The Republican Race to the Bottom, and What it Says about Political Discourse

At the beginning of the Republican primary season, I confess that it was entertaining to watch the interplay between the various candidates: Ron Paul, so obviously sincere and so impractical in his views of both domestic and foreign policy; Michele Bachmann, a Sarah Palin wannabe, with only slightly more gravitas than a cream puff, Newt Gingrich, always determined to provethat he's the smartest one in the room and never ruffled even when delivering the most outrageous lie; Mitt Romney, clueless about how to connect with the common man, and doomed to be the kid who earnestly runs for student council and is never really liked, and now Rick Santorum, who is so far right in his pro-life positions that he risks alienating whatever women are still left in the Republican party.

But in the past few weeks, this contest has become downright painful, as it has devolved into a game of chicken with each candidate rushing headlong towards a cliff and trying to pull up just short of taking a position that will eradicate GOP hopes of winning the general election.

Mitt Romney continues to eke out enough support to make it likely that he will ultimately win the nomination, but most Republicans seem to want to convince themselves that he's the best man to beat Obama rather than turning into true believers.

Both Romney and Santorum continue to court the Republican “base,” those social conservatives whose appetite for turning back the clock to some mythical flag-draped American past grows ever more voracious with each sop the candidates throw their way.

It's not enough to be against abortion; you have to oppose insurance for contraception as well, even though 65% of the American public supported the President's position on Plan B coverage according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

You can't just bully women into carrying a pregnancy to term; you have to humiliate them along the way by forcing an invasive ultrasound procedure on them. And then insult them by telling them to keep aspirin between their knees.

Supporting home schooling and charter schools doesn't cut it any more; you must label those who advocate getting students through at least community college as “snobs” and “elitists,” even if you have multiple degrees yourself.

You tell people that you would rather have let the auto industry go bankrupt (the government loaned GM $13.4 billion and $4 billion to Chrysler) even though GM and Chrysler have repaid about half of the government's largesse, unlike the banks who continue their reckless investment practices, even after they've received well over $700 billion.

And political discourse has become so toxic that moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe declare that they have had enough, leaving Congress polarized between Democrats and the extreme wing of the Republican party, which sees compromise as failure and views every political battle as a “winner takes all” contest.

Lincoln famously warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand,” and it feels increasingly as if we have reached the same kind of fevered animosity that fueled tensions between North and South during the Civil War. While I don't expect any state (even Texas) to secede or cane fights to break out in the Capitol, the lack of civil discourse in the House and Senate fuels public distrust in and disgust with government.

Why are Republicans so set on such a destructive course? It could be that having helped to elect Tea Party extremists, they have simply lost control of a wing of the party that no longer wants to play by party rules. Or it could be the desperate gambit of a party that sees Obama benefiting from a slow but evident economic recovery and has thrown all its weight into “wedge” issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the like in the hopes that at least social conservatives will turn out next November.

Unfortunately, for Republicans, in a world of 24/7 news coverage and “viral” videos, their words are destined to return to haunt them, just when their nominee has to try to convince the general public that he really didn't mean all of the crazy things he was willing to say to prevail in the primaries.

In the meantime, the remaining Republican candidates for president keep making me think of the proverbial image of lemmings going over a cliff. To make it to the nomination, they may well have to commit political suicide and destroy their chances of getting the American public to vote for them in November.

The Unforeseen Pleasures of Watching Boys in Motion

When I was young, I never thought that I'd be the mother of three boys. If I did imagine motherhood, I thought of it as something that would happen in the distant future, maybe in my 30s, and that I would, of course, raise a strong, intelligent, self-confident young woman.

But chance or fate had other plans for me, and I found myself with first one, and then two little boys under the age of three. Finally, some five years later, I took one more shot at conceiving a daughter.

It was not to be. Soon after I realized I was pregnant, I found myself looking at an ultrasound that made the technician laugh out loud. There was my Nico floating around, legs spread in such a way that the outline of a tiny penis was visible on the screen. “You're definitely having a boy,” he said smiling, and for a split second, I felt a wave of dismay sweep over me as my dreams of a little girl dissolved into what might have been.

Yet the realities that have replaced those dreams have given me so many experiences I would never have envisioned when I was simply thinking of a future daughter. I've had the chance to play with Legos and Matchbox cars, to run under a swing as I launched the boys skyward yelling, “Underdog!” and to watch two of them (Alejandro and Tomás) grow tall enough to rest their chins on my head and look so pleased that they had outstripped me in height.

But one of the most striking things I've learned is an appreciation for the sheer grace and power of the male body in motion.

As a young mother, I soon realized that boys seem to have some innate compulsion to push themselves physically and to express themselves in physical ways. Beanie babies turned into artillery; pillows were always flying across the family room, and the cushions spent more time as part of an obstacle course than they did on the sofa.

I was neither athletic nor particularly graceful as a child, so it always took me by surprise when I witnessed my boys doing back dives into the pool,walking across the top bar of a play structure, trying out parkour stunts, or performing an especially intimidating kata, all the while explaining in gruesome detail just how it could incapacitate an opponent.

Part of my general klutziness certainly stems from a deep-seated fear. My mother was always warning me about getting hurt. “Remember your cousin's boyfriend went down a pool slide the wrong way and broke his neck,” was just one of the cautionary tales she used to share with me.

I remember trying to run off a cliff that is about 20 feet above Lake Villarrica in Chile, where my husband's family has a farm. Since there is a ledge that juts out just below, you can't stand at the edge and jump; you need a running start. But I've never been able to work up the courage to launch myself into what looks like a sheer drop from the top. My cautionary instincts are just too strong.

As a result, my kids think my childhood was fairly boring, especially when they hear about their dad making a homemade rocket by scraping the sulfur off the end of matches or running through an abandoned Colt factory in New Haven carrying bottles for recycling and trying to get away from the security guards.

I have nothing on these exploits. On the other hand, I've never been the kind of mother who tells her kids, “Don't do that because you might get hurt!” As long as they used safety belts in the car and wore helmets when they were riding, rollerblading, or skateboarding, I've never worried about them.

And I spent a lot of time not watching what they were doing and hoping none of them would earn a Darwin Award after uttering those fatal words, “Hey guys, watch this!”

