Recently in Social and Political Category
This is how lucky I am.
When I was digging up weeds yesterday, I was maintaining property that I own, not trying to make enough money to feed my family on someone else's land. The conditions where I was digging were safe and I could stop whenever I wanted.
When I came in and took a shower, I had electricity, clean hot water, and a reasonable expectation of safety and privacy.
When I broke the soap holder off the wall while drying my leg and sliced the bottom of my foot open on the broken pieces, someone was home to help me.
When I had to hop around naked holding a clean maxi-pad on my foot trying to stop the bleeding while getting some clothes on, it was in front of my child care provider, a relative who loves me (and saw me give birth already).
When I could not stop the bleeding and needed medical attention, I didn't have to worry about how we would pay for it.
When I needed information about where to get that medical care, I was able to look for a provider on my high-speed internet connection. I could read and understand the information, find the correct phone number, and make a savvy decision about where to go for treatment.
When I needed a ride to the urgent care center, my husband had the flexibility to leave work and drop me off so that my child care provider could take my two year old to his gym class as scheduled. Our family did not lose any income as a result.
When I got to the urgent care center, they had someone check on me me right away even though my scheduled appointment was in two hours. I waited for a doctor in a comfortable private room. I was treated with respect by every member of the staff who interacted with me.
When it took over three hours on a weekday morning to deal with the incident, I did not get in trouble with my boss or lose any income.
When I needed to keep my foot propped up, I could resume working from the comfort of my home, seated in a chair.
Unlike migrant farm workers. Unlike people who are poor. Unlike people who are in prison. Unlike people in abusive relationships. Unlike people who get paid hourly and have no sick time. Unlike people whose families and friends aren't dependable. Unlike people who have no health insurance or who depend on public programs to pay for their health care. Unlike people who are doing their best to survive in a country where they don't yet speak or the language fluently.
I wish everyone understood how much of what I have is because of luck. It was luck that my mother in law was home to help, and that the cut wasn't deeper or longer because then hello stitches, but it's even luck that I had a soap holder to cut it on in the first place. Looking at my son, who was born with even more advantages than I was, I don't know how anyone can believe that there's a level playing field. I grew up with money, skin color, nationality, health, family dynamics, education, and knowledge of how to navigate bureaucracy on my side, and he will too. He is starting out so far ahead, just like I did.
I have worked hard at times in my life. But most of the adults and a good percentage of the children in the world work harder in a day than I do in a week. They don't get to sit at comfortable desks and push pixels around. They're already putting in their time and then some. How are they supposed to work harder to cover the distance between where they are and where I am? Why are we so surprised when many people don't have that strength, already working harder than I ever have and battling barriers I never had to face?
And when one of those people cuts their foot in the shower, why do so many people think it's okay for their experience to be so much different from mine? That if they want to achieve what I have, they will simply work harder?
For the second time this year, I have run across a blog post suggesting that people work together to read the entirety of one of the health care bills... by each reading one page. Today's find is 1,502 at conservative blog bRight and Early.
Am I the only one here who has ever READ a bill? They don't come in 1-page chunks.
Here's a comment from one of the readers of the Baucus bill (PDF):
Page 774 establishes quality standards by the Secretary, Who ever that is, for the "Pilot Program". [...] My concern is the "Secretary" seems to have the ability to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Maybe some other part of this bill tells us his regulated powers, but I doubt it!
My guess? The Secretary is defined somewhere else in the bill, and the powers are defined elsewhere in the bill. If not, that's a legitimate criticism. But if you don't even check, what's the point of this exercise?
Would I want to read a 1,502 page bill all myself? No, and it wouldn't make any sense to try. I applaud the idea of working together to produce a summary and analysis. But page by page makes no sense. I can only imagine what insights will be gleaned from all the pages that start mid-sentence.
They do section the dang thing, y'all. There's even a table of contents.
So I'm over at Wired reading an article about Newsy, an up and coming news website/service thingy. They assemble video clips of coverage on a single issue from multiple sources so people can see how the issue was reported differently on different news outlets.
This, my friends, is cool. People, including me, need to have their certainty messed with regularly.
Then I got to this part:
Newsy [...] does a fine enough job of presenting competing viewpoints from global news sources in a condensed video format. But it's content to stop there, shying away from the next logical step of analyzing these competing viewpoints to figure out which one is the most accurate, the way FactCheck.org does.
Another piece of the puzzle, to be developed with some of the new funding, will be ranking system where the crowd votes up and down which of the news sources are closest to getting it right.
I'm sorry, WTF? Double WTF? WTF with a side of are you high? How the hell does the crowd have a clue who got it right? Popularity and correctness are not the same thing.
I headed over to Newsy to learn more. This is how Newsy describes what they do on their About page:
By monitoring the world's new coverage, we provide immediate analysis of news perspectives so you can form your own opinion. You'll find it an informative and a convenient resource that you will want to check daily. We will not change the news, but we will change your view of it. Global access to multiple perspectives helps provide the real story.
