This is the last time. Are you sad?

Last summer, I started a series of posts about the online word game Psychobabble in which Cara and I met, and that, as our friendship grew, we increasingly used to flirt with each other via sentences we made in the game.

First Psychobbable post (Note: this post includes an explanation of how the game worked. Since it's been so long since my previous post on the topic, it's probably worth including a very brief refresher here. The game was based on magnetic fridge poetry, and in each round, players in a room of up to twelve had one minute to pick some words from a set of around 60-70 tiles and arrange them into a sentence. Then all the sentences were displayed and players voted for their favorites.)

Second Psychobabble post

I intended it to be a three-part series, and now I'm finally getting around to writing the third part, which covers July and August 2006 including the first trip we ever took together, an event that was shortly followed by the end of the game Psychobabble. As before, I'll be posting screenshots of sentences, sometimes with corresponding in-game chat, along with my explanations of the sentences. And as I said in the previous post, "I will remind everyone again that she and I never collaborated on sentence making; every single time that we made sentences that went with each other it was a case of us being on the same mental wavelength by thinking of the same inside jokes or, in certain cases, by some bizarre coincidence."

Now, back to the sentences.

July 9

As shown in my previous post, we really liked to make sentences about going on walks together.

July 10

"Fishing" - as in fishing for compliments from each other - was something we often accused each other of, and made jokes about, in our online chats.

July 11

Cara and I decided that we were going to travel together to Washington, D.C. in early August to see a show by our favorite band, Ozma. This sentence by Cara celebrates our decision to go!

July 13

Cara's sentence was foreshadowing of numerous future walks on which we would hold each other's hands. My sentence is a reference to the fact that I had recently sent her a short video clip of me playing the piano (specifically, a snippet of the Ozma song "Gameover").

July 23

Here we both made sentences referencing the fact that Cara worked at a company called Garden City Group.

Our two sentences both referencing the Ozma song "You Know the Story" go together nicely.

July 29

Cara's sentence is about the fact that she liked a lot of the music I listened to. My sentence teasingly insinuates that Cara liked music we considered bad such as "In the End" by Linkin Park and "My Immortal" by Evanescence.

August 1

My sentence here kind of amazes me. As I talked about in my previous blog posts about Psychobabble, it's one that could plausibly be "just a sentence," but I have no doubt that in my mind when I made it was the fact that I had never been on a real date (something I had not directly told Cara!) and that if Cara and I went out on a date she would therefore be "my first date." Which did, of course, happen, but not until a little over three months after I made this sentence!

August 2

And here's one from Cara that could be "just a sentence" but was undoubtedly actually about her hopes that I did in fact "like her" (as more than a friend).

This was shortly before our trip to D.C. My sentence is obviously about the fact we were going to a show there. Although we were going primarily so that we could see Ozma, they were actually not headlining the show but rather opening for The Rentals (another band we liked), so that's what Cara's sentence is about.

"Speedy speed boy" is something Cara had called me in reference to my being a runner.

August 4

After we returned from D.C., we learned the dismaying news that Popcap, the company that ran Psychobabble, had announced they would soon be shutting the game down. My sentence is about this, with a classic Garden Fight reference. I should also mention that of the two people who voted for my sentence, one was (of course) Cara, and the other was... Cara's mother! But I didn't know that at the time. Actually, a while before Cara had told me that her mother played Psychobabble, but I thought Cara was joking, and when it became clear I thought she was joking, Cara decided to play it off as if she had been joking rather than continue to try to convince me. It wasn't until years later that I learned the truth.

Just days before we went to D.C., I broke my arm after falling down while running, which meant that Cara had to do all the driving on the trip. Here's Cara with a rather cruel (and hilarious!) sentence about my injury.

Another sentence by Cara about her hopes that I was into her.

A great sentence by Cara about the imminent demise of our favorite pastime.

August 7

While on our trip, we saw a sign for "Forks of Cheat," a winery in Morgantown, West Virginia. We thought this name was very funny. I love Cara's sentence referencing it.

