The Wise Latina Woman was Right

This morning Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, making her the first Latina and the third woman to sit on the Supreme Court.

During her confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor was excoriated over and over again over her comment in a speech about the specific wisdom of a “wise Latina woman.” Here is the exact quote:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Sotomayor was responding to an assertion, often attributed to Sandra Day O'Connor, that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Sotomayor argued against the presumption that gender, race, ethnicity, class, and life experience do not have an influence on how we make judgments even if we as individuals are consciously striving to be reasonable and impartial in our treatment of all parties in the case at hand.

And Sotomayor, is absolutely right. The weight of recent research in psychology and the emerging fields of cognitive and neuroscience show that our experiences and our emotions, our sense of who we are and what groups we feel an affiliation with, all of this affects, though it does not determine, how we make decisions.**

Take gender, for example. We need only look at the recent Supreme Court decision, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, which ruled that a school district illegally conducted a strip search of a thirteen-year-old girl, to recognize that the presence of a woman on the court was an important factor in the Court's decision-making process. In the oral arguments, Justice Breyer suggested that it was “no big deal when kids strip. After all, they do it for gym class all the time.” Outraged, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded angrily that “boys may like to preen in the locker room but girls, particularly teen-aged girls, do not” (See NPR transcript for April 21,2009.)

As a woman, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood , in ways that the other male justices could not, how traumatic it would be for a thirteen-year-old girl to undergo such a search. In a culture that simultaneously hypersexualizes the female body and yet assumes that pubescent girls are both sexually innocent and modest, it's inevitable that young women feel much more anxiety and embarrassment about the physical evidence of sexual maturity and do not want to strip in front of strangers. The girl who experienced the strip search developed stomach ulcers, a clear symptom that being forced to strip down to her underwear and then pull those garments away from her body was far different for her than changing her clothes for gym class.

This is not to say that I believe strip searches of students on such flimsy evidence as the school district had in this case is any more justified for boys than it is for girls. But Ginsburg recognized that gender made a difference in how much more negatively it could affect a young woman. Ultimately the majority of the court agreed with her and the decision ruled against the school district and in favor of the young woman.

What Judge Sotomayor was talking in about in her speech was precisely the kind of effect that Ginsburg's comment can have when judges are trying to reach a consensus about a particular case. In her “wise Latina” speech, Sotomayor stated: “I accept the thesis of a law school classmate, Professor Steven Carter of Yale Law School...that in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought.” She then went on to argue that “whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

This is not an argument in favor of a particular cultural, ethnic, racial, or gender bias. Rather it is an argument that since we all have these biases built into the very neural networks of our brain, our conscious awareness of them can bring new perspectives to the process of judging, just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's tart comment on adolescent nudity, brought a new dimension to the case at hand and gave the male justices some insight into what thirteen-year-old Savana Redding might have felt the day she was strip-searched.

In fact, the more we are aware of our emotions and the processes we use to reach decisions, and most importantly, the more we are exposed to the life experiences of others who are not like us, the more we are able to expand the range of internal perspectives we use to make decisions that don't simply reinforce our inherent predilections.

In her “wise Latina” speech, Judge Sotomayor demonstrated that she is very much aware of the balance we must strike between drawing on our own experience and the need to try understand the experiences of others in striving to achieve our best semblance of impartiality. As she put it: “The aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.

For these reasons, Judge Sotomayor's presence on the Supreme Court represents not just a symbolic victory for diversity, but a real and practical one. As she has said, "Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage." In a society where women constitute about half the population, and as we rapidly move towards the day when there is no single majority race or ethnicity in the United States, that kind of self-awareness and openness to other experiences is precisely what we need more of on the highest court in the land

***In his seminal work, Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neurology at USC, argues that the ideal of pure reason championed by philosophers from Plato to Kant is wrong. Instead, he argues that “certain aspects of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use,” (“Introduction,” p. xiii). More recent work in neuroscience has confirmed and expanded Damasio's findings.

Goethe Slept Here (Not)

In June of this year I traveled through the countryside of Germany to small towns that do not show up on most maps. I was searching for the places my forebearers used to live and feeling grateful to my brother-in-law for the loan of his GPS navigation system, since I would have been utterly lost without it.

As far as I know all of my ancestors for three or four generations back arrived in the United States from Germany. My father's father came from Steinbach-Hallenberg, a beautiful village in a narrow valley of the state of Thuringia in the forests of central Germany. My mother's family came from the province of Mecklenburg, a land of small lakes and rolling fields near the Baltic Sea. My maternal great-grandfather was from the tiny village of Viezen, and my great-great-grandfather from Dargun, a town that produces one of the best beers I've ever tasted.

All of these towns lie in the Eastern part of Germany, and for much of my parents' adult lives were inaccessible to them because of two world wars and then the heavily guarded border that separated East Germany from the West. To my great regret, both my parents died without ever having the chance to see the homeland of their ancestors.

To reach these places I traveled extensively in what had been Eastern Germany, and saw first-hand what twenty years of investment has accomplished: here you find brand new stretches of autobahn, gleaming colorful town squares and Aldtstadts, and ongoing construction everywhere. But while Leipzig and Dresden and Berlin, and even smaller cities like Jena, have reaped the economic benefits of all this investment, the smaller towns have found the reintegration of the two Germanies to be a double-edged sword. Everywhere you see the care these towns have taken to restore their buildings and homes, but their inhabitants are largely from an older generation. Their children have mainly left for jobs in the West or in the larger cities of the East. I spent a poignant late afternoon in the town square of Schmalkalden. Despite its central role as the place where Protestant princes drew up articles with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon to defend their rights, this historic town's central square was practically deserted.

Yet what I also found in small towns like Schmalkalden, Steinbach-Hallenberg, and Dargun was a warmth and eagerness to share information with an American like myself who was seeking her roots. An American tourist is a rare bird here. Yet more and more of us are coming back to these towns in search of our ancestry just as their own townspeople are rediscovering and celebrating their own history.

And small-town Germans, it turns out, have a wonderful sense of humor. As I was walking the streets of Steinbach-Hallenberg, down the very street where my own ancestors once lived from the 1600s to the end of the 19th-century, one of my cousins pointed out a sign on a house nearby. From street distance it read: “Hier wohnte Goethe” echoing the hundreds of placards you find everywhere in towns like Frankfurt, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Weimar and Jena that can rightly claim to have housed Germany's most famous poet. And yet, as my cousin pointed out laughing, if you stepped a little closer and glimpsed behind the fence, you could see the word at the bottom of the sign that not only denied its claim but also played off the maddening tendency of German grammar to leave the most important words for the end of sentences. “Hier wohnte Goethe...nie” or literally “Here lived Goethe (never).”

Towns like Steinbach-Hallenberg and Dargun know full well that they are not on the main intineraries of foreign tourists. They are not listed in Frommer's or the Michelin Guides. But that is precisely part of their charm. To reach them you drive on winding highways through forests or fields where wildflowers bloom on the sides of the road. You find a strawberry field and eat the most delicious fruit you've ever tasted straight from the field. You climb up a steep path to a ruined castle that locals visit on their daily walk. When you're having dinner at one of the family-run restaurants in town, you might hear the owner playing guitar or wonder what the children in the back room really think of a dubbed episode of The Simpsons. You can ask the hotel clerk where to find the local pastor so you can ask about church records, and have another guest tell you, “Of course I know him, he's a great guy (ein toller Mann)."

And what you will find more and more often are great sources of local history. In Steinbach-Hallenberg, the Museum of Metalwork shows you just how much hard work went into making the corkscrews, metal instruments and nails that were the main industry for centuries. In Dargun, where dairy farming and brewing beer are the main sources of income, a new small museum has opened documenting the historical farming and dairy practices of the region (Uns lütt Museum). Just behind this museum lie the ruins of a beautiful Cistercian abbey dating back to the 12th century as well as palace grounds and buildings that date back to the 17th-century when the monastery became the residence of the Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Destroyed in the final days of World War II, it is about to undergo a massive restoration. Every summer the monastery and palace grounds host a festival of light with fireworks that shine on the nearby Kloster Lake.

