Dan let out a sigh of relief. The meeting was over and he could go home.

He made eye contact with Heather and widened his eyes in a half-hearted gesture of sympathy for the gauntlet of community members she would face on the way out. 

Then he went downstairs and out the door, got in his truck, and careened down the empty, pothole-scabbed surface roads of Detroit, to one of the many sunken highways that cut through the city like hot knives through butter. From there it would be an easy twenty minutes home on a route he could drive without thinking. 

So he thought instead about the meeting for the Springwood Avenue development that had just concluded. This was an important project: it could be a financial windfall or a disaster, depending on how it was managed. And jobs like this, in urban environments, were particularly complicated to manage. They frequently involved more coordination, such as the need for some kind of 24-hour security solution, however that may be hobbled together (alarms, cameras, and good neighbors).

He thought of that loud woman in the tie-dye hat at the meeting. Heather had warned him about her. The most blood-thirsty anti-development warrior in South Detroit lived right across the street. He had better keep things locked down tight on the site. No tracks of mud running out into the road, no temporary fencing panels tossed on the sidewalk to make way for deliveries, and no starting the damn chainsaws before 7 a.m., which had ultimately led to a lawsuit on a job three years ago.

His stomach tightened without him realizing it, and he desired, without realizing it, to think of something else. He flipped on his regular radio station featuring conservative commentators discussing the state of the country. 

This radio station soothed him because it reflected a view of the world that aligned with his own. But it also caused him distress, because Dan’s view of the world was grim. First and foremost, the President of the United States, holder of the most important office on earth, was too old to carry on a complex conversation in real time, a fact that could not be denied by anyone with an honest bone in their body. And this simple fact called into question the entire edifice of constitutional democracy that the country was founded on. Who was running the government? 

Who was running the government? The answer, to Dan, was simple: a gang of career politicians who cared only about their re-election, and therefore only about a horizon of one to two years. 

But once the subject of liberal college students came up, he became too agitated and turned off the radio. He set his mind to thinking about work: something he could control. So he did just that for the rest of the drive home, calling and texting people as tasks occurred to him. And this activity served to temporarily soothe the nagging feeling that Dan always carried with him, the feeling that he should be fixing something.

He parked the truck in the driveway of the quaint three bedroom house that he and his wife had moved into since the kids went off. It was a brick house, built in the 50s, which Dan had completely renovated before moving in. It was now one of the prettiest, though not one of the biggest, houses on the street, with a lush garden wrapping around the front that his wife tended to daily in the spring and summer.

Walking into the house through the garage, he took off his coat and work boots and left them in the laundry room before heading into the kitchen.

“Hello dear, how was work?” said his wife Claire, as he came in and gave her a kiss. “Sit down and relax. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.”

Dan walked to the liquor cabinet, then stopped to remember the date. It was an even number. He slowly, steadily, poured himself a gin and tonic. 

He sat down in front of the TV, and he frowned. 

He frowned because the commercials were on, which was keeping him from seeing what he wanted to see. What he wanted would make him relax, though it too, like his radio station, would make him frown. That is because, again, he was waiting to watch a news network that showed him the world through a lens that made sense to him, that showed him things and called it like Dan saw it. And this was calming to him, telling him that he belonged and was in the right, even as it made him frown because watching reels of radical liberals and dishonest politicians filled him with disgust. 

However, I'm going to pause here. Because to be fair to Dan, I would like to introduce him in another way, which is more about his character traits than his private judgments of others. So we will reintroduce him according to character traits that he himself might lead with.

Dan was 68 years old and eyeing retirement. He had accomplished a lot in his life. He had started and grown his construction business into a multimillion dollar company. He and his wife of 45 years had raised three children together, gotten them all through college, and were now happy grandparents. And, most importantly to Dan, he was a man of integrity and principles.

Dan had many principles, and he could not understand those who did not appear to him to have any. One of the earliest principles that was instilled in him was the need to work hard. He had indeed worked hard: at least 60 hours a week for the last 50 years.

Another principle that he believed in was caring for his family. He had cared for his children, a responsibility which was largely dispatched. And he cared for his wife, which he would do from beyond the grave if necessary.

