dennis – Page 4 – Dennis C Merritt

Law and Order

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups…”

I was just starting up with a new girl friend who had a third floor walk up apartment in Charlestown MA, which had a reputation as a tough town.

She told me that not too many days ago she had been raped in her apartment. An actual real home invasion sort of rape. The guy had climbed up the fire escape and came in through a window and used a kitchen knife he found to threaten her.

It was the sixties, things moved fast and I wound up staying over with her. After we had gone to bed we heard something in the hall. We thought it was her cat, but then the guy appeared in the bed room door.

He had a cowboy style bandana mask on his face, and his junk hanging out. Instead of a knife, he was brandishing a knife sharpener he had found in the kitchen. I was naked and stood up and looked at him. He looked surprised and asked me what I was doing there.

I was scared but tried not to show it. I told him if he left now there would be no trouble. He thought for a moment, and then seemed to agree. He left.

We then realized that he had been in the apartment the whole evening, hiding in a closet. We had been out, and we’d come home, he was already inside. Shudder.

We called the police and the uniformed officers didn’t seem to have ever seen any TV about policing. They handled, with their bare hands, the knife sharpener and just casually looked around and really didn’t seem to take note of anything.

The two detectives were different. They said their name fast and we always referred to them as Mike&Jimmy. They too didn’t seem to care much about evidence, but acted like they were on a mission.

A couple of days later they said they were pretty sure they knew who did it and asked us to come to the police station to identify the guy. They had had him called in on a phony excuse about his driver’s license. He was standing in line. Mike&Jimmy pointed him out.

A chill went up my spine. Although I never saw his face, I knew it was the guy. My girl friend felt the same way.

Mike&Jimmy took us to their office. They showed us a picture of the guy. Then they said, here’s a book with a bunch of pictures. Go through it and pick out his photo.

We did. (TV crime viewers will know this was, of course, an illegal identification.)

They told us when we got to court we would be asked if we did the identification by looking at the book of photos first. We should testify that that is what happened.

There was a back story. This guy had been involved in a number of rapes in the town. One of the most recent was of a nine year old girl. Mike&Jimmy had the guy, had the girl’s testimony and were ready for trial.

Then the parents of the girl decided she couldn’t go through the trauma again, and moved to Baltimore before the trial.

So Mike&Jimmy had no option left but to leave the guy on the streets and wait until he struck again. When he did, that was my girl friend.

They did not want to let him go again, which is why they made sure they got an identification from us, which is why they told us how to testify.

We met with the prosecutor. He also knew exactly what was going on, and we rehearsed how the questions at the trial would go. (Witness tampering, also illegal.)

It turns out this guy was borderline functioning with an IQ of around 70. He was assigned a public defender. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect he was also in on what was happening.

The judge read the charges. The guy was charged with “ravaging and carnally knowing” the defendant.

We were asked the questions on identification and the incidents, and gave our answers. Sounded bad for the guy.

The defense was an alibi. The guy’s cousin said how wonderful he was and how he had taken his nephew to a Red Sox game that day. When asked if she remembered who they played, she confidently said yes. The Tigers, and the Sox won 2 – 1.

The prosecutor was showing a little glee, as he asked for a recess while they located and brought in a special witness, the scheduler for the Red Sox.

Turns out the Sox were on the road that day.

In the summary arguments, the last statement by the public defender was “… and we heard she had cats. I ask you, where were the cats?”

He was put away for seven years.

But still, we couldn’t go into the apartment without first checking every possible place a person might be hiding. It became a ritual. For at least five years, we couldn’t not search where we were living as that fear of a home invasion stayed with us.

So my question is, did we do the right thing? Did Mike&Jimmy? The prosecutor?

Years later I was watching the OJ Simpson trial. Testifying about the glove which might have been planted, detective Mark Fuhrman described how police, detectives, prosecutors and witnesses often worked together on evidence to make sure they put the bad guys away.

He was ridiculed as people said: the prosecutors and the detectives working together to fix a case? No way.

All I thought was, way.

Libertarians vs. Progressives

Our local paper, the Greenfield Recorder, had recently published an op-ed piece advocating a libertarian approach to the pandemic. This was my op-ed published a short while after.