Even if you don't have any specific reason to go quite as far off the beaten track as I did in seeking my family roots, I found plenty of small German towns that warrant the attention of the more adventurous tourist including Bamberg, with its grand cathedral, or Schwerin, which has an impressive Chambord-like castle that also escaped the devastation of World War II, or the highly under-touristed Schmalkalden, which was one of the most historically fascinating towns I visited. For anyone traveling Europe by car (and with GPS) taking a detour off the autobahn, autopiste, or other highway is well worth the time and effort. You never know what might lie around the bend, and taking the time to explore the unknown is more than half the fun of travel.

A Family Reunion in Steinbach-Hallenberg

On Saturday, June 20th I finally met my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg. Separated by two World Wars, and the division of Germany into East and West until 1990, it has taken three generations for our families to reconnect, but the sense of kinship was palpable when I cross the main street of my ancestral hometown and shook hands with Rolf, Helmut, Werner, and Lothar Wahl.

Steinbach-Hallenberg is a small town nestled in a valley inside the Thuringen forest in Central Germany. In winter, it is a ski area, but in summer, it is host to many German hikers (or Wanderers). Its red roofs stand out in colorful contrast to the green hills surrounding it and many of the houses are covered with beautiful slate siding in intricate designs. The valley seemed quite narrow and deep as we entered it, and despite the fact the river running through it, die Hasel, is hardly bigger than a small stream, you often catch the sound water flowing by as small stone canals (literally “steinbach”) carry mountain runoff through the town.

Driving into Steinbach-Hallenberg sent a chill down my spine because I'd felt as if I were fulfilling not only a dream of my own but also of my father who died in 1978, long before reunification was even dreamed of. I had anticipated this meeting with much excitement and not a little trepidation. Would my cousins be as eager to meet me as I was to meet them? What would I learn about my family history? What would they want to know about the American side of the family? And most of all, would my recently resurrected German suffice to make conversation possible?

I need not have worried about the warmth of my welcome, and it was clear that Rolf Wahl had planned our visit with great care. First we toured the Metalwerksaftmuseum (Museum of Metalcraft) with Veronika Jung, the Museum's Director. This is one of the many new museums that are springing up in small German towns, as their inhabitants express their pride in their heritage by creating a place to document a way of life that is fast disappearing in more urban centers.

Inside the museum, Veronika began by greeting us in English, but she gave most of the tour quite slowly in clear German so that I could understand just about everything she told us. The museum is located in two houses, one of which was moved from another site with everything intact – the nail-making apparatus, all the tools, and a number of patents. The family (die Recknagel) had no children, and they wanted to give the remains of their business to the museum to preserve. It was impressive to see how much thought and energy had gone into a preservation process that required raising one of the buildings off its foundation and then moving it through small village streets to its new site.

For me this discovery of the tool-making history of Steinbach-Hallenberg generated a good deal of emotion.. In the museum I found the first tangible piece of evidence about my paternal great-grandfather, Peter Wilhelm Wahl who died in 1893 at the relatively young age of 52. I knew that his death had precipated his family's departure from Germany when his widow, Marie Bauerschmidt, decided to take her children, including my grandfather, Adolph, aged 8 and travel to America.

Peter Wilhelm had been a master locksmith, and museum has in its possession a book that recorded sales of special tools. So here I was actually holding history in my hand and seeing the page where Peter's name was written and the number of corkscrews he sold. I was almost moved to tears thinking what it would have meant to my father to be able to hold this document as well because I knew he had always longed to return to his homeland.

At the end of the tour we watched a smith make a corkscrew and then a hand-mail nail. It sounds like such a simple thing but it was back-breaking work when people in the town had to make thousands of nails a week just to survive. My cousins who are about about twenty to thirty years old than I am remembered seeing men who literally bent over from the effects of such hard labor, and Rolf emphasized that the nail-makers were the poorest of the townspeople and lived in the smallest houses, often with eight or ten children, all of whom helped out with the family trade.

Many of these hand-made nails were beautiful objects with different decorative heads on them for use in fine furniture. My father's autobiography mentions that a nail factory had closed down in Steinbach-Hallenberg in the years before Peter Wilhelm's death, but Veronika Jung told me that there were actually many nail and corkscrew factories in the area, almost all of them small family firms.
By the turn of the century, it was getting harder and harder to make a living from nail-making. A cigar factory opened up which used imported tobacco from Florida and Cuba and employed many women in the town, including Rolf's grandmother. Metalworking expanded to include production of many different kinds of tongs and other specialized metal implements.

Today in Steinbach-Hallenberg you can still see these small family enterprises, like the metal workshop whose very modern equipment is located in a house once owned by Rolf's great uncle. But it delighted me to see that in a small town where records of my ancestors as date back to the 16th century, the spirit of the family entrpreneur continues to reinvent itself. Just down the street from the metal workshop, Rolf pointed out to me a sign hanging on the house of another probably Karen Wahl, advertising not metalworking but IT services!

From Blogger Pictures

Congress Gets a little Greener

On Friday, June 26th, the U.S. House of Representatives, in a narrow 219 to 212 vote, made environmental history by passing a landmark “cap and trade” bill: the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Like many Americans who have been waiting years for the United States to take a leadership role on climate change, this represents an important first step.

But as happy as I am that Congress is finally taking action, Americans still have a long way ago to lessen the output of carbon we all help to generate.

Not only does this “cap and trade” legislation now have to make it through the Senate, where there is considerable Republican opposition, and some anxiety among Democrats from coal or oil-producing states, but the energy debate in the United States is still too stacked towards a smorgasbord policy that gives carbon-generating options like bio-fuels and “clean” coal (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) too much weight in the mix.

In terms of what the United States could be doing to support the most environmentally friendly forms of energy production, like wind and solar, we are still paying mostly lip service to alternative energy sources, and even less attention is being paid to the most cost-effective but least glamorous solution: reducing our consumption.

Critics of alternative energy often overstate the inherent “instability” of solar and wind power – namely, that the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun only shines a portion out of every 24-hour period. But those objections have repeatedly been shown to exaggerate the effects of these periodic disruptions.

In fact, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests “that a land-based network of 2.5 megawatt turbines installed in non-urban, non-forested, non-ice covered areas could supply all of the world’s electricity needs.” In the study's findings about the United States alone, the potential for wind to supply American electricity needs is even greater, sixteen times current electrical needs.

Indeed, the main obstacle to harnessing the power of the wind, lies in the need to construct a better, smarter grid of transmission lines, and the political will to pay the upfront costs that can be compensated by clean energy production in just a few years.

In answer to the common critique that wind power either produces too little or too much, scientists now suggest that when excess electricity is generated it could be used to generate hydrogen, which is another clean energy source and one that can be stored.

I just returned from a trip to Germany, and I was struck by how advanced this country is in generating wind power. Driving anywhere in the countryside you see dozens of windmills. At the end of 2006, Germany had 18,685 wind turbines with a capacity of around 20,600 megawatts. Wind accounted for 5.7 per cent of Germany's energy consumption and was the largest source of clean energy. By contrast in 2007, the United States' total wind energy capacity reached a meager 16,818 megawatts (MW).

According to the Germany Wind Energy Institute (DEWI), by 2010 Germany's wind farms should have “a combined out put of A48,000 MW, including as much as 10,000 MW from offshore farms.” The U.S. Department of Energy, under the former Bush Administration, was not predicting a substantial increase in wind power until 2030.

There is much to celebrate in Congress's first steps towards reducing America's production of carbon, but looking at our neighbors across the Atlantic, it is clear that we need to move much more aggressively on the deployment of alternative energy production in our own backyard. Our technological capacity to harness the power of the wind and sun is improving every year; now we need to generate the political will to make the investment that will improve all our lives in a time of accelerating climate change.

A Surprising Mother's Day Gift

From Recently Updated

I've received my share of memorable Mother's Day gifts over the years, despite occasional snarky comments about the “Hallmark Card” nature of the holiday. Casts of my children's handprints, hand-made pillows and vases, and the “Mom's Day Off” button that wasn't as effective as it promised, have all brought a smile to my face.

