By Their Leaders You Shall Know Them

So the National Tea Party Convention is underway in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of the touted speakers is former Congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado). In the speech he gave at the Convention yesterday, Tancredo claimed that Barack Obama was elected president because our country does not have a "civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country." Ummmm..... when and where in this country was a literacy test required for voting? And who was the target of that literacy test? Mr. Tancredo, standing in a city in the South, demands a literacy test for voters?

What century is he wishing he lived in? Or to what century does he wish to drag back the country?

Good. Lord.

Feeling Grumpy but Not Over-Educated

So a few days ago I read a headline announcing that a majority of the "over-educated" continue to support President Obama, and I wondered just what is meant by "over-educated." The most popular definition of that term suggests that someone with a post-graduate degree is over-educated. I have a post-graduate degree, and I don't feel over-educated.

How stupid a term is that: "over-educated"?  More than educated? I really don't see how someone can be over-educated.  By whose measurement? If I'm a plumber with a doctorate, am I over-educated? Why? Because I know more than I need to know to fix a faucet? Who says so?

I'm feeling quite surly about this.....curmudgeonly, perhaps.... or.....misanthropic--an indication that I might be "over-educated"?

Good. Lord.

Not a Health Care Soundbite

Jerome Groopman, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and author of How Doctors Think has an interesting article online at The New York Review of Books website about how medical "best practices" might be included in government health care legislation and how that inclusion might play out in the decisions of doctors and their patients. Groopman provides two viewpoints of how "best practices" might be legislated in health care reform, one that uses the established best practices as a "nudge" to get doctors to choose governmentally-approved health decisions, another that more aggressively promotes these "best practices" by providing financial incentives or negative consequences. President Obama's friend and advisor, Cass Sunstein, favors the first (providing doctors with some leeway not to choose always the established "best practice" method in dealing with a patient's health issue) and Peter Orszag, another of Obama's advisors and director of the Office of Management and Budget, prefers the more strong-armed approach:

Doctors and hospitals that follow "best practices," as defined by government-approved standards, are to receive more money and favorable public assessments. Those who deviate from federal standards would suffer financial loss and would be designated as providers of poor care. In contrast [to the Senate bill], the House bill has explicit language repudiating such coercive measures and protecting the autonomy of the decisions of doctors and patients.

I didn't know much about this debate until I read Groopman's article this afternoon, and I was fascinated by Groopman's discussion of how established "best practices" sometimes turn out to be wrong or not the best health choice for certain individuals. Thus, there are problems with aggressively pushing doctors to choose the "best practice" standard at all times in all situations. This situation reminds me of the debate over mandatory-sentencing laws.  When judges do not have any discretion over sentencing criminals, serious injustice sometimes results, for instance, first-time drug offenders given long jail sentences when they could have been put on parole, provided with rehabilitation, and given the opportunity to change the course of their lives (and thus not cluttering up the prison system and costing the taxpayers huge amounts of money).

What really struck me was the anecdote of Groopman's personal contribution to a "best practice" standard that proved to be wrong. You just got to listen to folks who are willing to admit their mistakes.

Anyway, it's a long article, published in another one of those magazines that some people sneer at for being "elitist," and thus won't be part of any health care soundbite--but it's worth reading: Jerome Groopman, "Health Care: Who Knows 'Best'?," The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010 edition.

Profiles that Complicate our Cardboard Cut-Out Judgments

Reading the profile of John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, online at The New Yorker this morning reminded me of some of the reasons I have subscribed to that magazine off and on over the years. The article's in-depth description of a complicated character makes me re-think my own knee-jerk reaction to Mackey's op-ed on health care reform that the Wall Street Journal published last year. Not only did I think the guy was a nut, I agreed with Matt Yglesias, who wrote that:

there’s asking a CEO to pander to your prejudices, and there’s pressuring a CEO not to go out of his way to offend your prejudices. Corporate executives have a lot of social and political power in the United States, in a way that goes above and beyond the social and political power that stems directly from their wealth. The opinions of businessmen on political issues are taken very seriously by the press and by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Once upon a time perhaps union leaders exercised the same kind of sway, but these days all Republicans, most of the media, and some Democrats feel comfortable writing labor off as just an “interest group” while Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Jack Welch are treated as all-purpose sages. One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.

What Yglesias had to say on the issue still resonates with me--the idea that rich CEOs have too much power, anyway, so they need to be careful about how they throw their weight around in the public arena--but Nick Baumgarten's article also provides me with a more nuanced profile of John Mackey, whom I had never really thought about until Mackey wrote that op-ed.  Like many interesting characters, Mackey is a contradictory mix of hippie, capitalist, libertarian, paternalism, and goofiness. I think Mackey's idea that the world would be a wonderful place if other corporate leaders ran their companies as he does his--his idea of "conscious capitalism"-- and thus there would be no need for government laws to protect people from the over-reaching power of corporations, is very pie-in-the-sky.  I think we've had a very nasty wake-up call as to the self-centeredness and greediness of corporations--manned by their overpaid CEOs--in the debacle of Wall Street, the bail-out of banks, and the almost-collapse of our economy. I am glad that there are corporate leaders such as Mackey who do think it necessary and good to provide their workers with fairly generous benefits and good wages--too bad there aren't more of them these days.

