Lucky White Girl

Thanks EJ!

Finally!  I've been waiting for someone to say something that makes a little bit of sense in the Obama-Wright controversy.  No surprise that EJ Dionne steps up to the plate, pointing out the hypocrisy of how quick our society is to condemn radical black preachers while being more diplomatic and understanding of racist white preachers who say things like "God doesn't hear the prayers of the Jews" and call the Catholic church "the anti-Christ". 

I disagree with the biblical scholar he quotes towards the end of the piece who says Wright was wrong to cloak himself in the mantle of a prophet because "prophets of old didn't announce their prophetic prerogatives at press conferences and press clubs".  Well, duh! They lived 2,000 years ago!  That has nothing to do with anything.  I think we do have prophets today just as human society had prophets 2,000 years ago and just as we will 2,000 years from now.  Who knows how they're going to deliver their messages?  Prophets just might use press conferences and press clubs to speak truth to power.  Whether Rev. Wright is one or not is up for debate but it's silly to attack the means of delivery instead of the message.

Immigrants. Identity. Illegal. Invasion.

Look at this map. Isn't it cool?  It's so simple on the surface: just a map of the Lakota Nation (see this post from the unapologetic Mexican).  But the more I look at it in the context of the current climate/controversies involving immigration in this country I think it raises all sorts of good and necessary complications around ideas of nations and borders and the interactions between humans across those imaginary lines. 

When you look at this map and I say "immigrants" who/what comes to mind?

What if I say "border security" --what does that make you think of looking at this map?

"Law and Order"?  "Illegal"?

"Invasion"?

These are words the anti-migrant crowd (e.g. Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan etc.) use in abundance when the subject is the US Mexico border and the desperately poor people who cross it looking for a better life.

History gives so much perspective on contemporary issues.  I'll give a little anecdote: I'm home visiting my folks for the holidays and my mom, as usual, says something to the effect of "I don't mind immigrants; I just wish they would learn English!" and it sounds reasonable but she says it with such anger that I know there's something else going on there under the surface.  It's not just about language --not really.  Because my little 70 year old white mother never has to worry about someone not speaking English to her.  She doesn't know many non-English speaking people.  My group of bilingual, multicultural friends is way more diverse than hers and I can't think of any friends of mine who don't speak English (even those in South America)!  So there's got to be something else going on there.

Over dinner I mention that my friend Paul recently came to visit.  Paul's parents are from Belguim and he was born in Argentina and raised in Fort Lauderdale.  He speaks English and French.  My mom was curious as to why he doesn't speak English and Spanish if he was born in Argentina.  I explained: His parents --like a lot of Europeans-- went to South America during and after the second World War.  And like a lot of immigrant groups when they got there they hung out with other Belgians and didn't learn much Spanish.  Sound familiar? I asked her. 

It's hard to learn another language --a fact never less understood than by those who have never tried to do so (my mother would fall into that category).   And it's freakin' hard to try to live and work in a country where you don't speak the language.  I know from personal experience that it's utterly exhausting.  It took every ounce of energy I had when I first got to Colombia to even to do the simplest of tasks (take the bus; buy groceries; have a vague idea of what's going on around in my immediate surroundings).  Life depends on language and when you're in a foreign world; you can't learn the new language fast enough.  But it takes time.  Especially if you're an adult.  And especially if you are not in the foreign land out of choice but by economic necessity the temptation to retreat into the familiar sounds and cadences of your mother tongue can be irresistible.   Heaven forbid, we get tired!

This is all the same thing.  No matter where we are now, no matter where we go in the future: we've been there before.  One day we are the migrants and the next someone else is.  Today we have plenty, tomorrow it's us asking for help/another chance/a better chance.  No matter how hard we try the world just refuses to congeal itself into a frozen unchanging mass.  Immigrants come and immigrants go and the flow of people and languages and cultures continues, messing up those little imaginary lines and convenient boxes.

Thank goodness for that.

Emphasis on "Happy": Consequences of economic insecurity

Madeline Bunting had a column in The Guardian a few weeks ago about the economics of insecurity.  Security and insecurity is a favorite subject of mine because the concept is so pliable.  What is security?  It's a goal we're always striving for; it's been ever more prominent and elusive since 9/11 but rarely do we ask what it would mean, exactly, --what it would take-- for us to feel "secure"?  Are we talking about military superiority so overwhelming that no one would dare attack us physically?  Or do we mean food security: knowing we grow and produce enough food to feed ourselves?  What about social security: knowing that one's government provides safety nets for its population so that we don't all have to live at the mercy of fate?  Then of course there's economic security and that's the one Bunting talks about in her article.  Our current economic system is built on economic INsecurity, and overconsumption as a whole is "a mal-adaptive type of coping mechanism".  And what are the consequences of that (besides global warming and the general destruction of the planet)?