Yet I have to admit I get a vicarious thrill when I catch one of them at the top of a 30-foot tree or see the footage on the video camera that one of them took when he lay at the base of a skateboard ramp so he could catch his brother flying overhead.

We had just moved back to our house in California for a few months in 2008, when I came back from a Costco trip and noticed that the neighbors were giving me funny looks, the kind accompanied by head shaking, and a clear insinuation that I had failed all their expectations of good parenting.

“All right,” I told the boys as I entered the house. “What were you up to?”

“Nuuuuuthing,” they both answered with silly grins on their faces.

After a little prodding, they confessed that they had been jumping off the roof into a pile of leaves they had raked up in the front yard, and of course, had commemorated the occasion with photos.

Now that the two oldest are almost out of their teens, I don't see quite so many scrapes and bruises. But Tomás, who is 18, still exhibits the same kind of infectious excitement I saw when he was five and used to tell me, “Mami, watch can I do!” And Nico, who is 12, adores his older brother in part because he takes him to the skate park and commiserates with him when he gets in trouble at school for climbing on things.

Yesterday, when I came home, Tomás called to me from his bedroom to take a look at some photos he and his friend had taken while they were skateboarding at a nearby bowl. Tomás has a passion for all kinds of skateboarding, street skating, bowl skating, and vertical runs, including the long board, which he would like to see in professional competitions.

When I asked him what he loves about skateboarding, he told me that “it's a freeing experience.... In a bike or car, you're strapped in, but with skateboard, you're standing on a piece of wood strapped to wheels” and then he added, “I skateboard now for the same reason I did when I was six. Because it's fun.”

Watching my boys in motion, I realize that it's not just their agility and grace that I admire. It's that they are so clearly having the time of their lives, and that's something I hope they never grow out of.

What Next for Homs and Syria?

Watching the siege of Homs reminds me of a scene in the movie Crash, where a young girl runs out of her house just an Iranian gunshop owner is threatening to shoot her father because he wrongly blames him for negligence that allowed vandals to break in and destroy his shop.

In the theater where I saw the movie for the first time, the audience let out a collective gasp of horror and disbelief as the man pulled the trigger just as the girl jumped into her father's arms while her mother watched helplessly from the house behind her.

That same gut-wrenching feeling of watching a tragedy unfold without the power to intervene hits me every time there is a news report of a new atrocity in Homs: the shelling of civilian homes, the continued lack of food, water, and medical supplies, and most recently, the refusal to let in humanitarian supplies.

As Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch put it in an interview on the PBS NewsHour, “This is worse [than Sarajevo], worse than Grozny, the city in Russia that was leveled by Russian forces in 1998 and 2000.”

In fact, all of those who participated in the discussion with Malinowski, including Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton, and Richard Haas, Council on Foreign Relations, agreed that the options available to respond to the situation in Homs are “incredibly painful.”

Professor Slaughter called for Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar to help the Free Syrian Army “establish civilian protection zones as close to the border as possible” and to provide the intelligence, communication systems, and weapons to make this possible.

But Richard Haas objected that since Syria is one of the most highly militarized countries in the world, this might well make Homs the beginning stage of a protected civil war.

All agreed that it must be up to Arab nations to lead any effort against Syria, both in the case of any military action and also in the enforcement of economic sanctions.

Haas focused on the Syrian National Council as the best way to offer an alternative to the Assad government that can protect minorities who now support the regime, with the hope that Assad's supporters will find it worthwhile to turn against him. But he admitted that any diplomatic or political solution will almost certainly come too late to save the people of Homs.

Another factor, of course, is the continued opposition of Russia and China to any peace plan like the one proposed by the Arab League to the United Nations Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was uncharacteristically blunt in her assessment of these actions:

It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed

It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people.

In a situation where even Hamas has turned against the Assad regime, it seems particularly shocking that Russia and China continue to support it, even though the long term prognosis for Assad looks increasingly grim. Sooner or later he is likely to face the same fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, but not before blood runs through the streets of Homs, and that is no metaphor.

On her return from the Friends of Syria conference in Tunis, Hillary Clinton again expressed her frustration with the situation in Homs but tacitly admitted that United States has limited influence. Then she spelled out the few realistic options that remain:

We have to continue to consult with those who truly are friends of the Syrian people...We are doing everything we can to facilitate humanitarian aid. Secondly, we continue to ratchet up the pressure. [Syria] is an increasingly isolated regime. And third, we push for a democratic transition by working with and trying to build up the opposition so they can be an alternative.

In the movie Crash, the anticipation of the young girl's death provoked an instinctive gasp of horror that turned to overwhelming relief as the audience realized that the gun was filled with blanks rather than bullets. Homs is unlikely to have this kind of Hollywood miracle. We're at that cliffhanger moment, and whatever the Friends of Syria and the Syrian opposition can accomplish in the long term, Homs may well go down in the pages of history as another Sarajevo, another Grozny.

Walking Therapy

Every week I walk the hills behind Stanford along a path that winds up to a large radio telescope that is still active (in 2010 it was one of several devices that tried to contact the missing Mars rover). People here refer to it as "walking the Dish," and it's such a popular spot that finding a parking spot at the main gate can be a challenge most mornings.

But I almost never walk the Dish alone. Usually there is a friend with me, and we join the hundreds of other people, mostly pairs of women, who walk or job along the steep, winding path seeking exercise, conversation, and the pleasure of reaching a vista that lets you see from San Jose to San Francisco on a clear day.

Today, however, a new walking partner called to cancel because she felt under the weather, and I found myself facing the prospect of walking the Dish by myself. Watching all the other pairs of people setting off chatting and laughing, I felt disappointment fill my chest, but I reminded myself that being on my own meant that I could walk at my own pace, stop to take photos without annoying anyone, and challenge myself to work out a little harder.

In fact, I decided to walk the entire Dish, including the mile-long path that leads over the crest of the hills and descends towards Interstate 280 on the other side. The whole walk would

total six miles, and I had no more than an hour and a half to complete it.

