Springs to Mind

Further thoughts on Google's new Privacy Policies

2012-01-29T10:32:00.006-07:00

Like many Google users, I received an email from Google on January 28th detailing the new privacy policies that have generated so much media coverage and debate. They are worth a careful read.

Since my previous post, a Google employee also contacted me to explain some of the benefits of these new policies. This included creating a profile that ensures that search results reflect your interests. You can see your own profile (and edit it) by click here.

To quote the same Google employee:

The profile is all fairly broad attributes, demographics such as age range and sex, and broad interests. You don't have to worry about searching for some odd fetish (research for a book, of course) and having ads show up later, because the odd things wouldn't have a category in the profile. As we put it, "Google does not associate sensitive interest categories with your ads preferences."

So I am certainly not advocating giving up your Gmail account or your Android phone or boycotting Google's many services. But I do feel that most users do not understand the implications of Google's policy changes, either for good or ill, because most online data-gathering and profiling activities are largely invisible to them.

In fact, Google's new privacy policy offers a good opportunity for both personal reflection and public debate about what privacy means in the digital age.

I believe that those who engage in data gathering, like Google, have an obligation to educate the public about how their users' information is tracked, stored, and disseminated.

Consumers also need to think about the implications of having personal information tracked and stored indefinitely. While Google may protect users' privacy today, none of us can see into the future far enough to fully understand how this data might be used in ten years or twenty or beyond.

Just as advances in understanding the human genome required legal safeguards regarding an individual's genetic information, we may also be reaching the point where similar legal protections may be necessary to protect an individual's personal privacy on the internet.

Finally, the potential for abuse of this information may be low today, but that could also change in the future, particularly with regard to government policies on terrorist or other illicit activity (and that's taking only the U.S. government into account).

The privacy debate will continue, and we may well see Google's new policies as a salutary reminder of how crucial these issues are when more and more of our daily activities are transacted on the internet.

P.S. For two opposing views on the privacy debate, see the op-eds of Givens and Robertson.

Correction to the Original Post: The letter I referenced from thirty-two privacy and civil rights organizations is not a recent letter but one from 2004, which is not relevant to the current privacy policy changes.

Will Google Trade Privacy for Profits?

2012-01-29T10:24:00.001-07:00

Just after its successful campaign against legislation (SOPA) that could have eviscerated the concept of “fair use” and potentially restricted free speech on the Internet, Google has made a troubling shift in its own privacy policies.

Google claims that it is simply consolidating privacy policies across its many internet services including its search engine, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and its Google + social network.

But many of us who use these different services and are aware of how much of our web presence they can track are rightly concerned that our privacy is about to be sold, literally, to the highest bidder.

How much can we trust Google to keep its promise of “don't be evil” under the pressure of advertisers to provide the most minute and up-to-date information about everything we buy, where we go, and what our interests are?

And will Google put its own financial self-interest above its ethical obligations to allow its users to “opt out” of at least some of this tracking? Under the current proposed changes, there is no “opt out” for Googlers, unless they decide to stop using its services altogether.

Clearly there is always a trade-off between personal privacy and the convenience of getting information almost instantaneously whenever we use the web. My personal privacy policy is never to write anything in an email, blog, or on a social-networking site that I wouldn't be comfortable having appear on the front page of The New York Times.

But that doesn't mean that I want Google to keep track of what kind of medical information I might be seeking or what websites I read. And if I were a researcher looking into a topic like women passing as men (and I have researched this topic for a book I wrote), I wouldn't want that research to indicate anything about my own personal gender identity.

But these infringements on privacy seem picayune, when you think about the potential for this kind of aggregated information to be abused by hackers, identity thieves, and repressive governments who want to track down and suppress their political opponents.

Right now Google is proposing to scan the text of all emails and retain this information indefinitely; this change alone raises serious privacy concerns, and thirty-one privacy and civil liberties organizations have written a letter to Google asking for the suspension of its Gmail service until these policies are clarified.

This morning when I used Google maps to figure out the best bike route to an appointment, I was asked to click “Allow” for Google to find my location, but I have no idea what else I may have “allowed” since no service agreement or disclosure statement popped up for me to scroll through. And there didn't seem to be any way to get the route information I wanted without making this choice.

So now when I send email, I have to face the prospect that somewhere my words are being stored, and I have no say over who has access to them, and or how they will be used at some future date.

When I use my Android phone, Google can approximate my location because the phone reports back its location based on GPS data and the cell tower it's connected to. Right now Google states that there is no link between that data and the data collected when you check your Gmail on the same phone, but one can imagine that this could change as Google works to integrate its different services. Advertisers would be thrilled to know that you just asked a friend to coffee, and that they now have the opportunity to recommend the nearest Starbucks, whether you asked for that information or not.

I am not claiming that these changes indicate that Google is about to become the next incarnation of Big Brother. But the aggregation of so many different kinds of personal data by such a large and dominant corporate player in the Internet world should give consumers pause, particularly when Google is not giving us the choice to keep our personal data from joining the billions of other pieces of data it collects every time its users search, watch a video, send email, or try to map a route. Consumers should not be forced to forfeit their privacy in order to access the web, and they also deserve full disclosure of how that information is being used and will be used in the future.

Please, Google, don't sell us out!

Thoughts on the State of the Union

2012-01-25T22:40:00.014-07:00

Two days ago I was invited to participate in a panel of citizens who represent different parts of the political spectrum and who had all agreed to watch President Obama’s State of the Union address and discuss it on the PRI program, To the Point.

So I made sure I could tune in my local PBS station and sat down with my kids to watch the President deliver the last State of the Union address of his first term.

I was impressed with President Obama’s strategic decision to touch on themes that would likely play well to moderate or independent voters – ending the war in Iraq, preserving the middle class dream of owning a home or sending your kids to college, and above all, a call to businesses to bring jobs back from overseas to a country that still suffers from having too many people out of work.

I was also pleased that the President was willing to assume a more adversarial stance towards Congress, which has played Russian roulette with the debt ceiling and still threatens to let unemployment benefits and an extension of the payroll tax reduction expire out of what can only be described as an act of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

But I have to admit I was a little taken aback when I found that the first question I was asked on To the Point concerned the Republican response and not the State of the Union speech itself. Fortunately, I’d listened to most of that too, so I could point out that that Governor Daniels’ assertion that “One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today” was misleading at best.

What I really wanted to ask was why Governor Daniels was focused primarily on how many men are unemployed when women make up over half of the US labor force. Is the female unemployment rate unimportant to the GOP? But I was already representing the Democratic point of view on the program, and to throw in “feminist” as well might unnecessarily rile the other two panel members, who were both male and Republican so I decided not to press the point.

But here I can say explicitly that while I suspect that Governor Daniels’ examples were purposely selected to make the unemployment situation look as bad as possible, it also strikes me that the focus on men here is symptomatic of the GOP’s blind spot when it comes to working women, just as the Republican leadership foolishly persists in describing the increasing economic gulf between rich and poor as “class warfare,” when even a majority of Republican voters thinks that those making over $1 million should pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes.

That is the main reason I believe President Obama has an advantage going into the current election cycle. Americans are no longer buying the “politics of envy” rhetoric any longer, especially when it comes out of the mouths of millionaire candidates like Mitt Romney. Of course, Mitt Romney can claim that paying a 15% tax rate is perfectly legal, and that he shouldn’t pay more than he owes. But he embodies the very inequity of the tax system and has said nothing about what he would actually do to address this inequity. In fact, both Romney and Gingrich bridle at the suggestion that millionaires contribute the same percentage of their income to the treasury as middle class Americans, who are paying 25% if they make more than $35,000 as a single filer and more than $47,000 as a head of household.

President Obama also sent an inspiring message when he mentioned the military as an emblem of what can be accomplished when every person is focused on a common purpose.

Those of us who've been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight. When you're marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.

Certainly, as an institution, Congress is about as far from the military as you can get. It’s meant to be a place where people represent different points of view and argue for different solutions to our nation’s problems. But the increasingly divisive, tit for tat, petty partisan politics that has dominated Congress during the past year has rightly disgusted voters on both the left and the right.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Landmark civil rights legislation, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and even welfare reform under President Clinton were all undertaken with cooperation between the two parties and with a sense of the common good.

Statesmanship in the best sense of the word is all but extinct in today’s Congress, and in an election year, there seems little chance of its resurrection, but by advocating moderate policies in clear, unvarnished terms, President took the first steps towards a reasonable and thoughtful way for both parties to respond to the nation’s most pressing need.

Hubert Humphrey said that the “essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.” It’s time for our representatives to stop lobbing bombs at one another and show just this kind of consideration for the future of the country rather than wasting another year in an unprofitable and potentially dangerous stalemate.

The Internet Strikes Back!

2012-01-21T10:56:00.003-07:00

Up until this week, it's safe to assume that very few Americans had ever heard of SOPA or PIPA, much less formed an opinion about them.

But all of that changed when the Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia joined forces to make all of us realize what our world would be like without a free and unfettered net. Google blacked out its logo, Wikipedia's English version went offline, and site after site offered links for users to contact their representatives in Washington to protest these proposed bills.

By the end of the day on January 19th, Google had collected over 7 million signatures opposing SOPA and PIPA, and members of Congress, even those who had supported the bills, were practically tripping over themselves to run away from them. For the moment, SOPA and PIPA are off the table, but it's unlikely that Hollywood and the Chamber of Commerce will give up easily.

There are so many things wrong with SOPA and PIPA that it is difficult to know where to start, but perhaps the most obvious one is how these bills distort the balance of power between a creator and an end user under copyright law. According to these bills, the movie and record industries would be entitled to a “private right of action” in which they could directly target any site they believe is dedicated to or even “facilitating” infringement of copyright and have full immunity for doing so if their claims are proven false.

Not only is this a recipe for blackmailing any website hosting material a corporation doesn't want public; it would also eviscerate any remaining rights to the “fair use” provision of copyright law. No one would want to play the Talking Heads' “I want to make him stay up all night” as background music for their baby videos, or parody Lady Gaga's “Telephone,” since it it could be interpreted as “infringement” according to these bills, and no internet provider would take the risk of hosting this kind of material on its site. These bills would foster a “guilty until proven innocent” atmosphere on the web that would be tantamount to corporate censorship and destructive of the kind of creativity that thrives on the access the internet offers to all kinds of art, media, and information.