Cara's sentence is about the fact that we had slept in the same hotel room in D.C. (but in different beds!).

August 8

In retrospect, my sentence is kind of cruel considering how apparent it was Cara had a crush on me and how uncertain she was of whether I felt the same way about her! Good thing it ended up not being Cara's imagination! Her sentence is a reference to the bowling outing that was the first time we got together in person.

One of the highlights of the trip was the fact that in the car, I read aloud to Cara Cretaceous Park, the sequel to Jurassic Park that my best childhood friend and I wrote in fifth grade. (In August 2015 I created an annotated version of Cretaceous Park and it can be found in this blog post.) This led to a lot of laughter on both our parts. The funniest thing to us was the absurd repetition of the phrase '"Run!" shouted Alan.'



Because I had a broken arm, it was hard for me to open a bottle of water. Cara's sentence is a great reference to this, evoking a scene of her watching me struggle with the bottle and waiting for me to ask for help (she did end up helping me open the bottle). My sentence comes from the fact that certain aspects of our trip were very poorly planned, mainly that we did not pick a dinner location ahead of time, assuming we'd come across something, and then (in those pre-smart-phone days) failing to do so after walking around the National Mall for a while and then taking the Metro to near the 9:30 Club, the concert venue. We were both very hungry, me especially. I ended up buying a bag of chips at a gas station across the street from the 9:30 Club. In the fall of 2015, on a trip in which I went to a concert at another venue in the same area, I discovered that there were actually numerous restaurants just blocks away from where we had been. Oops!

Cara's sentence is another reference to her helping me open my water bottle. My sentence is another reference to Cretaceous Park. 

August 9

Here's another Forks of Cheat reference.

While at my parents' house, I was looking at Cara's pictures from the trip on Flickr, and my mom saw that the name on the Flickr account was Communista, leading my mom to say, "Is... is this person a communist?" (Cara was not a communist.)

I really like this pair of sentences referencing the Ozma song title "Light Years Will Burn."

Aw, what a nice sentence by Cara.

Cara with another Rentals sentence. Me with another "is it flirting or is it just a sentence" sentence.

While I made a sentence about our D.C. trip and Cara made a sentence about hoping to go to another show with me, Jen (SA_shedevil) also made a sentence about Cara and me. She was someone who frequently played Psychobabble with us and who Cara had privately told about her feelings for me. I'm pretty sure I voted for "Your walks are really more than that" thinking that it was Cara's sentence and I don't remember what I thought of it when I saw it was actually Jen's sentence.

I feel like with the game soon ending, Cara was feeling desperate and was making more and more sentences hinting at her feelings for me. Although we did flirt some in our frequent AOL Instant Messenger chats, we were much more flirtatious in our Psychobabble sentences, because there was the plausible deniability factor of "maybe they're just sentences." The game going away would remove this outlet. It makes me wonder if things would have played out any differently, and perhaps sooner, had the game not gone away. My sentence, by the way, is about Cara driving the car on our trip while I controlled the music from the passenger seat.

Cara's sentence references the fact that we took the Green Line on the D.C. Metro. My sentence is a twisted reference, but one that Cara nonetheless got (and loved!), to a rest stop on the way to D.C. that overlooked the Youghiogheny River. (I combined the tiles "Yugo," "-ing," and "-ly" to make something that very vaguely resembled Youghiogheny.) This would be a good place to quote the first paragraph of Cara's wedding vows:

Even before we met, we finished each other's sentences. After we had actually met, I knew I wanted to get to know you better. And as we sat atop a hill overlooking the Youghiogheny River later that year, I knew that I was beginning to fall in love with you.

(Well, I have tears in my eyes now.)

August 10 - the last day of Psychobabble

Awwwww. Cara was going all out on the flirting.



My punny and topical sentence here was very popular.



These are my and Cara's final Psychobabble sentences ever, which we made in the same round. Very fitting.