But I wasn't thinking about that when I started up the loop from the steepest end which ascends among a grove of trees. I was thinking how I was going to keep myself from getting bored along the way. Exercising alone feels like work. You feel every muscle ache, and pretty soon you find yourself looking at your watch to see how far you've come and how much longer you have to go.

So I decided to eavesdrop on the conversations of other walkers as I passed them and amuse myself by trying to figure out the story behind these snippets of conversation.

We'd been going there for years, but we then realized it's never going to happen. If we had known...

so Ivory Tower. There was such an aura of privilege...

He said it's your duty, not just your fiduciary responsibility...

This time I have the maps...

When Suzy and I were first married...

My mother thinks it's a sin, but I wish that she'd....

You could construct a whole book of short stories just by paying to the conversations going on around you.

As I listened, I stopped paying so much attention to the strain in my legs as I climbed a particularly steep stretch, and time began to pass almost as quickly as if I were walking with a friend.

I thought about the snatches of conversation I was overhearing, and I realized that for me, and perhaps for most of the people walking the Dish, this experience is as much a form of therapy as it is exercise.

Walking with a friend gives you the opportunity to be excited, to confess your anxieties, to complain about your children, your boss, or your spouse, and to just plain pour your heart out to a sympathetic person. And the only price you have to pay is listening in return to all of your friend's joys, sorrows, and discontents.

"No wonder I never notice the time passing," I thought, "when I'm up here with a friend. It's like going to confession, only without needing to do penance afterwards."

And then I stopped to look over the South Bay and the wide expanse of the valley on one side and the eastern hills on the other, and I felt the peace that always steals over me when I've reached the highest part of the loop and can stop to enjoy this familiar prospect. I looked all around me and took in the shimmering beauty of the morning, with the sun halfway through its ascent, casting a warm light over hills that seemed etched against a cloudless blue sky.

"Now this is therapy," I thought, "balm for the soul." "If only my friend were here to enjoy it with me."

Fulfilling a Dream: Breaking Ground on the National Museum of African American History and Culture

On Wednesday, February 22^nd, President Obama spoke at a ground-breaking ceremony for the Smithsonian's latest building on the national mall, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This museum has been a long time coming and has met many roadblocks along the way. The first proposal for a such a museum came from black veterans of the Civil War, but their efforts faced the obstacles of the Depression and two World Wars. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, a number of powerful politicians from the South also opposed the idea of such a museum and quietly moved to thwart any attempts to make it a reality. In fact, it was not until 2003, that bipartisan support in the Congress reached a point where an act to establish the museum could not only pass both houses but also receive the enthusiastic support of President George W. Bush.

Since that authorization, the museum's director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, has been working on a herculean set of tasks. First, he had to raise the money for the museum, since Congress had authorized very little funding; then he had to find an architect to design the museum and embody its vision; and finally, he had to gather the materials together and create exhibits that would address both the painful history of the African-American experience under slavery and the incredible richness of African-American culture.

I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Bunch describe this endeavor at a Stanford lecture last May. He is a born story-teller, and his audience was rapt with attention as he talked about making a visit to Philadelphia to meet a man who claimed to have Harriet Tubman's shawl. Dr. Bunch admitted to having a lot of skepticism about these claims, but he was amazed to find that the shawl was an inheritance from Harriet Tubman's great niece and that underneath it, her descendants had also discovered her hymnal.

More recent artifacts that will appear in the museum include a Louis Armstrong trumpet, a James Brown suit, and the entire Parliament Funkadelic Mothership stage set, which was found in Tallahassee, Florida. But the real sense of history comes from more than 8,000 oral interviews which museum staff have conducted as they toured the country and encouraged people to bring forward their personal family treasures for evaluation and conservation. Many of these items have been donated to local museums around the country, but a few treasures will make their way to the Smithsonian as part of this new museum.

It is easy for some to dismiss a museum of African-American history and culture as an institution that only addresses the experiences of one group of American, that it really only speaks to them and not to us. It can and should be uncomfortable for many of us to acknowledge the history of those who were not allowed to be full participants in our democratic republican. In fact, one could argue that a majority of Americans did not enjoy this full participation until the beginning of the 20^th century.

But we miss the opportunity to fully understand our own history if we fail to include the experience of those whose voices are not at the forefront of most historical narratives, and who were excluded from positions of power because of their race, ethnicity, or gender.

When I visited Washington, D.C. some years ago, I spent several hours in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, marveling at the beauty of so many Native American art forms and feeling a tremendous sense of sadness and loss at the suffering of so many tribes and how close many came to losing their identity as their numbers dwindled.

I left with a deeper sense not just of Native American history but also with a better understanding of my own history as an American and the ongoing struggle we have as a nation that is still coming to terms with its treatment of indigenous people, the thousands of Africans brought here under slavery, and the other racial and ethnic groups who at one time or another were denied the rights of full citizens.

As Dr. Bunch stated in an interview he gave as part of his visit to Stanford, “The truth is that America’s expansion of the idea of liberty itself is tied to the history of African Americans. Our optimism, spirituality, resiliency…these are the contributions that have African Americanized American culture as a whole.” Dr. Bunch' s vision for this museum is certainly not one that sees it as a place for African-Americans alone but where he hopes all Americans will come to learn, to grieve, and to celebrate.

President Obama echoed these sentiments at the ground-breaking ceremonies alluding to his hopes for his own daughters and for all American children who might visit and learn from such an institution.

I think about my daughters and I think about your children, the millions of visitors who will stand where we stand long after we're gone. When our children look at Harriet Tubman Shaw or Nat Turner's bible or the plane flown by Tuskegee Airmen, I don’t want them to be seen as figures somehow larger than life. I want them to see how ordinary Americans could do extraordinary things; how men and women just like them had the courage and determination to right a wrong, to make it right.

So when this extraordinary museum opens its doors in 2015, I hope that many of you will take the opportunity to see what Dr. Bunch, the Smithsonian staff, and countless donors and contributors have achieved. I plan to be there to witness the tragic history of slavery, the indomitable spirit of Harriet Tubman, and the joyous music of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and so many others. And I certainly plan to bring my kids.

Digging Out from Under the "To Do" Pile

I had hoped to use the Presidents' Day weekend to catch up on my never-ending "to do" list and write some posts ahead of time for posting this week. Alas, for good intentions!

