Back in the Rain

S. and I had lunch Thursday. Like most of the young and not-so-young professionals whom I encounter, he becomes animated, even agitated, when the subject turns to politics. S. holds views that are nearly the opposite of mine, but he’s got a good heart, and I always enjoy our discussions. Besides, if I refuse to converse with those who believe that conservatives are driving the country over a cliff, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody in my office or most of the people at my church or even in my own household.

We met at the Metropol on Sutter. He ordered the salmon and I the meatloaf. We both have to watch our cholesterol, but I needed the comfort food after a six-block walk in the winter storm. S. was my manager when I worked at the San Francisco office of Touche Ross, one of the national CPA firms. He moved on to banking, served on the staff of the FASB, and is now the finance director at a non-profit foundation. Add to that his MBA from the University of Chicago, and it’s hard to win an economic argument with him.

When we sat down, he got right into it: so, do you like the direction we’re going? Over the next hour and a half our discussion flitted from the national debt to tax policy to government spending, from wiretaps to the futility of maintaining privacy in a wired world, from asymptotic curves to the approaching Singularity, from functionalism to predestination, from the isolation he experienced in Colorado Springs to the fish-out-of-water feeling that I get in San Francisco.

In the spirit of the Season, I will only note some fundamentals on which we did agree: 1) the pace of change is so rapid and our legal system is so far behind technological developments that it didn’t matter very much whether our respective views on domestic policy were enacted into law—we are on a runaway train, just trying to hang on. 2) we are worried for our children, not so much for their survival, but whether they have the judgment, the skills, the grounding to navigate the confusing, cacophonous world that they will inherit. Would we rather be us or them? S. and I both picked us.

On that note, I bade S. a Merry Christmas, promised to do this again, and walked back in the rain. © 2005 Stephen Yuen