Despite our incessant flirting in the game, it wasn't until almost three months later, November 4, that we finally revealed our feelings for each other and started dating. The long delay was partly due to the fact that after that trip to D.C., we did not see each other in person for over two months. This next in-person get together was for an Okkervil River concert in Columbus, after which I finally came to the full realization that I did want to give being more than friends with Cara a shot. And the time after that when we saw each other was that fateful November 4, Cara's first of many trips to see me in Cleveland.

Psychobabble was gone forever, but in the months and years to come there were multiple attempts at recreating it by fans of the original game. The best was called Pseudobabble, which we would enjoy playing many times over the years, all the way up to as recently as 2013. Sadly, Pseudobabble eventually died off, and to my knowledge there is no working Psychobabble-like game online today.

It really was amazing the way Cara and I hit it off after meeting through this game and then the way we used the game to create our own unique way of communicating with each other. What a fantastic love story...

Concert review/trip report: Okkervil River in DC

Okkervil River is my favorite band and has been for many years. I had already seen the Will Sheff-led folk-rock outfit seven times in concert when they announced earlier this year that, for the tenth anniversary of their most acclaimed album Black Sheep Boy, they'd be playing a very brief run of shows in which they'd perform both Black Sheep Boy and the companion EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix in their entirety. Instantly I knew, since this was likely a once in a lifetime opportunity, that I had to go. So last Friday, November 20, I headed out with a couple friends to Washington DC and the Black Cat music venue for the first of the anniversary shows.

The music of Okkervil River was very significant to my relationship with my (deceased from lung cancer in April) wife Cara. Of the seven previous times I had seen them, she had joined me for six. I was naturally reminded of all those great shows - most of all, of the very first time Cara and I saw Okkervil River, on October 11, 2006 at the since-closed venue Little Brother's in Columbus. Cara and I were not yet dating at the time, but had become best friends over the course of that year. I drove down from Cleveland for the show despite it being on a Wednesday, because I had recently become a huge Okkervil River fan and I had never seen them in concert before. Any trip to Columbus was also an opportunity to see Cara, so naturally I asked her if she'd join me at the concert. Although she herself was not yet that familiar with Okkervil River's music, I can imagine how excited she was to go to the show with me. I was very excited to see her as well.

My friends and I ended up standing near the back of the room at the Black Cat, as Cara and I had also done at Little Brother's (the room at Little Brother's was smaller, though). And so I imagined Cara was next to me at this show as well. On occasion, I spoke to her, in my mind. "Isn't this great, Cara? Isn't it so cool that Jonathan Meiburg is here?"

(One of the best aspects of this anniversary show was the fact that Jonathan Meiburg, a member of the band from the earlier days who left years ago to focus on his own band Shearwater, joined Okkervil River to perform all their old songs. Meiburg, who has a stunning voice that wonderfully complements Sheff's rawer vocals, was with the band the first two times Cara and I saw them, which were probably the two best shows of all the Okkervil River concerts I've attended. Up on stage at the Black Cat, Meiburg looked so happy to be performing with his old band. It was a wonderful thing to see!)

Despite my having seen Okkervil River so many times in the past, the majority of the songs performed at this show were ones I'd never seen live before. I imagine many of them had rarely if ever showed up on setlists. Before the whole band came out, Sheff opened the show with a solo acoustic performance of the Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP that preceded Black Sheep Boy in Okkervil River's discography. It was a great way to open the set. Sheff made an amusing and insightful comment before the last song, "No Hidden Track," about how the "hidden track" reference was very of its time and already very dated, referring to a concept that was only a thing during the CD era.