But the most frustrating thing about these bills is that this kind of legislation has been proven over and over again not to work. Since the 1976 Copyright Law, content providers have gone to Congress sixteen times to create more and more restrictive copyright laws, and these laws have done absolutely nothing to solve the problem of pirated copies and illegal downloads. Taking down websites will not stop piracy, and prosecuting people for downloading movies and music will not ensure that they then purchase a legal copy.

In fact, one reason that music sales are on the rise again, may well be that new technological devices like the iPhone and iPad are making people want more content accessible all the time. Yet the corporate content providers continue to try to muzzle the very technology that increases demand for what they supply.

I am not denying that illegal downloading is an issue. The very qualities that make the Internet so attractive and so powerful are also those that can make it quite a dangerous place. Every flavor of pornography is accessible with a few keystrokes, viruses come disguised as love letters, and there are few of us left who have not received one of those “our database has been hacked” notifications, meaning that some unscrupulous person now knows our name, address, and other private information.

But these dangers do not stop us from using the Internet every day (and probably every hour) of our lives. In fact, what I find so exhilarating about yesterday's protests is the way the Internet can magnify the voices of individuals into something so powerful that it can topple governments and turn corporate lobbying on its head.

Yesterday millions of people used the Internet to strike back at legislation written by corporate lobbyists solely for the benefit of corporate media that would have undermined our fundamental values of free speech, fair use, and the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. We witnessed more than the defeat of some terrible legislation; we also witnessed democracy in action on an unprecedented scale, and that is truly something to celebrate.

My Children are from Mars, Mercury, and a Galaxy Far Far Away

2012-01-13T16:29:00.011-07:00

When you head home from the hospital with a little bundle in an infant car seat, you worry about sleepless nights, developmental milestones, and how you're ever going to pay for childcare, much less college.

What you don't really think about is that somewhere in that tiny little body is a unique and often unfathomable individual who will very soon develop a will of its own.

While I never had very distinct ideas of what I wanted my children to become and considered myself too “progressive” to slot them into the conventional triad of doctor/lawyer/business professional, I did have half-formed dreams of them winning awards, playing in an orchestra, or at least making the honor roll.

And then they started growing up, and my expectations met the irresistible twin forces of personality and peer pressure.

My oldest (the one from Mars) was very independent and cared little for convention. In preschool, he decided that it was cool to wear knee socks pulled up all the way over his knees, and soon his best friend's mom was calling me to ask me, “Where did you get those socks? My son won't go to school without them!”

In elementary school, he came up with his own Halloween costumes based on characters from book like Roald Dahl's The BFG. The year he dressed up as Pippi Longstocking, complete with bright red wig and pig tails, I remember one parent looking at me and saying, “That's Mars? I thought he was a girl,” and then turning bright red in case I took offense.

In middle school, he insisted on taking up martial arts and giving up dance, despite having the chance to fulfill his mother's dream of seeing him on stage in a leading role in The Nutcracker.

By high school, I knew very well that I could offer Mars advice, and he would smile and then do what he wanted anyway.

My youngest son (Mercury) was born almost ten years after his older brother and spent the first five years of his life as the object of adoring attention. We were so happy when we uttered his first word, “bubble” in a tiny breathy voice that we didn't realize he would never stop talking.

Mercury is always in motion and in close orbit around his older brothers. As a person who is uncomfortable around weapons of any kind and squeamish about depictions of violence,it was quite disconcerting to have a child who begged for an air soft gun from the age of eight and got his brother to convince me that it was “okay” for him to play Modern Warfare.

If there is a child who fit classic definition of ADD/HD, it is Mercury, and that can make life as a mother a little exhausting. I've been known to tell him after repeated badgering to make sure I'm listening, “No, I'm not listening. You've been talking nonstop, and I need a little break. Please!”

Peer pressure plays a considerable role in Mercury's view of the world, and that means I have become even more of an “embarrassment” to him than I ever was to any of the others.

Yet Mercury has also fulfilled one of my cherished maternal dreams. He plays the violin very well and will soon be much better than I ever was.

And then there is my second son, who seems to exist somewhere in a galaxy far, far way. He has been my most challenging and enigmatic child. Galaxy is the kind of quiet, unassuming young man that adults love and small children flock to.

He has a natural athletic grace and could play any sport on a competitive level, except that he only likes to compete against himself. On a long board or a surf board, he is a wonder to behold, and when he's not doing that, he's likely in his room, playing the guitar and composing music.

If you ask my children what they want to become when they grow up, Mars is practically there. In May he'll graduate from college with a degree in Political Communication, fluent Arabic, and a plan to go to law school. Mercury, on the other hand, is still torn between wanting to blow things up and his desire to become a race car driver.

And Galaxy is still somewhere far, far away contemplating his options.

Twenty-one years ago I would never have imagined being the mother of three such different individuals, and I know that's a good thing. Because if I've learned anything, it's that parenting is as much a process of letting go of expectations as it is of watching over and directing a child's path.

These three boys will find their own orbit, and I won't be the center of their universe any longer. But there will always be a gravitational pull between us, the familial tie of parent and child, and I trust that this force will keep us within the same ambit.

New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-06T15:28:00.004-07:00

Every January thousands of people make resolutions. Some start visiting a gym or join Weight Watchers. Some give up smoking or tear up credit cards to prevent shopping sprees. Studies show that for most individuals, the failure to keep New Year's resolutions hovers somewhere between 78% and 88%. We are truly creatures of habit, and those habits that are most deeply embedded in the wiring of our brains are the hardest to break.

Still almost half of us make New Year's Resolutions every year despite the daunting odds, demonstrating that perhaps the easiest New Year's resolution to make is to resolve to continue making New Year's resolutions.

A week ago, on the first day of 2012, I participated in this annual ritual, but the most important resolution I made was this: I promised myself that I would appreciate what I have.

It sounds like a simple proposition, but it's not easy to put into practice.

People tend to take what they have for granted. We forget that the very senses we possess-- sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—form our essential connections to the world around us. Isolated in an office or a car or our living rooms, we cannot experience the warmth or cold of the weather; the rustle of trees or the cry of a bird; the smell of freshly mowed grass or the taste of a ripe blackberry growing wild along the road.

But it's not just the physical world that eludes our consciousness. Too often, we find ourselves talking to people but not really listening to what they say. Before anyone has had a chance to finish a sentence or two, we're already formulating a response, thinking about our next appointment, or worse yet, surreptitiously glancing at our cell phones. And if we are truly honest with ourselves, very few of us can remember the last time we just sat on a park bench and did nothing at all except be in the moment, exercising a deliberate awareness of everything around us.

This past December I realized that I was spending far too much of my own life in this kind of sensory and social deprivation. Like Lewis Carroll's White Queen, I was running as fast as I could only to stay in the same place, and worst of all, I was losing my sense of connection to the people I love.

So New Year's Day has come and gone, and I still have this resolution to fulfill. While I'm riding my bike, I feel the crispness of the air rushing past. When I'm out walking the dogs, I smile at the people who are approaching me on the sidewalk. When I'm with friends, I try to take a moment and think how lucky I am to have them and how lonely my world would be without them. When my kids are driving me crazy, I try to stop myself from yelling at them and remember to give them a hug because I love them.

Of course, my efforts to appreciate what I have are often thwarted by the small insults and irritations of daily life: a driver cuts me off; I'm infuriated by some irrational act of Congress; my son leaves his shoes where I can trip on them for the umpteenth time; my husband fails to understand my directive to leave silverware in the side of the sink where forks and spoons won't fall into the garbage disposal and get chewed up.

And then there are the twin distractions of fear and envy: What if I can't pay my bills this month? What if my new business never works out? Why can't I afford to remodel my house like everyone else? Why don't I have the relatives with cabin near Tahoe? Those distractions can keep me suspended in a feverish anxiety about a possible future that may or may not ever come true.

But in reality all of us only ever experience the present moment. Today, this house, this family, these friends, these possessions are all that I have, and I can choose to see them as sufficient for now or choose to disparage them because they don't live up to my expectations of what might be.

The Gospel according to Matthew puts the case this way: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” (6:4).

I don't advocate living my life with no thought of the future, and my focus on what is sufficient looks more towards the joy than the pain of daily living, but the apostle's sense of where we might best invest our attention is exactly on the mark. All I have is today, and with luck, the tomorrow that will become today. That's why my resolution is more than a New Year's ritual; it's a resolution I am making for my life to be the best it can be right now.

The Blog is Back

2012-01-06T15:18:00.004-07:00

I made my last post to Springs to Mind in August of 2009 when I took a full-time job. Now, after a two-year hiatus, I'm coming back to blogging with more thoughts and reflections from an almost 50-something woman living in Silicon Valley with three kids, two poodles, one husband, and no Prius.

The Wise Latina Woman was Right

2009-08-08T15:00:00.014-06:00

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)

2009-07-27T21:03:00.049-06:00

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

2009-07-02T12:53:00.015-06:00

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

2009-06-28T10:27:00.011-06:00

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

2009-05-21T22:32:00.012-06:00

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?

2009-05-18T18:53:00.015-06:00

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

2009-05-06T11:11:00.008-06:00

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

2009-04-29T14:48:00.016-06:00

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

2009-04-25T11:08:00.011-06:00

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”?

2009-04-14T21:35:00.012-06:00

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

2009-04-11T20:14:00.009-06:00

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

2009-04-09T16:48:00.002-06:00

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

2009-04-01T22:09:00.011-06:00

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

2009-03-30T22:47:00.008-06:00

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

2009-03-29T10:39:00.017-06:00

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?

2009-03-23T21:21:00.008-06:00

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."

Let them Eat Cake, and other Musings on the Financial Crisis

2009-03-18T18:23:00.012-06:00

Now that public outrage du jour has turned towards AIG bonuses, I've been trying to make sense of what these recent events-- Bernie Madoff's guilty plea, Citibank's surprise report that it finally operated at a profit, and the widening of foreclosure problems into fixed rate mortgages--might tell us about the overall economy.

Are we at the bottom, or still sliding down towards it? Do we need to worry about imminent deflation or long-term hyperinflation? Will the economic stimulus turn out to be too little, too late or too much, too soon? And how do we get any kind of accountability back into our financial system?