Reading the article on Mackey reminded me of the profile of Barack Obama that I read in The New Yorker a couple of years ago: "The Conciliator," by Larissa MacFarquhar. Anyone who read that article would not have been surprised by Obama's leadership style this past year. Obama might have been one of the most liberal voters in the Senate, but as MacFarquhar pointed out two years ago, " In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative." Obama had a history already of trying to understand "the other side," on whatever the issue might be. This is a telling story from his long-time friend Cassandra Butts:

Obama is always disappointing people who feel that he gives too much respect or yields too much ground to the other side, rather than fighting aggressively for his principles. “In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers,” Cassandra Butts says. “The issue of the Second Amendment came up and Fried is pretty much a Second Amendment absolutist. One of our classmates was in favor of gun control—he’d come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue. And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out—he was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc, where they didn’t have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn’t understand that.”

So when I read the crazy right-wing comparisons of Barack Obama to "Hitler" or the claims that Obama is a "socialist," I know right away that the person making that claim is just plain stupid or highly misinformed--or deliberately misleading. And there are a lot of folks like that. They obviously don't read The New Yorker, and, of course, I'm sure they hold in high disdain anyone who does. It's an "elitist" magazine. But I sure as hell have learned a lot from reading it--many times the articles challenge my own assumptions. However, there are a lot of people who don't want their assumptions challenged or their minds changed in any way.

I quit subscribing because, damn it, the magazine is published every week, and I can't keep up with the reading of it. I love the cover art, and I continue to think I will return to read articles I don't have time to read right away, and so the paper copies just stack up--I can hardly bear to recycle them (though I did grit my teeth at the end of the year and did just that). I think I need to get with a couple of other people who would like to subscribe and start a joint subscription--in other words, have someone to whom to pass on my copies.

Fandom--Because I don't want to think about politics today

I don't write much about television or films, but that's not because I don't enjoy television or films. I love a good drama. Recently I've become a fan of the British television series Life on Mars, the story of a British policeman who is hit by a car in 2006 and "wakes" up to find himself 33 years in the past, in 1973. The series is being re-broadcast on PBS.  Although I root for the modern, methodical, more sensitive DCI Sam Tyler, the officer who is stunned to discover he's on almost alien soil in 1970s England, I have an awful soft spot for the often corrupt and bullying DCI Gene Hunt, but I would like to think that soft spot is more the result of my rather swooning regard for the actor who plays Hunt--Philip Glenister--than of any admiration for the ham-fisted Hunt.  But evidently Gene Hunt has a swooning effect on many women viewers, and I'm just one of many. Maybe it's that confident swagger and curling lip that attracts us so.  However, I first really noticed Glenister as an actor in his role as Mr. Carter in BBC1's Cranford, a very different role than that of DCI Hunt--and I immediately liked that character, too. So, yeah, though he is not traditionally handsome, for some reason, I think Philip Glenister has a lot of sex appeal. I think I'm a fan--or as much of a fan as I ever am of actors. Here is a list of some of my favorite actors/characters:

• As a child, I loved Eric Fleming's Mr. Favor in Rawhide, my first "crush" on a fictional character.
  
• Vying for second place were Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock from Star Trek (all those other women could have the captain!) and Patrick McGoohan's "Number Six" in The Prisoner.
  
• Kevin Kline--a great talent
  
• French actor Jean Reno--oh yeah!
  
• British actors Alan Bates, Bill Nighy, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, John Hannah, and Alan Rickman--all very sexy (and, yeah, I know that Everett is gay, but that doesn't make him less sexy!)
  
• I love Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes.
  
• Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, especially his role in Yojimbo
  
• Don Cheadle--not only a great actor but also very good-looking
  
• I first really noticed Forest Whitaker in Smoke and have enjoyed his acting ever since.
  
• Indian actors Aamir Khan and Ajay Devgan.

And that's my list of favorite actors, none of whom are really traditional heartthrobs--provided here today because I don't feel like addressing the really important news of the day, such as the execrable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. Yep, taking refuge in the superficial and entertaining.

Satisfaction in a Completed Project

I finally completed one of the folk art quilts I began last year. This one is my son's; I am now finishing my daughter's quilt.  In order to guarantee I wouldn't lose interest and thus finish only one quilt, I crafted simultaneously the blocks for two quilts before crocheting the blocks together.  Over the Christmas holiday, I sewed blanket stitches around each block of my son's quilt and then crocheted a half-double-crochet edging to each block. Then I hand-sewed the blocks together and finished the quilt with a crocheted edging.