Instead, my "to do" list spiraled out of control, and I found myself spending most of the past two days preparing all of our tax information for our tax preparer. The irony of having to "prepare" tax documents for a person I am paying to prepare our taxes is not lost on me, but I always remind myself that, in this case, an ounce of preparation is literally worth pounds and pence in billing hours I won't have to pay.

I have also been gradually trying to reduce the flow of tasks into my mental "inbox" by unsubscribing from email lists and reducing my junk mail by taking my address and phone number off of public contact lists.

But there is no way I can resign from my "mom" job which entails many hours of finding lost forms, bike helmets, and shoes; buying items of clothing at the last minute when my son realizes his pant legs don't reach his ankles; and trying to make sure the kids have turned their homework in on time.

And then there are the tasks that just seem to crop up randomly - the door windows on all three cars break one after the other; the doorbell stops working; and I always seem to get in the car and drive off without the box of clothing I need to drop off at the Goodwill.

I've read any number of books and articles on organization, and they do help a little, but it always seems at the end of the day that I need more than 24 hours, or a small army of hired help, to get everything done.

Which means that I have to let some things go, and for me, that's really hard. Every dropped backpack, scattered pair of shoes, unwashed dish, and pile of papers feels like a personal reproach. And I find it physically painful to sit down without restraining my impulse to keep on "tidying up."

So today I folded laundry, picked up air soft gun pellets from the carpeting, dropped off a prescription, deposited a check I received in December, and deleted a bunch of ancient emails I was never going to read or answer before I allowed myself to sit down with a skinny Mocha and write this post.

I'll never change the part of me that wants to keep on crossing off those items on my "to do" list, but at least, I can continue to make myself take time out to do things that are really meaningful in my life, like writing these posts. And I've promised myself that at least one day of week, I won't even make a list of everything I think I have "to do."

The Politics of Contraception: Why Gender Balance Matters in Congress

There are times when the effects of the gender imbalance in Congress really hit home. This week, when House Republicans convened an all male panel to discuss contraception, was one of those times.

It seems almost incredible that we are still arguing over the merits of birth control in 2011 when almost 99% of sexually active women of all ages use at least one method of birth control (Mosher WD and Jones J, "Use of contraception in the United States: 1982-2008, Vital Health and Statistics 2010).

Of those women, nearly a third use oral contraceptives (“the pill”), especially those under 30 years of age, while those over the age of 30 are more likely to choose sterilization than any other form of birth control (Alan Guttmacher Institute, Facts on Contraceptive Use in the United States, 2010).

Yet the male-dominated House and Senate are considering bills that would allow any employer to opt out of covering birth control, and they're discussing this issue as if women had nothing to say about it.

This lack of coverage would, of course, create a disproportionate burden on young women and poor women, two constituencies Republicans apparently care little about. Of the 66 million women of reproductive age, about half (36 million) are in need of contraceptive services, and about a quarter need publicly-funded services because they are poor or under the age of 20. In fact, four in ten poor women of reproductive age have no health insurance at all (Alan Guttmacher Institute, Facts on Publicly Funded Contraceptive Services in the United States, August 2011).

Given these figures, you would think that Congress would be discussing the need to increase financial support for contraception, not talking about taking it away from those women who are fortunate enough to have insurance policies that cover it.

But when you convene a panel of five people, who by definition cannot get pregnant, can we really expect an honest, objective discussion of a resource that allows women to choose whether to get pregnant or not?

Can you imagine what the response of men would be like if Congress put together a panel of five women in order to discuss whether or not insurance should cover medications to address erectile dysfunction?

The cynic in me wonders if this latest fight over contraception is simply a Republican gambit to shift attention away from their embarrassing gaffe in holding up a payroll tax extension for millions of working Americans.

Or it might be a deliberate provocation of the Republican party's base of social conservative base to get them riled up enough to vote, when Mitt Romney seems more and more likely to make them want to stay home on election day.

But I can't help but feel that this fight points to some deeper and more unsettling in our culture. There seems to be an almost atavistic fear of women having control over their own fertility as if it might threaten the very structure of society.

During the Enlightenment, French philosophers from Louis de Jaucourt to Rousseau to Condorcet argued for political liberty for men, but they openly worried about extending the same kinds of liberties to women because it might upset the hierarchical structure of the family.

Indeed, Rousseau's ideal woman was one whose education was limited to her role as wife and mother, and he attacked aristocratic women as selfish and decadent for wanting to control their fertility. “Not content to have ceased breast-feeding their infants, they have ceased to want to have them at all,” he wrote in his novel Émile.

In a similar vein, Pierre Bayle wrote: “It is certain that if women had only consulted reason, they would have renounced the quality of mother, discouraged by the inconvenience of pregnancy, the pains of delivery, and the care that must be taken of the little creatures they produce.”

This fear that if women could control their fertility, they would avoid having children may run deep in a culture where “family values” still connotes a husband who works and a wife who stays home with the kids.

Today the number of households fitting this description is rapidly diminishing, and the number of women who still have no children by the time they reach their mid-40s has doubled since the 1980s (Jane Lawler Dye, "Fertility of American Women, 2006," Current Population Reports).

Is it a coincidence then that Republicans picked five men to talk about one of the important health and life issues a woman can face, i.e. deciding when and if to have a child?

Whatever their motivations, this ongoing debate raises serious issues for women, and it underscores the danger of having so little female representation in bodies like the House and Senate, when a majority of men are writing laws that affect the most important decision a woman can make.

So I urge women not only to write their representatives and let their voices be heard in support of contraceptive health coverage but also to urge their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons, and male colleagues to do the same.

And let's start putting at least a few more women in the House and Senate where they belong.

We are Creatures (but not Prisoners) of Habit

This morning I was backing out of my driveway thinking about about how much of our behavior is “automatic,” when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a woman on the sidewalk, who had stopped to let me by. “How ironic,” I thought. “Here is the very example of the danger of operating on “autopilot” that I want to write about, and I could have easily fallen prey to it, if this pedestrian had paying as little attention to her surroundings as I was.”