"there is a madness at the heart of this economic model with its terrible environmental costs. It's best illustrated by a graph used by the US psychologist Tim Kasser at a Whitehall seminar last week. One line, representing personal income, has soared over the past 40 years; the other line marks those who describe themselves as "very happy", and has remained the same. The gap between the two yawns ever wider. All this consumption is not necessary to our happiness....

The brilliance of this economic system built on insecurity is that it is self-reinforcing. The more insecure you are, the more materialistic; the more materialistic, the more insecure. As Kasser has shown, materialistic values (which are on the increase among teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic) make you more anxious, more vulnerable to depression and less cooperative. Studies show that people know what the real sources of lasting human fulfilment are - good relationships, self-acceptance, community feeling - but they face a formidable alliance of political and economic interests that have a vested interest in distracting them from that insight to ensure they work longer hours and spend more money.

The task we're faced with now is how to turn that equation around: go from a high-anxiety high-consumption mode of life to a low-anxiety low-consumption one.  A low-consumption economy would be "oriented towards facilitating the real sources of human fulfilment":

Hearteningly, we know it can be done - our parents and grandparents managed it in the second world war. This useful analogy, explored by Andrew Simms in his book Ecological Debt, demonstrates the critical role of government. In the early 1940s, a dramatic drop in household consumption was achieved - not by relying on the good intentions of individuals ... but by the government orchestrating a massive propaganda exercise combined with a rationing system and a luxury tax.

So, yes it's good to buy eco-friendly laundry detergent but to really make a change we need to act en masse.  That's why the UN's Climate Change Conference in Bali this week is so important and that's why a movement that relies on individual good intentions has never-- and will never-- change the world.  All the great progressive changes in society were based on communal action (sometimes sparked by a brave individual but eventually carried out communally).  In this age of globalization our community is now the whole world.  Some things just require a group effort.  As that famous presidential candidate once said, "it takes a village", eh?

"Green" nuclear power?

I found this on a list of the world's 7 creepiest places.  At a time when nuclear power is being presented by many as a "green" alternative to fossil fuels, we'd do well to remember what happened in Chernobyl to make it so infamous. 

Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine

Walk through the abandoned town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, and you'll find a large-scale crime scene abandoned in a hurry: A nursery full of children's shoes, and apartment complexes with the morning newspaper, dated April 28, 1986, open on the breakfast table. Two days before, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, minutes away, melted down, but it took 48 hours for the authorities to alert locals and clear them out of the world's biggest nuclear disaster site. Now that radiation levels are safe for short-term exposure, Chernobyl's nuclear complex has become an unlikely tourist attraction since opening to visitors in 2002. The power complex is at the center of the 20-mile-radius "Exclusion Zone," a regrown area of forests now populated by wolves and bears. Reactor #4 is the star of this sad show, today sheathed in a concrete and lead sarcophagus 200 feet high.

This system would work if only reality would cooperate!

Okay so say we decide that global warming is a GOOD thing and we want to encourage folks to burn EVEN MORE FOSSIL FUELS at every opportunity because, you know, we like flooded cities and stifling air pollution and the like.  ;-)

If such were the case, a smart government might decide to CREATE INCENTIVES to encourage folks to burn as many fossil fuels as possible when they travel.  They might come up with a system such as this:  Make train travel EXPENSIVE and make air travel CHEAP.  That way people --even people who don't like to fly-- would be forced to fly out of economic necessity and burn I don't know how many hundreds of pounds more fossil fuels than they would otherwise.  Isn't that a great idea? 

yeah... that's the system we have now.  :-(

DC to my hometown in Florida
via airplane: $150
via train: $300

It's soooo frustrating.

What's scarier than rampaging zombies?

I live in a little college town in Florida.  Here, we have this local theater company who puts on plays in this historic building downtown.   Currently, in honor of the season, they are putting on a production of Night of the Living Dead.  What could be scarier than rampaging zombies?  We gotta go see it!  And so we did. 

First of all I should admit that this theater is so known for its safe, unchallenging, "fun" plays that I haven't ever been very motivated to go see very many of them.  And on the rare occasions that I do, I always walk away with the same impression: gee, that was mildly amusing and maybe rather cute but not very daring or profound.  But with George Romero's movie as the basis of the script how could they disappoint?

For those unfamiliar with the movie, the original Night of the Living Dead movie was made in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.  Seen within that context, the movie is very daring and provocative.  Fear of something "out there", a great threat to "life as we know it", talk of "containment", and "cures" that are as bad as the disease (the only way to kill zombies is to shoot them in the head and many non-zombies are killed not by zombies but by other humans trying to kill zombies)!  And in the middle of all this is a great power struggle between an older "law and order" white man and a young rebellious black man in which the more sympathetic character of the two is --amazingly enough now remember this was 1968-- the black man.  Wow!

