmark, I mean at a minimum, a metaphorical Denmark that draws on an endless bounty of social trust; that thing that enables people to trust other people, corporations and governments because they’ve got reason to believe they have the common good in mind.

Installing social trust in America has been a bit of a journey. We didn’t after all, start in Denmark. We started with a rebellion against absolute rule, state sanctioned racial slavery, segregation and inequality and at least eight different regional cultures. I recommend Colin Woodard’s fantastic book American Nations if you want to read more on those cultures. LINK

The one result that’s come from America’s asymmetrical start has been an uphill climb for establishing social trust. We Americans are inherently untrusting to the extent that it makes things that ought not be hard, hard. Woven into our culture is an insistence not to do things we know are good for us simply because someone told us to do them. Paying into a healthcare insurance pool for instance becomes a terrible idea as soon as one has to do it. When one doesn’t have to, it’s a great idea.

The Denmarks of the world miss the folksy charm in that logic.

Over centuries though, America has built institutions and held to some consistent values that have enabled us to construct what I like to refer to as a Minimum Viable Trust. That MVT has been enough to keep us moving and progressing slowly, painfully homogenizing into something that one day may resemble one common good that enables us to pool resources and will to solve common problems when we must. It’s something we do well when it involves fighting wars. Less so for other things…at least yet.

When evaluating the performance of representative governments, I think an important aspect, beyond how consistently they effectively execute the duties of government as well as represent political ideology, is their impact to MVT. It doesn’t take much to knock us asymmetrically untrusting Americans off kilter and send us spiraling into civic paralysis. Improving on our woeful level of trust in government, corporations and each other by way of governing within a rule of law that incentivizes such behavior isn’t an after thought. It’s a principle.

How’s that going these days?

Thomas Weber’s Becoming Hitler

I finished reading historian Thomas Weber’s Becoming Hitler: the Making of a Nazi last night. I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Weber is a German historian, Hitler scholar and professor at Aberdeen University in Scotland. The book, his latest, covers Hitler’s life from the end of WWI in 1918 through his publishing of Mein Kampf in 1925.

Though there is almost no mention of contemporary global politics, and the book was originally written in German in 2016, it’s hard to imagine that Brexit and the rise of Trump in America weren’t an input to the tone.

Here are my take aways:

– All politics are local. From the outside how German regional politics played out isn’t obvious to the casual observer. In reality Bavaria, Berlin, and Prussia were and still are very different places in which Hitler’s message played very differently.

-It struck me as unusual how old Hitler was, 30, before he even considered positions of leadership or even taking an interest in politics. Weber also makes it clear how that blank slate was capitalized by Hitler himself through clear and intentional dishonesty in how he chose to portray his political awakening.

-What I found particularly troubling was that the language Hitler used towards Jews is very present in the language some contemporary conservative voices use in how they refer to liberals as a whole. The tainting of the media. The cosmopolitan elite status. The globalization of resources etc.

-At the risk of stating the obvious, Hitler mattered. There’s been an appropriate movement in Germany towards owning the outcomes of WWII and the Holocaust as a people over the last few decades. But Weber is clear. The socioeconomic and geopolitical situation may have been ripe for demagoguery, not just in Germany but throughout Europe. But only Hitler led to the outcome of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s political views, temperament and goals for Germany were what drove the direction of Nazi Germany. In Weber’s view, it matters what kind of demagogue one gets. Some are worse than others.

-Hitler’s core motivating principal was creating a unified Germany that would stand up to any future attacks by world powers. By 1925, he believed the two things that stood in the way of that vision: 1-The presence of Jews in both in Germany and the global capitalist system. 2-Lack of territory, or “space to live” .

-Hitler, from the beginning believed violence was the preferred path to political  outcomes and he attempted violence, multiple times unsuccessfully, before appealing more broadly in a political sense.

-As early as 1924, Hitler’s strategy required genocide of Europe’s Jews, Poles, Slavs and Russians. It wasn’t something that developed over time through necessity. It was core to the message a decade before the message caught on.

-Though tempting because of the current American socio-political environment and the authoritarian bend of the Trump administration on immigration policy, drawing parallels from Trump America to Nazi Germany require a few leaps not easily taken. One thing Weber would likely say is that it matters how similar Trump the man and Trump the strategy is to Hitler. Whether or not violence is his preferred method for resolving issues. Whether or not genocide is a key tenet of his strategies. After 40 years of Trump the man in the public eye, there’s not much evidence of either of those things. But it is critically important to remain hyper-sensitive to signs of them if they show up.

Something There is that Doesn’t Love a Wall

I’ve been reading Robert Frost poems my whole life. There was a giant book of them on the dusty book shelf in my mother’s living room next to the record player, just to the right of the 1985 World Book Encyclopedia set she was always pulling off the shelf.

Before “Alexa” there was an index finger along the spine of neatly rowed, alphabetized knowledge. Then thumbing through gilt edge pages to discovery. Or disappointment. Continue reading →