Among all the contradictory indications of the past week, one piece of financial reporting stood out for me. Josh Bearman's story of how he started his own Ponzi scheme as a child gave the clearest narrative yet of how a Ponzi scheme works, but it also demonstrated the psychological dimensions of these schemes that keep both the perpetrators and the victims invested in believing in their own lies.

As a third-grader, Josh arrived at a new school where he had no “currency” to let him participate in the market of school lunch trading because his mom believed in “no sugar” lunches. So he started offering kids the promise of a “future security” in return for all the Cheetos, Rice Krispy treats, and other snacks he could get.

He even recorded their names in a book with the items they gave him and told them he would give them slices of a fabulous cake he said his mother baked for him at the end of every school year. As he himself put it, “[B]asically, I developed this sort of derivative lunchroom market for delicious cake futures," (“Sweet Memories Of A Snack Food Financial Scheme,” Planet Money/NPR, March 13, 2009).

Most of the kids bought into the scheme with enthusiasm until one skeptic figured out that there was no way to bake enough cakes to pay for all the food Josh had been enjoying. But Josh himself and the other kids were so invested in the idea of this glorious cake and so afraid of the prospect of admitting that they might have traded all their goodies for nothing that they poured scorn on the skeptic, forcing him to back down.

It was only when adult “regulatory” authorities intervened that Josh's scheme was exposed and Josh himself punished. Still, as Madoff's victims know all too well, there was no getting back their investments: as Josh concludes, “those Cheetos and Nutter Butters, they were never coming back."

A similar dynamic of uncovering explanations that don't add up has dominated reporting on the AIG bonuses. First the public was told that there was nothing federal regulators, or the Treasury Department, or even the new head of AIG could do about these bonuses because they were “contractual obligations.” That may be true, but whoever wrote these contracts was certainly setting up the recipients for a sweet deal.

In fact, the hand-wringing over these contracts rings increasingly hollow as more and more details emerge about the legislative bailout that authorized payments to AIG in the first place.

While the House version had specifically included language to exclude taxpayer payments for these bonuses, the language was reinserted in last minute revisions to the bill. Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd told CNN on March 18th that "he was responsible for language added to the federal stimulus bill to make sure that already-existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored."

According to Dodd, the request to reinsert the language came from officials at the Treasury Department whom he declined to identify. According to Dodd, they were "afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language," ("Dodd: Administration pushed for language protecting bonuses," CNNPolitics.com). Dodd himself has received more donations from AIG than any other member of Congress.

So it's not just AIG greed that is responsible for these excessive payouts, but it also appears the either political indebtedness or cowardice or incompetence in our own government has also allowed the greed to continue unabated and unchecked.

In addition to the "our hands our tied" defense, AIG executives also argued that they needed these bonuses for “retention” purposes. Really. The same financial wizards who created the credit default swamps that helped bring on our current economic Armageddon reaped huge rewards for their mischief. Then they allegedly needed these financial incentives in order to stay on because they were the only ones who understood the mess well enough to clean it up.

Apparently, one million dollars per person was not enough for eleven of them who took the money and left anyway.(See The Wall Street Journal, “AIG's Liddy Asks Employees to Give Back Bonuses, 3/18/09). These are the people who are supposedly irreplaceable “top” talent in a market where financial services firms have taken huge hits and let go thousands of highly-qualified professionals.

If you believe that, then I have a couple of slices of cake I'd like to sell you. Just hand over that package of Twinkies first.

Why I Parted Ways with Wells Fargo

2009-03-11T13:09:00.007-06:00

A few weeks ago my husband and I found ourselves driving along El Camino Real trying to decide what bank we were going to choose for our new business. We had already tried our credit union, but in this instance they couldn't help us out because they don't offer small business accounts.

So there we were, taking a shot in the dark on one of the brand name banks (or what's left of them). On our left was Bank of America. “No way,” I said, "they're in deep trouble ever since their merger with Merrill Lynch.” On our right was Citibank. “Even worse,” I told him.

Then there was Wells Fargo. “Well, at least it's based in San Francisco, so it's relatively local,” I thought, all the while having the sinking feeling that we really shouldn't rush into this without doing more research.

But my husband was determined that we stop paying business expenses out of our personal accounts so we arrived at the new accounts desk where we met your typical unctuous account manager. After signing mountains of paper work, he finally got around to what I really interested in: fees. “You may see a fee on your account,” he told us, “but just let me know and we'll remove it.”

“Does the savings account bear interest?” I asked and received a blank look. I took that as a “no.”

The first signs of problems appeared when I couldn't get the Wells Fargo account information to download into my Quicken software. The account manager had called my husband to see how things were going even though we'd made it clear that I handled the finances for the new company.

"How do I download my account information?” I asked. He gave me a toll-free number to call. He gave me another toll-free number when I asked about online bill payment. He didn't say anything when I told him a "check card rewards annual fee" had already turned up on our account. The guy was great at giving out numbers and asking how we liked our account but not very good at anything else. Nor were the people on the toll-free line who couldn't even figure out whether Wells Fargo supports downloads into Quicken.

Then the real problems started. I had set up online bill pay, where I admit the instructions said that bills would take two business days to process. Of course, at my credit union, these electronic transfers never take two days since computer transactions are supposed to speed up the whole process of paying bills. Otherwise, we'd still be using snail mail.

But not at Wells Fargo. There a payment that was supposed to take place on the Thursday before the Presidents Day weekend actually took until the following Tuesday to go through, technically two full business days. I had to call my credit card company to reverse the late charge, and I was steamed. “You should schedule these payments a week in advance to be sure they arrive in time,” the customer service person told me over the phone. "Why?" I thought to myself. "Is Wells Fargo still delivering money by stage coach?"

For the privilege of having my bills paid as slowly as possible, I also found out that Wells Fargo was going to charge me $20 a month. Despite the promise of a fee waiver, I was also being charged $20 for the privilege of having a savings account that paid no interest. Plus $35 for a box of checks and $12 for a Rewards Check Card, aka an ATM card, I never asked for or even activated. My Wells Fargo Business Services Package account that was supposed to offer me "greater value that will save you money and time" was certainly not doing either.

The final straw occurred when I received my first statement and noticed the following notice on the last page: “Effective April 1, 2009 the Deposited Items Fee will be $0.50 after 20 free deposited items. Also, the Cash Deposited Fee will be $0.20 per $100 after 5,000 free cash deposited." This was followed by a list of thirteen other fees that were also “changing,” a euphemism for “increasing.”

For a moment I could not believe what I was reading. Wells Fargo was going to charge me money for giving them my cash?

I immediately emailed the account manager who had been so eager to find out how much we liked our new Expanded Business Services Package. Why are we going to have to pay to deposit funds?” I wrote. “I have never in my life paid any institution to give them my money."

I received no response, either by email or telephone, and a few days later I told my husband that we were going to close the account.

Getting our money back was no picnic either. The account manager on duty had to check with the bank manager to get permission to close the account. “We shouldn't be charged for the rewards check card since we never used it,” I told her. “I'll have to get the bank manager again in that case,” she responded. I looked at my husband who was already impatient to leave. “Never mind,” I said. “It's not worth the trouble.”

We opened our account with Wells Fargo on January 26th, 2009, and we closed it on March 6th. The experience cost us $87 and some small change.

In the meantime, I had done some research on the Internet and found a local bank that specializes in banking for high tech start-ups. They charge one basic fee per month but waive it for the first year while a business is getting going. So far Silicon Valley Bank has been a pleasure to work with and very responsive to any questions or concerns I've raised.

So what is the moral of my financial tale?

Our brief experience with Wells Fargo points to some of the fundamental problems with big banks in today's world. Not only are these banks “too big to fail,” which means they don't take the pain as well as the gain that of the free market, but they also don't offer small businesses or individual customers any better service in exchange for using a “name brand” company.

Most individuals and most small businesses would be better off going with a local credit union or a local bank that specializes in investing in its community than opening an account at a big "name brand" bank.

Bigger isn't necessarily better in the financial world, and it's not just our government and taxpayers who are finding that out. If I were a customer at Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, or Wachovia, I'd be shopping around for an institution that offers real service and doesn't nickel-and-dime away my savings. At the very least, I shouldn't have to pay my bank just for the privilege of depositing my money.

Facing the Fears of another Great Depression: Thoughts on how that Crisis Shaped Generations of My Family

2009-03-07T14:04:00.006-07:00

During the past months as the financial crisis in the U.S has deepened, politicans, economists, and pundits have raised the specter of “another Great Depression.” Ben Bernanke's main credential for leading us out of this crisis has rested on his fame as a student of the Great Depression. Barack Obama's major test of leadership is already defined as whether or not he can lead us out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But when interviewers actually talk to survivors of the Great Depression, the differences in daily experiences between then and now are sharply evident. Those who lived through the Great Depression speak of difficulties staying warm, or trying to pack nineteen people into a single house, or shipping children off to more affluent relatives because they could not afford to feed them.

Certainly the presence of a safety net in the form of unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid and COBRA means that we are unlikely to see bread lines or tent cities unless things become much, much worse than we can imagine right now.

While many are quick to point out the stark differences in today's financial crisis and the crash of 1929 that turned into the Great Depression: 8-10% unemployment versus 25%, a loss of perhaps 7000 banks between 1930 and 1933 versus an estimated 1000 banks in danger of insolvency now, there is one striking parallel between that time of economic peril and our own.

The Great Depression saw a widespread reduction in the American standard of living that was not reversed until the postwar boom of the late 40s and 50s. Today there is also a widespread expectation among economists and the public at large that most Americans are likely to see their standard of living fall as taxpayers face a national debt that we and our children will be paying for the foreseeable future.

For generations, Americans have worked hard, not just in the hope, but rather in the expectation, that their children would have longer, healthier, and better lives than their own. Until this past year, many Americans in their 20s, 30s and 40s were enjoying a higher standard of living than their own parents, albeit at the cost of increasing debt loads and two-income households. That expectation is no longer a given for larger and larger sectors of the population.

But as I reflect on this prospect of a lowered standard of living, I find myself less afraid of than reflective about the future. In an odd sort of way, I feel a little bit relieved to be facing a reprieve from this endless cycle of expectation, of giving my children a higher standard of living than what they enjoy right now. “Do we have enough?” I ask myself as I also wonder, “Do we really need to strive for any more?”