Now I am sewing blanket stitches around the blocks for my daughter's quilt, and will then crochet an edging to each block before hand-sewing (yarning in the backs of each stitch) the blocks together. It is really satisfying to complete a project such as this, a project that evolved out of my interest in felting worn wool sweaters.  Half of the blocks on each quilt are embellished with buttons or applique from cut-outs or of my own design. The picture at top left is of the front of the quilt. 

The back of each square is made of cotton material I saved over the years. Much of the material came from clothing I purchased from Marketplace India. When the outfit became too worn, I would toss it in my rag bag. Some of the material came from items of my children's clothing; for instance, on the back of my son's quilt is one square with an embroidered dragon from a robe he had as a small child. Also, both of my children practiced embroidery stitches when they were young; I found some of these early attempts and incorporated them into the quilts, too. The photo on the right is of the back of the quilt.
 

Discouraging

Yesterday evening as we drove home from watching the 3-D version of Avatar, we noticed a woman at a stoplight. As soon as cars came to a stop at the traffic light, she stepped off from the sidewalk to brave the still-slippery spots of the icy road in order to beg for money. She passed from car to car, holding up a one-dollar bill in mute request for more. I thought of her later as I remembered Judy Woodruff's report about jobs in December: the percentage of joblessness was remaining steady--but that was in light of the fact that 600,000 people had stopped looking for jobs.  Where does the government get the numbers for unemployment statistics? I had been told that the number comes from unemployment offices and that it is derived from the number of people still seeking employment and receiving benefits. The answer is more complicated than that, however, and is described on this website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Just as discouraging as the number of folks who quit looking for jobs last month (for whatever reason), is the information about what recently re-employed people are discovering in the current economy. Most folks take a pretty hefty pay cut with the next job. And this pay cut affects their future earnings:

[P]eople hired at lower wages in a tight job market tend to lag behind their peers for years, sometimes decades. For example, workers laid off during the 1981-82 recession earned 20 percent less than people who remained in a job — even 20 years after they were rehired, a Columbia University study found. The study examined pay for white- and blue-collar workers, managers and hourly workers. ("For the Unemployed, New Job Often Means a Pay Cut," Christopher Leonard, Associated Press Writer, 10 January 2010)

In addition, "[m]ore than six people are now vying, on average, for each job opening, according to Labor Department data — compared with just 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007." (my emphasis)

Some institutions benefit from joblessness. I read a recent article that reported a tremendous rise in the number of people returning to college, particularly to community colleges, and the number of traditional students who are choosing less-expensive colleges closer to their homes. (See Washington Post's "Community Colleges Get Influx of Students in Bad Times," by Valerie Strauss, 31 May 2009).  However, many community colleges are unprepared for this huge influx of students, for their state funding has been hurt by the economic downturn as well. (See "Community Colleges Get Squeezed," by Brian Burnsed, Business Week, 15 January 2009) One consequence is that community colleges are hiring more part-time faculty.  Look at the employment pages of any community college and note how many adjunct positions are being advertised. For instance, as of last year, New Jersey's Burlington County College was planning "to hire up to 200 new adjunct faculty members, increasing its part-time teaching staff to about 575, at the same time that the college faces a drastic cut of nearly 42 percent from the county and state."

Such part-time jobs for educators might sound great in this tough economy, but the pay for those jobs is often very low, particularly in the South, and those part-time positions also offer little or no benefits.  In a country where one receives better access to health insurance through full-time employment, that's not good news.

(For more on part-time faculty at community colleges, see Inside Higher Ed's The Part Time Impact," 16 November 2009).

The Problem with "Eyewitness" Accounts

I clicked on the article about the man who opened fire at a power plant in Missouri, depressed, again, by how many people turn to violence to express their frustrations with their colleagues and fellow workers, with their spouses, with the government. What really caught my attention in the article, however, was the description of the shooter, a description that illustrates the problem with eyewitness accounts:

Descriptions of the gunman have been confusing to police as one witness described the gunman as a black man, about 5-foot-8, wearing a tan coat and carrying a semiautomatic weapon — but later, a company supervisor called police to give the name of a disgruntled worker, a white man, who had possibly been recently fired, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

The news account reports that relatives of workers are saying the shooter was a disgruntled worker.

The End of Christmas

....not with a bang but a whimper--from the perspective of our cat Pluto, looking out a window into our neighbor's yard...