We are all aware that much of our daily lives are governed by this kind of automatic behavior. Most of us don't have to consciously think about how to fry an egg or what route to take to work, and if by chance, we have a doctor's appointment first thing in the morning, we might find ourselves going in the wrong direction, as our brain automatically directs us to drive off to work as usual.

It's a very convenient function of our brains until the moment when we back out of the driveway and don't notice the cyclist behind us, and we find that habit has gotten us into serious trouble.

But even if we have a potential near miss, like I did this morning, it's unlikely that our vigilance will last very long. Within a day or so, backing out of the driveway will become as habitual as it always has been, and we won't be giving much conscious thought to doing it.

In fact, a study conducted at Duke University found that about 45% of our decisions are primarily based on habit rather than a conscious consideration of possible pros or cons.

Retailers know this and target the young accordingly to take up smoking, prefer Coke to Pepsi, and establish a thousand other little habits that will affect how much they consume and what brands they buy.

Recognizing that we are creatures of habit, however, does not mean that we are prisoners of habit. We can break patterns of behavior that are harmful, like giving up smoking or alcohol, and we can even create new habits, like going to the gym every weekend or drinking mineral water instead of soda.

In recent years there has been an explosion of research in neurology and psychology about habitual behaviors and an equal upsurge in the number of statisticians and programmers engaging in “predictive analytics” to exploit these behaviors. A detailed and rather scary article about how Target does this appears in the February 16th edition of The New York Times Magazine.

The author of the article, Charles Duhigg, has a book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business forthcoming from Random House on February 28^th, and I am eager to read it in full. But what I found so fascinating in his article was his description of how habits are formed and how they can be broken.

In essence, the operation of any habitual behavior is relatively simple. The brain is stimulated by a particular cue (a location, a time of day, an emotion, interactions with other people) and that triggers the desire for a particular reward that the brain associates with this cue. What happens in between is that our brains prompt us to engage in a certain routine behavior that repetition has led us to believe will lead to the reward we are seeking.

Duhigg gives his own example of how he broke his 3:00 p.m. cookie break when he realized it was contributing to gaining a fair amount of weight over the years.

The cue for this habit was easy to identify. Every day around the same time, Duhigg felt the craving for a cookie. The way he satisfied this craving was to go up to the cafeteria, buy a cookie, and spend time chatting with colleagues while he ate it.

It might seem obvious that the sweetness of the cookie was the reward. But Duhigg recognized that there were other factors associated with his routines, so he set out to explore various hypotheses to test what he was really craving. One day he took a walk instead of buying a cookie, on another he went to the cafeteria but only talked to colleagues, and on yet another, he bought a cookie but took it back to his desk to eat.

It didn't take him long to realize that the real reward he was seeking was conversation. Every day around 3:00 p.m. he wasn't actually hungry; he was bored and restless. Once he figured this out, he was able to create a new habit that involved going over to chat with a colleague for a few minutes and then returning to his desk. He didn't miss the cookie at all, and he lost weight.

As Duhigg explains:

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

As a example of creating a positive habit, Duhigg talks about how members of a health insurance plan were encouraged to exercise, but a smaller set of them were also taught about habit formation as well. The results were dramatic. Those who left themselves a visual cue every morning (putting their tennis shoes next to their bed or packing a gym bag) – and a specific reward (a treat or a record showing their progress) had far more success in establishing an exercise routine than those who didn't receive the training on how to change or form a habit.

We often think about changing habits in terms of willpower, making it a moral or ethical issue, when research increasingly demonstrates that habits are dependent on the pursuit of pleasure and the way our brains have become wired to seek it.

For example, over the past month or so, I've been trying to establish an exercise habit, and it's working. But Duhigg's article gives me insight into why I've been successful at creating one habit but not so successful at obtaining my goal in exercising: to take off the extra pounds I've put on in my 40s.

For me, the rewards of exercise are simple: I almost always do it with someone, whether it's my husband, or in a class, or with a friend, and the sociability I associate with exercise makes me feel just as good as the endorphins my body produces.

But when it comes to figuring out what to put in my mouth, or when to keep my mouth shut when my kids are trying to provoke me, it's much harder to change my habitual response. Am I stressed? Then it must be time for some sweets. Tired? Coffee, no, make that a latte. Impatient that my kids arent taking out the trash? Repeat myself, only louder.

Sure, I could reach for an apple instead of a granola bar, or order the decaf version of my drink, or count to ten, and maybe check to see if they're playing video games or in the bathroom.

But sometimes I just don't care enough to ignore the habitual response.

Maybe changing some habits does come down to willpower. But I'll have to think about that for another blog.

Can a Bibliophile Really Learn to Love the Kindle?

I am one of those people who truly love books. I don't just mean reading them. I love the feel of a book in my hand, and even the musty smell that old books acquire. I like collecting books, sorting them, and arranging them artistically on my book shelves.

One long wall of the family room is filled with books, from floor to ceiling, arranged by subject area, and then alphabetically within each subgroup. And woe to the person who doesn't put a book back where it belongs!

There are books everywhere in the house: in my bedroom, the kids' bedroom, stacked on coffee tables in the living room. You only need to walk through my front door, and the first thing you notice on your left is an open bookshelf that contains stacks of books I have checked out from my local library.

It's an obsession long in the making. I remember my first trip to Manhattan with my mother and how we walked to 5th Avenue to visit Brentano's, an independent book seller, now sadly defunct after a merger with Waldenbooks and later Border's. Cheap paperbacks were a new phenomenon for me, and at 75 cents or so a piece, my acquisitiveness was limited only by what I could carry. I proudly walked out with a stack of books that reached up to my chin and spent most of the remaining vacation devouring them.

When I was ten or eleven, my sleep overs at one friend's house were the occasion for “read outs.” This is what we called our midnight excursions into a lighted hallway to read (or keep reading) a favorite book when we were supposed to be in bed. I read Pride and Prejudice cover to cover in that hallway and then re-read it so many times, it literally disintegrated.

So I took a considerably jaundiced view of the Kindle and other e-readers when they first came on the market.. My husband bought one for his parents so they could easily increase the type size and avoid eye strain. Then he gave me one for Christmas. I loved the white background, which was much closer to real paper than a computer screen, and the miniature reading light that you could pull out, which meant that you could still read at night. He had even bought a red cover for it so that it looked more like a Moleskin journal than an electronic device.