On the page called Story Selection, it says this:
We work together to research, write and edit our stories, paying close attention to providing our audience with unique perspectives and analysis of the differences in coverage. Our stories are written by a diverse team of people with many voices working together to create a unique final product.
I watched two videos: Obama to Choose Afghanistan Path and Catching Rays and Resentments.
Oh the underwhelm.
What do you get when you combine teensy clips from news broadcasts with a "host" who describes for you what angles each media outlet is concentrating on while reporting on the topic?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If it's an event you're unfamiliar with, you get barely enough information to even know what happened, let alone make any sense of the micro-coverage that follows. Even if one could make the argument that juxtaposing different coverage of the same topic is analysis in and of itself, which I would dispute, Newsy seems to fail miserably at even that.
Part of the problem with today's journalism is an overreliance on the "they said this, the other people said the opposite" form of reporting where no attempt is made to weigh both claims and arrive at a conclusion - even on something that is empirically verifiable. Newsy is like the MTV version of that syndrome.
Seriously, take a look and tell me if I got it all wrong. Does a Newsy clip offer you anything in the form of information, analysis, or exposure to a range of perspectives?
If you've read any conservative blogs in the past six months, you may have run across a somewhat bizarre claim. According to some of these folks, the mortgage crisis came about because banks were forced by the government to make loans to low-income people and minorities who could not pay them back and should not have gotten loans in the first place. Furthermore, it is the Democrats' fault for creating the regulations that forced these banks to enter into such unwise arrangements.
Now granted it's been a few years since my graduate coursework in affordable housing, urban poverty, and public policy. Off the top of my head, though, I did recall some lending requirements on banks contained in a piece of legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act. Perhaps this is what these folks were referring to?
Of course, the CRA was passed in 1977 and advocates have been complaining ever since about how the feds won't enforce it and too many institutions not covered by the CRA have gotten into the mortgage lending business.
Many advocacy groups that represent low-income folks have also been quite concerned about what they call "predatory lending" in the housing market. Basically, they've been worried that low-income borrowers were being targeted for subprime loans, and they had spent years pushing for government regulation to prevent lenders from enticing people with unaffordable mortgages before the meltdown began.
So it was difficult for me to envision how a 30 year old law and a bunch of liberals had forced all the banks to make bad loans while the institutions that would have been doing the forcing were operating under a Republican president.
Luckily, I happen to know a Professional Economist, so he helped me out with some info on the debacle. Yes, it's the CRA that's being blamed, and yes, it's a bunch of b.s. Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis? has the best explanation I've seen so far of exactly why. A few salient quotes:
- [...] half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA.
- Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts.
- In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but [...] that activity "largely came to an end by 2001."
- In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified...
- [...] even lenders have not fingered CRA.
Seriously, people. There are plenty of REAL things to dislike about any political party and their preferred laws no matter which side you're on. No need to make stuff up.
This came out in mid-September, but I just found out about it today.
Sen. Joe Biden gave $3,690 to charity... over 10 years.
In case you're interested, here's more about all four of the candidates' giving.
Conservatives have scolded him quite harshly for this, and I have to say that in the absence of any additional information - which I did not locate with el Google - I agree. That's pathetic, especially for a person in elected office.
Without being rude, how exactly do you tell a fellow white person to stop comparing (a) themselves or (b) Sarah Palin to Rosa Parks?
I've seen it on two blogs that I generally like, and I am so... I hate to use the word "offended" because people mock it so much, as if being offended is just something that people make up when they want to cause a scene. And I think I'm more shocked and bewildered than angry or hurt, so offended is probably not the right choice even though it's the first word that comes to mind.
Rosa Parks was not just some random woman who got on a bus one day and thought "Gee, you know, I'm tired, I think I'll just refuse to move." She was an activist and an African-American during a time when you could be beaten, your house bombed by terrorists, and you and your family murdered for standing up for your rights. After she acted as plaintiff in the test case against bus segregation by going to trial for her actions, she was fired and her husband had to quit his job. They had to move to a different city so she could find work. (You can learn more at the Rosa Parks entry on Wikipedia and her biography at the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute.)
Saying that a white American is the Rosa Parks of whatever cause is really disrespectful. It's not synonymous with saying "she's a fighter" or "she's breaking down barriers." It's appropriation of a person and a context and a movement that you do not own and do not have permission to borrow. And I'm pretty sure it's my anti-racist duty to point that out, even if the parties involved don't care what I have to say, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to explain it without throwing 5,000 words at it when 15 would be better.
Suggestions welcome.
I'm still thinking about that poverty essay I blogged about a while back where the guy constructed a budget for a family of four in Los Angeles with one full-time wage earner and one part-time wage earned who both make minimum wage.