Unlike most people my age, I am in fact the child of parents who came of age in the Great Depression rather than the great postwar Baby Boom. I was born at the very tail end of that boom, just as my siblings are part of its vanguard.

While I never experienced the hardships that my parents went through in the 1930s, their experiences shaped the way they brought me up and the expectations they set up for me.

I knew that my father, in particular, could not tolerate children who were fussy about what they were served at meals, a hang-over from days when it was the height of rudeness to refuse to eat whatever a family put on the table because it might be the only thing they had to offer a guest.

I felt a great deal of poignancy in finding a letter my mother wrote to her parents when she was a freshman at the University of Michigan in 1934, struggling to pay for books, and hoping that she could sell back her textbooks as quickly as possible to recoup what she had had to expend on them.

Sixteen years old and desperately homesick, she gave up the opportunity to get a college education away from home and returned to live with her parents and attend Wayne State University in her home town of Detroit. What part the family finances played in this decision remains a mystery to me, but the prospect of paying for tuition, room and board must have seemed an enormous expense to my grandparents who had never been to college themselves.

I do know that my father suddenly found himself the head of household at the age of eighteen in 1930 and that he worked very hard to make sure his five siblings went to college, or joined the military, or learned a trade. Even when they were all married and with children of their own, my father never stopped feeling a parental responsibility for his brothers and his youngest sister, Jean.

Since the weight of the Depression fell hardest on those with less education, it made my parents all the more determined to put their own children through college. In two generations my family experienced a huge boost in their standard of living that was almost exclusively due to education. My paternal grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in the 1890s with the expectation of learning a trade, and my mother's father had to leave school after the fourth grade to work to support his family. My parents were the first ones in their families to go to college, and for my siblings and our children, college has been a given.

Because of my parents' experiences during the Great Depression, I knew that our vacations would consist of trips to visit family or camping around the country and would rarely include a night in a hotel. Christmas gifts were plentiful but never included the latest “must have” toy; instead my father enjoyed the post-Christmas sales that helped him get bargain gifts for my January birthday, and once gleefully presented me with thirteen dolls because the sales had been too good to resist.

I remember when one family member came across a sign that said, “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or go without,” and told Dad that we had found his perfect motto. We joked about his penny-pinching ways, but his frugality allowed him to put four kids through college and help them get a good start in life.

So when I look at my own children and their friends and see the number of cell phones, iPods, video games etc. that they go through in a year, I find that a certain part of me is pretty much appalled at the materialistic excesses of the average American standard of living. I look around my own home with my kids' closets full of toys and the presence of five computers for three people, and that same accusing finger points right in my own face.

This is not to say that I want the doomsday scenario of another Great Depression to come true. Nor do I want people to lose their homes or their jobs or have to struggle to send their kids to college as a result of the current economic instability.

But it does seem to me that as the American consumers have put the brakes on their spending this year and started once again to increase the collective savings rate, there may be a silver lining in our financial woes.

If we start consuming less, perhaps we may find that we appreciate what have even more. And if our standard of living plateaus with this generation, we may find that we and our children can live quite well without always wanting more and more.

Just as the experience of the Great Depression profoundly affected the way my parents viewed money, today's economic crisis is likely to affect my own family and the ways that my children think about money and their own standard of living. They may find it harder to get a job that pays well or to afford a house, or they may make different choices about what they need to achieve a “good” standard of living.

What I believe won't change are the fundamental values that my grandparents passed on to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren: the importance of education, supporting one's family, and the belief that you pay forward your own good fortune to the next generations. That's a legacy that can get you through the worst of times.

The New "n-word": Nationalization

2009-03-06T12:40:00.003-07:00

A number of readers who've commented to me about my recent blog on the financial crisis directed me to the March 3rd interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Simon Johnson, former research director at the IMF and now a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

In that interview, Johnson argues forcefully that the United States government should follow the standard IMF formula for dealing with “bad” banks: nationalize them using FDIC intervention, reorganize them, clean them up, and immediately privatize them again.

Paraphrasing what Johnson has written in recent weeks, Terry Gross stated: “If you showed old hands at the International Monetary Fund... the U.S. ledger books, but you hid the name 'United States,' so that they didn't know what country you were talking about, they would all say, 'Nationalize the banking system. That's the solution.'”

Mr. Johnson agreed and in the rest of the interview made a very cogent argument for why such a policy makes the most economic sense as well as warning that the current policy of serial bailouts may only be prolonging the crisis and potentially making it worse.

But Terry Gross also pointed to a central flaw in this “obvious” solution when she drew a distinction between the hypothetical “if you hid the name of the country,” and the reality that this crisis is taking in the world's second largest economy and most powerful nation in the world.

Johnson himself acknowledged the political sensitivity surrounding the crisis when he said that since the United States is the IMF's largest shareholder, that organization doesn't even want to state publicly that U.S. should take the nationalization route.

The resulting paradox is that a temporary nationalization seems to be the sensible, time-tested solution to managing “bad” banks even for a superpower like the U.S. Yet no one dares say so.

Instead, as NPR “Planet Money” reporter Adam Davidson indicated on Morning Edition, “The official word is clear: The Obama administration and Federal Reserve officials say that nationalizing the banks is the wrong choice and that they have no intention of doing it,” (“Obama Administration Could Still Nationalize Banks,” March 6, 2009).

The reasons: 1) Republicans screaming about “socialism” in our banking system, even though the government already owns substantial portions of some of the largest banks like Citibank; 2) Fear that the very mention of the “n-word” will precipitate a run on banks or further devaluation of financial stocks in the stock market; and 3) the fact that many politicians are highly indebted to Wall Street for political contributions and don't want to be in the position of being responsible for their donors losing their jobs.

In fact, Simon Johnson's strongest criticism of the actions the Treasury Department has taken to date focuses on the fact that so many banking executives like Vikram Pandit of Citibank have been allowed to stay in their positions, when a central tenet of cleaning up banks is: First, fire all the top level executives.

However, while the government continues with its official denials of any intentions to “nationalize” failing banks, more and more of those in the financial world expect that behind the scenes, they are taking precisely the kinds of steps that would constitute nationalization in all but name through increasing levels of government ownership of struggling banks.

As one independent analyst, Sean West of Eurasia Group, told Adam Davidson, “The net effect, rather than actually talking in [the] language of nationalization, it's really [that] the government has opened the door to increasing ownership of these banks.” In other words, if the U.S. doesn't dare nationalize the banks openly, it may be setting up “stress tests” that force the banks to ask for such intervention, that is, to “nationalize themselves.”

So even if “nationalization” is the new “n-word” in the political lexicon, the extent of government intervention and government control of banks continues to increase. Taking the standard IMF approach to cleaning up the U.S. banking system may not be politically feasible or even logistically possible since the scale of clean-up required is unlike anything the IMF or FDIC or any regulatory agency have ever seen.

But it seems that whether or not we call it “nationalization,” we the people and our government are ending up owning a lot more of the banking system than we ever bargained for.

Pay Now or Pay More Later: What Can We Really Do about Toxic Assets?

2009-03-02T04:17:00.013-07:00

For those of you who still think a “tarp” is something to cover up ugly debris, the government's TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) program actually does reflect the literal sense of the word quite well. Although the TARP has been an ever evolving work-in-process since it was first conceived by Hank Paulson in the last days of the Bush Administration, one aspect of it has not changed. TARP still represents the government's best efforts to help the financial industry contain a mountain of largely uncollectible debt. Yet months after the first attempts to bail out the banks, we still don't know just how toxic their "troubled assets" really are.

If you are wondering why the Feds and the Treasury and SuperObama can't just clean up the mess, it's worth taking the better part of an hour to listen to this week's public radio program, This American Life. NPR's Adam Davidson and TAL's Alex Blumberg have produced some of the best reporting to date on the banking crisis (See “Giant Pool of Money” and “Another Frightening Show about the Economy”.)

The most recent segment, “Bad Bank,” explains why we American taxpayers may have no choice but to pay “as much as we can” to redeem debts that bankers made to people with lousy credit and no credible means to pay back their loans. As a researcher from Deutsche Bank, Joe Lavorgna, wrote bluntly in a recent report: “Ultimately, the taxpayer will be on the hook one way or another, either through greatly diminished job prospects and/or significantly higher taxes down the line.” Mr. Lavorgna goes on to suggest that the government should "estimate the highest price it can pay for the various toxic assets on financial institution balance sheets," and then then cough up the funds even at taxpayer expense.("Taxpayer Beware: Bank Bailout Will Hurt").

If this sounds like a holdup note, both the reporters on this story and the economists and bankers they interview agree, it is. The banking industry after all its greed and excesses is basically telling us, “Pay up now, or just pay more later.”

But as one expert in banking crises from the Columbia University School of Business points out, this aspect of the financial crisis is not really new. According to Professor David Beim, history shows that governments have always bailed out the banks because societies can't function without them. He cites the example of a banking crisis in 37 AD that had the Roman emperor galloping back to the capital posthaste with bags of money to give to the bankers who had created the problem by making bad loans. Sound familiar?

Professor Beim notes that this has happened over and over and over again, only not on such a global scale. We'd be in great shape, relatively speaking, if the U.S. were merely Indonesia or Argentina. The IMF could intervene, take over the bad banks, clean things up, and the global economy would keep chugging along nicely. But take a behemoth like the United States with its Bank of America and Citigroup, which together hold over a quarter of all the money in the U.S. banking system, and we face a dilemma of a different order of magnitude.

The problem is compounded by the continuing belief that such dire outcomes “can't happen here” and by the anger of the American public who are still telling politicians to let the bankers take it on the chin even though it could propel the United States into a economic crisis that would make make the Great Depression pale by comparison.

Yet by far the scariest part of this reporting on the state of “bad banks” does not come from tales of people losing jobs or homes or life savings, but rather from a simple graph. According to David Beim, this is the hard data that shows we are not simply facing a housing crisis or a credit crisis but something much deeper and more systemic.

The graph shows that for much of postwar history, the collective debt of the American consumer has always been a mere fraction of our gross domestic product (GDP), usually hovering around 30%, sometimes rising to 50%, but in the last ten years, rising faster and until it reaches a point where the indebtedness of the American people equals GDP. That means 100% of what we owe is equal to 100% of all the goods and services we produce.

