I already knew. I knew political and other elites largely controlled the media I was subject to locked down in my house. I knew business and political leaders not only won’t fix our world — they can’t.
And I already knew what they can, and will, do is work together to fix their worlds.
So I chose not to sit inside, cornered there to find out what was happening to my country through a device screen.
As a former marketing and advertising professional, I was less interested in what media was reporting than in what media was doing — its effect on people, on communities, on the emotional atmosphere of places I knew and places I had never been. From my time in advertising and later consulting in national defense, I had learned not to trust media at face value. I also could tell from what I was consuming that journalists themselves weren’t even going out. And so I went out.
I traveled between locked-down and unlocked areas, left communities and returned to them weeks, months, and years later — wandering back in different places and during different phases. I used no GPS. I listened to only local radio. I wouldn’t decide where I was going until I left the place I was. I’d leave and stop, reviewing what I saw and what questions it raised. Sometimes I’d circle back looking for answers. Other times I’d go on looking for the answers, and for new questions. I found myself learning over time to read where a place was in its lockdown cycle without even knowing the official state of lockdown.
I wasn’t building any case. I simply valued primary source information. I wanted to discover for myself, unaffected by the allegations and arguments of those cloistered behind four walls and assumptions. Plus, I wanted to become someone whose understanding of this country came from primary evidence rather than hearsay, someone capable of moving authentically among the full diversity of my nation rather than the narrow slice of it that agreed with me. I wanted to change myself according to reality, not group think or the market positioning of media platforms.
That question of institutional support was already settled, too. I had found plenty of it over the years — and found, each time, that it came with a pull toward someone else’s framing, someone else’s ideologies and conclusions. I wanted reality. I also knew, from years handling marketing concept and creative at the Fortune 50 level, what happens to my process of analysis and evaluation the moment it is being packaged for others. Real world data begin serving the concept and creative being sold. I had watched that happen too many times to let it happen in this deep personal quest. Truth, as I had come to understand it, had to be built from direct encounter — unmotivated by clicks or other rewards — or it wouldn’t be wholly honest, nor completely real.
What I found, among other things, was a society in the process of choosing who gets to live and who gets to bear the weight and the costs. The investment class and the remote-work class sheltered in place. Their children attended private schools with the resources to move online. The lesser-advantaged had no such buffer — unable to work, unable to keep shelter, unable to educate their kids, left exposed while others debated policy from the safety of home offices. It was not malicious, exactly. It was structural. And it was a preview.
Because a logic of crisis triage — who gets protected, who gets exposed, who the system is optimized for — was then and is now being encoded into social systems and at scale. Then add the automation of large scale systems and their processes. That automation removed the human discomfort of having to face the people the decision affects. All this while most of the people making the decisions were doing so from home over Zoom. Nobody had to really look anyone in the eye. Especially the ones being cast out on to the street. Accountability among the housed dissolved into algorithms. Accountability among the unhoused dissolved into desperation to survive against the elements and against housing bias.
As I coursed the USA, one of the things that became a measure for me, in ways I did not anticipate when I started, was the presence or absence of smiles on children’s faces. There is a story behind how that happened. I will save it for another time. There is another story waiting here too — about a process of social displacement arising out of longtime increasing income inequality and class apartheid the lockdowns simply went on to accelerate. That displacement continues now, as Middle East war rages, and as self-learning machines replace blue- and white-collar work alike.
The lockdowns were one event. Their effect on community — and our collective unwillingness to reckon with that effect — is another event still unfolding. This time of our lives deserves books, a series of conversations, a national discussion.
This here is merely a marker that the Human Peace Project is grounded in more than matters about automated processes and the people who control them. Those processes matter, of course, because the humans they act upon matter. During the lockdowns I went out to look directly. And deeply. What I found changed me. I found an intimate touch to our vital interdependencies with Creation and one another. I found what this project is reaching toward.
On social displacement and of healing communities there is more than has yet appeared on these pages. Please come back. I am working as fast and as hard as I can.