He believed in God and heaven and hell, and though he did not go to church on Sundays, he believed that God was happy with him, because he was honest and not prone to violence…at least not often. Anyway, he had never hit another person in his adult life. 

He was a regular contributor to community groups and nonprofits. He was a member of the Rotary, though in that too he failed to keep up with his weekly obligations, while at the same time feeling that he was in very good standing with the club, having served as its president several years before. He was especially committed to helping a non-profit group dedicated to supporting families battling with severe autism, as he had a nephew on his wife's side who had the diagnosis.

With his employees, he was firm but fair. He had never allowed a subcontractor to go unpaid for work performed and materials purchased, even if it meant going out of pocket when clients stiffed him which happened, as it does, to all contractors. 

He believed in the principle of fairness, that is, proportionality. If you worked hard, you got paid, and if you didn't work hard, the world didn't owe you anything, making exceptions of course for those with legitimate disabilities. 

In summary, Dan was a man who had lived his life by the principles he deemed to be important. And unfortunately, many of those principles were flouted by the radical left, on news stations and online articles that he frequented.

Now dear reader, I privately hold liberal beliefs, and as such I naturally have a negative view of some of the conservative news outlets in our society. However, the things I'm going to say about a certain news outlet apply just as much to MSNBC, in my opinion. I even agree that the New York Times leans fairly hard on dog whistles and regular whistles, which are used whenever an unsavory character is on the scene. They stop short of calling Rudy Giuliani a dingbat, like the Post or Daily News would, but they make their contempt known. 

But there is one news outlet which has been absent from my exhibits, and worldly readers might deduce which one it is.

Yes, Dan watched Fox news, and yes, the TV had rotted his brain, just as his dad had told him it would.

Why did Dan turn to Fox? Well, asking someone a direct question like that is actually kind of unfair, because you are asking for a simple, rational reason, whereas the truth is probably complicated and a mix of habit, emotion, and reasoned action. There are in fact often dozens of factors that our mind is weighing, pros and cons, certainty and uncertainty, implications in the present and in the future; and that is only if we involve our rational minds to begin with. The easier path is the path of habit, and you may be asking somebody to dress a habit up in a rational explanation. Please allow me to explain.

If you asked Dan why he watched Fox News, he might say something along the lines of, “Because I want to stay informed, and they are the only news source that is willing to go out and say truthful things about our society. Things like, ‘the President is unfit for office today, let alone for four more years.’”

The problem  with Dan’s answer is that even assuming that both of these statements were true does not satisfactorily explain why Dan gets home and watches Fox News. 

What I would like to suggest is that the process should be examined as a habit, which comes down to the dopamine cycle. The reason Dan tunes in is because the chemicals in his brain are telling him that he has a deficiency, and it should be corrected, or he will become more and more uncomfortable. The deficiency is that every day when he gets home, he unwinds and watches the news. This is part of a soothing ritual. 

Now, why is that distinction important? Because now that we know the reason he watches Fox–the why–we know what happens when, for example, he doesn’t get to watch it. Which, unfortunately for Dan, is what happened that night. 

For, before even the commercials had ended, his phone rang. It was his project manager Tony. 

“What's up, Tony?” Dan said.

Claire, in the kitchen, noted the call, and hoped Dan would be off in time for dinner. Then, after Dan was uncharacteristically silent on his call with Tony, she peeked into the living room. 

Dan's face was set, and getting red. Finally, he barked, “Well you're kind of screwing me over here, Tony. What is it, the money?” Another minute pause, then, “I don't need to hear any more bullshit. Pick up your shit from Carol on Friday.”

He hung up the phone, paused for a second, and then let out an explosion of curse words. Claire shook her head and went back to her cooking.

Five minutes later, she called him in for dinner.

Dan approached the table, in a state that he would call “preoccupied.”

What he really was, emotionally, was “worried.” “Worried” is another name for “fear.” But Dan would never call it this without the help of a mental health therapist, which he is constitutionally opposed to seeing. For him, you don’t deal with a problem by getting in touch with the emotion that you are feeling; you deal with it by figuring out a plan and doing something about it.

So in that spirit he had been mulling over the same two possible solutions for the last five minutes, both of which were unappealing. He needed a project manager. He could either cast a net, go on Craigslist, and see what kind of deadbeat he could get on such short notice; or he could suck it up and make a very difficult phone call to a person he knew could complete the project on-time and on-budget.

