Out of the Loop

I don’t keep up with the latest fashions or stay current with many trends, so there are a ton of things I’m not the first to know about or understand.  It seems my all-consuming work and health circumstances of the last week also coincided with an awful lot of things happening out there in the world.  I’m not sure there were actually more than the usual number of major global happenings, but I sure feel extra out of the loop as I emerge from my short personal isolation.

Apparently a private citizen now controls a massive, high tech air force.  That news didn't break this week, but I just learned about it so it feels fresh to me.  It seems like a bad idea no matter when it happened.  It's like part of the set-up for one of the many gritty sci-fi futures I am okay to read about in fiction or watch on Netflix, but I hope never comes to fruition in the real world.

And since when is it advisable to not wear a mask on an airplane?  The CDC just extended the mask mandate on public transportation so public health officials could study the latest Covid variants driving up infection rates all over the country and give us all some guidance.  But instead of waiting for the professionals to do their job, a judge in Florida decided it was actually time to stop with all those (life-saving) mask-wearing shenanigans.

Maybe the world is just too much to keep up with these days.  It does seem like there has been an up-tick in monumentous happenings in the world over the last couple years.  2022 has been especially eventful.  I know I'm not alone in feeling like this has been a very long year... and we're only in April.  Four full months down.  Nine more to go if we’re lucky.

Clearly there’s no way to stay in all the loops.  I just hope there's at least one person who cares paying attention to the all the things that matter.  This week a story broke about something more people should have been paying attention to.  5 years ago the City of Detroit admitted to perpetrating what amounted to a new flavor of redlining.  The homeowners over-charged $600 million were mostly Black, and many lost their homes to foreclosure when they couldn't pay inflated property tax bills.  We learned this week the homeowners still haven’t been made whole by the government.  That we know about it at all means at least one person paid attention long enough to alert some other someone elses.  Now it’s our turn to stay in the loop and spread the word.

Ultimately, it matters who is paying attention, to what, and when.  And it matters who is telling the rest of us what’s going on.  A recent study paid Fox News viewers to switch to CNN for a month instead.  At the conclusion of the study, some of those formerly Fox-viewing folks had changed their mind on important political topics.  It matters who is in charge of writing things down for the people who come after us.  And it matters where it is all written, in what formats and who has access to read and view it later.

I stay in as many loops as I can, both locally and globally.  I hope you all pay attention to what you can as well.  Maybe pay attention to something no one else seems to have their eye on.  I share things that matter through this weekly essay, and I hope you all share important things a little bit further out into the world.  Maybe you'll bring someone into a loop they were out of before.  And we all need to support each other in as many ways as we can manage.

---

Information and Inspiration

• The War Zone: This Man Owns The World’s Most Advanced Private Air Force After Buying 46 F/A-18 Hornets
• NPR: Justice Department might appeal the mask ruling if the CDC says they're still needed
• Detroit Metro Times: Detroit illegally overtaxed homeowners $600M. They’re still waiting to be compensated.
• The Guardian: What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?
• The New Yorker: The People Who Decide What Becomes History
• The Guardian: The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?