It was refreshing to read John Blasiak’s My Turn a while back, and to see all the dialog he stirred up. It advocated, as many probably know, a pure Libertarian approach to the problem. The Libertarians stress individual responsibility and rights with minimal government intervention. (Like they don’t want the government telling them whether or not they can use marijuana, have an abortion, or own a gun.) They harken back to thoughts such as those expressed in our own Emerson’s essay on Self Reliance.

Here’s what I really like about Libertarians — they are genuinely interested in what they believe is best for the people of this country. You might argue with their vision, but their concern is the best life for the individuals in our country.

The Recorder has a lot of My Turn essays supporting a Progressive agenda. Universal health care, college education for all, things like that.

Here’s what I really like about Progressives — they are genuinely interested in what they believe is best for the people of this country. You might argue with their vision, but their concern is the best life for the individuals in our country.

Both groups want a government by the people, for the people. Not one bought and sold by the interests of the super rich.

You know what I don’t like about the Republicans and the Democrats? Ideally they might echo Libertarian or Progressives views, but they don’t. Both parties are dependent on the wealthy donors who support their elections. We are where we are today through a sequence of alternating Democrat and Republican administrations that serve those donors.

Consider health care. Millions are winding up uninsured as they lose their jobs during this pandemic. Why? Even though we elected a president, Obama, in large part because he promised to fix health care, and even though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, we’re still stuck with the big business of group insurance and the world’s most lucrative, for the health providers, medical system in the world.

Obama recognized the value in either a Libertarian or Progressive approach. He didn’t care if we went to individual free market insurance (Libertarian where everyone buys their own in a free market, like we do with say car insurance) or nationalized health (Progressive like maybe Medicare for all). Either would be better. But of course, Congress didn’t do either and instead got the health insurance lobbyists to write up legislation that sort of promised the insurance companies wouldn’t be as cruel as they used to be, but they’d still be in charge, and still make plenty of money with which to fund elections.

Note that a laid off individual today would still have their insurance if they had bought their own individual insurance (Libertarian) or were covered by government insurance (Progressive).

I would love to see a Congress filled with Libertarians and Progressives, debating the best way to run our government, reaching compromises based on competing views of what is best for the people. Without their main priority being who will fund their next election.

Ranked choice voting can take us there. Make it OK to have Libertarian and Progressive candidates. To hear their voices in the debates (neither Gary Johnson, Libertarian, or Bernie Sanders, Progressive, were heard in the last presidential debates). To be able to freely vote for either without feeling as if the vote was “wasted.”

Represent Us is one organization fighting for ranked choice voting.

Breast Cancer, AI, the Military and More

My ideating friend, Abel Viageiro of Mozambique, was pondering the ways technology could be used to better handle pandemics. Which reminded me of some work my small company, Amzi!, was involved in back in the late 1990s.

War Fighter

The work was for a part of the Army involved in medical technology, and was called the “war fighter” project. The idea was that you put intelligent devices on soldiers that could monitor various health aspects, and then communicate to a local net so that the commanding officer could see the data, which could then be aggregated at different steps and sent up the chain of command. (This was how Abel was thinking, using the Internet of Things and other network ideas.)

The data would be used for various things, one being triage, knowing which soldiers were not going to live, and which had a good chance of survival. The other being that the commanding officer would know the health status of his immediate command, who was still in fighting shape, who wasn’t. Other general health data, such as fatigue, would also be aggregated so higher up the command they would know which units would be most effective to deploy in combat.

Where did we fit in? We were a vender of tools for adding AI rules in network environments. These would aid in the decision making up and down the chain of command.

That project ended, at least for us, prematurely when our sponsor, Fred, in the military died. I don’t know anything about whether the project went to completion or not, or if anything like it is being used today.

Military Spending in the Clinton Years

Fred was also the sponsor of an earlier project that we did complete. It was an online, breast cancer decision support system that helped thousands of women understand and navigate through the course of treatment for that disease. It won us an award from the Smithsonian and the Washington Post said it was the only Internet application worth anything at the time. This was in the 1990s.

Why was this work done for the military? There was a lesson in politics in the project. It was part of how Bill Clinton fulfilled two contradictory campaign promises: 1- reduce military spending and 2- not reduce spending on our military. He did this in part by defunding a center for cancer research and giving those contracts to the Army. So Fred, in the military, was getting funding for non-military work on cancer.