This was an important project. He was counting on this as a final opportunity to make a chunk of money and pad their savings account before retiring. He did not feel like he could bet his future on the help wanted page on Craigslist. That left only one choice. He would have to, somehow, come around to calling his brother.

Dan and his brother had a troubled work relationship. It had been productive, but it had ended in a fight. Well, really they had had lots of fights. But the one that ended things was of a singular nature.

Now, if we were stuck inside Dan's head right now, we would see a nasty replay. We would hear a loud inner monologue filled with defensiveness, blaming his brother for flared tempers, and thoughts about how unreasonable his brother was. 

However, and I hate to harp on this for those of you out there who, like Dan, are opposed to it, but I must point out that if Dan went to therapy and allowed himself to get in touch with what was truly bothering him about his relationship with his brother, he might have some more words. And it would be those words that would be most helpful to you, the reader, in understanding him.

For if Dan talked to a therapist, he would probably begin by talking about how long his brother worked for him, with him: all told over fifteen years. That's a long time. A lot of time to teach someone, a lot of mistakes to forgive. He would talk for a long time about all the mistakes his brother had made, and all the times his brother had goaded him into acting poorly. 

But, if the sessions continued, then Dan might get to talking about other things. 

He might start to talk about how, being ten years older, he had always felt both responsible for his brother, and somehow ashamed that every poor choice his brother made in life was his fault, like he had let his brother down somehow. 

He might even tell the therapist what he had never told anyone, about how at one point he wanted his brother to run the business. Indeed, he had once calmed his troubled mind by thinking about how good things would be when they ran the company together, someday. 

And then Dan might think of the fight, and how angry he got, and how in his anger he had said some things and did some things that he really regretted. And then he might try to explain to the therapist how much he actually loved his brother. And then, he probably would have started to cry. 

And that was why he avoided therapy. Because what on earth would be the point of crying at a time like this?

“Is everything okay?” Claire asked, and startled Dan out of his stupor.

Now, dear reader, let’s examine Dan’s state of mind right now. His nightly ritual had been interrupted by a phone call, thrusting him into a situation which made him afraid. He is in a highly stressed and emotional state, though he would never identify it as such. In fact, if you were to call him afraid, it would make him angry. He had been bottling up his emotions, keeping his face set, which in his mind was all he had to do, as a mature adult. The problem is that if this bottling is interrupted, it will threaten to drop him back into fear, which will make him angry.

So Dan became angry.  And in his mind, because Claire was talking, his lizard brain thought that Claire was the cause of his anger. He therefore, unfortunately, acted poorly in response. I ask you to not hold it against him, because he is in fact playing out a chemical process, and he is doing the best he can: he just doesn’t know of any better tools to help him manage his stress than drinking gin and watching the news. Fortunately, Claire is in a solid place mentally right now, and can understand what he needs. She reacts as well as she can, and helps him cope with his emotions. Is this fair, that he gets away with being rude to her? Sometimes it takes an angel to keep a relationship afloat. 

“What?”  Dan asked with expert sarcasm, as though he was literally bewildered by the question, as though he was being spoken to in a foreign language. He stuffed all of his frustration into that one word and lobbed it into the air of the dining room like a grenade, because he was angry and wanted to see an explosion.

Now Claire paused. She did not want to fight. She could simply get up and walk away. This would be the easier thing to do. But she could see that her husband was deeply distressed and in pain. 

So she chose, as her next move, not to respond to the question. Instead, she received his tone without fighting back, and cultivated an accepting silence over the dinner table.

After a few minutes, Dan broke the silence. He didn’t apologize, but did offer up his predicament as an explanation for his mood, which he hoped she would understand. “I'm going to ask my brother to work for me.”

“What?” Claire said, genuinely shocked. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. At best, it was pure fantasy–BJ would never go for it. And at worst–well, at worst, the image of a mushroom cloud came to mind. But what was he thinking? “Are you going to apologize?” she asked.

Dan just sighed. On the inside he felt his body tremble, like a single withered leaf on a windy fall day, though he would never admit that to anybody, not even to himself. “He's the one who should apologize,” he said meekly.

Claire shook her head. “You've got to apologize.”