I had to write an SQL query today. This is not a good thing. I am not the kind of person you want writing SQL queries.

A little back­ground: Drupal has a module called Views. This module, as I under­stand it, cre­ates a nice GUI for making an SQL query of a Drupal data­base and then dis­playing the results of that query in a friendly way. The results of a View-based query can be sorted in a number of ways before they are dis­played. One of the sort options is “random” – basi­cally, ran­domly arrange my results and then dis­play them.

I’m pretty sure I’ve used the random View sorting suc­cess­fully before. How­ever, in the latest ver­sion of Views for the latest ver­sion of Drupal, the random sort doesn’t quite work. Sure, it works for users who are logged into the site, but it doesn’t work for users who are not logged in – basi­cally, everyone in the world but me a few spe­cial people. That’s a problem. Maybe it’s not a huge problem but it’s a sig­nif­i­cant one for me and the other people who use Views. I fig­ured this out when I searched the Drupal web­site for an answer to this problem. I found answer, but not the one I hoped for. The thread of mes­sages between users and the module con­trib­utor boiled down to an “it’s not my fault, so it’s not my problem” mes­sage from the contributor.

So I wrote an SQL query to grab infor­ma­tion from a Drupal data­base to be for­matted using PHP to be fed to JavaScript to create a view of con­tent that is ran­dom­ized. I’m not a very happy camper. At least it worked and I didn’t break my employer’s website.

But it makes me think. We live in a world where people don’t really care about solving prob­lems, espe­cially if it’s not a problem that has any direct per­sonal effect. The most impor­tant effort seems to be making sure that blame doesn’t fall where it’s not wanted or where it might be incon­ve­nient. This is why pol­i­tics in the United States has resulted in a failed gov­ern­ment. Very few people are inter­ested in actu­ally solving anyone else’s prob­lems. They just want to make sure they aren’t blamed for those prob­lems, because blame might hurt the chance of being re/elected.

Is it a lack of empathy? Our society has been frac­tured into camps of Us and Them. Pro­gram­mers and Users. Rich and Poor. We men­tally com­part­men­talize the other so that we can hold them sep­a­rate and (in some cases) dehu­manize them. So there’s no empathy. No one can see the world from another person’s eyes or walk in their shoes. Did I leave out a common metaphor? Empathy leads one person to help another. Empathy gives a person the incen­tive to solve a problem that doesn’t directly affect him or her. It cre­ates mutual under­standing upon which demo­c­ratic insti­tu­tions of repub­lican (little r) gov­ern­ment need to be based. “We the People” is not “Me and These Other Idiots”. Except it is. The Drupal Com­mu­nity is not “Con­trib­u­tors and Users”. But it is.

I realize it’s much easier to have empathy for a person rather than a group of people. I’ve often said that indi­vidual people are kind, con­sid­erate, and thoughtful. Groups of people are stupid, irra­tional, and dan­gerous. I don’t like crowds. I also am not fond of gen­er­al­iza­tions. Gen­er­al­iza­tions allow us to men­tally group people. But indi­vid­uals aren’t that simple. They defy gen­er­al­iza­tion and clas­si­fi­ca­tion just as much as they might con­form to them. So the Views con­trib­utor in ques­tion might simply not want to have to deal with what might be a major pro­gram­ming chal­lenge for what may seem to him like a minor problem. Per­haps the effort doesn’t jus­tify the ends.

Maybe he should have had a little empathy for my (and other users) problem and told us that instead of “it’s not my fault”. Maybe he could have given us a little guid­ance about where to find a solu­tion. Something.

* * *

For­tu­nately, there were a few other people on the Drupal web­site who did try to offer solu­tions. The Drupal Com­mu­nity isn’t as frac­tured and dis­func­tional as, say, the pol­i­tics that has cor­rupted and ruined gov­ern­ment. If you’re inter­ested in knowing some more about this problem with Drupal Views, you can see the issue page. Unfor­tu­nately, the solu­tion from the Views con­trib­u­tors seem to be “update the doc­u­men­ta­tion so people know about the problem”. Some of the com­mu­nity mem­bers have offered poten­tially effec­tive solu­tions, although none of them is appro­priate for what I wanted to do.

I also dis­cov­ered today that there’s no good way to pass a vari­able from JavaScript to PHP. Not that I wanted to know that, but maybe you did.