But this year I received an unusual gift, and it came, rather surprisingly, from my husband.

“How would you like to go for a bike ride?” he asked me as I drank my morning coffee. I thought about it and looked outside to see one of those perfect Northern California spring days --sunny but mild.

“Okay,” I agreed. Where shall we go?” He coaxed me to try some hills, telling me that after months of working out at the gym's “virtual reality” bikes, I was in better shape than I imagined.

Feeling both challenged and a bit nervous, I set out with him towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we hit the first slopes on the bike path, my husband told me to downshift. Breathing fast I did so and we made it to the end of the path at the underpass of I-280.

Here we turned left and started up the real hills following a series of side streets that eventually would take us to Page Mill Road, the route serious bikers take up to Skyline Ridge or even over the mountains to the Pacific. Now I was on my lowest gear and just focusing on my mantra: “One more foot of asphalt, Just one more foot. Keep pedaling. Keep breathing.”

To give you a sense of why I was so much on my mettle during this ride I have to explain about my long-running love/hate relationship with the bicycle. To me the bicycle represents a perfect balance of yin and yang: the thrill of speed and the peril of losing life and limb.

There are home movies of my Dad returning from his daily bike ride to pick up a newspaper with me tucked on one arm, while he used his other arm to steer.

When I was a little bigger I used to ride on the back of the bike on a seat my father made out of an arm rest. I often rode without shoes until the day I caught my heel in the spokes of the back wheel and gained a scar I carry to this day, and after that, Dad threatened me with a switch if he caught me out biking barefoot.

From My Pictures

At three I rode my tricycle so fast around curves that I frequently tipped over, scraping knees and elbows. At five, free of training wheels, I rode my bike around a bend in the sidewalk, hit a piece of concrete that had been lifted by tree roots and chipped my brand-new front permanent tooth on the handlebars.

By the time I was in my teens, I was riding far afield, still seeking the thrill of speed. There weren't many hills around my house, but I did find one with a decent incline. Unfortunately, the city buses used to run along the road at the bottom, and my brakes were not reliable so there inevitably came that “Oh my God” moment when I sailed in front of a bus driver with inches to spare.

But my real fear on this particular Mother's Day came from the memory of having attempted this same ride years ago on a ten-speed. Then I had downshifted to the lowest gear only to find that I was basically pedaling in place. I finally had to get off and push the bike up the steepest part as other bikers flew past, and the humiliation was too much. I was twenty-something and already too old for biking.

Now, sweating and making my painstaking way up another steep slope I thought that while nearly twenty more years had passed, I was actually making it this time.

We finally reached our intersection with Page Mill Road, and my husband was still urging me onwards. “It's only another half mile to Foothill Park,” he told me. “We're almost to Foothill Park?” I thought to myself incredulously. Now I had to keep going and I did, feeling a huge and surprising sense of accomplishment. I'd not only conquered a hill; I'd conquered about four miles of hill.

The best part, however, was yet to come. “Do you want to go back down Page Mill?” my husband asked me. I readily agreed and shifted to third so I could stay in better control of my speed. I turned my bike around and set off, transported back to my childhood self, the speed demon, heedless of possible scrapes and bruises, with the wind rushing past me and the cars barely passing me, and many glorious miles of descent unimpeded by red lights, stop signs, or city buses.

It's not often you find yourself physically upstaging your twenty-something former self, and I can attest, it feels like you've had a taste of immortality when it happens. So here's to more bike rides and a Mother's Day gift that didn't make me feel like a mom at all but just like being a kid again.

Has the Marriage Debate Reached a Tipping Point?

Photo courtesy of Sarah Parker. All rights reserved.

For the past few years Americans have been consumed with discussions about the legalization of same-sex marriage, first as a political wedge issue, but more recently as a legal phenomenon that seems to be gaining momentum.

Americans were simultaneously incredulous, elated, transfixed and horrified when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome began his impromptu issuing of marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in February 2004, a mere three months before Massachusetts became the first state in the union to legalize same-sex marriage. Before that only Vermont allowed couples of the same sex to gain any kind of legal recognition and then only under the rubric of “civil unions,” a term purposely created to avoid the religious and cultural sensitivities that surround the word “marriage.”

It's ironic in a way that marriage has become such a social and political bone of contention when the general movement of heterosexual couples over the past thirty to forty years has been away from marriage as both a legal and religious symbol. Beginning with rising rates of divorce in the 1960's and 70's, the number of couples dissolving their marriages reached a peak in 1981 (5.3 for every 1,000 people) before beginning a modest decline.

At the same time, increasing numbers of couples, particularly among the young, began to choose to co-habit or “live together” rather than marry, so much so that the 2000 census had to replace its quaint acronym, POSSLQ (Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters) with the more accurate “unmarried partner,” which could cover both same-sex and different-sex couples. In 2005, the United States Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than 1,000 percent from 1960, when there were only 439,000 such couples.

So it seems a bit strange that heterosexual couples, who seem less inclined to marry or to stay married themselves, should get so exorcised over the desire of same-sex couples to participate in a type of legal union heterosexual couples increasingly reject. Indeed, there is a certain “dog in the manger” quality to heterosexual arguments against same-sex marriage.

At best, these arguments offer same-sex couples the alternative of “civil union” as a kind of “separate but equal” institution for marriage, even though these same legally married couples bridle at the thought of making all “marriages” into “civil unions” for legal and governmental purposes. They want to stay “married” not “CUed” (civilly-unioned).

At worst, these arguments use a kind of “marriage in wonderland” logic to allege that same-sex marriages will somehow harm the marriages of heterosexual couples.

And that's the Achilles' heel of the argument against same-sex marriage.

We've been living with same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden as well as a host of other countries who offer civil unions that carry the full rights and responsibilities as those provided by marriage. Yet Western civilization as we know it has not come to an end, there has been no mass expression of moral outrage, no uptick in the number of children declaring themselves “gay” because their parents are “gay,” no discernible effects on families whatsoever, except for gay couples and their children, who finally can exercise the legal rights other families take for granted.

You know that the hysteria over gay marriage has reached its last gasps when the “threatening” scenario of an advertisement like “The Gathering Storm” provokes more laughter and parody than nods of agreement. Opposition to gay marriage has long seemed like a powerful political stance for conservatives; now politicians who express strong disapproval of gay marriage risk seeming merely silly and out of touch.

In demographic terms, I represent a divide between members of an older generation that finds it hard to accept the idea of same-sex marriage and younger people who increasingly take it for granted that some of their peers will want to marry someone of the same sex. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll: “Support for gay marriage has grown somewhat among voters over age 65, from 15 percent to 28 percent, but six in ten remain strongly opposed. Among those under 35, though, two-thirds support it, up from 53 percent in 2006, and nearly half support it strongly."

For those who fear the rising tide of public support for same-sex marriage as well as the expanding enfranchisement of same-sex couples to marry in more states, time is not on their side. Same-sex marriage will gain more acceptance, and although I'm not often given to prediction, I believe that by the time more than half of states legalize such marriages, the response of the public will be a collective yawn.

Now it's spring, the wedding season is upon us, and I myself will soon be attending the nuptials of my niece who is marrying a man. Frankly, it would make no difference to me if she were marrying another woman. Having attended at least one same-sex marriage, commitment ceremony, what you will, I can safely say that the beauty of a marriage celebration comes from sharing in the happiness of the couple who are pledging their faith in front of friends and families and not whether that couple is gay or straight. Some day I hope it won't even be an issue.

Nothing Says Summer Like a Day at the Beach, Any Time of Year

We had a brief heat wave a couple of weekends ago when Bay Area cities broke records, and then we descended back into wintry weather with cloudy skies, wind gusts, and temperatures that barely broke into the 60's and 70's. Even I agreed to turn on the heat the other day when the rest of the family got out of bed and started putting on parkas and two layers of sweatshirts over their pajamas.