After a few weeks or so, my husband looked at my unused Kindle collecting dust on my nightstand next to a stack of books and asked me in wounded tones, “Why aren't you reading your Kindle?'

How could I explain without hurting his feelings? Reading a Kindle in bed was just not the same as holding a book in my hands. “Well, I have all these books to read first,” I told him, giving him the first excuse I could think of.

It wasn't until we traveled to Barcelona last year that I discovered the Kindle's guilty pleasures. Instead of lugging a stack of paperbacks with me to be discarded in hotel lobbies, I had nearly 20 books loaded on my little machine. It was even better when I went out sight-seeing with my son and clicked open the guidebook I had downloaded. I could look up any museum, find a local restaurant, and negotiate the metro, all without unfolding maps, or awkwardly leafing through pages. Now when I travel, I always take my Kindle with me (although I still pack a few books as well).

But I do feel a certain trepidation every time I purchase a book for my Kindle. If the Kindle were just a new form of technology, like getting a mobile phone in addition to a land line, or replacing LPs with compact disks, I wouldn't feel so guilty. But it's the combined power of this new technology and Amazon's domination of (and attitude towards) the book trade that gives me pause. After all, Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO allegedly declared that bookstores and the physical book are dead, and Amazon is probably as much bent on becoming the online competitor to Wal-Mart as it is in becoming the world's biggest bookseller.

Not only are Amazon's Kindle books much cheaper than their hardcover or paperback versions, but since Amazon is selling its Kindle Fire for less than it costs to make, many in the publishing business worry that Amazon could eventually control what gets published. As one publisher put it, "Get market share, and when you get far ahead it is hard to catch up. Bezo's game, like Jobs's before him, is to get the device and get eighty-to-ninety-percent distribution on the device, and you own the game," (quoted in an article in The New Yorker)

I don't subscribe to the doomsday scenarios of e-readers like the Kindle “wrecking the publishing industry,” but having watched Border's go bankrupt, and my local independent bookstores scaling back the number of volumes they carry, it does give me pause. Am I contributing to the demise of the bookstore as we know it?

According to a Harris Poll taken late in 2010, the answer is maybe. The ownership of e-readers is increasing at a phenomenal rate, but when people buy them, it seems to have either a neutral or positive effect on the number of books they read and on the number of books they purchase. This is encouraging news for someone like me who is still clinging to the pleasures of browsing bookstore shelves. Scrolling through Amazon's recommendations is not the same as the serendipity of finding a title that intrigues you because it happens to be next to the book you're actually looking for.

So I try to visit my local bookstore more frequently and not feel disappointed because there are fewer volumes to browse. What I fear most is that bookstores will go the way of Tower Records or the record shop which have disappeared as the majority of people download music from the web. It's hard to purchase a music CD these days except at stores like Wal-Mart and Target where they're just one more consumable item. I don't go to bookstores to consume. I go there to enjoy the experience of looking at books just as much as I go there with the intention to buy one.

Of course, with my shelves overflowing at home, it might be better if I did slow down my physical acquisition of books. But somehow I don't anticipate that I will. The Kindle is still just a machine to me. You can't give a Kindle to a toddler and let her chew on it as well as read it, the way you do with board books. Nor can you cuddle up with a Kindle at bedtime and let your child turn the pages as you read aloud. Books carry memories of afternoons spent curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea, and associations with the people who read to me when I was a child. For me, books are a lifelong love affair as well an obsession, and I don't anticipate a break up any time soon.

Dedicated to the One I Love

Yesterday, my husband hugged me and told me that he couldn't believe he was still in love with me. He says this fairly often and always with a sense of wonder that we still share the same sense of affection and understanding after more than twenty years of living together.

"I should be bored by now," he laughs, "But I'm not. I can't imagine anyone else I'd rather be with."

Today is Valentine's Day, and since I share that same sense of wonder and gratitude, I'm dedicating this post to my friend, lover, and husband, Raúl Antonio Díaz Zegers.

Why do I love this man (apart from the fact that he's handsome, smart, and funny)?

Here are a few reasons why:

In college, when we spent nights arguing over politics until the wee hours of the morning, he always defended his viewpoint passionately but tried to understand mine.

He agreed to take a course called "Power and Gender in Roman Society" on my behalf because it conflicted with Spanish 101, which I was taking so I could understand the dinner conversation at his parents' house. It ended up being once of his favorite courses.

He's such a nerd that I once found him kneeling by the shower door in our coed bathroom, marveling at how the door's mechanism used gravity to make sure that the door always swung shut to the exact same place.

He's such a nerd that I never have to worry about my computer set up or where to get the latest and greatest software, especially open source programs. There's nothing like living with an IT guy.

When he took me to Chile to visit his family's farm for the first time, he told me that he was taking me to the "most beautiful place in the world," and he wasn't lying.

He wanted to have kids right away to "get it over with." As if you ever "get over" having kids! He still keeps asking when our twelve-year-old is going to go to college.

He held me up, literally, for hours when I was having back labor with my second child, Tomás.

He got the kids' science projects banned two years in a row for studying the physics of a rocket and how to make a fountain (apparently the kids managed to soak one another and a few other exhibits).

He's always encouraged me to take risks, whether it's starting a new business or hiking in the Andes, or trying to ride a bike with clip-on shoes and without scrapes, cuts, or broken bones.

He loves languages so much that he's always practicing one of the many he knows or trying to learn new ones. After he studied Anglo-Saxon, we went to see a performance of Beowulf in the original with subtitles (joining what my son said were the "other five people in the Bay Area who care about Beowulf").

He loves his gadgets but puts them to great use, especially his camera.

We bicker a lot (ask our kids), but our ground rules exclude the use of "You never...." or "You always.." Well, almost always.

He hates chores but is always willing to pay someone else to do them.

He knows exactly when I'm feeling upset or scared, and he always asks me why.

He's the one person in the world I trust absolutely and without reservation.

And as he tells me so often, I can't imagine being with anyone else.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Why is Obama Running Away from "Obamacare"?