The project was also a lesson on internal politics. These were Fred’s pet projects, which he nurtured and saw through. When he died, ironically of cancer, a brain tumor, nobody else stepped up to take over “his” projects. So the funding stopped. He was a bit of a cowboy, an outside-the-box thinker (for the 1990s) and no-one else in his area quite had his vision.

Marketing AI in the 1990s

We got involved with Fred as the result of our work trying to capitalize on integrating two relatively new (1990s) technologies, AI and the Web. We had developed a product we called WebLS (Web Logic Server) that was an easy to use tool that allowed developers to encode decision making rules into a Web site. (for online diagnostics, sales recommendations, advice giving, etc.)

We were going to make our fortune selling these at $99 each. We had ads in all the right places. And we waited. We didn’t get a single sale, not even a single inquiry. It seemed nobody cared.

Except Fred. He was the only one who saw our well-placed ads and saw the tool’s potential, as eventually realized in the breast cancer system.

It always seemed strange to me, WebLS didn’t generate a single $99 sale but led to a number of years of government contract work that, while not making us rich, definitely contributed to the retirement I’m currently enjoying.

And Now for Something Completely Different

To be clear about the breast cancer system, we were not experts in breast cancer treatment. We developed the software framework for the system, which was then used, with our help, by medical experts to encode the actual knowledge the system provided. In other words, we understood AI and the Web and worked with others who understood breast cancer treatment.

As part of that work we were in interviews with the various specialists that might be involved, such as surgeons, ontologists, radiologists, psychologists and others.

It was all very technical and somewhat dry, but the interview with the psychologist at Walter Reed made a big impression on me, given my fascination with mind/body health issues (see Reflection).

He said (this is just that one psychologist’s opinion at the time) that the women who had breast cancer fit a similar psychological profile. They had emotionally given totally of themselves for the lives of people close to them, their husbands, children, parents, etc. Those who reacted to the disease by making changes in their lives, paying more attention to maybe their own needs, had a much greater chance of survival than those who didn’t.

I did, by chance, get a second opinion on this a number of years later. I had just casually met a doctor who was involved in cancer research at Duke University. I had asked about what he did, and in a relatively dry and boring way he was relating to me some of the medical research he was doing.

It occurred to me to see what his reaction would be to my story of the psychologist. I didn’t expect his reaction. He suddenly lit up, became very animated and said, yes, yes, that’s it exactly, said how important it is to change the way one’s living in order to survive, and went on to tell me of his wife’s work that was very much involved with that side of it.

These ideas are scary, nobody wants to hear them. Dry medical information is much more comforting. The psychologist never explained his emotional profile idea to a patient directly, but instead tried to gently steer them towards new paths or attitudes in life.

And so, interesting anecdotes about the mind/body connection, in particular about breast cancer. But today the march of science has made it not as relevant for breast cancer. Today, most people survive breast cancer, so not such a big deal. I know a number of these women. One, a nurse, after being diagnosed said just cut these puppies off and let me get back to work. She’s doing fine.

Qualifying for the Boston Marathon

I like to brag that I once qualified for the Boston Marathon. Anyone who knows anything about that race is impressed. One needs documented fast times in one or more previous races to simply get to the starting line. That’s how it is now, and has been for quite some time.

But back in 1968, to qualify all you had to do was send in $5. I did that.

Now I had been running some, and thought I would do OK, but I spent the Saturday/Sunday before the always-on-Monday race climbing. So when my alarm went off at 8:00 AM Monday morning I was faced with two choices.

1 – get up, drive out to Hopkinton and then run 26 miles back into the city, or

2 – go back to sleep, wake up later, make a big pancake breakfast, and go out and enjoy watching the race.

I made the logical choice.

My Professional Dance Career

Back in the 1970s in Cambridge Mass. a recent Harvard MBA graduate had an idea for a business. Serious dance lessons for non-serious dancers. Instructors that taught jazz and ballet dancing in studios with wood floors and mirrors and bars. But for ordinary people.

He called it “The Joy of Movement Center” with a number of studio locations through out the city. It was a huge success, all sorts of people signed up to learn the sort of dance serious dancers did, including my wife and I.