That has only happened twice in the last hundred years: in 1929 and now. As a nation we are literally out of room to borrow because we don't have the assets to borrow against. From this perspective, the problem of banks' toxic assets, intractable as it seems to be, is just the tip of the iceberg. We have all been victims of our own collective greed and our collective indifference to consumer borrowing run amuck.

So what can we do? Well, according to the experts we don't have many choices. Thanks to the fiscal irresponsibility of the past decade, we have a war we've borrowed to pay for, and a financial system that deregulation has helped send into a tailspin. And we, as consumers, have gone along for the “free” ride that is proving to be a costly fantasy trip.

We can pay now, or pay more later. And no amount of outrage or denial will change that.

In Vitro Fertilization: Too Much of a Good Thing?

2009-02-26T19:54:00.006-07:00

Talking whether or not to have children in contemporary American society seems as fraught with danger as talking about religion, politics, or sex itself. First of all, the act of reproduction is now largely perceived as a matter of choice rather than an accident, a chance occurrence, or a reflection of the will of God.

For this reason we tend to view reproduction almost exclusively as an activity within the individual's control, You want to have a child; check when the female partner is ovulating and have fun. You don't want to have children: have fun but don't forget the birth control. This reductive either/or thinking makes it all to easy to forget how vulnerable we humans still are to flawed genes, the curve ball of disease, and the threat of infertility that increases as we defer parenting to our late thirties or forties.

New reproductive technologies have offered one form of reassurance to those who have trouble conceiving, especially those who have deferred the choice to have children until infertility presents a serious impediment. They also make it possible for lesbian couples to conceive and for gay male couples to have children as well if they can find a female surrogate.

But while new technologies like in-vitro fertilization offer solve a number of problems for these couples, they also raise serious ethical questions that medical practitioners and those seeking such treatment are often ill-equipped to answer.

For example, the ability for infertile couples to use in-vitro techniques as an alternative to adoption has fostered a situation in the United States in which large numbers of children remain locked into the foster care system, often seen as “unadoptable” by the very families who might once have taken a closer look at them. Moreover, infertile couples are not simply choosing to conceive one or two embryos that might be born as their biological children but are choosing a technology so costly that many choose to risk multiple births rather than lose the opportunity of becoming pregnant at all.

The case of Nadya Suleman, the single mother who chose to have so many embryos implanted in her womb that she gave birth to octuplets, merely writes large the ethical dilemmas that such unregulated reproductive technologies have generated.

The cost of in-vitro fertilization is high, and since few have health insurance to cover the cost, the incentive is even greater to try to get the most “bang for your buck” by having as many embryos implanted in the womb as possible.

The problem is that the human womb is not designed for more than one or two occupants at best, and the situation of multiple births automatically presents high risks and higher medical costs for both mother and babies, some of which may persist for the life of the children who survive. In fact, the ugly underside of potential multiple births is the real possibility of multiple deaths as the survival rate lessens dramatically for twins, triplets, quadruplets, and higher multiples. (For an excellent overview of these issues,read Liza Mundy, Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World).

The other side of this reproductive superabundance is also reflected in the dilemma of what to do with the embryos that are not implanted. In almost every in-vitro situation, there are “left over” embryos that a couple may want to use for future births. By one estimate, there may be half a million of these potential babies.

Unfortunately, once a couple has the number of children they desire, many cannot face the ethical dilemma of what to do with the embryos they no longer need. Do they donate them to other infertile couples? Do they allow them to “expire”? Do they offer them for scientific research? A growing number of people, unable to decide, simply stop paying the fees to keep their embryos frozen, but doctors are often too afraid of legal problems not to continue keeping them in this reproductive limbo.

Which brings me back to Nadya Suleman. The public is quick to condemn her for choosing to give birth to children she cannot afford to raise and has not the means to care for, but the same public says little about the many couples who abandon their unused embryos, leaving them in a legal and physical limbo, a financial charge to the labs that helped create them.

Indeed, the amount of vitriol directed at this woman rivals that provoked by Ronald Reagan's mythical Welfare Queen, and reflects the resentment of an American public that can barely afford to feed, house, educated and provide health care for its own children, much less subsidize a woman who appears to have her children at “taxpayer expense.”

But we don't see nearly the same amount of outrage directed at the doctors and hospital that agreed to provide this infertility treatment to Ms. Suleman, even knowing full well that she already had six children from previous treatments. The real scandal that Ms. Suleman's multiple births has revealed is that of a medical profession operating under “wild west” conditions guidelines but no clear rules that might have immediately rendered Ms. Suleman an inadmissible candidate for further in-vitro fertilization treatments.

The medical profession that practices these techniques needs to take a hard look at itself and ask some pressing questions such as: What role does the profit motive play in decisions to offer in-vitro fertilization services? Under what conditions, if any, should a doctor refuse to provide in-vitro fertilization? Rich or poor, there may well be an ethical limit to the number of children that any medical professional should help a couple conceive by these means.

Certainly, as a society, there is a public interest in determining to what degree tax payers should subsidize the infertile when we already underfund housing, education, and services for children who do not have families to care for them.

And we should also be asking those who provide the technology for the infertile to conceive to make sure that these same couples fully comprehend the implications they face in making the decision to create multiple embryos or undertake multiple births. We cannot allow those who make the choice to create multiple embryos simply to walk away from those choices when they become inconvenient or superfluous.

Nor should we sweep under the table the negative effects of reproductive technologies' effects on women's health, on the ability of families to cope with the economic, emotional, and physical stresses of raising multiple babies at once, and the many costs to society of providing care to these children, who are often more vulnerable to disease and disability than their singleton counterparts.

In-vitro fertilization has offered many couples the opportunity to turn the dream of having a child into a reality, and I fully support the efforts of any couple, straight or gay, to have a child who shares at least some of their own unique genetic makeup.

But as Nadya Suleman's tragic situation demonstrates, an unregulated and unquestioning field of reproductive technology also poses the nightmare scenario of a society subsidizing one woman's unrealistic obsession that has turned into the grim reality of fourteen very young and very vulnerable children, who are dependent on one mother and an increasingly fragile safety net for their very survival.

That fact alone should have the medical community and the public large asking the question: Can in-vitro fertilization be too much of a good thing?

A Melancholy Month

2009-02-20T20:46:00.007-07:00

T.S. Eliot wrote that April was the cruelest month, but for me it's always been February that is the most difficult time of year to get through.

When I was growing up in Detroit, it seemed that February was the time when winter settled in with grey clouds, biting cold, and not even a glimpse of blue sky for weeks on end. It was when the snow either settled into a permanent crust with snow tires creating deep grooves that remained permanently frozen, or fell from the sky in a perpetual icy drizzle that was not quite rain, or else simply melted into black slush, an ugly combination of salt, snow, and mud.

They hadn't invented the term “SAD" (seasonal affect disorder), but I knew that if I ever had the choice, I would definitely spend those twenty-some days in a place far warmer and sunnier than Michigan.

Now that I live in northern California, I no longer feel saddened by the winter weather. Instead, I feel anxious if we have too many stretches of sunshine between the rainstorms that roll in from the Pacific, and I enjoy afternoons where the temperature reaches 70 degrees in January with more than a tinge of guilt, knowing that the warmth doesn't bode well for the Sierra snow pack.

My February blues these days don't come with the weather but with my own inevitable sense of disappointment and failure to live up to my own expectations. I always look to January, the month when I was born, as a turning point in the year; a time to take stock and start over. As anyone in my family will tell you, I am not a laissez-faire sort of personality. I want to take life by the shoulders and shake some sense into it. Like my hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, I want my “Earl Grey hot” as soon as I finish saying the words, and my dream is to arrange real life so that “Make it so” could be more than a line in a sci-fi script.

Unfortunately, none of my other family members ever conform to this fantasy, and February has had more than its share of small domestic dramas that have kept me awake at the wee hours of the morning worrying about how my teen is ever going to make it to college and how my little one can find a school that values rather than tries to suppress his energy and enthusiasm.

I worry about how we're going to find the funding to sustain the great ideas my husband has for his new company and whether or not I'm ever going to find a job I love again. I worry and worry some more, joining the company of thousands of Americans who lie awake at 3:00 a.m. wondering if they can keep a roof over their heads or pay their medical bills or avoid the pink slips that seem to be sprouting like the buds in my garden.

Each day seems to set a new low for the stock market, and a new dip in consumer confidence. I know I am not alone in my February melancholy and my heart goes out to those who have far more reason for a heavy heart than I do.

But knowing that your misery is shared does not necessarily make the sufferer any happier. So a couple of days ago, after getting the kids off to school, I went back to bed with an escapist novel and spent as much of the day as I could in my pajamas before heading off to the airport to pick up my husband.

If I were the bubble bath sort, it would definitely have been a “Calgon, take me away!” sort of moment, but for me, just a couple of hours in self-indulgent sloth is enough for me to gird my loins and return to the grey skies of February and a reality that we could all stand to be a little less grim.

In Politics, the Poor are Expendable

2009-02-03T13:01:00.002-07:00

It's a truism that politicians talk a lot about their concern for children and the poor, especially when they are in front of cameras. But when it comes to voting, too many politicians pay the most attention to their donors and to the constituents they believe are most likely to participate in the next election.

Unfortunately, the most recent compromise on the President's economic subsidy proposals proves this truism correct once again. With Republicans going on and on in front of TV news cameras about the inclusion of “millions of dollars for contraceptives,” President Obama caved in and jettisoned an important subsidy for poor women to gain access to contraception. Thus conservative hypocrisy won over common sense, and good public policy lost out to political expediency.

Hypocrisy is a strong term for describing conservative objections to this subsidy, but I cannot think of anything less accurate. With their emphasis on self-sufficiency, Republicans surely can not be said to be in favor of the poor having more children they cannot afford, and they are even more adamantly opposed to terminating an unintended pregnancy. Can you imagine the outrage they could have generated by showing up on Fox News and shouting, “This stimulus plan includes millions for publicly funded abortions”??

Yet what logical reason can they put forward for objecting to helping poor women control their family size and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? Is money spent helping pharmaceuticals offer contraceptives any better or worse than subsidizing an expensive drug plan for the elderly? According to most economists, it doesn't matter where you spend the money, as long as the government is pumping cash into the economy. So why are contraceptives any worse a product to subsidize than corn or wheat or any other commodity?

