Anyone Can Go Zero to Sixty. The Real Skill Is Sixty to Zero

If you’re from Detroit, you learn about going zero to sixty from a very early age. We’re car people here.

And around here, how fast a car goes from zero to sixty MPH is a big deal. It’s a measure of speed, power, and legitimacy. Zero to sixty is a proxy for respect, and one of Detroit’s contributions to the American idea of success.

Why go if you can’t go fast? Why be, if you can’t be fast?

One moment at our kitchen table with my sons showed me a different path.

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A week ago, our boys were in a slurping phase. Everything they drank, they slurped. Robyn and I protested, and they kept testing us on it.

One afternoon, I lost it and demanded the smoothie cup, erupting from zero to sixty in less than two seconds.

Unlike in muscle cars, in parenting, going from zero to sixty is rarely the goal. It’s what breaks trust, triggering senseless yelling and tears.

I hate myself when I do that.

I don’t know how it happened, but for some reason — luck or divine intervention, probably both — I calmed myself from sixty to zero just as fast as I accelerated.

It was a stunning feeling. I’d never done that before, never had that physical sensation of rapid deceleration.

As an adult, and as a parent, the skill of controlled, rapid deceleration is essential. It violates my Detroit upbringing to say this, but how quickly we go from sixty to zero is far more important than how quickly we go from zero to sixty.

Usually, rapid deceleration — for me at least — is uncontrolled. Probably for most of us. I say something that makes one of us weep, or grab my son’s shoulder in a way that spooks him, or slam my fist into the table hard enough for the pain to jolt me into a pause.

That’s the emotional equivalent of a car hitting a tree.

Controlled, rapid deceleration, on the other hand, is like having a race car with really good brakes.

In relationships and parenting, we ought to be like skilled drivers who know when and how to brake — not reckless ones who blow through the guardrails.

The good part is, I think we can practice this. Over the past week, I’ve tried it a dozen times. First, I make my body go to sixty in a second — clenching my teeth, muscles, and fists. Then I do the opposite, relaxing fully in the same amount of time.

I can’t prove it works, but I now know what deceleration is supposed to feel like in my body.

I don’t have some profound conclusion here, except for this: parent to parent, adult to adult — practice deceleration.

In America, anyone can go zero to sixty. The real skill is learning to go sixty to zero.

Even though there’s no applause for it, we ought to practice it anyway. Who cares if nobody will ever know? We will. Our kids, our partners, our families will. Our colleagues will.

Having a better, more peaceful life is worth it — even if the world never notices.

Racism, Reform, and the Second Commandment

In these very dark times, I am struggling to make sense of what is happening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s unfathomably cruel murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer. For a lot of reasons.

We live in a predominately black city. I have worked as a Manger in our Police Department for the better part of the last five years, so I’ve seen law enforcement from the inside. I am, technically speaking, a person of color with mixed-race children. We live in a mixed-race neighborhood.

And of course, there’s the 400+ years of institutionalized racism in the United States that I have begun to understand (at least a little) by reading about it and hearing first-hand accounts from friends who have felt the harms of it personally.

And as I’ve stewed with this, I keep asking myself - what are we hoping happens here? What do we want our communities to be like on the other end of this?

Because something is palpably different this time. George Floyd’s murder feels like it will be the injustice that (finally) sparks a transformation.

What I keep coming back to in contemplation, reflection, and prayer is the second greatest commandment - “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.”

What I hope for is to live in a place where I can have good neighbors and be a good neighbor. The second greatest commandment is the most elegant representation of what I hope for in communities that I have ever found.

I interpret this commandment as a call to love. We must give others love and respect, even our adversaries. If loving our neighbor requires us to do the deep work of growing out of the fear, disrespect, and hate in our hearts then we must do it. Rather, we are commanded by God to do it.

But in the world we live in today, we can avoid the deep work of personal transformation if we choose to. If we don’t love our neighbors, we can just move somewhere with neighbors we already like. More insidiously, we can also put up barriers so that the people we fear, disrespect, or hate, can’t live in our neighborhood even if they wanted to.

This seems exactly to be what institutionalized racism was and is intended to do. I don’t have to learn to love someone if I keep them out of my neighborhood through, redlining, allowing crummy schools elsewhere, practicing hiring discrimination, racial covenants, brutal policing, and on and on.

If we choose neighbors we already love as ourselves, we’re off the hook for removing the hate from our hearts and replacing it with love for them.

In this, I am complicit. Part of why we live in a city is because I didn’t want to raise mixed-race children in a white, affluent suburb. I didn’t want to deal with it, straight up.

I say this even though I acknowledge that places like where I grew up are probably much more welcoming than they were 15 years ago. Similarly, there are times that I’ve chosen to ignore, block, and unfollow people who I fear, disrespect, or disagree with. I have been an accomplice creating my own bubble to live in.

Adhereing to the idea presented in the second greatest commandment is really quite hard.

The problem is, I and any others who want to live in a truly cohesive, peaceful community probably don’t have a choice but to do the deep work that the second greatest commandment asks of us.

My intuition is that even if we dismantled institutionalized racism completely, that wouldn’t necessarily lead to love thy neighbor communities. They’d be more fair and just, perhaps, but maybe not loving.

And, I’m not even convinced we can completely dismantle racist institutions without more and more people individually choosing to do the deep work of replacing the fear, disrespect, and hate in their hearts with love.

Which leaves me in such a quandary - I truly do believe there are pervasively racist institutions in our society, still. And those institutions need to be reformed - specifically to alleviate the particularly brutal circumstances Black Americans have to live with.

But at the same time, I know I am a hypocrite by saying all this because I too have to do the deep work of personal transformation.

I did the Hate Vaccine exercise last week and realized how fearful and disrespectful I can be toward people from rural and suburban communities because of my race, job, and where I went to college. When I really took a moment to reflect, what I saw in myself was uglier than I thought it would be.

In community policing circles a common adage is that “we can’t arrest our way out of [high crime rates].” I have been wondering if something similar could be said for where we are today - can we reform our way out of racism?

Maybe we can. I honestly don’t have the data to share any firm conclusion. But my lived experience says no: the only way out of this - if we want to live in a love thy neighbor society - is a mix of transforming institutions and transforming all our own hearts.

Thank you to my friend Nick for pointing out the difference between the second commandment and second greatest commandment. It is updated now..