We thought we were a pretty good dancers, what knowing how to do the Mashed Potatoes and all, and were fairly athletic 20 year olds at the time, so we signed up for Intermediate Jazz because, clearly, we were past beginner.

Huge mistake! There were 5 6 7 8s coming at us faster than we could process, and isolations and moves and complex choreography. We quickly developed a lot of respect for serious dancers.

Our instructor had a professional dance troupe, “Becky Arnold’s Dancing Machine,” and she’d just lost one of her male dancers. Male dancers were hard to find and she needed a replacement for one number in her show and I showed some promise.

So she asked me to be in her show.

Well what a trip, of course I said yes. And she worked with me on the moves and the choreography but I had such a hard time remembering the sequences, and even when I did, well I got the moves but probably not with the pizzazz I should have.

Then came the night for our performance, at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston. It was lightly attended, but still, there was an audience. I made it through all the moves, so no great embarrassment, but that’s probably all I can say.

Becky came up to me after the show and gave me $5, my share of the gate. And told me I wouldn’t be needed any more.

But still, that makes me a professional dancer, right?

Epilog — We remained friends with Becky and her husband, and took a number of other courses with other instructors and enjoyed them all. But then, sigh, people, there were arguments between the young business guy who started it and the instructors and battles over money and the whole thing fell apart.

Generational Differences

As I talk with my grandkids, I note the key disconnect between generations. Not just ours, but probably all since time began.

I’ve been 20, and I’ve had kids who were, and now grandkids. And I’ve read some history. From that point of view it’s easy to see the general pattern of 20 year olds reacting to the world they find themselves in.

It’s a perspective the 20 year old can’t possibly have, and it leads us, the elders to a sort of smug condescending sort of attitude.

But the world this crop of 20 year olds is entering isn’t at all like that of their parents, or grandparents. This is true for every generation, but in our particular case we, the elders, know nothing about the social norms of today, the problems with dating, the difficulty with getting an education, the dismal job prospects, the anger over the environment, etc. etc.

In other words, from the 20 year old’s perspective, we simply don’t get it. They’re right, and our blindness to the current world pisses them off.

So there’s the basis of the conflict. The elders see the larger patterns that the youth can’t see, and the youth see the realities of the day that the elders can’t see.

We, the elders, understand well the pattern of angry young men. But we haven’t a clue as to what it is that makes them angry today.

Millennials and Boomers

Being one of the first Boomers, born in February of 1946, I do tend to bristle a bit at the critiques of my generation. Like how we don’t get white privilege, we’ve let climate change destroy the planet, we’re complicit in huge economic disparity, etc. etc.

Well, OK, that’s all true. But look at the world we came of age in–nobody had to explain white privilege, blacks were getting lynched, couldn’t ride on buses, had to pee in the one filthy ‘colored’ rest room at the back of the gas station, women couldn’t hold a fraction of the jobs they can now, and when they did at a fraction of the salary, you couldn’t breath the air around cities, you couldn’t swim in the rivers or drink the water, and American imperialism was at its worst.

The Boomers ended the Viet Nam war (which was started by a Democrat, by the way), started Earth Day and the EPA (put in during a Republican administration — these issues have nothing to do with the two-party system), got Civil Rights legislation passed, integrated our society, and started the Feminist movement.

(On a personal note, I used to bike to work in Boston, and when I started doing that I could hardly breath when I got there. Just a few years after the EPA, the air was clear on my commute.)

But, was it the Boomers? I don’t think so. It was young people. We were in our 20s, we saw the world our complacent and clueless parent’s generation was trying to tell us was just fine. And it wasn’t. And they didn’t get it. So we rose up and became the change we wanted.

Our rallying cry: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”

But wait, our parent’s generation? Weren’t they “The Greatest Generation?” How could this be? They were the ones who saw a world under threat of dictatorial fascism, coming at us from both our East and our West. They were the ones who survived the Great Depression brought on them by Capitalism run amok. Them? The problem?

It wasn’t actually the generation label that was key. It was their age. They were 20 year olds. 20 years olds who saw the world was in trouble, who lied about their age to get into the War, who if not fighting made rivets to support the War, who risked their lives so no one had to submit to the tyrannical rulers literally trying to take over the world.