Do conservatives want poor women to stop having sex? Perhaps so. But given that poor women are disproportionately young and less educated, many of them may not have the power, real or perceived, of just saying “no” to a sexual partner. Moreover, since many conservatives are also libertarian in their thinking, they surely cannot favor the government either explicitly or implicitly getting into the business of dictating such choices.

And since Republicans always want the government to spend less, why wouldn't they want to spend a little on contraception in order to avoid spending a lot more subsidizing health care, education, and Aid to Dependent Children as well as the public spending on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases that could be avoided by more women using contraceptives?

So why do poor women have to lose again? By courting conservative votes (which he didn't get), and avoiding any kind of controversy (especially around sex), President Obama chose to cede this issue to the conservative right. But that doesn't mean that voters have to go along with such political expediency. If those of us who take our ability to access contraceptives for granted don't speak up on behalf of poor women who don't enjoy that privilege, no one will.

Back to the Gym

2009-02-03T12:51:00.004-07:00

Okay, I confess. I have made that most banal of all New Year's resolutions, namely to get myself in shape.

But this year I have an extra incentive. The thrifty part of me that hearkens back to my dad's love of a bargain and the motto – “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or go without” – has made me answer the call of the January coupons for “free trial memberships” that every local gym seems to be offering.

Thus far, I've had a week at the Y and I've just finished two weeks at a new gym, which I could probably follow by one more trial if I pushed it. Don't get me wrong. I really am looking for a gym, and I do intend to pay for it, but not until I've explored every cross-trainer, every weight machine, and every free 30-minute personal training session to get the best bang for my buck.

Trying out the Y was actually a return to familiar ground since I used to be a member there for years before I moved to Albuquerque. I took prenatal dance before my first son was born by C-section, and afterward returned to post-natal classes. By the time I was pregnant with my third son, I was no longer paying much attention to all the hype about not getting your heart rate up too high or worrying about lifting weights.

I was working out on my due date when one of the trainers came up to me and asked when the baby was expected to arrive (I looked like an advertisement for Omar the Tent-Maker at this point). “Oh the baby is due today, actually,” I replied nonchalantly. With a look of horror, the trainer took one more look at my belly and said, “What the hell are you doing here then?” as if he expected a Hollywood scene to ensue with water bursting, me screaming and panting, and the arrival of a baby on an exercise mat right there in front of him.

So I was rather sad when I returned during my trial period and didn't see him there. I wanted to tell him that my son had arrived a bare fifteen minutes after I arrived at Stanford Hospital, just to get a rise out of him.

It was a little eerie seeing the same cast of characters I'd grown so used to, still working out, no one either visibly thinner or fatter, but all with the little quirks I'd grown so fond of. There was the elderly man and his wife who always worked out together; he often wore a Tam o'shanter on his head and sported a tie-dye t-shirt. Or the guy who always biked to the gym but never took off his windbreaker while he worked out; I never understood how he didn't die of heat exhaustion keeping it on after a hard ride. Or the friendly woman who always used to come up to me and say, “Now I know I've seen you before, but I can't remember your name” as she proceeded to introduce herself for at least the fifth time. To be fair, I never remembered her name either, but I always felt like I was in some kind of Star Trek time distortion whenever we went through this ritual

You may wonder why I took such an interest in my fellows as I did my own exercise routine, but I learned long ago as a graduate student when I started a weight training class at a university gym: “The guys are going to look at you; lifting weights is really boring, so don't take it personally.” That was the advice of our female trainer who was there to make us feel comfortable in this relatively alien territory, and it certainly freed me from any inhibitions about letting my curiosity have free reign while I was resting between sets.

But what I loved most about the Y was the fact that I never saw a woman arriving to work out in full make-up or with perfectly matched leotard or workout gear. The Y crowd was an unpretentious group, who came there to get a workout and not to make a fashion statement.

So it was with regret that I came back to find that although all my favorite cast of characters were still there, the gym had also been caught in a bit of a time warp so that the machines were rather out-of-date and that the place had grown even more crowded in the intervening years. It was difficult to get on the machine you liked or find a space to stretch afterward.

I will be moving on to one of the newer facilities in the area with their state-of-the-art exercise machines, and pristine facilities, but I hope that in trading the new for the familiar, I'll still find the people-watching part of my exercise routine as entertaining as ever and the folks I exercise with similarly unpretentious in their pursuit of good health. After all, it's much more fun to watch people when you work out than CNN.

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – A real victory for feminists and families everywhere

2009-01-29T19:30:00.008-07:00

My family often remarks on my being a feminist as if I had some kind of slightly embarrassing disease. "You know Beth, she's a [pause] feminist." Frankly, I find this flattering and a bit funny. On the one hand, it's rather enjoyable for a middle-aged woman to be regarded as somewhat dangerous when I usually feel as if I should be labeled “mostly harmless,” like the Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. On the other hand, feminism has fractured into so many factions --- radical, third world, postmodern, third-wave--- that the term is danger of meaning just about anything you want it to. That is, except for the negative connotation that equates “feminist” with “humorless man hater” – that association continues on as strong as ever, but I've never actually met a “feminist” of that description, and I've been happily married for over twenty years so I can safely assume my husband doesn't think of me that way either.

When I do think of myself as a “feminist,” it is usually in terms that are pragmatic rather than ideological. Feminism, for me, encompasses political and social responses to inequities between men and women, and the most serious of these are inequalities before the law and inequality in pay. That is why I am so thrilled that President Obama has signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law because it address both of these inequalities in the case of a true miscarriage of justice. “Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue, it's a family issue," the President said. "And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination,” ("Obama signs first bill into law, on equal pay," AP).

Lily Ledbetter is not an ideologue, and it is questionable whether she ever thought of herself as a “feminist,” but she was dismayed to find that after working at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Alabama for almost twenty years, there had been a sizable discrepancy in pay between her and her male co-workers. Ledbetter pursued a discrimination case all the way to the Supreme Court where her case was rejected based on a catch-22 argument that she should have filed suit within 180 days of the first occurrence of discrimination even though she did not discover the injury until she reached retirement.

Lily Ledbetter will not receive one dime of the more than $200,000 in salary, pension and social security benefits she lost through the discrimination she experienced, but she was willing to fight for this legislation to ensure that our “nation's daughters and granddaughters will have a better deal.” To me the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act embodies the core of what feminism should be about, particularly in an age where Census Bureau figures show that women still earn about 78 cents for every dollar men get for doing equivalent jobs.

While much feminist rhetoric has become embroiled in stale debates over “politically-correct” terminology, this new law marks a real advance for women who face so many serious obstacles towards true economic equality. For example, women disproportionately bear the costs of child care and are more likely to need subsidized care in order to be able to earn a living wage; in many states women face discrimination in health care costs without any legal protection to prevent this from happening, and of course, women's longer life spans make it even more important that they save for retirement.

Women already face social and cultural barriers that make it difficult for them to ask for raises, and they also run the risk of being perceived in more negative terms when they are assertive about asking for more pay. There are many subtle forms of bias that women negotiate every day, including the social assumption that men “need” jobs more than women, or that women are more likely to give up their jobs to raise children, and therefore don't “deserve” the same career investment that male employees get.

What Lily Ledbetter has fought for, the rights of women to take instances of pay discrimination to court without facing unrealistic constraints on their ability to find out about and prepare evidence to support their cases, makes it much more likely that employers will think twice before paying men and women different compensation for the same work. For taking that important step towards a level playing field, Lily Ledbetter and the many women and men who worked to bring this legislation to Congress and fought until it reached the President's desk deserve our thanks for a truly “feminist” victory.

When Your Inbox Disappears

2009-01-21T21:59:00.002-07:00

It's scary to think about how much “free” stuff we depend on: we watch network TV, and check out books from the library, and use coupons that promise “buy one get one free” – all on the assumption that we're getting something for nothing, when we really are paying, one way or another. The network takes our time (and hopes we watch its ads), the library stays open because of our taxes and donations, and the “free” sweater we got with our coupon is actually one-half of the total we spent on the first one.

But most insidious of all is our dependency on the “free” communication networks of the Internet. Take away Wikipedia or Google search, and I feel lost. Take away my free email, and I'm bereft, not just of my primary way of communicating with friends and colleagues, but also of all the information I've save in those messages: the instructions, the jokes, the stories, and of course, the contact information.

The fragility of this communication system came home to me in a very real way a few days ago when I was reading messages in my Yahoo Inbox. Suddenly, as I was in the middle of a reply, I received a server error message, and then another one, and as the little hour glass icon stubbornly turned round and round before my eyes, my email messages began to disappear.

Unable to find the scroll bar on the right hand side of my Yahoo window, I used my arrow keys to try to move to the next message. And then it was gone. I moved again, and another message vanished.

I tried to see if I was somehow accidentally deleting the messages, but my Trash box was empty as well. So I closed the window, and rechecked my mail. Now my Inbox was completely empty; every single message there, read and unread, had disappeared into the ether.

So I did what I always do when confronted by a serious technical glitch; I called my local IT guy, otherwise known as my husband. “What did you do?” he asked accusingly. “What did I do>” I answered indignantly. “What did Yahoo do to my mail? That's what you should be asking.”

Suffice it to say that despite “live” chat with two Yahoo customer service agents who asked a lot of questions and then disappeared, perhaps to take a tea break somewhere on the other side of the world where they are undoubtedly underpaid to provide minimal assistance to end users like me. After all, Yahoo Mail is a “free” service, and therefore Yahoo is not going to go out of its way to help those who get into trouble using it.

Still it was discouraging to wake up the next morning and find out that “Santi” had never reappeared in any form to answer my increasingly urgent queries: “Are you there?” “Hello, hello, hello.” “Please contact me at -------------- when you find out what went wrong” “Is there anyone else there who can help me?”

By dint of much searching, I finally found a link where I could request restoration of my email, which I did, not realizing that when someone finally set back the clock twelve hours, it would completely overwrite any messages that I'd downloaded in the interim. “We're not yet set up to support integration of messages. We regret the inconvenience” is the gist of the email message that arrived to inform me of this unfortunate side effect, well after I could do anything about it.

So here I am, a chastened user of the wonders of the Internet, rapidly transferring my most precious emails to my Gmail account. And why do I trust Google more than Yahoo, you might ask? Gmail is also a “free” service and one that is still in “beta” mode, at least officially.