Doing Justice

The tip of my hat to Steve Benen today who posts on justice finally being served to REPUBLICAN attorneys screwed by George Bush's Justice Department. The first was Leslie Hagen, who, despite her "outstanding performance" and Republican credentials, was kicked out of the Justice Department in 2006 because Monica Goodling heard a rumor that the attorney was gay. Like many other people who think their world view is the only one and that therefore they are always right (a kind of insanity, I think), Goodling not only did not renew Hagen's contract, she undermined the attorney at every turn, making sure that she could not get an appointment anywhere in the Justice Department. If hell exists, there is a special place for people such as Monica Goodling. And since I don't think hell exists, I believe it behooves the rest of us to counter-act in whatever legal, moral--hey, and maybe even comedic--way we can the malicious, vindictive acts of people such as this. There is a singular perniciousness in people who vindictively try to prevent qualified folks from attaining appropriate employment.   After a national search to fill the position in the new administration, Hagen was re-hired. (Gee, and she isn't even a Democrat! Imagine an administration that doesn't politically vet all of its Justice hires.) However, as an article on NPR's website describes:

It is not a perfectly happy ending for Hagen. Nobody official from the department ever apologized to her for what happened. She still owes thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and the Justice Department has refused to pay those bills.

The other attorneys Benen mentions in his post are William Hochul --who Goodling got rid of because Hochul's wife is active in the Democratic party though Hochul himself is a Republican-- and Daniel Blogden, who, as U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, was fired because he refused to politicize his office. Both attorneys have been rehired by the Obama administration. 

What to do with bad presents?

The smirky morning team at ABC has some advice on what to do with bad presents.....

Gee, I didn't get any bad presents.

Here is Odyssey at the end of our Christmas morning unwrapping, telling us that the best presents are the animals who love us.

Happy end of the year!

"Do No Injustice"

Over the past couple of months, I have been going through the papers of my husband's family: letters, photographs, recipe clippings, greeting cards, cancelled checks, and all the ephemera of everyday life left behind by folks who disposed of very little. Their paper detritus suggests their unwillingness to leave this world. Hundreds of letters are stacked in boxes and an old steamer trunk, whispering in the darkness, trying to tell their tales. And I am now trying to make some sense out of the chaos and to channel those voices. I have learned a lot about writers of the family letters; the people are just as ambiguous and conflicted as any today. But in those letters are revealed values that at times seem to shout and echo in the moral hollowness of today's business world--whether it's political business on Capitol Hill or financial business on Wall Street or the daily business of a national non-profit.

I just turned to a letter dated January 12, 1886, a letter written from a father, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., to his young adult son, Baker White Armstrong (later Sr.; my husband's great-grandfather). The son has left the family home in Virginia to find better prospects in Texas. Baker had evidently received an offer of business from one man to take on a partnership. The father offers his son this advice:

I want you to be very careful that in advancing your own interests that you do no injustice to others.

What a world it would be if people took that advice to heart.

Little Stupidities

Okay, I know that the retail business will have some excuse...uh, explanation... for this, but.......Why does the curling ribbon I bought have a sticker on the ribbon itself and not the plastic wrap around it? So I'm wrapping presents in a hurry, and I take out the curling ribbon, unwrap it from its plastic, and then try to peel the sticker off the ribbon. Impossible. I'm left with reams of curling ribbon with white sticky paper attached to it at regular intervals.

Are retailers that worried that people will unwrap the curling ribbon from its plastic in the store and then harass cashiers with items that have no bar code? Are they afraid the holiday lines will be held up like those in the commercial where the woman tries to cash a check instead of using her debit/credit card?

Yes, I've got plenty of more important things to worry about: Will my son arrive safely at the Atlanta airport this evening? Will we have to move in order to provide our family with financial stability again? Can anyone really get justice in this world?  How come people think it's okay that millions of Americans do not have health care and that millions are without jobs?

Oh, and why am I using this curling ribbon, anyway? Shouldn't I use something that's recyclable? Or save paper and not wrap the presents at all?

But it's the sticker glued to the curling ribbon that seems to have unglued me for a moment. Amazing.

Citizens' Rights to Bear Tomatoes

So....people are free to bring guns to events in which the President of the United States appears, but their rights to carry tomatoes are abridged by a local grocery store! A Costco store in Utah took its tomatoes off the shelves because Sarah Palin was appearing at an event in town and because some nut had thrown tomatoes at her when she appeared at the Mall of America. (He missed and hit a police officer, instead.)

Wow. Can this story really be true?

The Comfort of Cats

The semester is over at the community college where I tutor part-time, and now I'm home with the cats.  How can one be stressed with cats around? At the left is Persephone, who keeps me company in my study. She sleeps in here because she is the sweet cat the other two cats dominate; in the study she gets her own chair and cushion and a spot on top of boxes full of material for one of my projects. And when I'm here she has me all to herself. Persephone will crawl up on the desk and rest her chin and paws on my right arm as I type on the keyboard.

Below are the uber-cats of the house, the ones who fight for domination, but Odyssey, the oldest cat in the house, always wins. Odyssey is on the recliner, sleeping beside the partially-crocheted work of my daughter. Pluto has the chair. Both sit in the livingroom, cozily purring near the fireplace.

As long as we have our pets, the world is a little warmer place.