He was trying to rebut the claim that a family can't live on the minimum wage.
The more I think about it, the more I'm realizing how silly that is. No one is claiming that there is no combination of mathematics, budgeting, and good luck that will not allow a family to live on the minimum wage for a finite period of time. Saying "a family can't live on the minimum wage" is shorthand.
When Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickeled and Dimed, she wasn't arguing that never in America had anyone been successful working at the type of jobs she worked. She wanted to demonstrate how hard it was. How painfully, back breakingly hard. How even if you worked that hard, things could happen to put you under water.
When Adam Shepard replicated her experiment and had a better experience, as a younger, healthier, male American, how could this possibly be treated as a damning rebuttal?
(See Playing at Poverty and Has Class Trumped Race? if you're not familiar with Shepard.)
Adam Shepard had more privilege. He had credit in the eyes of society that Ehrenreich didn't have, and even Ehrenreich had credit that many people in America will never have because society just will not give it to them.
Adam Shepard is basically my son. Rich, white, not disabled (though that can change), and we expect him to be reasonably well educated. My son is going to have about five hundred truckloads of privilege. How do I raise my son to understand that whatever he achieves is partly his own efforts, and partly because of what society just gives him by virtue of his social status? How do I make sure he knows that others have worked far harder for far less?
I didn't understand poverty when I was growing up, even though my mother encouraged us to give to charity. I didn't even know that people grew up in apartments. I thought if your parents got divorced and thus you had slightly less money, you lived in a townhouse. I thought we were lower income because we didn't have a boat and go to Vail. Privilege and ignorance is not a good combination. Too bad Alan Shepard didn't use his sojourn to clear up that second part.
I'm going to quote liberally from Shannon's call to action here. I'm not doing this to guilt anyone, but please read this and pay attention to the part I've bolded near the end.
The adoption agency that placed our daughters with us has been doing wonderful work since 1992, helping children who would otherwise end up in the fostering system get into permanent, loving homes from birth.
And for the past three years, they've been matching HIV+ children from many parts of the world with adoptive families. HIV+ children are almost never born in the United States anymore, because prophylactic medication during pregnancy prevents almost 100% of maternal-fetal transmission. But in many places in the world, these drugs are not available or affordable. Instead, babies are born positive, their parents die of AIDS and they are left with very little medical care, hopefully in the loving care of relatives, but when that's not possible, in an orphanage.
If they are lucky.
Many orphanages in countries with large HIV infection rates are so overwhelmed that they actually have to turn children away. [...]
Our agency has decided to broaden its efforts to include supporting orphanage care--in particular access to quality medical services--for those children who will simply never be placed with permanent families. [...]
...a dollar can go much further in a place like Haiti, than it can in the U.S. For a fraction of what it would cost to raise a child in the United States, many children can be raised in their home countries (and perhaps have access to surviving relatives, their native language, culture, religion and other benefits).
Our agency is looking for sponsors willing to commit to giving $35 a month to fully support one child in an orphanage in Haiti.
Come on, y'all. $35 per month is not a stretch for most of my friends. Except the one in Los Angeles. Skip a dinner or two out, knock one movie off your Netflix subscription, or don't buy that skirt. I doubt you'll even notice.
Please.
Fred Clark's post Move that schoolbus! is from... a while ago. If you've ever seen the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, though, it's worth a read, as is the article he links to.
The few times I watched it, I felt vaguely ill about the massive pile of stuff that was thrown at the featured families. Especially in run-down neighborhoods, I couldn't help but wonder how the neighbors felt about the sudden appearance of a gargantuan, state of the art house crammed with technology and luxurious furnishings. (I hadn't seen an episode where other homes on the block got any assistance, but apparently it sometimes happens.)
Clark's idea of having Extreme Makeover: School Edition crystallized it for me, that an extravagant act of commercialized charity totaling near half a million dollars for one family could, in another application, benefit hundreds and hundreds of children, or even several families. The producers do such a great job positioning the families as suffering and needy. But I wonder, do they really need so much? I'm pretty sure that paying off someone's mortgage and getting them a reliable car and a family vacation while sprucing up their current house is a financial and emotional boost that any family would rejoice to receive.
But because it's on television, and not really about helping, everything is about vast quantities of stuff. We can't just fix up your current house, we have to tear it down and start over and throw out all your furniture and appliances and get you new ones. We can't just get you a new reliable Honda Civic, we're going to get you an expensive SUV.
Then I feel bad about "begrudging" any of these families the lottery they basically won by appearing on the show. My proposal of mortgage, car, vacation, and house sprucing obviously shows I'm not arguing for only giving them enough gruel to live on and two outfits so they can wash one while wearing the other, but the producers make it too hard to look at the family and say "wow, should this television show really get credit for helping people when it does so in almost the most narcissistic, inefficient way possible?"
So yeah, I don't watch much television anymore. Too complicated.