The Black Sheep Boy album was next. It opens with a gentle-sounding cover of the Tim Hardin tune of the same name, before going immediately into the visceral "For Real." I have a vivid memory of the first time I listened to the album. I got it for Christmas in 2005 after asking for it simply because I had read some good reviews online. My first listen to the CD was in fact my introduction to the band's music. I remember sitting at my computer at night, next to the window in the bedroom of my fourth-floor apartment. When that second track came on I was just blown away. And looking at my old last.fm logs, I see that after my first listen to the album, I listened to "For Real" three more times in the subsequent hour. It's a spectacular song. On the album, you can practically hear Will Sheff's spittle hitting the mic as he belts out the lyrics. Which reminds me of how, at two of the Okkervil River shows we attended, Cara commented that she got hit with some of Will's saliva while he was singing. She wasn't annoyed by this; rather, it was an indication of how close to the action she was (in both cases, I was standing behind her). The first time this happened was the second time we saw them, at the Pepper Jack Cafe (which, like Little Brother's, is apparently closed now) in Hamilton, Ontario on Cara's birthday in 2007. The other time was Cara's final Okkervil River show, on September 29, 2013 at the Beachland Ballroom here in Cleveland. On that occasion, Cara had recently had surgery to drain three liters of fluid from around her lungs. She didn't have the strength to stand through a whole concert so we had her in a wheelchair for the show so that she could be front and center by the stage. Here's a picture she took at that show:

Seeing the whole Black Sheep Boy album performed at the Black Cat was quite an experience. It's definitely a classic album. Hard to believe, of course, that it's more than ten years old now. The years really do go by. For the first time at any Okkervil River show I've attended, there was a female vocalist to duet with Sheff on the several tracks that have female vocals on the album. This was a really nice addition. Besides "For Real," another definite highlight was the much slower burning but equally intense "So Come Back, I Am Waiting." I have fond memories of this song both from that first time seeing the band back in 2006 and from the time we saw them the night before our wedding in Columbus, in June 2011.

(An aside about "So Come Back...": I've always thought it was just a bit odd that during the highly emotional climax of the song, there is what seems to me like a really cheesy pun: "Come back to your life on the lam." Get it, "lam," like "lamb," like "sheep" as in "Black Sheep Boy." Not a slight, just something that always stuck out to me. Moving on!)

The closing track of the album, "A Glow," is another song I've always loved but one I had never seen performed live. It's one of those songs with a really pretty male/female vocal duet. Great stuff.

After a short break, the band came right back for the last portion of the show, the Appendix. I've always thought Black Sheep Boy Appendix was fantastic (heck, everything the band has done is pretty fantastic), but never held it in quite the same regard as the album proper. Live, though? The Appendix might have been the very best portion of the night's proceedings. "No Key, No Plan," "Another Radio Song," and "Last Love Song For Now" were all spectacular, with the band rocking out at full intensity. One of my favorite moments, though, was the comment Sheff made before "The Next Four Months." Something about how he didn't want to "George Lucas things up too much," but he had to fix the lyrics in the song, which is about taking pills. Apparently he had gotten the dosage wrong, so "2000 milligrams" in the original version was changed to "100 milligrams" in this live performance. I just thought that was so great; I could imagine that little mistake eating away at him over all those years and I could imagine myself feeling the exact same way if I had done something like that. One of the wonderful things about live music, especially with certain performers such as Will Sheff, is seeing in person the humanity of the people whose music you've listened to so many times on your speakers or headphones. Which takes me back to that very first Okkervil River show in 2006. Sheff was sick, and apologized for it, but it didn't stop him from delivering a powerful performance. Because he was sick, he was drinking a lot of water during the show. He made a remark about being in the "hydration scene" that Cara and I remembered and referenced for years to come.

Another memory of that show is standing with Cara at the merch table near the entrance to the venue, looking at the shirts, and her asking me if I was going to buy one. I said I would wait to decide until after the show, and it would depend on whether the show was good enough to warrant making such a purchase. It most definitely was. I bought another shirt at the Black Cat last week. And here's the whole collection. Left-to-right: my shirt from 2006, my shirt and then Cara's shirt from 2013, and my shirt from 2015.