We're in the middle of spring, and in Palo Alto, that means we should at least be getting a taste of summer. True the roses are in bloom, and the pollen count is up, but it's often been too cold to be outside without a jacket and we've had more clouds and rain than I can remember for this time of year. For a region that's been plagued by drought, this is good news, but there's a part of me that's still insists stubbornly that this is not exactly the merry month of May.

So I'm looking back with nostalgia at photos from a weekend we spent at the beach in the middle of April when we had a brief respite from rain and clouds. We had one perfect day on the coast in Carmel: the sun was out, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the kids felt warm enough to risk getting splashed by cold Pacific waves.

We started out by climbing along the rocks and tidal pools at the Point Lobos State Park Reserve. My youngest soon left me behind as he scrambled up sharp inclines like a mountain goat, reminding me of my own father's penchant for climbing rocks, and getting himself into perches overlooking waterfalls or ravines that were clearly out of bounds. “Dad, the ranger's coming,” I found myself yelling at him once when were in Yosemite, hoping it would scare him back down into safer territory.

There was no hope of that today. I hadn't seen a single park official anywhere, but one of the mothers who was with us, filled in that role, telling her kids not to follow mine out onto the rocks where a rogue wave could sweep them off. She was perfectly right to be concerned since her two boys were much younger than mine. My fifteen-year-old was keeping an eye on his adventuresome younger brother, and my husband was also looking out for them, when he wasn't concentrating on getting a perfect shot of the waves and the pelicans that kept sweeping across just above them in swift-moving arcs. I had sighted a playful sea otter with my binoculars and had no intention of going anywhere as long as it stayed in view.

Now that I'm on my third son and resigned to the fact that he's an intrepid climber, my attitude towards child safety has shifted considerably towards: “Don't ask, don't look.” I know the odds are that they will make it out of childhood with no more than scrapes and bruises (and so far one broken arm), and following them around telling them to be careful is just going to drive them towards steeper cliffs and more dangerous surf. As it turned out, my boys did move off the furthest rock about one minute before a wave swept over it, but my husband reassured me that they would just have been soaked (most likely).

From Springs to Mind

In search of safer beaches, we climbed up the trail towards China Beach, a protected cove with white sand that shines under turquoise waters as if you had suddenly found yourself in Jamaica, only with much, much colder water. There was no chance of playing in these waters, however, because the beach had been taken over by mother harbor seals who were still nursing their pups. We watched one pair emerge onto the beach and lumber up onto the sand, and then with the binoculars we began to discern at least four or five more pairs, and one pup who was old enough to be on her own. The young ones flopped and wriggled while their mothers occasionally batted them with a flipper as if to say, “Enough already. Can't you see I'm trying to take a nap?”

Tomas, my fifteen-year-old, was still determined to make it to beach where there were waves he could play in so we all piled back into our respective mini-vans and headed about a quarter mile north on Highway 1 to Monastery Beach, officially known as the Carmel River State Beach, and referred to by local divers as “Mortuary” Beach because just about every year there are fatalities due to rip tides, rogue waves, or divers who lose track of their depth.

The geology of beach is fascinating because as you look at the cliffs behind where the Carmelite monastery is located, you don't realize that you're on the edge of an enormous canyon, big enough to hold several Grand Canyons. The steep slope of the beach means that waves often crash directly onto the sand, particularly in the middle where the slope is steepest.

That didn't stop Tomas from playing in the freezing surf, keeping a watchful eye on the younger ones who ran up to the waves and then away from them cackling with glee. All of them got soaked eventually, but the cold and wet couldn't dampen the joy on their faces. With Tomas guarding them from behind and the rest of the adults watching them from above, we whiled away a perfect warm sunny afternoon as the tide came in and children ran shrieking from advancing waves, stopping only to refuel on cookies and grapes before they ran back for more and more.

From Springs to Mind

The Hundred Day Mark

I can't help but participate in the media frenzy over Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. After all this is the first time in over 10 years that the candidate I voted for actually won the presidency, so I feel a special responsibility for his success or failure.

Looking back it's hard to image the very real fears some Americans felt about electing the first African-American president. In a series that NPR ran on voters in York, Pennsylvania, during the fall campaign, you could sense how uncomfortable some whites felt about him. As one woman put it, “"I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time,” ("York Voters Express Post-Election Hopes, Fears," NPR, October 24, 2008). Some white voters like this woman, sincerely thought there would be a racial backlash against whites as a result of this election, if not by Obama, than by voters of color who supported him.

Or course, this seems absurd now. President Obama acts neither like a black president, nor a white president; instead, he has presented himself above all as an American president, and projected an idea of America both here and abroad that is strongly welcoming of those who have felt left out of the political process: the middle class, recent immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, even atheists. Overseas, repressive governments may well feel that the greatest danger posed by Obama is not a resurgence of American imperialism but simply the outpouring of admiration and support among the young, particularly in the Middle East where most of the population is under the age of 30.

Here at home, the Republican Party watches in dismay as Obama woos voters away from their bases of support in the Midwest, West, and even the South. Demographics, both generationally and in growing minority populations, favor Obama's style of politics.

It is true that President Obama has had his own stumbles, particularly with candidates for cabinet and agency positions who turn out to be as beholden to special interests as Republicans nominees before them. For a while, it seemed that just about every nominee had a “tax problem” of some dimension, a few minor, a few serious enough to make it necessary for such candidates to take themselves out of consideration.

It is also true that President Obama finds himself constrained by the nation's overwhelming financial problems from addressing the many ethical questions left behind by the Bush Administration, including its perversion of the Constitution to justify torture, abrogate the right to habeas corpus, and spy on its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism.

As a pragmatist, Obama has already made it clear he wants to delegate these constitutional and moral issues to the Justice Department so that he can cut the necessary deals with Republicans in both houses to make headway on his ambitious domestic agenda: expanding health care, pushing “green” industries, addressing climate change, and jump starting the economy, not to mention juggling two wars overseas and an ever-evolving series of foreign policy crises in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East.

While it's too early to give Obama a “grade” for how he has performed domestically and internationally, he certainly deserves high praise for the work ethic he has demonstrated since he took office. No one is likely to compare his days spent on vacation with those of his predecessors, Reagan and Bush. His energy, ambition, and drive are literally breath-taking, yet so far, he exudes a cool-headness about his agenda rather than a sense of hubris.

But Obama's greatest accomplishment so far has been the change he has helped to effect in public confidence. Americans of all political persuasions give him high marks for character and personal integrity, something many thought had all but disappeared on the political stage. More importantly, an increasing number of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track. This month saw a surprisingly sharp uptick in consumer confidence,(1) which is a good indicator that Americans may start spending a little more freely, a necessity if economic activity is to expand again.

Anyone looking at the achievements of the President's first hundred days should also give credit to his wife, Michelle, for the tone she has helped set at home and abroad. Her warmth contrasts with his relative aloofness, and her down-to-earth intelligence combined with great personal charm has given rise to unexpected moments of connection, like the hug she shared with Queen Elizabeth that so shocked veterans of Buckingham Palace.

Obama's own memoir, The Audacity of Hope, seems like an appropriate label for his first hundred days. He has shown considerable audacity in what he has taken on, and he has given Americans hope that he can actually pull it off. That alone gets his Presidency off to a strong start.

(1) "The New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose more than 12 points to 39.2, up from a revised 26.9 in March. The reading marks the highest level since November's 44.7 and well surpasses economists' expectations for 29.5," AP, April 29, 2009.

Talk about a “Stale Debate” - Why we Need to Stop Arguing about the “Ticking Bomb” Scenario

One thing is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's release of the so-called “torture” memos: those who wrote these memos and their apologists want to frame the debate as one in which torture saved the world from terrorism. Vice-President Cheney has called for the release of the information gathered by practicing these techniques, alleging that this will prove that the ends justified the means.

Of course, one cannot prove that a terrorist event that didn't take place was definitively related to the gathering of such information or that such information could not have been garnered by other means. We're still left with a putative connection between evidence and and something that might have happened as a result, and those connecting the dots have a vested interest in turning that connection into a narrative of the world saved by a last minute necessity, however brutal or indefensible in any other circumstances.

