The Company You Keep

Bad Company might have better songs

This week, I met up with a friend that I haven't seen for decades, when we were just kids, honestly. He's new to my area, needs to step up his network, and we had one of those 90-minute meals where the conversation never lagged. I left feeling completely energized, and followed up with some leads that hopefully helped him on his journey. With luck, we'll meet up again soon and do more. 

Which reminded me of, well, just how the people in my childhood brought me along in their wake, and how one of the shortest ways out of any personal funk is to think about how much I have to be grateful for. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and it wasn't easy; no funds (truth be told, my grades and test scores weren't strong enough), not much aid, and I had my heart set on a name brand, private, and pretty expensive school. It all worked out after many years of paying off debt, but the point that I want to make is that no one makes their way alone. Even once I got out of school, that same pattern of being brought along from the inertia of others reasserted itself at various stops in my career. 

So I know a lot of things about a lot of things, and it's mostly because of people I've had the honor of working with. I've said this enough times that it sounds like a canned laugh line in conversations with clients, but because of the actions and support of others, I've been able to seem smarter than I am. I've also been blessed with a memory, and the ability to focus on individual salient points. Which leads to the ability to tell a good story or two. So with luck, I've started to (hopefully) pay back what I've learned.

The point of this isn't to just tell you about myself. More so, it's to share with you how this came to be. Because the people that I've learned from are all over the map, demographically. That's not a coincidence. Your thinking, and your opportunity to think different things, just gets sharper and better if your peer group is diverse. Rather than getting stuck in the same patterns and tactics, you get outside of your comfort zone faster, hear different perspectives, and in general, just go to different mental places. 

Also, you wind up eating better, listening to more interesting music, seeing different movies, thinking different thoughts. It's harder to be bored, harder to get down on yourself, and just a better way to be. And once you find this kind of peer group, you don't give it up.

So this is where I pivot, perhaps obviously, to the election that's going to happen in a couple of days. One side has diverse support; the other does not. One side has endorsements, whether pursued or not, from expressly racist organizations; the other does not. One side has a higher percentage of supporters who are positively voting for their candidate, rather than simply against the other. One side spends much of their political advertising just simply repeating wildly inappropriate and divisive statements made by the other candidate, in the simplest "attack" ads in recent memory. One side relies on statements that are simply and easily shown to be not true, to a much greater percentage. 

This isn't a matter of getting to simply vote for the side that you normally vote for, or the one that's closer to your history. It's also, due to the clearly perverse nature of for-profit "news", a situation where we may never have a not-close, third party "safe" election ever again. 

That's why the polling for this election doesn't show the usual splits by income, but more pronounced by education level. This isn't a matter of insidious indoctrination into a political belief system; it's simple exposure to a diverse community. (The same thing applies to how one side does well in cities, where a mix is inevitable, as opposed to less dense areas.)

I'm not sure what happens next in our very broken system. This election has been an ordeal for seemingly all involved, and the only true bi-partisan point is that these take too long, cost too much, and just infuriate. But I do know that when you judge the sides by the company they keep, the choice seems obvious. So, choose accordingly.

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