And then they came home, and enjoyed the economic benefits, and got complacent in their life styles, and turned blind eyes to the injustices around them. And had kids who, well, that goes back to the beginning of this essay.

I look at the world today, and so much is wrong with it. But I’m OK, I’ve got my house, my retirement, health insurance (Medicare)… yes, complacent. Yet I see and hear the Millennials, and how angry they are, how they can’t own a house, can’t get a job, can’t get health insurance, to say nothing of watching the environment go to hell and politicians continue to support the 1%.

I say go for it. The world desperately needs a dose of fired up young people. They’ve changed the world before and I believe they’re going to do it again. I for one am kind of excited.

The times, they are a-changing. (our music was better)(Dylan was 23 when he wrote that song)

General note on generational differences.

Showdown over Star Occultation

A story of a workplace bully

I was a programmer working at what was then called the M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab. It serviced various engineering contracts, mostly large D.O.D. ones, but other, smaller ones, as well.

My group was working on a contract involving atmospheric study from space. One small part of that small project was Star Occultation.

Looking at a star from space, as it sets behind the earth, the light changes as it starts to get obscured by the atmosphere. Given equations for how various atmospheric components affect the light, it’s possible to work backward from the dimming star light to deduce the make up of the atmosphere it settled behind.

This project had only two people. Myself, the programmer, and Terry, the lead scientist, a PhD student at M.I.T. Terry was to provide the equations, I was to write the program implementing them.

Terry was, well a bit arrogant. I remember him showing up at our offices one day complaining about how unjust the world was, that, for example, a plumber could go out and get a job that would pay more than he might make, he, that is, an extremely intelligent person with a PhD from M.I.T. How could it possibly be a mere plumber might be worth more than him?

You might guess where he thought a programmer should fit on the hierarchy of worth, compared to a PhD. It showed.

Well Terry gave me the equations to program up and we had some test data (from the X15, the space rocket that preceded satellites).

So I did, but when I ran the program the results all came up zero. I showed it to Terry. Controlling his irritation he patiently explained I’d clearly programmed it wrong and I should check my code.

I did. The next day (those were the days it took a full day to get the results of running a program punched into a deck of cards) the results were still zero.

I heard him go into my boss’s office and vent for all around to hear about how incompetent I was, how could it be we didn’t have a programmer who could code up a simple set of equations, and how I should be fired and replaced by someone who could handle the job.

That was Friday.

As a scrawny, quiet, geeky sort of kid, I’d run into bullies in school. I’d learned (different stories) that bullies don’t like it when you fight back.

So that weekend I went home with his equations and looked at them from a pure mathematical perspective. And on Monday morning asked if my boss would call Terry over.

The three of us sat in his office and I went to the white board. Oh yes, I was all wired up. I then proceeded to prove, mathematically, that the equations Terry gave us would always generate a zero result.

You should have seen Terry. He didn’t say a word, stood up, shoved his chair out of the way, and stormed out slamming the door as he left the room. (We never saw him again.)

My boss and I sat in the quiet left behind for a moment. He then looked at me and said, well I guess you’re now lead scientist on Star Occultation.

Covid-19 and Anger

Various healers through the ages have looked at the links between underlying emotions, or maybe Karma, or maybe God, and the trials people suffer.

It’s in the Old Testament, Eastern religions, 1800s authors (See the Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick) etc. I don’t want to make a case for or against the idea here, but rather, just for a moment, look at what seems a Twilight Zone moment happening right now.

One aspect of the idea is that symptoms of a disease express the emotions underlying the disease. I’ve heard of a number of these links but the one that rattles around in my head is this:

Anger manifests itself as a cough.

And here is Covid-19 spreading through the world, and all the news for the years leading up to that have been about how angry and divided people are. In this country, but in the world as well.

Populist leaders rising to power riding the anger of people who feel they have been ignored and betrayed by those traditionally in power.

And then a backlash of anger from those who hate the populist, often authoritarian, leaders.

Judging by my FaceBook feed, there are a lot of people just boiling over with anger at Trump. Who continues to be popular amongst all those who are furious at the liberals ruining our country with their hypocritical self-serving policies.

Maybe Anger is the Pandemic, and Covid-19 the symptom. Maybe, yes we need to wash our hands, but also, maybe start to try to figure out how to dial back the divisive anger pervading our country and the world as well.

