Societies respond to a sense of shared experience by establishing norms of expected behavior. In primitive societies, these norms are conveyed through cultural expectations, but as a society becomes more complex and heterogeneous, laws are passed to introduce rules to regulate behavior in order to achieve a society that upholds its values. The Triangle Waistcoat Fire of 1910 claimed 146 lives in one place in one day at a time when 50,000 workers lost their lives each year in disparate factory incidents. The emotional impact on socialites who witnessed the 350,000 ordinary workers demonstrating on the streets of New York in the subsequent Funeral March motivated those with power to act to address the festering, but previously unappreciated problem of worker safety. Social response was swift with the enactment of workplace sanitation and safety rules and a Commission to enforce them. Similarly, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 instigated more than ten years of widespread economic suffering; the social shock brought about the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that protected the US economy from disasters for three generations.

Failure of a society to collectively recognize festering ills precludes action to mitigate them. Failure of a generation to remember the causes of a society’s response to prior ills addressed risks exposing the society to those ills again. OSHA continues to act to ensure worker safety, although negative attitudes towards its mission have weakened its resolve to seek out and correct dangerous workplace conditions. And over-exuberance and forgetfulness allowed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which exposed the USA to a repeat of Great Depression in 2008. Despite real suffering that was felt, it was only because of lessons learned the first time around that government action avoided a full-on repetition of the suffering felt by the society a life-time earlier.

The social media and information technologies of today have facilitated a precipitation of thought groups that we can call “tribes.” No single perspective encapsulates the diversity of American experience, and the failure to communicate across tribes exacerbates animosity and has caused a great weakening of the American social fabric. My various activities require that I interact with folks of many different backgrounds and opinions. I try to listen, to process, and to distill until I can penetrate to the essence of an issue.

We are all members of society; each in our own way, we both contribute to the social welfare and we benefit from it. Each of us has a self-interest that stands in unique relation to the interest of society at large. Good citizens will hold both of these facts together as they participate in the discussions on this Site.

While I hope that all readers will embrace a positive attitude toward the work of building a shared understanding of the current social condition, some readers may find themselves holding an irreconcilable view. There will also be nefarious characters who delight in causing anger, fear, and strife. Whether consciously understood or not, these latter folks perceive that their own interest stands in opposition to the general welfare; if they cannot be brought to understand their own dependence on a healthy society, they must be shunned and ostracized because they distract us from finding real solutions to problems that we can all agree are hindering domestic tranquility. It would be a great achievement if this Page could help to root out these miscreants and expose their motives.

This page takes the name Ð ecclaro (pronounced ‘de cla ro’); a name invented as a loose approximation of a Latin-esque word that sounds as though it should mean: “I say.” The Old English capital Ð is used as short-hand to abbreviate
Ð ecclaro.

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