If there is one that really puzzles me about President Obama, it's his unwillingness to take credit for, much less mention, the signature piece of legislation he managed to pass in his first term: the Affordable Healthcare Act, scornfully characterized by Republicans as "Obamacare."

Even with all its flaws and compromises, President Obama's health plan represented a long-sought victory for those who believe that health insurance is the missing link in our social safety net. And he accomplished this where all other presidents before him had failed, including the likes of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton.

The successful passage of this legislation has brought howls of outrage from Tea Party activists and Republicans who were quite happy to whip up their base until audience members at a Tea Party sponsored debate cheered at the prospect of letting an uninsured person, who was in a coma die, rather than receive services at state expense. That was a little too callous even for the Republican leadership, and the heated rhetoric simmered down for a while.

That is until conservatives saw an opening when the administration recently released rules requiring all nonprofits affiliated with a religious organization to provide preventive care, including birth control. This led to more protests against state interference and on behalf of "religious freedom," even though no church, mosque, or other house of worship was required to provide this coverage, just religiously-affiliated hospitals, schools, and universities.

This latest scuffle over the health care plan was a mere tempest in a teapot compared to earlier protests, but it obscured a very important point. Beginning January 1, 2013 almost all women will have access to birth control at no additional charge through their employer plans, and this preventive screening package will also include HIV screening and support for breast-feeding mothers.

It's true that the new health care act provisions may have contributed slightly to increased premiums but most of the 9% (yes, nine percent) rise in health insurance costs from 2010 to 2011 came from (guess what) the rising cost of health care.

In addition, preventive medicine actually saves health care dollars (and lives). If more people know they have HIV, we can slow the spread of this disease, especially among the young and in communities of color. If more women are able to breastfeed their babies at work, those children are less likely to be obese and will benefit from a whole range of other health effects.

In this Great Recession, college graduates who can't find a job have been able to stay on their parents' health insurance until they reach the age of 26, and seniors have seen less and less of the infamous "donut hole" in their Medicare Part D coverage. And that doesn't even include children who can't be excluded from health coverage because of pre-existing conditions, small business tax-credits that encourage employers to offer health insurance, and the end of life-time limits on insurance policies.

Instead of running from his health care legislation, President Obama should be out talking to every person who now has health care coverage, or who has managed to keep their coverage because of Obamacare. If I were Obama, I would make "Obamacare" a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and I would be hailing every success of Mitt Romney's health insurance initiative in Massachusetts as an indication of what could be accomplished when the law is fully implemented in 2014.

When Everything Seems to Go Wrong

Yesterday was one of those days that the pages of history tell us are better spent lying down, at least according to one of my favorite movies, The Philadelphia Story.

My youngest son, Nico, has suddenly made the leap from childhood to adolescence, fueled by raging hormones with an emphasis on raging. He came into our bedroom at 6:45 am to ask why I wasn't up helping him get ready for school. "You're 12 years old, Nico." I responded sleepily, "Can't you get yourself up?"

"Well, it's much easier if you help me," he responded. "Otherwise, I'm late for school," he added, in a tone that clearly meant, "And it's your fault if I am."

If there had been a "please" involved, I might have gotten up. But Nico had been difficult the night before, and I wasn't ready to face Little Lord Fauntleroy so early in the day.

It went downhill from there as Nico returned to his list of grievances from the night before, namely the fact that there had been no dessert after dinner. This has been a point of contention for a while now, with me arguing that if he wants dessert, he's old enough to make it, or eat what's around, like fruit, or the ice cream that's been in the freezer for a couple of months. In my view, I'm responsible for making sure dinner is on the table; dessert is optional.

Once my husband got involved, there were more raised voices, slammed doors, and I ended up driving Nico to school since he was on the point of melting down in tears, shifting back from adolescence to childhood in the blink of an eye.

The bad mood had already taken hold though. When I got back from dropping him off, I made the mistake of taking a look at the remains of breakfast still sitting out on the kitchen counter and made a sarcastic comment to my husband about his lack of commitment to housekeeping. This resulted in more slammed doors and domestic drama, with me feeling equal parts guilt and frustration.

Then my husband called me later that afternoon to tell me that my eighteen-year-old, Tomas, had been in a car accident. Since he had recently damaged our mini-van during a close encounter with a dumpster, this did nothing to improve my mood.

I was fuming, when my husband called again to clarify. It wasn't the car that was in an accident. It was Tomas. He had been hit by a woman, who was backing out of a parking space and didn't see him.

Suddenly, anger shifted to guilt and fear. Here he was out looking for a job to pay for the damage to the car, and I had assumed he was at fault for another accident, when he was actually the victim of someone else's carelessness. Fortunately, he was only bruised and scraped. And, of course, he hadn't gotten the name of the driver or her insurance information. "She could barely speak English," he told me, as if that was a sufficient excuse.

But I had already let go of my irritation over that when I saw that he really was okay. No broken bones, just scrapes and bruises. No further damage to a car, that after all, could still be driven, even if one sliding door was permanently wedged shut.

It had been one of those days when everything seemed to go wrong, but in the end, nothing really did. And that's a good thing after all.

Learning to Love Yoga (in spite of myself)

About a month ago I started taking Hatha yoga classes at my local gym. It was one of those "I should try this because it's supposed to be good for me" decisions. The kind that impel you towards nonfat Greek yogurt and steel cut oats.

I am not a complete yoga novice. I had tried another class a couple of years ago, and it was pretty much a disaster. I could do very few of the poses without feeling extremely uncomfortable, and holding them was excruciating. I looked around at all the far more flexible bodies around me performing these poses with ease, and I felt completely humiliated.

My next experience of yoga came through a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) training program I had signed up for. Despite the off-putting name, MBSR was developed to help people with chronic pain for whom no other treatments were working. I came to it at a time of extreme stress in my workplace and discovered that MSBR combined both meditation and yoga movements like the child's pose and the cat/cow stretches, positions that have become standard parts of many exercise classes. The meditation appealed more than the yoga though so I didn't actually practice these poses all that much.