Tales of a Dance Monarch

The issue of complaints among dancers is a difficult one. Having been involved in running a number of dances for a number of years, I’ve decided to document some of the cases I’ve dealt with in an attempt to illustrate the complexity of the issue.

A was a, maybe 30ish, dancer who could best be described as extremely arrogant. He had a way about him that put a lot of people off, and a strong lead that some women didn’t like. He also had friends in the dance community who did like him. Nobody thought him a sexual predator, but some women would not dance in a line with him.

This was a dance where we had decided to have three people talk to a problem dancer. We did. He simply got defensive, said nobody complained to him. He continued to dance the way he did and eventually stopped coming because I think we pissed him off.

I was invited to join the board in part because I was sympathetic to some of the issues of the young lady dancers and the problems they were encountering with unwelcome advances from older men. This led to a period in the dance where announcements were made targetting creepy old guys, with statements like “if she’s young enough to be your daughter, treat her like your daughter.”

The net result of this was the announcements, instead of painting a picture of a welcoming fun event, painted a picture of a viper’s nest of sexual predators. Not sure that’s what we wanted to do.

There were announcements made to counter the then ethic of always accepting dance invitations. You didn’t have to say yes to someone who creeped you out.

This era was more complex than it might seem. Were there more creepy old men then? Well there certainly were some who loved to dance with young girls and maybe closer than they should. But I would say the majority of men simply liked to dance with dancers of all ages and enjoyed the cross-generational contact that is often so missing from our culture.

I spent a fair amount of time talking to various young women at the dance to get a sense of their feelings on the issue. Again, yes there were some bad apples, but mostly these young dancers wanted to dance with just their young friends and didn’t like it when people of their parent’s generation would ask them to dance.

One young lady told me the biggest problem she had with the dance was that there were so many people who thought they could dance in “their” line. She didn’t even want to encounter people not in their clique as neighbors, let alone men from a different generation.

I had the sense that maybe the dance powers of that era were played into villifying older (and I mean over 30) men to allow a very active and dynamic young clique to stayed closed to outsiders.

It’s still more complicated — that young clique got a lot of criticism from the elders, but everything we said dance should be, a community, a place of mutal support, a welcoming place, etc. etc. was true in spades for these young dancers. That community they had, within the larger community, did everything one would want a dance community to do. Some said they didn’t think they would have survived those turbulent early years of life without the support of that young community.

The school we danced at received a lot of complaints from freshmen who attended the introductory dance. The school had a committee of people designated and trained to handle these sorts of issues. We had a meeting. (I was the only man in attendence.)

There were five catgories of complaints registered against the dancers at our dance. Four of those complaints could have occurred at any event where men and women were together. Unwelcome compliments, attempts to get someone to leave the dance with them, and in general all those situations where a man might hit on a woman and the clueless ones don’t pick up on the cues that his overtures are unwelcome.

These things could happen at work or a church social. It’s about men and women trying to balance the normal activities of life with underlying hormonal urges.

One of the five categories was dance specific. Men holding the women closer than they felt comfortable with. This could be something we could address. But again, it’s complicated, this was also an era where grinding was common at the dance and lots of couples enjoyed close physical touch during the swings.

We spent a lot of time teaching women how to assert their space by holding a dance frame at the distance they want. Left hand placed on shoulder in a way that it can push out. This lets the woman be in charge of the distance. I taught that when I was teaching.

Then I had a very educational experience — I sometimes enjoyed what was then called the lady’s role. There was a guy, bigger and stronger than me, who I wound up having to swing with mulitple times in a dance with a shadow swing. He went all faux gay on me, saying how glad he was to have this chance and pulling me close, stroked my back, and, well he was joking, but I didn’t enjoy it, and even seeing it coming, wasn’t able to use a dance frame to keep him away. (He was a dancer women complained about as well.)

It was embarrassing to me and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Hmmm, this is way more difficult than it seems.

I had another man try to pull me close after that, but I saw it coming and used a dance frame that was almost a straight arm to hold him away. He got really mad at me and said that’s how he dances with everyone and how dare I push him away. That’s how I should expect to be swung. (He was a dancer women complained about as well.)