Behind all of these justifications for resorting to torture lies the specter of the “ticking bomb.” In this hypothetical and highly unlikely scenario, a terrorist who is directly responsible for the setting of a ticking bomb refuses to tell authorities where the bomb is. At that point, some argue that torture is justified to get this information and save the lives of those in harm's way. Those who make this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration's torture policies may believe this to be true or they may simply want to sway public opinion in their favor before they end up as defendants themselves.

Unfortunately, many Americans tend to buy the “ticking bomb” scenario because it's the plot behind just about every Hollywood action flick in which the seconds tick off and the bomb is stopped just in time, usually through the violent intervention of the hero. The popular TV series 24 relies explicitly on the appeal of the “ticking bomb” plot. The world is saved and the hero's vigilante actions demonstrate that in the world of terrorism the ends justify the means.

But real life is not at all like a Hollywood action flick as police officers can tell you when they have to sort out real bomb threats from pranksters or attention seekers. And the perpetrators of terrorist acts like the mentally handicapped woman who was induced to become a suicide bomber in Iraq can also be victims of terrorist plotters just like those who died as a result of her suicide bombing.

In addition, mistaken identity can lead to terrible consequences as a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, can attest after he was apprehended by US authorities who thought he was a terrorist. US authorities then used the principle of extraordinary rendition to send him directly from Kennedy Airport to be tortured and jailed in a Syrian prison until Condoleeza Rice intervened to order his release.

But the main problem with debating the “ticking bomb” scenario is that it is all about debating unprovable outcomes. We can't prove that authorities will never face the perfect ticking bomb situation, and those who believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances can never prove that alternate methods would result in extracting the same information that torture could produce. (For an excellent analysis of this scenario, see Gary Kamiya's article in Salon).

However, we can take as a given that under the ticking bomb scenario, someone will act to stop a terrorist. We witnessed this in the closest thing to a real ticking bomb scenario the U.S. has experienced, namely, when the passengers on Flight 93 realized that the airplane they were flying on was intended as a suicide bomb. The initiative they took to stop that bomb at the expense of their own lives demonstrates that both courage and common sense can prevail in such extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Nor would we blame the military if they had been forced to shoot down that plane before it could crash into the White House or other buildings in Washington D.C.

Yet what we should be debating far more seriously than these extraordinary circumstances are the effects of policies that give legal authority to use methods explicitly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, whether you call them “enhanced” interrogation techniques or torture.

How do we protect our own soldiers from being tortured when we use such methods against others? Do we really think that our enemies are going to distinguish between a soldier and a military combatant or even a civilian who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time?

What will we do with the prisoners at Guantanamo who were tortured? If they are dangerous, we should be reluctant to release them, but under what pretext can we continue to detain them when our legal system requires that they be charged and tried even at this late date? Yet how can we try these prisoners when the evidence against them has been extracted by torture and will not be admissible in any serious court of law? We know that those who are tortured will say anything to stop the pain; therefore, we can never fully rely on the validity of what such prisoners say under duress. Indeed, after such treatment, it is unclear whether those who were tortured are even mentally fit to stand trial.

In fact, the information gathered by torturing Al Quaeda leaders like Abu Zubaydah often blurred the distinction between real threats and imaginary alarms as much of the information he gave led to unnecessary and expensive surveillance of American landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and even large malls when no real threat existed. Ask any American if s/he is really worried about our being at “orange” alert level, and you realize how dangerous the dissemination of bad information can be in lulling Americans into a false sense of security, and no one yet knows or has acknowledged how much useless information was tortured out of individuals along with information that had some value.

But the real problem with the torture memos is that the United States traded a potential short-term gain for vastly more negative long term consequences. If the real goal of our government is to stop terrorism, we have instead prolonged and strengthened the impetus towards terrorism by our actions. Every act of torture recorded by the Red Cross, every photo of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, every case of mistaken identity that ended with in the abuse of an innocent person has served as a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Yes, we have not experienced an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, but in the interim the incidence of terrorism around the world has risen significantly since 9/11, even as respect for and cooperation with the U.S. government has plummeted.

Worse, by giving up on our Constitutional principles and respect for the rule of law, the United States has abandoned the ethical in high ground that gave hope to millions around the world who look to the U.S. as a defender of laws and of human rights. That makes it much much harder for the United States to condemn the actions of a Russia or a China against its own citizens when those actions can so easily be coded as acts to prevent “terrorism” whether in Chechnya or Tibet.

The Obama Administration has taken an important step in rectifying the United States's past mistakes by making the torture memos public. But this is only the first step, and much more remains to be disclosed before we can close the door on this sordid chapter of our history.

What we should do now is stop debating whether or not torture is ever necessary and start recognizing the ways our practice of torture has already damaged our national security and our relations with the rest of the world.

We remain a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but it will be a long time before the rest of the world trusts us to uphold them. We need to start building that trust now by repudiating torture in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.

The Obama Administration is trying to steer a middle course between letting bygones be bygones and taking on a full-scale prosecution of those who committed torture by bringing past practices to light but not taking legal action against the perpetrators. That is understandable given the President's inherent pragmatism and the enormous challenges he faces domestically that will require the cooperation of Republicans in Congress.

But that does not mean that the Justice Department and Congress itself need follow this course. For example, Congress has the ability and the right to impeach Judge Jay Bybee who signed two of these memos. Senator Carl Levin has stated: "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here,” adding that it is his personal opinion “that the legal opinions here were abominations,” ("Congress: Who's Accountable for Torture Memos?" Morning Edition, April 23, 2009).

If the United States wants to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we truly are a nation of laws, we should let our own rule of law take its course and bring those responsible for these memos to justice, according them the basic human rights they so easily denied to those who were brutally treated as a result of their perverse interpretation of our Constitution and our common understanding of what constitutes “torture."

Who Says You Can't Grow a Garden without “Crop Protection Products”?

Organic gardening on the White House lawn? Plants grown without artificial fertilizer and insecticides? Children learning that food comes from the soil and not from the supermarket?

The Mid America CropLife Association just won't stand for it any longer. Appalled by the revolution sprouting where manicured, fertilized, and properly “crop protected” lawn used to sit, this agricultural trade association has decided to educate Michelle Obama and her young associates about the proper role of a garden.

Not only did Executive Director and Program Director of MACA send a letter to Mrs. Obama, they also forwarded it to their associates with the warning:

While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.

Of course! Plant one organic garden outside the White House, and then everybody will have a garden in their backyard, and sooner than you can say “organically grown,” the fragile edifice that is American agribusiness will come crumbling down in a torrent of corn husks.

The letter goes on to extol the virtues of American agriculture, claiming that “many people, especially children, don't realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America's agricultural industry.” Okay, and having kids create a garden won't enlighten them about where their food comes from?

No, starting a garden is not worth the effort the letter-writers warn. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family's year-round food needs.”

Furthermore, the writers claim that “much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical” than food grown using “organic” methods, a word these writers don't even want to mention.

These CropLife Ambassadors then generously offer to “educate” Mrs. Obama and her young gardeners. "The CropLife Ambassador Network offers educational programs for elementary school educators at http://ambassador.maca.org covering the science behind crop protection products and their contribution to sustainable agriculture. You may find our programs America's Abundance, Farmers Stewards of the Land and War of the Weeds of particular interest."

This kind of propaganda would be merely amusing (I really, really want to see the War of the Weeds), but it does show just how scared big agribusiness is of Americans caring about and wanting to learn about how their food is grown and what effect our conventional methods of agriculture are having on the environment, on fuel consumption, and on our national security (as the price of food rises around the world so does political instability).

While the CropLife Ambassador Networks wants Americans to imagine a bucolic world of abundance, where an acre of land yields “42,000 lbs. of strawberries, 110,000 heads of lettuce, 25,400 lbs. of potatoes, 8,900 lbs. of sweet corn, or 640 lbs of cotton lint,” the real focus of agribusiness is directed towards the production of corn, meat and dairy products, and soybeans.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that as of 2003 the top five U.S. agricultural “products” were: 1. Corn 256,904,992 2. Cattle meat 11,736,300 3. Cow's milk, whole, fresh 78,155,000 4. Chicken meat 15,006,000 5. Soybeans 65,795,300 (all in metric tonnes).