It's one of the greatest films of all time and admittedly it'd be hard for a play to achieve something like the level of ingenuity of the original movie, but the story line is so ripe for biting political commentary updated for the 21st century that you'd have to have your head in the sand to waste it. And wasted it was. The Hippodrome's was a cute version that I really wanted to like --and probably would have if I didn't know how brilliant the Romero movie was-- but it could have been so much more.

The play was fun: the set impressive, the acting superb and the dancing zombies quite freaky-looking.  Ben, the black man, was played by Armando Acevedo, in jeans and a muscle-revealing white tank and to their credit, they did maintain somewhat the social power dynamic of the movie while updating it to 21st century prejudices.  Ben could've been an illegal immigrant or a farmworker.  Mr. Cooper the white man was perfect in his polo shirt and slacks.  I also appreciated it all being adapted to our area with lots of local references (Barbara and Johnny come from Tallahassee and the zombie attack takes place in Gainesville).  But that's about as far as they push the envelope in this one.

Okay you might say, so it was maybe a tad on the bland side but what's wrong with that?  Isn't Halloween supposed to be about having fun?  Sure, but how much fun is it when it's obvious that stuff has been intentionally toned down so as not to offend the funding sources?

Here's an example: At one point in the play a woman in the audience stands up with a microphone and plays a local news anchor reporting on the situation.  In the list of preparations the city has undertaken she tells us that Ted and Linda McGurn, two locally famous wealthy developers, have opened a zombie-free "SafeSpace" downtown.   Now, practically that entire audience would know "SafeSpace" as the name of a one-stop center that the city has been trying for years to open to provide services for the homeless.  The reason it has taken so long is because there are some pretty powerful interests who are aligned against such charitable endeavors in the downtown area.  The biggest and most powerful of those interests are --yes, indeed-- the McGurns!  It was the perfect setup and they just turned and walked away leaving everyone smiling painfully at a lame quip about parking enforcement! 

The McGurns, you see, are one of the largest donors to the Hippodrome State Theater.   Can you spell i-n-f-l-u-e-n-c-e?

Alright, I can understand not wanting to deliberately piss off your largest donors with personal jibes at their heartlessness towards the poor but ignoring the themes of racism, patriotism and militarism that are so present in the movie sunk the rest of the play for me.  There are so many rich parallels to George W's America.  The part, for example, in the story where the other young man trapped in the house is chosen to go out and face the zombies alone.  Romero put that scene in the movie for a reason: He's the young, loyal, good all-American boy going off to fight the good fight.  (hmmm... haven't seen anything like that on the news around here lately, have you?)  They could have played America the Beautiful, for example, during the scene where he's saying goodbye to his girlfriend, throwing red, white and blue lights on them as they embrace for the last time, both knowing they're likely to never see each other again.  Instead, the playwrights here made it a cheezy melodramatic dance scene as if it were a romantic comedy relevant to nothing.

The USA of 1968 and the USA of 2007 have a lot in common.  The climate of fear G.W's America rivals that of Romero's time.  What better way to illustrate that point than with a classic zombie story all about what people will do when faced with an incomprehensible threat of "epic proportions"? 

So you see the first lesson in art patronage: money buys good entertainment but not-so-good art. 

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until they prove otherwise, if you want to be entertained, the Hippodrome is the place to go.  If you want to see real provocative performances, you'll have to look somewhere else.  Because in a country once again so firmly in the grip of paranoia, nothing's scarier than safe zombies. 

Thanks Charlie!

Dear Gov. Crist,
I want to thank you for slashing taxes and devastating the budgets of our local city and county governments.  After all, government = bad.  Private corporations = good.  I'm sure Wal-Mart will step in to take up the slack and start providing services to our local homeless residents (population +/-800) and maybe Dollar General will start offering discount elderly assistance programs.  (My own parents are wealthy so they won't be affected by these cuts in social services but I'm sure they appreciate you lowering their tax burden). 

As for myself, well, I'm not wealthy but I personally don't mind using shabby, poorly maintained public roadways, overgrown parks and dangerously unsafe playgrounds for my kids (heck, survival of the fittest you know!)  As for public education, let's see if we can make it to the very top of the list of countries with the worst public education in the world!  We like to be number 1 in this country!  People should be homeschooling anyway.

The cuts to police and fire departments though are a little hard to take.  I can't see how this wouldn't also harm the wealthy.  Maybe it's time for privatization in this area as well?  I know private police forces sound alarmingly like paramilitary/militia forces but we gotta do what we gotta do.  All in the name of security and privatization.

I hope everything turns out all right with this tax cut deal.  If not, unlike our Resident in the White House, I trust you will figure out a way to get us out of the mess you got us into.