I was definitely sad, knowing that Cara would have been at the show with me (and not just in spirit) had she still been alive, but I'm very glad I got to go. It was an unforgettable experience.

My friends and I also had a nice time in DC the following day. We went to the National Gallery of Art, a museum I don't think I had ever visited in all of my many previous visits to DC. That might be partly because I thought art museums were boring when I was a kid. I've since changed my opinion. There was a lot of neat stuff there!

It was a very beautiful November day.

That evening we went to the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC and went to several cool places. We checked out a couple of neat record stores, caught some free live music at Madam's Organ Blues Bar, and then had a fantastic dinner at The Diner. Since I finally got around to getting a smartphone recently, naturally I have to take pictures of things I eat and drink:

I had the Voodoo Parish ("absinthe, sugar cube, angostura and peychaud's bitters, bulleit rye, sparkling wine" - my reaction: "a drink with both absinthe and rye? This I have to try" and it lived up to my expectations!), the Peanut's Revenge Shake ("peanut butter, chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream," delicious!) and a very tasty blackened salmon sandwich with caramelized red onion, mixed greens, and basil aioli. Also, one of my friends got this amazing (and vegan) Jamaican Shepherd's Pie with plantains, sweet potatoes, peppers, beans, coconut milk, and yucca.

We closed out the night by checking out one more bar and happened upon a place that was playing an amazingly nostalgia-inducing assortment of '90s alt-rock, pretty much every single track a hit from my middle school days. Songs like "Creep" by Radiohead, "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis, "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, and many, many others. It got to the point where every time the next song started up we would just look at each other and start laughing. Until finally, the music abruptly stopped, and then a minute later they started playing some lame Linkin Park remix. Which was a sign that it was time to leave.

By the way, Okkervil River fans (especially Clevelanders) may enjoy this bootleg I've just been listening to of their May 12, 2004 Beachland Tavern show. Sadly, that was before I was familiar with either Okkervil River or the Beachland, but it's really cool to hear the band back at that early point in their career and to imagine being there in that wonderful, familiar room.

A future that is better than today

I recently spent a few days in Washington, D.C., for the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting. It just so happened that one morning there, as I was eating a hotel breakfast, Tommy Lee Jones appeared on TV in a commercial for Ameriprise Financial and began speaking with this pronouncement: "In America, we believe in a future that is better than today."

This got me to thinking. Well, to be honest, it's something I've been thinking about for a while, but this commercial provided a perfect impetus for further, more focused reflection. "In America, we believe in a future that is better than today." Sure, it's a nice slogan for a commercial, but is it true?

I remember that when I was a child, the future seemed full of promise and potential. Looking back over the course of human history (in what's clear to me now was a very over-simplified way), it seemed like progress was something that happened naturally. Sure, there were still all sorts of problems for humanity to address, but as civilization advanced, as science and technology advanced, things would continue to get better. Why wouldn't they? In this country, my parents' generation grew up with a considerably higher standard of living than my grandparents' generation. And my generation grew up with a considerably higher standard of living than my parents' generation. As a child, I saw no reason to doubt that this trend would continue.

How things have changed. In the last three decades (over the course of my lifetime, roughly speaking), productivity in the U.S. has continued to rise, but median incomes have stagnated, as the gains have gone almost exclusively to the top. Take into account exploding health care costs (and a myriad of other factors, but that one right there is a killer), and the typical family now is worse off than the typical family in the '80s. To put it bluntly, my children's generation will almost undoubtedly grow up with a worse standard of living than my generation. It's kind of staggering to think about, and to contrast with my grade school self's view of the future.

"In America, we believe in a future that is better than today." After finishing my breakfast that day, I decided to forgo the conference events for the next couple hours and take a stroll through Washington. As I walked, a Washington Post headline caught my eye. But not the headline of that day's newspaper - rather, a headline on an image that appeared on the side of the paper dispenser. It was a rather interesting choice by whoever designed the dispenser's layout.