Add to that the fact that more than 50% of the corn grown in the U.S. is fed to animals and that an increasing percentage is going towards ethanol production, and you can see that providing your local family with lettuce, strawberries, and sweet corn ranks way down the list of agribusiness priorities. Throw in the additional fact that more than 50% of antibiotics used in the U.S. go to animals raised for food, and you can see that “crop-protection” products may well protect “crops” (plant and animal) at the expense of those who consume them (Mark Bittman, Food Matters, p. 23).

To add insult to injury, the Mid America CropLife Association is affiliated with CropLife America, a marketing association funded by the Department of Agriculture, that is, taxpayers like you and me. A list of the member organizations of Mid America CropLife reads like a who's who of the chemical industry, including, but not limited to: Aceto Agricultural Chemicals Corporation, Cheminova Inc., Dow Agrosciences, Kova Fertilizer, Monsanto, and United Phosphorus, Inc.

No wonder they shudder at the thought of the White House putting its imprimatur on an organic garden and teaching kids that they can grow food without pesticides.

After all, that's how we got people to stop smoking: by showing them just what kind of chemicals they were ingesting with every puff and educating the young, who in turn, educated their parents.

So even if you laugh at the Mid American CropLife Association's overreaction to Mrs. Obama's organic garden, don't fail to take them seriously. And while you're at it, send Mrs. Obama and her gardeners a letter of thanks for making a garden grow in a way that benefits the earth and all of us.

An Immigrant Story: Retracing my Family's Journey to America

Photo of Steinbach-Hallenberg by Stefan Nothnagel (24.12.2006)

From Beth Wahl Family Small

Photo of my Paternal Grandfather Adolph Wahl (January 7, 1886-November 30, 1930)

A few years before he died in 1978 my father sat down and typed up all he could remember of his family history. This is how his story begins:

In west central Germany in the general vicinity of Erfurt is a small town named Steinbach-Hallenberg which is approximately twenty miles south of Eisenach, Thüringer. So far as is known its only industry was a nail factory, which provided the principal income for the townspeople. Near the end of the nineteenth century, all that I know of my father's family left there and emigrated to America. The family consisted of my grandmother Mary Wahl and her three sons Adolph, August, and David. My father was about seven years old when they landed at Ellis Island and settle din the metropolitan New York-New Jersey area. My uncle August became a toolmaker, Adolph and electroplater, and David a house painter...David was the eldest and lived his whole life in Newark, New Jersey. My father, Adolph, was very energetic and ambitious. I recall he rode a motorcycle from Newark to Rochester, New York in 1910. August never married and lived most of his life in New York City until he passed away in 1960.

My father's autobiography begins, not with his own birth, but with the exodus of his ancestors from their homeland, constructing a narrative that echoes the structure of a fairy tale: a widowed mother with three boys, leaving their small town to seek their fortunate in a strange new land.

I was fifteen when my father died, and I hadn't yet developed a curiosity about my family origins. If anything, I was relatively prejudiced against all things German, which I associated with older relatives pontificating about the past and too much wurst, potatoes, and long drawn-out family gatherings.

But this summer I will finally make my father's father's journey in reverse, traveling from America to Germany, and for the first time in two generations, I will meet some of the Wahls who did stay behind in Steinbach-Hallenberg.

Now I want to ask him so many questions: Who told you the family came from Steinbach-Hallenberg? Did the nail factory shut down? What made your paternal grandmother decide to leave and what happened to her in America? Why did August never marry, and why did your father leave the family in Newark to make a new life for himself in the upstate town of Rochester so far away and so different from Newark or Manhattan?

In the meantime, I am trying my best to piece together some of the history that lies behind those all too brief sentences my father typed out for his children in the basement of our house in Detroit.

Some of the things I've found out have been surprising. Searching the Ellis Island archives, I discovered that David Wahl traveled three years before his mother and younger brothers on the ship Lahn arriving on June 8th, 1893 when he was only 16 years old. Marie Wahl arrived July 2, 1896 on the same ship with August and Wilhelm Adoph, my paternal grandfather. I've also discovered that Marie Wahl's maiden name was Bauerschmidt and that her husband, Peter Wilhelm Wahl died in 1893, a scant six months after his eldest son, David, arrived in the United States.

Travelling to Ellis Island two summers ago, I had a chance to see just a little bit of what my grandfather and his brothers might have experienced in 1896 when they arrived on the Lahn. If they had first or second-class tickets, the immigration experience would have been not much more burdensome than what we experience today in customs: a cursory inspection aboard ship.

However, if they were third class or “steerage” passengers they would have traveled in crowded, and not very sanitary conditions near the bottom of their steamship, spending perhaps two weeks in their bunks before they finally could breathe fresh air. Upon arrival in New York City, the ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers and allow the first and second class passengers to disembark first. The other passengers were taken from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone had to undergo a medical and legal inspection before being released. Most likely David had encountered a friend or family member to meet him at Ellis Island, but I cannot know this for sure.

All I can say is that standing on Ellis Island on a humid morning in July with the air so thick and cloudy it felt that you could cut it with a knife, I imagine that it would have been both thrilling to see the Statue of Liberty so close at hand and a little frightening as well to realize that only a narrow channel of water separated you from unforeseen adventures in Manhattan or on the Jersey shore.

Still as I reread my father's words, so many questions run through my mind: Why did David go ahead of the others? Did Marie and her children wait to follow David because their father was ill? Was the original plan for all of them to emigrate together? Why did Marie wait almost three years to follow her sixteen-year-old son? And what did he do for those three years while he waited for the rest of the family to arrive?

I am so grateful to have the story my father left me and to have been able to discover a few more facts with the help of archives and my cousins in the U.S. who share my interest in family history. Now that I have the chance to reconnect with my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg, I may even be able to answer some of those questions that remain.

This is most definitely an episode “to be continued.”

Putting the Screws on Credit Card Debtors

Today Bank of America joined a number of other credit card issuers in raising credit rates for borrowers who carry a balance. These are not credit card holders who have failed to pay on time, or who have any history of credit problems. Many of them even pay more than the minimum balance each month.

But they do have the misfortune of carrying a balance on their credit cards, putting them among the more than 50% of families who don't or can't pay off their credit card balances each month.

The average balance per open credit card -- including both retail and bank cards -- was $1,157 at the end of 2008. That's up from $1,033 at the end of 2006, a growth of nearly 11 percent in two years. (Source: Experian marketing insight snapshot, March 2009).

Even though credit card borrowing fell in February 2009, the number of credit card holders defaulting on their debt has continued to rise in the very same month. According to Reuters, “U.S. credit card defaults rose in February to their highest level in at least 20 years, with losses particularly severe at American Express Co (AXP.N) and Citigroup (C.N).” Incidentally American Express is the company that recently gained notoreity by paying low-charging customers to close their accounts, and Citigroup has been one of the most aggressive in raising rates.

Recently Congress has considered legislation to stop some of the credit card companies' practices that hurt consumers most:

Suddenly raising interest on accumulated balances
Raising rates across all credit cards held by a borrower because of a late payment made on one card
Charging for payments made over the internet or phone

The bad news for consumers is that these changes will not take place until 2010, and in the meantime, credit card companies are doing everything possible to wring out what they can in fees and interest rate increases while they still can.

To be fair, credit card companies are facing their own limitations on how much they can lend in a financial system where banks are leery even of lending to one another. Since the recession has dragged on, and unemployment has escalated, credit card companies have little way of knowing which of today's “good” customers may be tomorrow's defaulting customers because of escalating job losses. As a result, “Meredith Whitney, one of Wall Street's best known and most bearish bank analysts, estimates that Americans' credit card lines will be cut by $2.7 trillion, or 50 percent, by the end of 2010 -- and fewer Americans will be offered new cards.”