Well, the truth is that there is one thing that trumps “free” on the Internet, and that is having “connections,” not in the sense of high speed access, but actually knowing a human being I can call on when I'm in trouble. Even in cyberspace, it's still worthwhile to have that human connection, and as long as I know I can reach a real person at Google, their “free” service offers me a lot more value than I can ever expect from Yahoo.

So caveat emptor, and while you take pleasure in the freebies of the Internet, don't forget that they can come with an unexpected price.

Change for Good

2009-01-19T22:01:00.003-07:00

I still remember when I first heard the news that two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. I remember the overwhelming feelings of shock, horror, grief, and anger.

After that day, people said that the world had changed and that nothing would ever be the same again, and in some ways that prophecy has come true, at least in terms of America's innocence about its insulation from acts of international terrorism.

Tomorrow, Americans will again mark an occasion that some people claim will change the Presidency forever. No race to win the highest office in the land will ever be the same again.

On Tuesday, January 20th, 2009, a man of mixed African and American heritage, claiming both black and white parents, and embodying an ancestry unlike any other American president will take the oath of office and break a color barrier I never thought I would see breached in my lifetime.

This time the feelings that many Americans are experiencing run the gamut from joy to celebration to hope and perhaps to an underlying degree of anxiety, either on behalf of Mr. Obama's safety or out of personal concern about what a “black” presidency will mean for white America.

All eyes will be turned to Mr. Obama tomorrow, not just the eyes of Americans who will feel the direct effects of his Presidency, but the eyes of the entire world, who are watching with wonder and amazement at the improbable success of this unconventional candidate.

Barack Obama has captured the imagination of so many Americans and so many people around the world precisely because he represents so many things to so many different people.

He is an intellectual, educated at Columbia and Harvard and a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of an academic elite, but he is not an elitist, choosing rather to emphasize the opportunities that education offers all of its citizens.

Despite his academic background, he is also a pragmatist, a man who remains calm in the face of crisis, and who welcomes dissenting views, even as he remains confident in his own judgment.

He is a man on the very edge of the boomer generation, a man who only knew the Civil Rights movement, and women's liberation, and the Vietnam War from the perspective of a child. He is a product of its legacy without bearing the burden of taking one side or another during one of America's most turbulent periods of social change.

He is a man who has transcended class, race, and geographic boundaries. He has known poverty in his youth and witnessed poverty in Indonesia. He has refused to let himself be bound by race but has taken the unusual perspective, now shared by a growing number of Americans, that having parents of two different races gives to our understanding of racial difference and how it might be bridged. He is a citizen of the United States, but also a citizen of the world, having lived abroad and traveled to countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that have largely remained apart from the consciousness of most Americans.

He is a man who knows the Constitution intimately, having taught its legal history, but his interest in this seminal document exceeds the boundaries of the classroom and the courtroom to include his personal knowledge of what it means to fight for social justice and to survive the rough and tumble politics of Chicago.

He is a man who does not pay lip service to the ideals of community service but uses the day before his inauguration to call all Americans to participate in their communities by cleaning up parks, serving meals to the homeless, giving blood, gaining new skills through training, and sharing these experiences with friends and families.

There is certainly good reason to say that the world will have changed after Barack Obama takes office tomorrow, and given the fervent response of so many Americans to this historic occasion, we can also claim that this is change for good, a lasting change, and one that will benefit all those citizens who see in President Obama, a symbol of their dreams for their own future and the future of the nation.

The Invisible Bubble

2009-01-12T22:51:00.005-07:00

Today George W. Bush gave the last press conference of his presidency, and it was a particularly painful one to watch. The joke about the press “misunderestimating” him fell flat, and even the President's small steps towards reflection were tempered by a rhetoric that was alternately passive (“I was told, “I was disappointed” ) and defensively aggressive, “I don't see how I can get back home in Texas and look in the mirror and be proud of what I see if I allowed the loud voices ...to prevent me from doing I thought was necessary to protect this country.”

The mistakes President Bush acknowledged were the same ones he's mentioned in the recent past: placing the Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier just as U.S. control of Iraq was unraveling and pursuing the privatization of social security instead of focusing on immigration reform. The Bush Administration has had few lucky breaks of late, but one could say that the social security “failure” was truly a blessing in disguise given the precipitous fall of the stock market in recent months.

Bush quickly recast other “mistakes” as “disappointments,” or even as “things that didn't go according to plan,” and there was a moment of inadvertent black humor when he stated that he was “disappointed” not to have found “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and I could only wonder a) did he really want Saddam Hussein or any other dictator to have such weapons? Or b) did he want them so that he could justify one of the most ill-advised, costly, and destabilizing wars in U.S. history?

Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to respond to this discovery with a feeling of relief that Iraq did not pose such a threat to the U.S. or its neighbors, and then secondly, to feel and express some remorse for making such a momentous and far-reaching decision to go to war on a false pretext?

Perhaps the most telling moment occurred when the President insisted that he did not “live in a bubble” and did not feel “isolated” during his Presidency. For a White House whose main information source was Fox News, and given Bush's repeated boasts that he did not pay attention to polls or even pay much attention to the press, it stretches the imagination to believe that this administration or this President really wanted to hear any voices but those that echoed their own beliefs and reinforced their often smug sense that their world view was the right one.

But I felt a real sense of poignancy to hear a man who has been leader of the most powerful nation in the world for eight years remain so sublimely ignorant of or oblivious to the deep anger that many on the left and the right feel about the actions of his administration and the effects on the way the American government - not the American people or American culture--but specifically this administration is perceived around the world.

“I don't why they get angry. I don't know why they get hostile,” he said dismissively. Bush is so invested in his image of himself as fighting “the Enemy” that he has no means of seeing the world in any terms but the starkest black and white.

"You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror,” President Bush said in a joint news conference with Jacques Chirac in November 2001, and while the world and the American public have grown weary of such dogmatic pronouncements, President Bush seems unable to shift from this single-minded view of the world.

Thus while reflecting on what he could have done better in his response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush could only think in terms of the grand gesture: “If I had taken Air Force One to New Orleans or Baton Rouge, law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission,” he protested, as if the citizens who suffered from the storm's aftermath were not more concerned about the long delays in receiving supplies, the inadequate evacuation plans, lack of replacement housing, and the actual failure of the city's levees.

Similarly Bush rejected outright any notion that the scandals of Gitmo and Abu Grahib had damaged America's “moral standing,” reducing the world's outrage at the photos and the reports of waterboarding to the voices of some malcontent “elites” in Europe.

So now George W. Bush goes back home to Texas, hoping that history will restore his reputation according to his simplified “good versus evil” narrative, and unaware that he is still living in a bubble--not one imposed by the isolation of the Presidency--but one he has created himself through his steadfast assertion that all of his actions have been taken in defense of the homeland and therefore are not open to question.

Bush claims that the so-called “burdens of office” are overstated because he perceives any form of introspection or self-examination as a form of self-pity, not recognizing that the most respected Presidents in our history, like Abraham Lincoln, became icons of Presidential greatness, not because they were once unpopular for making the “tough decisions,” but because they made those decisions, without a sense of absolute confidence, but rather with doubts, with regrets, and with a respect for and awareness of those who opposed them. No one living in a bubble will ever be able to make that claim.

Be It Resolved

2009-01-01T10:19:00.004-07:00

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but since I actually managed to keep two of them last year, I thought this might be a good time to take stock of how they affected me.

Last January I was feeling at a loss over what to do with myself. I knew that I could not teach at the University of New Mexico because I was taking a three week trip to Chile in the middle of the semester, but I couldn't imagine not working at all.

So I resolved to do something I'd never done before, and I began substitute teaching at my son's high school. The results surprised me: I had never taught at this level before, and I liked the rapid give and take of a high school classroom.

Unlike my college classes where students are often much shyer about speaking in front of people they don't know well, these kids had no problems talking, sometime too much. And they weren't shy about asking for a “study hall.” “No way,” I told them. “They're not paying me to babysit you.” There were groans, but they usually gave in with a good grace.

For a class on poetry, I started by asking the students to write down one thing they liked about studying poetry and one thing they didn't like. “Analyzing the symbolism to death,” was the consensus on the negative side. So I had them first study the meter and sounds of Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” rather than looking for deeper meanings, and many of them were able to find the symbolism on their own.

At the end of the class, one girl looked at me in surprise and said, “No one's ever asked our opinion like that before. Thank you.” Those are the moments that make teaching a pleasure.

My second resolution was to start writing this blog, and that too has had surprising results. I hadn't done any writing for pleasure since I finished my book nearly ten years ago, and I was worried about not being good at it any more.

I also hadn't followed many blogs, and I had no idea what the “style” of a blog was supposed to be. So being the inveterate academic that I am, and I went to the library and checked out a book on the “best blogs” and found that it was pretty much the wild west on the blogosphere: hardly any rules applied.

Finally, consoling myself with the thought that probably no one was going to read it besides my friends and family, I put up my first post, “Why me?” followed by 66 more posts.

To my amazement, people actually read it. I received many comments (more offline than on) from friends, family, and people I've never even met.

Writing this often can be hard. I worry that I'll run out of things to write about, and then I read something, or hear a story on the radio, or my kids surprise or vex me, and there I am off again to my laptop to blog about it. Becoming a regular writer again has not only given me a voice, it's also brought me great solace and a deeper understanding of who I am.

So what lies ahead for 2009? Check out my next blog.

Counting your Blessings

2008-12-31T09:15:00.002-07:00

It's nearly the end of 2008, and for those facing the threat of foreclosure or just worrying about their retirement plans or the prospect of losing a job, this may seem like a year that cannot end too soon.

For me 2008 has been a year of transition: I saw my first child go off to college; I packed up my house and moved back to California; I started looking for a full-time job for the first time in three years just as the economy started to fall apart and unemployment began to rise. My timing could not have been worse.

But as I look back over the year and count my blessings, I see that I have more of them than I may have realized. I have food, shelter, a family I love, friends to care for, and the health to enjoy all of these. But I am also “blessed” in the sense of having experienced moments that brought happiness, pleasure, or simple contentment.