Dashed American Dreams

Today my husband, a highly competent and reliable professional, joined the ranks of the unemployed. He signs up for unemployment benefits tomorrow, having arrived at the local unemployment office too late in the afternoon today (mid-afternoon) to make it to the head of the line. The unemployment office in this county is evidently doing a booming business. I have been under-employed for some time--mostly out of choice for personal and family reasons--but I am now applying for full-time jobs so as to more adequately support my family in this difficult time.

We have become a part of the depressing stream of statistics one reads about in newspapers and on blogs.  In her article at the Huffington Post, Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, lays out some of those shocking statistics:

• "One in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed, or just plain out of work."
• "One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards."
• "One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure."
• "One in eight Americans is on foodstamps."
• "More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy each month."
• "The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings....and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street."

The middle class is suffering while Wall Street and bankers took handouts from the government (paid from our pockets) and now are making money once again, paying back the debt they borrowed and acting as if they are now free from any responsibility for the economic crisis.

My family is doing better than many Americans in our situation. We began taking care of financial debt as soon as the economy began to tank and started economizing around our household. We had long-term financial plans in place years ago--but as two adults who are unemployed and underemployed with two college-aged children, we now are facing the possibility of those financial plans failing. Oh, yeah, and what about health care? As Republicans unite to stall the health care debate, Americans are losing their access to adequate health care as they lose their jobs.

There is every reason to believe that we will recover, that my husband will be employed again and that I will find an interesting and challenging full-time job when our last child goes off to college. But this is not a given. I work with young people just out of college who are having a very difficult time finding full-time work in their chosen professions. One young woman, a psychology major and a recent graduate of an excellent liberal arts college, has applied for jobs ranging from holiday retail staff to parole officer. She sends out two to four applications every week while holding down a part-time job that offers no benefits. Other college-educated people with whom I work cobble together two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.  And we see more and more of the recently laid off on our college campus, anxious to update skills in order to be more competitive in a distressfully diminished job market.

Sitting here, now, at this keyboard, I can count my blessings....as I have been trying to do since last week, but I also have a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, that hollow feeling of anxiety that whispers, "What if?  What if one of you gets really ill? What if things don't work out the way you hope?" The economic news does not inspire confidence. We've been without jobs before, but we were younger, and the economy was better. As Elizabeth Warren notes:

Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

And now....back to composing that cover letter and updating my vita.

The Evil of Praying for Evil

Anyone who has never been treated unfairly lives a very charmed life. Can such a person exist? Perhaps. But most of us have encountered, numerous times, situations or people that caused us pain or injury unnecessarily, unfairly, or deliberately meanly. So we can sympathize with those who wish bad things to happen to venal people who initiate, nudge, or incite the harm that befalls others. Been there, done that, here's the souvenir. But we also suspect that such wishing does not emerge from our better nature; it crawls up from the primordial mud with the animal that snarls "kill or be killed." Our more deliberative pre-frontal cortex puts on the brakes and "gather[s] a more judicious 'big picture'. . . .  and thereby exert[s] executive control over behavior." The primitive brain has its place and its uses, but we usually realize, after some reflection, that wishing for evil to befall others is fraught with more danger to ourselves than to the one whom we think deserves the curse. We all know people who fall into the pit of bitterness and blame and learn to love the smell of their own excrement.

And that's the stench I catch a whiff of when I read about people praying for the death of President Obama.  These people aren't primitives raised by wolves and thus taught to tear at the flesh of their victims; they're leaders of Christian churches. Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake is just such a leader, and a former vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He invokes Psalm 109 in his prayers that God kill President Obama: "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their homes."

Okay, this goes beyond wanting mean people to get their comeuppance. The fact that the verses appear in the Bible is no excuse to be muttering them like curses toward the President of the United States--or anyone, for that matter. What kind of person prays for evil to happen to the children of political opponents? Someone listening to his basal ganglia and not his pre-frontal cortex. The thing about religious texts is that they're something like the human brain; they contain all that's human in us, from the first howling of the wronged that wants revenge to the ecstatic poetry of the mystic who realizes the connectedness of all things and the frailty of all humans.  To read the texts as if they are recipes is to court disaster. Once these haters pray for the death of one enemy, will they stop there, especially if that prayer seems to be successful? Won't they think, "hey, this is better than pulling the trigger myself, getting God to do it for me" (albeit through some nutcase like the abortion opponent who shot and killed Dr. Tiller)?  And then they'll go on to the next person they've labeled the "enemy." (And anyone want to guess what really drives this hatred of Barack Obama?)

So for all those people with bumper stickers that say "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8"--EVOLVE, PEOPLE!