About the meetings with the school, well they were very frustrating. I kept asking the experienced people at the school what steps they recommended we should take, and they were always cut off by our board members who instead wanted to describe the steps we were already taking. It was more as if the board members were trying to defend how they did things rather than learn how to more effectively deal with these issues.

The two men I mentioned above were both considered problematic for many women as well. Neither was really a sexual predator, although one was single and, like many people at the dance, enjoyed it as a place to connect with members of the opposite sex. But he was respectful and straight forward, just, well, an asshole.

There are a number of people at the dance who are socially awkward. There was one in particular who did tremendous good work for the dance but who simply rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. He probably had something wired the wrong way. He made the famous comment that everyone at the dance is socially awkward, and that’s what’s so wonderful about the contra community. You don’t have to be cool to be welcome in it.

E was an individual who definitely did have some mental problems. There were difficulties with dancing with him, there were behaviors that were difficult, but everyone in the community knew him and accepted him. Most of the women were happy to give him a dance in an evening.

On bad nights, people would just shake their heads and say E is off his meds tonight. So, maybe a wonderful story about and open and accepting dance community, but not such a good experience for a new comer at the dance.

I used to drive E home after dances. He told me about his meds, he said people want him on the meds, and, well he does it, but he doesn’t like it. He can feel the real him inside and he hates that the meds repress who he really is. If people can’t deal with the real him, well that’s their problem.

He wound up getting in an altercation with another of the problem dancers mentioned above, and we never saw him again. I tried to find him and see how he was, but was never able to.

F was a guy who showed up and waited for the new young dancers. He would hold them close, telling them that’s how a swing is done. I was surprised a number of times to run into him and his current new young partner in line, and have the woman (really girl) sink into my arms as if she thought that’s how you’re supposed to do it. I wound up trying to show them the dance frame.

There weren’t many complaints about F, because most ladies didn’t want to dance with him. He always found the newcomers. Many didn’t come back.

This seemed a problem so I talked to him. The problem persisted. I talked to him again. He explained that the women liked dancing with him that way.

He’s one of two people I asked not to come back to the dance anymore. (I was the monarch at that dance.) He didn’t have many friends in the dance community, there was no sense of loss.

G was a guy that was only occasionally at our dances, but someone who danced a lot in the larger dance community, weekends, etc. married to another, really nice, active dancing lady. They had kids and would sometimes trade who went to the dance and who stayed home.

He was a strong dancer and liked to dip whoever he was swinging. He did it in a forceful way, and, while maybe 30 or so, he liked dancing in the “young” line and dipping the young ladies.

A number of the older women in the dance community were offended by his behavior and made a very strong case that he should be banned from the dance. He seemed a nice enough guy, so I decided to watch him dance.

Indeed, he was in the “young” line, and indeed he dipped almost every neighbor lady. But they all came up smiling, they all seemed to really enjoy his dance moves.

I explained this to the women who thought he should be banned, the ones who didn’t like him. I asked them to tell me of a dancer who had a problem with him. They found one lady. I talked to her. Yes, he had dipped her when she didn’t want to be dipped. I asked if she said anything. She said yes, she asked him not to do that. I asked what happened then. She said he never dipped her again.

Despite a lot of pressure, I didn’t ban him.

H was maybe the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. But he was physically awkward and was a strong, not always in time, lead. Some women complained that he hurt them while trying to lead them where he thought they should go.

We’re not talking holding close or anything, just putting pressure on hands and arms that was uncomfortable.

I got complaints about him.

I talked to him, and said women say you are hurting them. Well here’s what happens almost all the time. He got very defensive and said nobody ever mentioned it to him. Right away we were in an antagonistic configuration.

Well time passed, and the issue persisted. One difference, I had learned a little bit about non-violent communication (NVC) which is maybe a misleading name. It might better be called non-judgemental communication. It’s based on 4 steps:

1- non judgemental observation

2- expression of how that makes you feel

3- express a personal need

4- make a request

Armed with this I approached H another time.

H, I said, (1) a number of women have come to me saying they feel you’ve hurt them while dancing. (Not the accusatory, you hurt them.) (2) this makes me feel bad since I don’t like it when people aren’t enjoying the dance. (3) I need to run a dance where the dancers feel comfortable. (4) Can you please work on using a lighter touch when you dance so I don’t get these complaints?