The sudden promise of huge surpluses for as far as the eye can see is radically altering the way some politicians and economists think about spending money and has raised expectations of bolder government programs in years to come. "We are on the edge, if we will have discipline, of a generation of surpluses beyond reckoning" said Newt Gingrich.

So goes the article, and it's a stark reminder of how, even at the turn of the century, the future seemed so different from today. Government . . . surpluses? The idea seems almost incomprehensible. Now we wake up to depressing headlines about debt panels and supercommittees debating how to cut retirees' benefits and social programs to stave off trillion dollar deficits.

Where did things go wrong?

Well, when it comes to the current deficit issues, at least, the answer is pretty simple. It also has nothing to do with the entitlement programs that are potentially on the chopping block. I don't want to get too analysis-heavy with this post, but this chart is useful.

Let's remind ourselves again that, when President Clinton exited office, we were projected to have surpluses for years to come. Then a few things happened. President Bush slashed tax rates with the benefits going almost entirely to the wealthy. (This was supposed to create jobs. It didn't.) President Bush launched two unfunded wars. And then the economy cratered, which both necessitated increased spending and caused decreased tax revenue. And the economic crisis can largely be linked to financial deregulation, going back to the '80s and '90s.

So, tax cuts, unfunded wars, and financial deregulation. Three actions taken by the government that led directly to the current deficit. If none of these three things had happened, the deficit would basically not exist! What do all three have in common? They benefited a very wealthy few, and did more or less nothing to "promote the general welfare" of this country. Interesting. Why would a government of elected representatives do all these things that oppose the interests of those they represent?

(If you guessed "because money has completely corrupted our political system," a winner is you!)

Returning to the narrative of my day in Washington, I walked a few more blocks down K Street until I came to the intersection with 15th Street. There, in McPherson Square, I came across a sight that would have looked utterly bizarre in the midst of an American metropolis just a few months ago.

As I'm sure you realize, this is the Occupy DC encampment. It was a striking thing to witness in person. I've seen it asked what the purpose of camping out in the streets to protest is. I think it sends a pretty powerful message, personally, of how committed these people are to the cause. I remember, before the first protests started, reading on the Internet that some people were planning to "Occupy Wall Street" on September 17. Neat idea, probably won't amount to a whole lot, were basically my thoughts at the time. A few days in, the movement seemed to be dwindling. I remember that many Internet liberals had a belittling attitude toward the Occupiers in those early days. Well, at least they're trying to do something, I thought. I had to at least give them credit for the effort.

Then something changed. The movement took off. Occupations popped up all over the country, and all over the world. It's really quite inspiring to see a true grassroots movement grow from such small seeds. I mean, everyone knows the system is screwed up. People were desperate for change, which is why Obama won such a sweeping victory in '08. I was a gung ho Obama supporter. I had been pretty despondent about the state of the country, and the Obama campaign provided hope. Lots of people thought he could bring real change to Washington. And in retrospect, it was naive to think that our current system would allow a president who was really going to change things in the ways that are needed, or that one person would be capable of bringing that change even if he intended to. So people are still desperate for change. And a few people realized that the old methods are no longer working. Voting alone (not to say that people shouldn't vote) isn't going to save us when the best you can do is the lesser of two evils. Holding big, one-day protests doesn't do much when everyone just goes home and back to their lives afterwards. So let's do something different, they thought. Let's do something that can't be ignored.

So a few people got together with an idea. And from those humble beginnings, many thousands upon thousands of people have latched onto that idea, and have stood up and said the way this country is being run, it's not working. We need real change. We need a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Ordinary Americans have woken up to the fact that (contrary to my naive childhood views) progress isn't something that happens naturally, it only happens when we fight for it. The whole thing really is inspirational. I haven't been so proud of my fellow country people in a long time.

There wasn't a whole lot going on at the Occupy DC camp while I was there, but I got a general sense of how things were run, and came away impressed. There's a medical tent, a food tent, a library tent - it was all pretty well organized. And there was a lot of exchanging of ideas. I think one thing I'd take away from the visit is this - people do better when they work together, when they care for each other, when they take an interest in each others' well-beings.