"Because He Cannot Cry"

This morning I read an article about a young man who was injured in an automobile accident when he was twenty years old. He has been immobilized for twenty-three years and, for twenty of those years, in what doctors thought was a "vegetative state. But doctors discovered three years ago that the man was actually conscious during those years, just unable to communicate that consciousness. What hell that must have been--to have your relatives visit and not be able to communicate your love for them; to have doctors diagnose your condition and not be able to refute them; to hear of a loved one's death and not be able to cry. And, of course, the story will make many people question the "vegetative" diagnosis of other paralyzed patients. However, a PET scan finally revealed that this man's brain was "almost normal," and doctors were finally able to make contact when the man was able to respond by slightly pressing a computer device with his foot.  When the patient later visited his father's grave, he closed his eyes for half an hour because he could not cry.   His physical condition may never improve, but his consciousness is no longer "locked in," unable to communciate.

While many of us have never experienced this kind of physical horror, we may have experienced that "locked-in" feeling when people on the outside label us and, through that labeling, think they understand us. (And people, like those doctors, who label us may also have the power to convince others of their "diagnosis." ) We may be unable to communicate our real feelings because that communication might have negative consequences on us or people we love. We remain stoic and silent for ethical reasons, because the situation that has created the "locked-in" feeling must be contained for the sake of others. Or  perhaps we just feel that to give way to our feelings would be to make us vulnerable in a way we are unable to face. How does one escape such a locked-in situation? Just as this young man did: with the help of someone who loves us or believes in us and with the help of people willing to listen to that person and to re-examine their own pre-conceived ideas. This man's mother continued to believe that her son was conscious, and she continued to press doctors to re-examine the diagnosis and to free her son.  Somehow she knew that her son was locked-in, fully aware but unable to communicate.

Most people can only hope for such a friend.

Being Thankful

In my previous post, I noted a news article that revealed the huge increase in the number of Americans who are going hungry and those who often do not have quite enough food to put on the table. Many other people are without jobs and have little expectation of being hired before holiday decorations are lit in downtowns across America (especially since some of those lights came on right after Halloween). Many of us have circumstances that cause us sleepless nights and that bubbly, anxious feeling in one's chest that seems to seep from one's pores and to fill the air one breathes. It's a hard time of the year for many people. Oh, yes, some seem immune from life's vicissitudes, but most have had that feeling at one or another time in their lives. And it's here, in the middle of that breath-catching moment, that it seems to me to be the most important time to be thankful. That's when it counts the most--not when one is sitting on top of the world, satiated, but when one is confronted with situations that seem to suck the air right out of the room. For I believe that thankfulness can help inflate one's lungs for that next, more hopeful breath.

I've been in such situations several times during my fifty-two-next-week years of living. Sometimes those situations were of my own blundering; at other times they were caused by the simple unfairness of life--the luck of the draw--or the callousness of others.  While I was never in great danger of starving, I do recall tough times in the first years of our marriage while my husband and I were struggling students.  During one particular rough spot, we sold my gold high-school ring to buy groceries. What we could have been thankful for then, however, is that if we hadn't had the money from that sale, we could have turned to family and friends, hands out, and had those hands filled--or an invitation to belly up to a full table.

And if family or friends aren't available--for whatever reason, death, disease, abandonment, distance--there is always the sunrise or the sunset or the smile on a stranger's face for which we can be thankful. That moment of thankfulness can be enough to produce the first oxygen-laden breath after disaster, a breath that just might allow us to think more clearly in order to navigate the maze of despair.

It's not easy.

But it's easier if you have a friend to show you the way. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that seems to do just that, sent to me by my friend Christine (Chris): Listen to and read Berry's poem "XI," here.


My friend likes best these lines:
"They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased."

I love those, too, as well as these, which speak especially to me:
"Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No. Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better."

"The South still lags" and Other Fun Facts

Note: I have rewritten this first paragraph since I first published this post. Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009
This post is not about me. It's about what's sorry about the South, where more than six generations of my ancestors have lived. I've found myself defending the South lately, first in a conversation while on vacation, with a woman in northern California; then in response to a blog post by Kevin Drum, whose blog I read often; then to a friend who was describing what some of her friends in California say or wonder about the South. But today I'm complaining, too, about the inequities of the South.

Take salaries, for example. Over ten years ago, I taught part-time at a community college in Duluth, Minnesota. My pay? $3500 per course per quarter. Fifteen years later, adjuncts at the community college here in Georgia where I tutor part-time make $2100 per course per semester. Adjuncts at the community college in Killeen, Texas, made $1550 per course per semester when I was teaching there in 2004-2007. I have taught full-time at universities, and when I was full-time, I was a voice for adjuncts and their pay. But my voice didn't make a difference.

And now, just a few minutes ago, I read that the United Health Foundation has published its results on the healthiest and unhealthiest states in the United States. Big surprise what states are the unhealthiest. The bottom 12?

• Texas
• Arkansas
• Kentucky
• West Virginia
• Georgia
• Tennesee
• Nevada
• South Carolina
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• Oklahoma
• Mississippi

The healthiest state in the country? Vermont. Oh, and guess what, health care has something to do with that:

[E]very pediatrician in Vermont accepts Medicaid and the benefits extend to families who earn up to 300% of the poverty line.

