Escaping History

Yesterday our group fled the shelter-in-place existence for a short drive across the nearest bridge to a beach in Marin.

China Camp is a small state park on the shores of San Pablo Bay, an estuary of San Francisco Bay. It was for centuries a settlement of the Miwok, later a shrimping outpost for Chinese families in the 1800s. The sole survivor of that Chinese community died just two years ago in 2018.

The beach is flat and peaceful, with a few outbuildings still standing, a wooden pier and an old shrimp boat. Small waves lap the shore as the tides sweep the bay waters in and out. This is a sleepy part of the Bay, lacking the busy shipping trade at the global port of Oakland to the south and east.

Watching six of my grandchildren playing in these waters yesterday, I ran over what I know of the history of the place in my mind. There is an ugliness to it; the Miwok were essentially extinguished in the century after the Spanish arrived; the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 forced many residents of San Francisco and other California cities to flee to enclaves like this one.

I wonder whether they teach much of that in our schools.

Our visit also reminded me that the #Black Lives Matter movement focuses on only one of the violent racist histories of our country. The shameful Japanese American interment of World War Two is another, and our Chinese Americans suffered discrimination for a long, long time also.

Even today, with the pandemic that apparently originated in China, Asian American friends report hostile looks and name-calling from people who blame them for the virus, though they of course are as innocent of responsibility as any of the rest of us.

Each time a social movement arises in America is an opportunity for us to revisit and discuss history with our children and grandchildren. That it may reflect poorly on our ancestors is not a reason to avoid it. In fact, avoiding history is among the worst failings we could experience in our lives; it only leads to repetition, cycle after destructive cycle.

One of my children is a historian; he'll have his B.A. soon, and he has been fascinated by all types of history since he was young. At some point, someone advised him that there are no jobs for historians, so why not concentrate on computer coding instead?

He did not follow that advice. In the end, there is no escaping history.

***

This election cycle is going to be ugly, I'm afraid. Polls show the President's approval rating is very low and has been falling during the pandemic and the mass marches for justice. It is relatively rare for an incumbent president to lose re-election, and it is difficult to imagine this particular one handling losing at all well.

We should expect the ugly personal attack ads in this campaign that unfortunately have become routine in American politics. Each party employs opposition research specialists who not only scour the record of opponents but test with focus groups which type of attack may resonate with voters.

In the media and software industries, I have become familiar with focus groups over the years and I'll be blunt: They are bullshit. Individuals are recruited and classified by gender, age, orientation, income, geography, race, education, creed and every other label you can think of.

Thus classified, they then are considered representatives of "their" type and their political preferences are presumed to stand for the herd. I'll say it again: Bullshit.

The people I've met throughout my career are fully capable of making up their own minds regardless of how much propaganda and opposition targeting they are subjected to.

Polls are wrong many times, but we keep taking and publicizing them. That the polls were so drastically wrong in 2016 has apparently not chastised the pollsters much at all; they're back once again.

With them come the horde of advertising and marketing specialists, the opposition research folks, the attack dogs -- all of whom earn more than our historians. My hope is that this time around, my fellow voters screen out all of that noise and vote their conscience based on principle.

And if they are not sure how to vote that they consult a historian.

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