Sincerely,
barb howe of www.luckywhitegirl.com

Don't Blame Bush

Paul Krugman had an excellent editorial in Friday's New York Times:

I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

You have to be a subscriber to read the full article on the NY Times but you can also read it here for free on Common Dreams.

Creating a customer for life

I started this post last week and saved a draft but never finished it.  Life is like that for me these days.  Nonetheless I kept thinking about it and now I mentioned it to a friend over dinner the other night so here it is:

Sometimes people make comments when they see me reading the business section or listening to the business report on the news.  For some reason they think that only capitalists are interested in such things.  I really don't understand this.  EVERYBODY --especially those of us concerned about the detrimental effects of capitalism-- should listen to business news.  It's really important.  And it's not all pro-bottom line. 

This morning was a perfect example.  NPR had a great story about marketing to children via their parents.  They interviewed the author of a book called Buy, Buy, Baby: How consumer culture manipulates parents and harms young minds.  Susan Gregory Thomas says marketers use anxiety to sell their products; they tell parents that they need to "stimulate" the baby using their products and if they don't do that they might be putting their children at a disadvantage to all those parents whose children will grow up to be geniuses because their parents bought them "Baby Einstein".  To a baby or toddler, everyday life is stimulating she says.  What is the real scientific evidence undergirding these products?  Very little according to Thomas.  The only thing these sorts of marketing and programming (Dora the Explorer, Clifford the big red dog etc.) does is induce brand or character recognition in the child which then will sell products (backpacks, juice boxes, underwear) later in life. 

"I think all media companies are really beginning to look at the zero to three segment as really being the entry point of a cradle to grave marketing campaign" 

It could mean something like several hundred dollars in sales for the company over the life of that child.  Now that's the spirit of capitalism!

Building great communities

Gainesville was ranked the best city in a new book that rates 850 cities in the US. 

In 1995 Money Magazine said this was the best place to live in the entire country and people still talk about that ranking today.  The AARP says it's one of the best places to retire too.  On the other hand, in 2004 the National Coalition for the Homeless said our town was the fifth meanest city to the poorest and most vulnerable residents and we are always having to fight to keep the city commission from passing ordinances and laws intending to make their lives even more difficult.

Despite this, personally, I like living here.  It's a nice town.  There are things I wish we could improve such as reducing the influence of wealthy developers and increasing compassionate care of all our community members but overall I agree, this is a good place to live. 

We have lots of interesting funky activities going on, art festivals, outdoor concerts, marches and rallies.  It's quite diverse ethnically and culturally, although painfully segregated between rich and poor with definite racial disparities between the two.  We have a large active progressive community that's very politically-involved, even if we have our squabbles and divisiness. 

We have an excellent public library system.  Period.

We're surrounded by some of the best of Florida outdoor life (freshwater springs, national forests, rivers, lakes etc.) and we have quite a lot of greenspace in town too. Dogparks.  People parks.  Lots and lots of trees.  And despite what one of the songs performed at the recent May Day festival proclaimed, this is a bike-friendly town.  We could always use more bike lanes and I've always said that a bicycle-awareness campaign targeted to educating motorists about the rights of bicyclists would be immensely helpful to making it even more bike-friendly but compared to other cities I've biked in (Tampa and Chicago) Gainesville's a breath of fresh air.  (In Tampa after writing the city to complain about the lack of bike racks they sent me a map with the location of each bike rack marked on it; Gainesville could not produce such a map.  There're too many bike racks.  They're everywhere.  It's the only city I know where you can bike to the airport and park your bike at a bike rack!  How cool is that?) 

Like many other graduates, I'd stay here permanently but there are no jobs in my field unless I want to give up my professional career and wait tables or bartend.

I've lived here seven years and I think for all that time, I have learned this: we weren't handed a nice city on a silver platter.  We fought for it.  If it hadn't been for the persistence and dedication of people who wouldn't give up this place would look like any other sprawling, car-centered, unbike-friendly south Florida city.  I went to the county commission meetings a few years ago when they were deciding on a ten year plan and I can tell you that we what we have because we fought wealthy-out of town developers who wanted more leniency to develop as much land as possible for the largest profit margin possible. And the people said no.  Hours of sitting in county commission meetings.  Thousands of letters.    Hundreds of signs.  We have bike lanes because people were outraged every time a cyclist was hit and killed by a motorist who felt that roads are intended only for cars.  We have a homeless shelter conveniently located in the downtown area despite, not because of, downtown developers.  We have all these things because people wrote letters, went to commission meetings, held rallies, blocked traffic, campaigned for noble-minded political nobodies, held signs on street corners and spoke out in public forums.

The lesson is this: Anything in life that is good, has to be fought for.  Whether it's working an 8 hour day instead of a 12 hour one or living in a nice city, it takes effort, organizing and struggle.  If you wait for the Man to remember you, you'll be waiting a long time.  I guarantee it.