The New England states evidently should be the role model for slacker states:

New England in general sets a benchmark for the country, the report found. All six New England states are in the top 10. These states have favorable demographics and an excellent public health infrastructure, including a large number of doctors per capita.

Eight of the ten states on the bottom of the rankings list are in the South:

In general, residents of these states are more likely to be smokers or to be obese, the report found. They also have worse health insurance coverage, fewer physicians per capita and live in areas with high violent crime and more child poverty.

Oh, and the article does report that 96% of Vermonters are Caucasian and "that health outcomes can be worse for racial and ethnic populations as well as those with lower incomes and education levels."

I read this article and couldn't help but make connections with this book I'm reading now: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Why does the South lag? Because the rest of the country tends to give up on the South--or what might stand in as a signifier of today's South. After the Civil War, the intransigent racism of the South led to laws that essentially re-enslaved African-Americans. How did the North respond? Well, eventually by giving up on the South until the South rose up again in the form of--no, not Johnny Reb, but the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those other heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson  "legitimized the contemptuous attitudes of whites," especially those whites who held power in the South, and that "new consensus

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with American compulsion with honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled with reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans. (Blackmon, p. 110-111)

I see this same betrayal today in our political discourse--oh, please, don't think I'm equating health care with the enslavement of millions of African-Americans. This is a comparison, not an equation. But just note the many politicians--not all of whom are from the South!-- who claim that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Who claim that every citizen has adequate health care. These are the voices of today's metaphorical South--it's not necessarily a region but a state of mind, a state of mind that condemns a vast portion of the nation's citizens to poor resources because of its slavish faithfulness to an ideology.

Other findings that represent this "separate but equal" myth? How about how uninsured and insured people are treated when seeking emergency care?

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. ("Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die", Associated Press, 16 Nov., 2009; posted on MSNBC.com)

Or how about this fun fact, that there are more hungry Americans today than there have been "since the government has been keeping track," as reported in The Washington Post :

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. ("American's Economic Pains Bring Hunger Pains," Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, 17 November 2009.

And earlier this week I read how,  in "its analysis of health care legislation,"  Goldman Sachs "concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing." Do nothing, and stocks rise for stockholders in insurance companies: "The study's authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period."  Hurray for rich bastard stockholders! Tough shit for all those millions of Americans who can't get adequate healthcare.

Something is seriously wrong in this country when over a million of Americans go hungry, many millions can't get adequate healthcare, many other millions can't change jobs because they are afraid of losing health care, and millions of workers do not receive pay commensurate with their skills and abilities.

Fun quiz: How many Southern politicians are supporting health care reform and sponsoring bills to decrease hunger and to provide workers with more rights? How do those numbers compare with politicians from other regions of the country?

Where I Am

I began this blog when we moved to metro-Atlanta in mid-2007, as a way to discipline myself to write about what I think, observe, and experience (the writing goes out into cyberspace, and who knows who will be reading--if anyone) and as a disinterested way to keep in touch with folks I love who live elsewhere. By disinterested, I mean impartial, not directed personally toward particular people, but with those people in mind as well as any anonymous reader who might stumble across my blog. (I also write letters, personal, private, non-blog-like, with a little stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the envelope.) My faithful readers are my best friend in California, my husband, my son in Austin, and perhaps a niece in Texas who has logged on as one of my "followers"; local readers appear occasionally in comments. Others are lagniappe and I welcome them, though I rarely am aware of their presence beyond the counter on my profile page. But, mainly, my audience is myself, or, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "This is my letter to the world....."

I am a faithful reader of other blogs, blogs written by friends and by more publicly recognized people whose judgments I've come to trust. Occasionally I read the comments on those blogs, and most recently I was struck by a snarky comment left on one blog: Hey, congratulations! [this person wrote] You made Mark Steyn’s “Reader of the Day” portal. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into the realm of those of whom it is said, 'Never have so many had so much to say to so few.' Oh, yeah, the sneering about having a small audience. Well, what writer has never had a small audience? And, really, who cares. Some of us write because writing helps us organize our thoughts, review our assumptions and conclusions, analyze our interpretation of events. If someone reads what we write--and responds appreciately--wow, cool. Otherwise, we know we're bound for oblivion, but until we go there, we're going to squeak a little along the way.

I have been writing less lately on this blog because I'm in the middle of a huge personal project that I'm recording on my second blog, Left for Texas. Also, I've gotten a little discouraged with what passes as political intelligence (Joe Wilson, Jon Voight, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, that stupid plumber guy--Joe something or other, ugh) in this country and have been content to read other people's posts on health care and the war in Afghanistan, etc. Yes, I want a robust public option in the health care plan; yes, I think Bush dropped the ball in Afghanistan years ago, and now we're reaping the fallout from that [sorry for the mixed metaphor]. Ummmm.... think Global Warming is NOT a hoax and that Barack Obama is NOT a socialist or Hitler or whatever latest moniker the fear-mongers have tried to hang around his neck. Okay, believe that, said that, signed the petition, move on.