But then after a long period of working hard on cardio routines and gaining strength through weight-lifting, I realized that something was missing. I was stronger than ever, but my flexibility and balance were decreasing with age, and exercise always seemed to take priority over finding time for meditation or even finding five minutes to do nothing at all.

So I tried the class and was immediately struck by the instructor, who is tall, slender and incredibly flexible. "Oh no," I thought. "Here comes the humiliation." But she turned out to be the kind of person who was just as interested in the mental aspects of yoga as the physical ones. She also encouraged us to "do less" instead of pushing ourselves to our physical limits.

Still the first few classes were hard. The instructor would tell us to focus on our breath, and all I could think about was my wobbly legs and straining muscles. I wasn't feeling any energy source from below. I was wondering how much longer I could stay in one attitude without falling over.

By the third class, I had started to gain my balance and was beginning to enjoy the different poses. The instructor always had props for us to use to make it easier on wrists or knees, and I could get beyond the discomfort to gain some inkling of what she was talking about.

The best part of the class, though, was the five minutes or so of meditation near the end of class. With my muscles warm and my body relaxed, I could ignore the internal chatter of my brain and just focus on the breath -- in and out-- just observing it, not trying to deepen or control it. When she instructed us to "surface," that was exactly what it felt like, coming out of one form of consciousness and back to the everyday world.

I was listening to an interview with William Broad, a yoga practitioner for over forty years, and author of The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards. He observed that while many people try to practice an active, intense form of yoga, yoga doesn't really accelerate your heart rate the way many other activities like biking, running, and swimming do. Instead, he said that "yoga has this remarkable quality to relax you, to de-stress you. That means that if you're prone to hypertension, that lowers. There are all these wonderful cardio effects that come from the other end of the spectrum: the relaxation of the heart, rather than the pumping-up phenomena you get from aerobic sports."

I was glad to have this physiological explanation since I often find it difficult to explain (especially to my husband and sons), why I find the practice of meditation, and now of yoga, such a source of well-being.

I see their skepticism and that look they get on their faces when they're thinking "Oh God, mom's really gone off the deep end this time." But at their age, I would have been equally skeptical of anything that sounded so touchy-feely or that smacked of New Age mysticism.

I'm still a novice when it comes to the theory of yoga and skill skeptical of claims about chakras (centers of energy) and shakti (sacred force). What I do know is that my practice of yoga is proving to be a perfect counterbalance to all the mental and physical activity that makes up most of my daily experience. Through yoga I let go of all mundane stresses of modern life and reach something different and quite rare: relaxation, stillness, and peace.

The Overturning of Proposition 8 - One More Step Towards Gay Civil Rights

This morning a three judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling stating that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. It's a time for celebration for those who support marriage equality in California and across the U.S.

But the ruling doesn't mean that same-sex couples in California will have the right to marry any time soon. The final decision on the constitutionality of Proposition 8 may well fall to the Supreme Court as its supporters continue their appeals, but only if the High Court takes the case.

This decision represents one small step forward in an ongoing struggle for civil rights that gay men and women have been fighting for many years. The ruling makes this clear: “[A]ll parties agree that Proposition 8 had one effect only. It stripped same-sex couples of the ability they previously possessed to obtain from the State...an important right-- the right to obtain and use the designation of 'marriage' to describe their relationships. Nothing more, nothing less.”

As the Court indicated, the state cannot take away the civil rights of a class of people without substantive reasons, and there were no compelling reasons that Proposition 8 supporters could put forward. Proposition 8 didn't take away people's religious freedoms or the right to speak out against gay marriage. Nor did it further the procreation of children, one of the central reasons many put forward in favor of limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

Instead, as the Court observed: “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

Like its federal counterpart, The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) Proposition 8 does nothing to support the institution of marriage, and it does a great deal to injure same-sex couples and their families. And it is families who are affected by this law. Not just same-sex couples themselves, but their children, grandchildren, parents, sisters and brothers, and all of the other people who support their struggle for civil rights.

The supporters of Proposition 8 and other opponents of same-sex marriage have engaged in any number of scare tactics to make the general public feel that allowing gay men and women to marry would somehow damage marriage as an institution. The infamous National Organization for Marriage (NOM) “Gathering Storm” ad took this approach with results that its backers might not have anticipated: an endless stream of parodies, jokes on late night TV, and laughter that barely cloaked the scorn beneath it. The truth is that there is nothing to be afraid of in extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. Gay marriage has now been legal for seven years in Massachusetts, and there has been no discernible effect at all on married, heterosexual couples and their families. Nor has any credible study demonstrated that same-sex unions harm married, heterosexual couples or society at large.

Some argue that gay couples should be satisfied with the designation of “civil unions,” which can be legally equivalent to marriage. The court also addressed that argument, noting that “domestic partnerships lack the social meaning associated with marriage” and that there is a “significant symbolic disparity” between the two. The right to marry doesn't simply offer gay couples the same legal rights that heterosexual couples enjoy; it also gives them the right to designate their unions with a title that has enormous historical, social, and cultural resonance.

The ruling explains this in eloquent terms:

We emphasize the extraordinary significance of the official designation of 'marriage.' The designation is important because 'marriage' is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but to the couple desiring to enter into a committeed lifelong relationship, a marriage by the name of 'registered domestic partnership' does not.

Like Judge Walker, who made the original ruling overturning Prop 8, I may be accused of having a bias on this issue. I witnessed my son's own wedding to his partner this past August in New Mexico, and the two are now legally married in the state of New York, although not in Texas, where they are both students.

But apart from my feelings as parent who is thrilled to see her son in a loving, committed relationship, I also feel that gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our time. Eventually, I believe we will see the legalization of same-sex marriage on a national level, and as in the case of Massachusetts, I can safely predict that a few years later, people will wonder what all the fuss was about. We look back at laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and they seem absurd. A few decades it was headline news to say that a wife could accuse her husband of rape, and that also has given way to a new understanding of women's rights and sexual agency.

But right now, that vision of marriage equality remains just a vision, a hope, and a dream for many same-sex couples whose committed relationships do not even have the status of civil unions. This ruling on Proposition 8 is something to celebrate, but we have a long way to go in pursuit of gay civil rights and an acceptance of gay men and women as equal citizens in our society.