The effect was amazing. He thanked me for pointing it out and changed his behavior.

J was, at least for me, one of the most interesting cases. He was old, very intelligent, and with a personal history of great ups and downs. Many people, including myself, who knew him really liked him.

But he did like to get close to the ladies. And here’s how various women reacted to him. Either evil or as a harmless old man.

A young woman, a sensitive gentle woman, new to our community and staying at our house was watching some dance videos I had. She was suddenly visibly upset seeing J in the video, saying that’s the man who ruined her early dance experiences. She was clearly very damaged by whatever interaction she had had with him. Yes, a bad dance experience can have lasting effect.

Wow. So I asked a lot of other women about him. One was another young dancer, a vivacious sort of lady and I asked if J bothered her with his hands, his grabbing. She just threw it off, saying “nah, that’s just J.”

Amazing, two different young ladies with completely different reactions.

What about the older (again I mean over 30 but also into their 60s) women? One was my partner in a dance. She went over to some neighbor interaction with J, and came back shaking her head and laughing, “J always figures out some way to cop a sneak feel.”

Another said she enjoyed grinding with him, but hated some other strange gesture he had and asked him to not do that. He stopped that and they continued to happily grind away.

I didn’t really have many direct complaints about J. As with E, it was as if he was a likable old guy with some strange behaviors that didn’t stop a lot of the women from giving him a dance in an evening.

But, like with F, he would sometimes go after the new young ladies. I watched him hold this young girl close, squeezing her breasts tightly against him. I asked the girl afterwards if she was comfortable with that. Well I’m like her grandfather, and so is J, and she couldn’t have been more than 20, and well what do you say? She didn’t know, she thought that’s maybe how you’re supposed to do it. She was clearly uncomfortable both with J’s dancing and my asking her how she felt about J’s dancing.

She didn’t come back.

I told J he couldn’t come back either. (Although I’m told he’s reformed and dancing again.)

Having left the dance community, I’ve heard of two dancers who have been asked to leave the dances. Both were long time members of the dance community. Both have personalities that some people like and others don’t.

Both feel as if they’ve been thrown out with no good cause and no good explanation and no good process.

Ironically, Y was one of the people who enforced the ban on X, and who, according to X, didn’t offer due process or explanation just as Y complains now.

I am in no position to judge what happened, but things are so complex and I noticed two really interesting examples where supposedly factual incidents were flipped from what they first appeared.

In one Y complained that there was no process or procedure used for “alleged” complaints in one dance. Well it turns out, there were, and he ignored them.

In another, someone complained about Y hurting them. Well it turns out, maybe, who knows really, that she was hurting him and wouldn’t stop.

This stuff just isn’t that easy.

Well, I know nothing of these two cases, but do have a fear that people might get banned because they’re assholes, or rub people the wrong way. As that one time dancer said, what’s wonderful about contra is you don’t have to be cool to be welcomed.

What if they’re sexual predators driving young dancers away? Well probably should be banned then.

What if they’re personalities that simply piss people off? (Two dancers back in the day famously almost got into a fist fight arguing about how a dance should be run.) Well maybe that should just be people working things out without the need of a higher dance organization stepping in.

There is no Z, but there will be. I tend to think this is not a problem that dance organizers can easily address.

Today I see the dance more like an arena, a place where men and women come together to enjoy an activity which has wonderful music, great dancing, and a constant interaction between all the men and women in the hall. It’s not like you can just dance with your favorite partner all night, or a few select friends.

It’s a learning experience for all of us, learning how to deal with all the dancers coming down the line at you. And there will be mistakes, and people not as good at it as others. And people that really like each other and wind up being couples for life, and people who become good friends and meet and socialize outside of the dance, and people who just piss each other off. Except those people also have friends, and maybe lovers in the community as well.

How much control should the organizers try to exert over the behavior of the men and women acting like men and women at the dance?

I think a lot of it just has to be left up to the dancers. And the truth be known, the dance won’t be for everyone. Some will thrive in the community, others won’t. People will learn who they feel safe dancing with, and also which lines to avoid. Like the one with your ex in it, or that asshole you can’t stand.

But the predators waiting for the new young dancers…. Well that’s where I would draw the line.