What I really want is happiness, happiness for my children, for myself, for my friends, for the world, really. And if I can't have that.....well, a little squeaking before oblivion. That's what I do here. Thank God.

Twice the Size of Texas

I have read several articles over the past several months about the huge gyre of trash in the Pacific Ocean that turns in upon itself, pulling in more and more detritus from our throw-away lives. Today's New York Times had another story on the Pacific garbage patch, "an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas." The idea that not one but several such tremendous toxic turds of human waste exist is really rather difficult to comprehend. And so the smaller evidences of our indifference seem to capture more clearly the monstrous consequences of the myth of convenience: the anecdote of the rainbow runner caught by researchers that had 84 pieces of plastic in its body and the picture in The New York Review of Books of the baby albatross, dead and eviscerated on a beach, revealing the many pieces of plastic its parents had fed it, thinking the colored bits to be food. The picture of that baby bird is more horribly eloquent than anything more that I could write here.

Oh, and this is depressing, too.

Chickens in the City

Today my husband and I attended a two-hour class sponsored by a local community garden project. The subject was on raising chickens in the city, and the teacher was a man who keeps five or so hens in his backyard. Evidently, there are a number of such backyard chicken enterprises throughout our community here on the east side of Atlanta. And the city has ordinances to provide some kind of control on backyard chickens while also not discouraging the practice. The Chickens-in-the-City class is so popular that it usually fills very quickly each time it is offered. One attendee at this morning's class said that she had tried many times to sign up for the class and had been put on a waiting list. On Friday, I received an e-mail from the community garden supervisor advertising that five slots were still available for this class from 10 A.M. to noon, so I quickly signed up online.
 

It was actually quite a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning; temperatures were in the mid-fifties at the beginning of the class, warming to mid-sixties, maybe, by noon. The sky was clear, and beautiful fall leaves stood out brightly against the blue. The teacher had set out a semi-circle of metal folding chairs in his backyard, and his talk was punctuated by the contented clucking of the chickens in the hen yard behind him. (My pleasure in the rather quirky gathering would have been much increased, however, had I not been suffering from a migraine that lingered well into the afternoon and early evening hours.)

I spent my childhood in the country in East Texas, and both my grandmothers raised chickens, as well as my father. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat mainly raised leghorns; she had a white henhouse of about one hundred chickens for a while, after she retired from teaching English to middle school children in Barbers Hill (also known as Mont Belvieu), Texas. My grandmother Ruby Scott Benton had a smaller, motley flock of red and brown chickens. And my father chose his chickens by their unique characteristics: Turkens with their featherless necks, Frizzle chickens with upturned feathers, Araucanas that lay blue or green eggs. He chose those chickens just for the delight of his children. But because I grew up in the country, I also knew the downside of raising chickens: snakes and possums in the henhouse, dogs chasing a flock and killing indiscriminately, and first-hand experience with processing chickens for Sunday dinner. I have smelled chicken death and plucked the feathers from many slaughtered chickens. (I never could eat chicken right after participating in processing those chickens for food; it would take about two weeks for me to get that raw, bloody meat smell--as well as the acrid smell of singed feathers--out of my mind.)

When our Chickens-in-the-City teacher turned to the more earthy topics associated with raising chickens, people began shifting a bit uncomfortably in their chairs. He described the raccoon he caught in his henhouse two months ago which he dispatched with a shovel. His Ameraucana hen was so traumatized by the raccoon invasion that she hadn't lain an egg since then; most of the time she crouches under bush cover at the edge of the henyard. The raccoon had killed one hen and left another near death. The chicken owner had to dispatch the second hen in order to diminish her misery, and he described the various ways to kill a chicken. "Can we call you to dispatch our chickens when something like that happens?" one Chickens-in-the-City student asked, plaintively.

I know that I could kill a chicken if I had to, but over the years, I've left the butchering to other people. My husband followed the policy of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat: a chopping block and an ax. My grandmother Benton would take a chicken and break its neck by whirling it around and then snapping the neck with a flick of her wrist. I was the chicken-plucker. Most people in the class, however, seemed to be interested mainly in egg production and in the counter-culture act of owning chickens in the back of their very suburban yards.

While standing in the chicken yard looking at the construction of the teacher's henhouse, my husband and I heard the call of a white-throated sparrow, one of my favorite bird songs, perhaps because the song reminds me of the times we hiked in the cool coniferous forests of Minnesota and heard that bird calling from deep within the woods. Despite the migraine, I felt that the Chickens-in-the-City class had exceeded my expectations.