Collective Mourning

Flock of birds mobilizing in the sunset - collective freak-out

Climate of Freak-Out

No denying it; a lot of us are in varying degrees of continual freak-out these days, with each new outrage by Trump and his minions. I’m not going to bother itemizing. I’d almost have to say that if you’re not freaking out – or not at least, needing to apply some mindful, proactive effort to prevent yourself from freaking out – then you’re not paying attention. And maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know. I don’t think it particularly helps anyone or anything that I freak out each day when I check the news.

That said, there is something interesting in sharing this “freak-out consciousness” will tens of (if not hundreds) of millions of fellow Americans. In a peculiar way, I have never felt as American as I do right now.

A Different Collective Emotional Experience

I’m a chess nerd. I’m a really strong chess player compared to most people, though I stink compared to most people who’ve been anywhere near as immersed in the game as I have for over 50 years.

One of my primary procrastination habits is to watch chess-related clips or coverage of high-level chess tournaments and matches on YouTube. I love watching grandmasters “commentate” on other grandmaster games, giving amateurs like me a lucid window into the remarkable strategic thinking of the world’s most elite players. (Absent that commentary, I usually don’t even understand the logic behind most of their moves).

Daniel Naroditsky, who died last week, was one of my favorite chess guys on YouTube. Funny, friendly, creative, clear, and a brilliant player in his own right, “Danya” died at age 29. His official cause of death has not been released, but many suspect he brought about his own passing, having suffered enormous stress over the past year due to wild and unjustified accusations that he was a cheater at online chess.

The accusations weren’t credible, but they were made by a former world chess champion, Vladimir Kramnik (who also went after other top players – including the world’s #2 rated player, Hikaru Nakamura — but none as vehemently as Danya). Kramnik had become a peculiar breed of wing nut with arcane data sets and statistics that allegedly signified “very high probabilities” of cheating by various high-profile online players.

Though the people who knew Naroditsky, along with basically the entire professional chess world, understood and affirmed (some more publicly than others) that Kramnik’s insinuations/accusations were bogus and insane, the attacks kept coming and were very hurtful to Danya. They tarnished his reputation because – after all – they were sourced from a former world champ with many online followers, and Danya was plagued and abused continually by trolls on social media (“trogolodyte lowlifes” he called them).

Therefore, many people now blame Kramnik for Danya’s death. It’s intense.

Daniel Naroditsky was widely beloved. A chess buddy of mine met him in person and spoke glowingly of his unaffected personality, accessibility, and friendliness. Danya was widely reported to have been an extremely kind person. This quality of warmth and kindness came through in his online persona, along with a keen sense of humor and an amazing ability to perform spot-on impressions of the world’s most famous grandmasters, such as long-time world champ Garry Kasparov, with whom Danya was pals.

A number of chess luminaries and commentators have posted tearful tributes to Danya. I’ve watched several; they move me very much. I too mourn Danya, though I never knew him personally.

And strangely, I have never felt more like a real chess player than I do right now, in emotional communion with chess players all over the world. I feel myself to be a full-fledged citizen of the international chess community in a completely unaccustomed way.

I know that there are many kind and deserving people dying each day, all the time, far too young, under tragic circumstances. But I don’t know them. I guess we tend to mourn those whom we know personally, or can imagine we know personally.

We may also mourn the horrendous deaths that occur in Ukraine or Gaza or Nigeria, but it’s different, right?

Random Public Service Announcement

If you use your credit card a lot, always check the itemized charges on your monthly statement.

I found a funny charge on my statement this month for $39.95 (amidst a forest of other charges). Didn’t recognize the merchant at all. It was a website: bestpdf.com. So I typed in the website to my URL bar. Guess what? That URL belongs to no one. It’s up for sale.

Called the credit card company. Turns out “BestPDF” billed me for $39.95 last month too, and I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t checked my bill closely. SO … now I’m getting a new card and my credit card provider is crediting my account $79.90.

Clever little fraud. Could have easily gone on a while. Most months I only look carefully at anything three digits (to the left of the decimal) or more on my statement.

So just saying. I did not lose my credit card at any time, but I’ve used it for groceries, restaurant meals, gasoline, online ticket purchases, etc. There are all sorts of ways these days that scammers can harvest your card number. So just check your statements.

Random Higher Thought Exchange

A friend of mine carries the Higher Thought Game cards in a pouch in her handbag, and she drew a question out the other evening, when we met for hot chocolate at the Nalu Kava Lounge. The question she drew was:

Do you think it would be a good thing if world leaders got high together? (They do, after all, drink alcohol together.) Why, or why not?

My answer was that I thought it would absolutely be a good idea. It could impart a sense of sacredness and ritual to summit meetings. It would render leaders more vulnerable; it would induce them to feel the consequences of what they do, to weigh seriously how their words and decisions can impact millions of other humans.

Alcohol, by contrast, numbs a person, makes them dumber, lulls them into a false sense of ease and often even arrogance.

I mused that perhaps Trump would not so blithely do things that hurt and destroy people if he got high. He might not have, for example, so callously and abruptly terminated USAID and its food and medicine programs.

My friend was skeptical. A computer software coder, she had spent a good deal of time in Silicon Valley where, she said, “taking mushrooms became kind of a thing, almost like … taking mushrooms to find ways of increasing shareholder value.” Her overall conclusion: “People are not going to stop playing dominance games just because they’re stoned.”