Some of those who pay off their balances every month and enjoy good credit may feel scant sympathy for those who are facing higher rates because they still carry credit card balances. But it's hardly a secure position when even good borrowers are losing their home equity lines and finding other sources of credit drying up.

If credit card companies continue to squeeze those who are paying them on a regular basis, particularly by lowering their credit limits and injuring their creditworthiness, they risk worsening the already weak consumer spending that generates a substantial portion of the United States' gross domestic product (GDP).

What looks like fiscal prudence now could also backfire on credit card companies when the economy begins to rebound, as many consumers may choose to get rid of their cards rather than pay the higher fees and interest rates.

For example, “Tamara Smith of Burlington, Vt., got a notice from Bank of America that her 7.9% rate will increase to nearly 13%. She immediately called the bank and opted out of the change. That means she keeps the 7.9% rate on her roughly $2,000 balance, but can't use the card for new purchases without having the higher rate apply to her entire balance,” (“BofA to Boost Rates on Cards with Balances,” The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2009).

Credit card companies may find a short-term profit boost in these actions, but as more consumers move from credit to debit cards or even to cash, they may find little reason to return to the companies that tried to ditch or gouge them. And credit card companies may find it much harder to woo back the American consumer in good times when they have treated the consumer so badly when times were bad.

If It's on the Internet, It must be True

A couple of days ago, my nine-year-old arrived home from school full of excitement. “There's this website I have to show you, mom,” he cried.

Mentally I groaned, thinking I was going to have to see some obscure piece of Lego weaponry or yet another video of exploding Coke and Mentos. “Okay,” I replied reluctantly. “You have to go to www.allaboutexplorers.com, and click on Christopher Columbus,” he continued. Once there I found the following:

Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney, Australia. His home was on the sea and Christopher longed to become an explorer and sailor. However, as a young man, Christopher went to Portugal and got involved in the map making business with his brother, Bartholomew. This business made Columbus a rich man. His books of maps are still found today in every library in the world.

I started laughing and Nico joined in, unable to contain himself at the joke. “There was a teacher who read this to her class, and only one kid, one kid in the whole school realized it couldn't be true, Mom,” he said proudly.

“Well,” I told him, “you know how I always tell you: 'If it's on the Internet, it must be true'.” "I'm really glad your librarian showed this to you,” I added. “The Internet is a great resource but you have to be sure that any website you use is a reliable one.”

I kept thinking about this example of a teacher getting kids to think about sources they find on the web, and it made me realize that the Internet has simply writ large a problem that has always existed.

While I sympathize to some degree with teachers who don't want kids just to go to Wikipedia to do all their research and forget how to use a book, I also don't agree with those teachers who simply ban the use of Wikipedia altogether.

With all its flaws, Wikipedia is a monument, not just to collective knowledge, but to the collective regulation of knowledge, that has not been equaled since Diderot and his fellow philosophes conceived of the Encyclopedie. With its constant updating and editorial self-review, the Wikipedia is probably the most peer-reviewed resource on the planet, and one with the capacity to add new sources of knowledge at a rate faster than any other published source.

Rather than telling kids not to use this resource, Wikipedia offers a great place to begin discussing why some sources are more reliable than others and why good research has to go beyond any encyclopedia to be sufficiently extensive.

Beyond Wikipedia, the Internet offers phenomenal resources for research as many libraries continue to put primary sources online, some in facsimile formats, that allow students to get to information that otherwise would require extensive preparation and the expense of travel. For elementary and middle school kids, the most important part of using the Internet is having teachers set up the right kind of portal with pre-selected websites, while high school students can be given tools to help them evaluate the reliability of a website on their own.

At the same time, for those who bemoan that Internet research is replacing a trip to the local library, it's a good idea to remember that just because something is published in a book is no guarantee that it's necessarily the truth.

Michael Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History before subsequent scholars began re-examining the validity of his research and thus questioning the basis for this arguments. As a 2002 Emory University Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesile finally put it: “[T]he best that can be said of his work with the [historical] record is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed.”

How many students used this highly praised book published by the respected Columbia University Press for their research before it was shown to be “deeply flawed” is anyone's guess. But it does demonstrate that the old adage, “don't judge a book by its cover” should be extended to cover the awards on its jacket and the blurbs on the back.

In fact, some of the most interesting research that I've done myself has stemmed from uncovering primary sources that have been obscured, falsified, or marked as “unreadable” by a book that cites them. For example, Lilian Faderman in her famous work on “romantic friendship” between women in the 18th and 19th century argued that no one ever suspected such friendships to be “lesbian” in character because sexual relations between women were unimaginable at the time.

But much of what Faderman came across as “sources” were works that had been “cleaned up” or even censored by Victorian editors. Her most famous example was a celebrity couple, the Ladies of Llangollen, who ran away as teenagers and spent the rest of their adult lives living together. Their “friendship” was widely idealized at the time, and they received visits from many famous politicans and writers in their day who never publicly stated that there was anything untoward in their domestic arrangements. But in their diaries, the comments could be much less polite. Hester Thrale Piozzi wrote in the manuscript version of her diary that the ladies were in fact “damned sapphists,” a contemporary term for “lesbian,” and a reference that was deliberately left out when her diaries were published years later.

The point is that whether a source exists in cyberspace or on the shelves of the local library or bookstore, we should never take the information we find for granted. Whenever possible, we need to educate our children to seek out the primary sources that others use to build a narrative about an historical event, or a set of medical data, or a social phenomenon like women joining the work force. What they find there may reinforce or it may undermine the narrative they've been reading, but the more they understand the relation between primary sources and the secondary source that builds on them, the better they will be at evaluating the books and web sites they use and thinking about them critically.

Which brings me full circle to my son and his “not really all about explorers” website. “How did you know that the information on Christopher Columbus was false?” I asked him. First he rolled his eyes at me. Then he said, “Well if Columbus sailed in 1492, he couldn't have been born in 1951, could he? He'd, like, have to be 500 years old!”

“Exactly,” I replied. A little arithmetic and some common sense goes a long way when you're researching. A little skepticism doesn't hurt either.

And you've read this on the Internet, so it must be true.

Want to Cut Your Carbon Footprint? Change the Way You Eat

Most of us probably already know the basic changes we can make in our lifestyles to reduce our impact on the planet's resources and cut our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We can recycle, replace our traditional incandescent light bulbs with CFL (compact flourescent light) bulbs, and bike or walk instead of taking the car whenever possible.

But another way we can have a significant impact on our carbon footprint is one we easily overlook: we simply change the way we eat.

Mark Bittman's Food Matters is not just another best-selling “green” consciousness-raising tome. Instead, it presents a simple idea in clear engaging prose that only takes up a little less than half the book. The rest is full of shopping lists, meal plans, and recipes to make it easy for the reader to put the ideas into action. Since Mark Bittman is also a renowned chef and general “foodie,” this section of the food is well worth looking into.

Bittman doesn't argue that you must eat organic or become a vegetarian or only buy locally grown food. His approach is not at all dictatorial. Any change you make towards eating more “whole” foods (an apple, not little tins of applesauce, peanuts rather than a Snickers bar, potatoes rather than chips) anything rather than processed foods will be good for your health, easier on your wallet, and better for the planet.

Food Matters singles out one important destructive dietary trend. As more and more countries, including China, adopt the Western diet with its emphasis on red meat and refined carbohydrates, the world will no longer be able to sustain current practices for raising animals for food (for example, global meat consumption is expected to double in the next forty years).

Factory farms already raise 60 billion of these animals every year in conditions that would have been unthinkable a century ago, but if demand keeps growing at current rates, we will need to raise 120 billion animals a year by 2050, and we will run out of the agriculture land necessary to raise the feed for all these cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry.

It's not just that a heavily meat-based diet is unsustainable, but as Bittman points out, it is also highly consumptive of fossil fuels. “To produce one calorie of corn takes 2.2 calories of fossil fuel. For beef the number is 40: it requires 40 calories to produce one calorie of beef protein,” (26).

Statistics from the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy suggest that the average American burns about 530 gallons of gas by driving and about 400 gallons of fossil fuels if that same American consumes an average American meat-based diet.