As a society, that's something we've moved away from, and nowhere is this more evident than at the very top, where the elites have become so insulated that it doesn't matter to them whether society as a whole is functioning properly. If the children of the rich and of the poor went to the same schools, for example, then the rich would want to make sure the schools were good. If politicians had to use the same health care plans as everyone else, then politicians would want to make sure we had a decent health care system.

The Occupy movement has faced a lot of criticism, even demonization, in the corporate media. They don't have any clear message! is one common complaint. I think you'd have to be intentionally blind to say that. There are a lot of intersecting issues at play here, but at a very basic level, the message that the government is owned by financial elites and thus does not represent the interests of the people comes across loud and clear. And I think that's a message that a sizable majority of Americans would agree with. What are they hoping to accomplish? There's a long road ahead; these problems are very hard to solve, the obstacles are enormous, and real change won't come easily. But they've already accomplished something - changing the national discourse - and that itself is commendable. Why don't those dirty hippies just get a job? Well, this common criticism is really quite remarkable. Besides the fact that most of the protesters do have jobs . . . with a historic unemployment crisis, you're telling people who are protesting (among many other things) the lack of decent jobs to just get a job? I mean, that's pretty laughable, isn't it?

Again, I go back to the idea, "In America, we believe in a future that is better than today." I suspect that the percentage of people who would honestly agree with that sentiment has taken a precipitous decline in the past few years. Everyone knows things are broken in this country. Most everyone knows the government doesn't really represent the people. More and more people are waking up to the fact that we need a real, fundamental change in our political and economic system, or things are, inevitably, just going to keep getting worse.

There's a feedback loop in action. When money has undue influence on government, then the rich will influence government to enact policies that benefit the rich. Thus, the rich will get richer. Thus, the rich will have more money to influence the government. And so on. Furthermore, even in the absence of government intervention, money and power have a tendency to accumulate in the hands of a few. It's essentially a natural law, and it's why progressive taxation is necessary for a functional society. The best way to become richer is to already be rich. (I defy anyone to argue with this.) And excessive economic inequality leads to a host of societal ills, as well as a less robust economy. The middle and lower classes, quite obviously, spend a greater percentage of their income than the wealthy, so what happens if too much wealth accumulates at the top? Less money flowing in the economy. Less demand. Less jobs.

The ultra-rich continue to get richer, and everyone else suffers.

That's the course we're on. Unless we reverse rising inequality and get corporate money out of politics, we're going to continue on that course. A lot of people have recognized this. The Occupiers have decided they're going to do something about it. Unless you like the status quo of politicians that don't care about your interests if you can't fund their campaigns, you should support this movement. Is it a perfect movement? Nothing's perfect, but I reiterate: without fundamental change in the system, things will get worse.

In this era of crisis, I'm not sure it's logical to believe in a future that is better than today. I do know, however, that a lot of the people I saw in that camp believe in that better future. People everywhere are standing up and fighting for that better future, and that's admirable.

There are a lot of people out there who think this movement isn't about them. They have fairly comfortable lives; they have their HDTVs and iPads and whatnot. Why are these protestors complaining? they might think. And then one day, years from now, they'll wake up and realize that, even after a lifetime of hard work, they won't be able to afford a comfortable retirement. Or they can't pay their medical bills. And even then, they might not realize that things didn't have to be that way, if only our government hadn't decided that preserving tax breaks for multimillionaires was more important than preserving the foundation of our society.

Or maybe things will turn out differently, because a bunch of people got together and decided things had to change and they were going to keep making their voices heard until things did change.

So that's the story of my morning in D.C. As scientists, I think most of us who were at the conference have a hope that our work will, in some way, help make the world a better place. The people I saw at the Occupy camp are also working to make the world a better place.

We're all in this together, and if we remember that, maybe there is hope for a future that is better than today.