As Bittman puts it, “If we each at the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers a week, we'd cancel out the effects of all the SUVs in the country,” (17).

And raising the meat we love to eat doesn't just consume a whole lot of fossil fuels, it also contributes to the rapid deforestation of the third world as rainforest is burned in Brazil to make way for cattle ranching and sugar production for ethanol, and Malyasia and Indonesia see the destruction of their forests to foster the production of palm oil, another common ingredient in processed food.

To make matters worse, the methane produced by cattle is also a significant part of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and the huge amounts of manure threaten both water and air quality in many parts of rural America.

Bittman's second nightmare food ingredient also leads back to the production of corn but this time in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Most Americans consume HFCS in the form of carbonated soft drinks like Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up and Sprite; as an aside Bittman notes that as a nation we actually consume 7% of our daily calories from soda. Not only does the consumption of sugar in this form tend to generate a greater craving for more and more sugar, but it's believed to be a leading contributor to the rise in Type 2 diabetes, especially among the young.

Now I'm going to follow Bittman's lead in not dictating any particular way of eating. But I do recommend a trip to the library or bookstore to check out Food Matters.

And I will ask my readers: Please consider giving up meat one or two days a week. Or if this is too much, keep the HFCS out of your grocery basket. An apple on your desk, a packet of trail mix in your purse, a refillable water bottle in your car will all go a long way towards keeping you and our planet healthy.

Bon appetit!

Dreaming of Patagonia

with permission, Andres Diaz, Cuernos del Paine, February 2008

I remember vividly when my boyfriend first told me he was “going to take me to the most beautiful place in the world.” At the time, I thought that he was either a hopeless romantic or that he was practicing some great pick-up lines.

A mere six months after our wedding I found myself mentally eating those badly chosen words as I emerged from a dirt road surrounded on both sides by patches of dusty raspberry bushes and dense green foliage to one of the most beautiful vistas I've ever seen, yellow-green fields rolling down to a intensely blue lake with a snow-capped volcano on the opposite shore.

From Vacation Chile 2003-2004

It was my first trip to Chile, and I had to agree with my husband, we had arrived at the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.

However, there was a downside to this discovery of a Latin American Shangri-La. Since my husband's family owns property on the shores of this lake with the incredible view of Volcan Villarrica, I rarely get to go anywhere else when we travel there.

My husband, who has over one million miles of airtime with American Airlines and nearly the same with United, doesn't want to travel when he goes on vacation. He wants to arrive at the most beautiful place in the world and stay there.

I, however, suffer from wanderlust. Since we married in 1987 I have seen the capital of Chile (Santiago), the seaside city of Viña del Mar, the family fundo (farm) on the banks of Lago Villarrica, and not a whole lot else, apart from some sides trip in the lakes region to Frutillar, a German-style village on the shores of Lake Osorno, the exquisite emerald green Lago Todos los Santos, and the port city of Puerto Montt.

But in the back of my mind there has been one part of Chile that holds a kind of magical appeal for me: Patagonia.

Chile is full of places named in the language of the native Mapuche people that roll off the tongue and make you want to see the location that gave rise to such linguistic invention. My favorite is the little town of Panguipulli, which is pronounced “pan-gi (hard “g”)-pu-yee), and means hill of the lion or puma. Set on the shores of Lake Panguipulli, you can see that the residents have a sense of humor about their town's name – the local panaderia sells “Pangui-pan.”

From Vacation Chile 2003-2004

So it's no wonder that Patagonia has held a special appeal for me, one that I felt even before I met my husband and was immersed in Chilean culture. Patagonia is a kind of utopia, a “no-where” land, a place so large and sparsely inhabited that one of the largest volcanic eruptions occurred in the far north of Patagonia in August 1991, and almost no one noticed.

According to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, there are at least three viable speculations about where the word Patagonia comes from. One of them argues that it derives from the Spanish word patagon meaning “a large clumsy foot,” since the Spaniard Magellan thus named the deep footprints of natives dancing in the sand when he first stopped on the southernmost shores of South America.

A second and more unlikely theory links “Patagonia” to the Incan word, Patac-Hunia, for “mountain regions.”

The third explanation, and my favorite, again links Magellan to the origins of the word but this time attributes it to Magellan's description of some of the natives who were wearing “dog-faced” masks. A popular novel of Magellan's time, Primaleon of Greece, featured a dog-faced monster named Patagon. This was the same text that gave rise to Shakespeare's equation of the native character Caliban with a “puppy-headed monster” in his play The Tempest.

Dick Lutz, author of Patagonia: At the Bottom on the World, points out that Patagonia is referenced with surprising frequency in Western literature, appearing in works by Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, Sir Conan Doyle, Edgard Allen Poe, and of course, Coleridge's famous poem, “The Ancient Mariner.”

So for me, as a student of literature, and as one long fascinated by the name and the idea of Patagonia, the land at the end of the earth, there could not be a more felicitous intersection of circumstances. In 2010 I am determined that my sojourn in Chile will not be bounded by the shores of Villarrica, however lovely they may be, and I will keep my readers apprised of all that I learn as I read more about and continue to dream of wandering through wilds of Patagonia.

Newspapers: An Endangered Species or an Evolving One?

In the past few weeks, two major dailies ceased to exist in print form. One was The Rocky Mountain News and the other The Seattle Post Intelligencer. The loss of these papers leaves their hometowns with only a single paper to cover local issues. Many other major cities like San Francisco and Detroit, are already in this position, and more cities are likely to join them as local and regional newspapers find it increasingly hard to compete in the world of the 24-hour news cycle and the instant access to breaking news that the Internet provides.

Many fear that the quality of local reporting will suffer as a result, and that the public will find it harder to hold their local officials accountable because they won't really know what is going on in their schools or mayors' offices.
Yet the power of print has faced such doomsaying before and survived, even thrived. Books have not yet been replaced by movies, CDs, videogames, TV, or the Internet, and there are in fact more literate people on the planet in 2009 than at any time in history.

So the market for news is there and growing: the difficulty is how to make room for the news you get on your iPhone and the pleasure of sitting at your local cafe and leafing through pages of newsprint you can hold in your hands.

And more importantly, since newspapers are a business and not a public service, how can they continue to generate enough revenue to survive when so many of us think that just about any content we get off the Internet, we should get for free.

If you take my hometown, Palo Alto, you could say that the newspaper business is thriving. We not only have The Palo Alto Daily News available online and in a paper version, but in the ten years I've lived here, that little paper has been joined by The Daily Post and other variations on the same theme for other local cities. These papers, although a little tabloid-like for my own personal taste, do take on city hall, the local school board, utilities, cable companies. You name the muck; they rake it.

On the other hand, the two major cities I live closest to – San Francisco and San Jose-- have seen their daily newspapers shrivel to a mere shell of their former selves. As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, “there's no there there” any more. And both of these papers, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Jose Mercury News, seem to be caught in a vicious cycle of shrinking ad revenue, shrinking staffs, shrinking content, shrinking readership.

Newspapers need a new business model, and they might find one in the world of non-profits like National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting where your target audience subscribes to content that is ostensibly “free” but at the cost of a nominal membership fee, corporate underwriting, and government subsidy. Surely, if the U.S. government can underwrite the transition to digital TV, it can shell out a little money to keep a free press alive.

A more promising approach is the idea of bundling news content in the same way that database companies have cooperated to provide a whole range of print journals online to public and university libraries. If a user knew that s/he could get the sports page from The Chicago Sun-Times, the editorial page from The New York Times, politics fromThe Washington Post, business reporting from The Wall Street Journal, and local news from their local newspaper, s/he might be willing to ante up for the privilege of getting that information online.

If newspapers were willing to allow users to select a slice of their content and create their own “personal” ideal newspaper, they might find the audience and the advertisers they are looking for.

In any case, newspapers need to think creatively about how to reinvent themselves before they truly become an “endangered” species, and that would leave all of us much poor for the loss.

For other thoughtful commentaries on the possible demise of the newspaper see The New Yorker, and Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."