Of course, the difficulty of daily living is holding on to those moments of joy or even contentment. I return from an hour's walk, feeling uplifted, only to find that the kids are quarreling, the sink is full of dirty dishes, and there are too many bills to pay. I calculate how far we can stretch our savings, what kinds of consulting I can do, how much we can invest in our new business. I start to feel burdened, as if my blessings are outweighed by too many cares.

Those are the times when I ought to find my poodle, Diana, pick up her leash, and take pleasure in her excitement at the prospect of yet another walk.

But often I'm foolish or stubborn enough to persist at doing the things that make me feel weighed down by care or anxiety. After all, the kids can be sent to their rooms, the dishes can wait (or I can dragoon someone else into doing them), and the bills, well, if they're not due tomorrow, they can wait too.

Every day I try to find one moment where I simply enjoy being alive. Like my father, I'm an early riser, and I love being alone in the quiet of the house before any others are awake. In the evening, if I'm feeling worn out, fifteen minutes with a good book will usually have me fast asleep.

And If I'm out walking, all I need to do is stop and feel the sun on my face to know that I am indeed blessed.

Remembering Tita

2008-12-22T11:12:00.006-07:00

From Christmas Photos 2008

This past August we lost one of our last living links to a previous generation. Raquel Prieto Humeres, affectionately known by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as “Tita” died at home in Santiago, Chile on the 25th of September 2008.

I first met Tita, or as she was styled “Señora Tita,” when I visited my husband's family in Eugene, Oregon for Christmas. Raul Antonio and I were engaged to be married that spring, and Tita had brought back a diamond ring for me in a setting that was typically Chilean, not a single stone, but five small diamonds placed next to one another in square settings.

Since we had very little money at that state in our lives, I had not intended to get an engagement ring, but my fiance surprised me by having Tita make a gift of the ring to me. I was so touched I could scarcely hold back tears, and I remember well her warm smile and her saying, “mi hija,” already drawing me into the family circle as a daughter.

When I think of Tita, the first word that comes to mind is “gracious.” More than anything Tita had the quiet aura and dignity of a woman from an earlier and more formal time. Her hair was always beautifully coiffed, her dress elegant, and her manners equally so.

Raul Antonio told me funny stories of how when she was traveling with his family in Europe one summer, she always had her small bottle of vermouth in her purse, and she would have an aperitif in the afternoon.

His mother would say that with two young, active boys and her youngest daughter in a stroller, all they needed was the parrot to complete the picture of a gypsy family on the Grand Tour, but Sra. Tita remained a little apart from the domestic bustle, and everyone did their part to insulate her as well from the stresses of travel.

This is not to say that Tita did not have her troubles, among them the heartache of losing two of her seven children. Since divorce was not legal in Chile, she lived apart from her husband, Raul Antonio Díaz Döll, during all the years I knew her. I saw them together on only one occasion when we brought my oldest son and their first great-grandchild to Chile at fifteen months to introduce him to his great-grandparents.

It is a source of great joy to me that my son, Alejandro, was able to grow up with both of them a part of his life until he became a young adult and that he was able to spend time talking with them and making that very rare bridge across three generations.

The last time I saw Tita was in a beautiful part of Chile on Lake Villarrica in February. She was very frail, and for the first time since I had known her, she had let her hair go completely white. I knew then that the time I had left with Señora Tita would likely be measured in months rather than years.

But though my heart was touched with sadness, I still took pleasure in talking to her, seeing her give me the same warm smile she had welcomed me with all those years ago when I was a young bride-to-be.

Good night, Tita. “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Hamlet, V.ii., 359-60)

Born: 8 August 1919
Died: 25 September 2008

The Party is on at Treasury

2008-12-19T09:50:00.008-07:00

Office Holiday Party canceled this year? Never mind. There's a party going on at the Treasury Department this year, and you've got an open invitation.

That is, if you're a bank, and your balance sheet is still in the black.

As Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor and Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel reviewing Treasury's performance in managing the bailout package told Terry Gross in a recent interview, “I don't know of a federal program where that's the only criteria for eligibility: Prove that you're a bank and prove that you're not broke. And if you can prove those two things, you just automatically get a percentage of taxpayer dollars,” (What Does $700 Billion Buy Taxpayers?” Fresh Air, December 11, 2008).

Professor Warren noted that in early December the GAO (the General Accounting Office) produced a report that shows that the government has been handing out funds to banks with little or no oversight mechanisms in place. According to The Wall Street Journal, the report states in part: “Without a strong oversight and monitoring function, Treasury's ability to help ensure an appropriate level of accountability and transparency will be limited,” (“Auditors Fault Treasury Oversight of Bailout Funds,” December 2, 2008).

Professor Warren's assessment is more blunt. “Their report, in my view,” Warren states, “is just a scathing indictment of the Treasury Department.”

In fact, Treasury's actions have produced no discernible effect on helping homeowners facing foreclosure, or students who can't get loans for college or graduate school or consumers who need auto loans. Even small business owners with good payment histories have found that their banks are cutting them off from vital lines of credit they need to survive.

The credit markets remain frozen, banks continue to sit on the taxpayers' money, and Treasury has no way of knowing if that money will go to shareholder dividends, or executive bonuses, or to those who need loans because it has not put any requirements in place to ensure that banks actually start lending again.

To add insult to injury, this morning, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had the audacity to make a public demand for Congress to release the remaining $350 billion in the bailout package because the Bush Administration has reluctantly decided to loan $17.4 billion to the three American automakers, effectively using up all the remaining funds that have been authorized so far.

The only defense of its performance that Treasury has been able to offer so far is that its actions, which have shifted from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C with no coherent strategy, have prevented the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

That may be the case, but it's no excuse for handing out taxpayer dollars willy-nilly without oversight or standards of accountability or conflict of interest rules.

Concerns about how Treasury has spent billions of dollars, for which taxpayers will ultimately be accountable, is not an academic exercise. This country has already seen billions in dollars wasted in Iraq as the result of non-competitive bids for contractors and a complete lack of planning for the aftermath of the U.S. invasion.

If we don't want to witness the inevitable Congressional post-mortem about why much of the bailout package failed to help the average taxpayer, we need to act now and let our representatives know that not one single additional penny should be given to Treasury until reasonable mechanisms are putin place to protect the taxpayers' interests and not simply those of the banks who have been receiving the money with virtually no strings attached.

The party is over, Mr. Paulson, and it's time to stop celebrating at taxpayer expense.

Mom's Keys

2008-12-16T21:02:00.006-07:00

Today I found two sets of car keys that had been missing for about a week or so. The significance of this event is not that I found said keys, but that the losing and finding of car keys is a recurring event in my life.

And losing keys is a recurring event not only in my life, but in the lives of many of my women friends, especially those who have spouses and children. In fact, I would safely assert that there is an algorithm waiting to be developed that would directly relate the frequency with which women lose keys to a) their marital status and b) the number of children they have.

In fact, I'm certain that the probability that a woman will frequently lose her house and car keys (and her cell phone) and other personal possessions is directly proportional to her ability to keep track of everything else.

She will be able to: a) manage any budget; b) fill out and submit any number of forms; c) find any article of clothing belonging to a family member; d) remember the names of all her children's teachers and their birthdays; and e) set up online billing so that every creditor is duly paid on time and at least two days in advance.

But she will not be able to find those essential personal items that allow her to: a) lock the door behind her; b) drive the car; or c) be contacted by other members of the family concerning items that they cannot find or have lost track of.

Last Friday my husband returned from a two-week business trip. During that time period I managed to lose track of (I will not say “lost”) two sets of my own car keys and therefore was forced to “borrow” his. That brought us to the crux of our current dilemma.

We could have easily solved this crisis by sending my husband on yet another business trip which would have deferred the necessity of find said keys. But since that was not feasible, I had to consider where those keys might be.

Now I knew that they were never “lost” in the sense that they were irretrievable or that they resided anywhere outside my home. Of that, I was quite certain. I had only to consider therefore whether they were: a) at the bottom of my purse; b) in a coat pocket; c) in the baskets of my bicycle; d) under my nightstand; or e) somewhere in the bag of shopping bags that I use when I go to the grocery store.

As it turns out, the keys were in b) and e) and it only took me about half a day to find them. Since that is far less time than it would take my husband or children to find any of the items they consistently lose track of, and since I expended all of the energy to find them, I consider that the rest of my family has far the better the end of the bargain than I do.

After all the only reason that intelligent, well-organized women lose their keys in the first place is that they are driven to distraction trying to keep track of everything belonging to everyone else. QED.

And if anyone has seen my cell phone, please let me know!

Reason's Greetings

2008-12-11T14:13:00.011-07:00

A few weeks ago I heard a story about a coalition of atheist groups purchasing space on billboards in Denver and Colorado Springs to post slogans like “Don't believe in God?– you're not alone.” These public declarations of unbelief join the efforts of the American Humanist Association which purchased ads on buses and in newspapers in New York City and Washington, D.C., asking their fellows: "Why believe in god? Just be good for goodness sakes!"

And now The Wall Street Journal reports that “nonbelievers of every description -- will gather in dozens of cities at the end of December to mark the holiday they call HumanLight.”

Ironically these secularists will celebrate by emulating common religious rituals as they sing from a Humanist hymnal, decorate a winter wreath, or light “candles dedicated to personal heroes.”

This recent surge onto the public scene of humanists, secularists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and self-proclaimed heretics both surprised, and I must admit, bemused me.

On the one hand, it takes a real act of courage to proclaim your lack of belief in a divine creator in a society where a 2007 Gallup poll showed that most Americans would rather vote for an openly gay person to become president than an atheist.

Yet launching these campaigns at the beginning of a major religious season does seem to be throwing down the gauntlet. Certainly displays like the placard the Freedom from Religion Foundation placed near a Nativity display at the Washington State Capitol have an “in your face” quality. The placard begins innocuously enough with the words: "At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail” but concludes with the far more combative: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

That is hardly the way to win friends and influence public opinion, particularly for a much maligned minority that makes up no more than five to ten percent of the population.

Of course, it's typical of our fast moving, jump cut, sound bite media culture that complex ideological and philosophical questions about freedom of expression and the existence of God are being waged through billboards, placards, and bumper stickers.

But it's also ironic that the very development of atheism as a modern philosophical and ethical position was fostered in large part by the same historical processes that generated so many of the Christian religious sects that now flourish in the United States.

If Gutenberg had not used his new printing press to publish the Bible and make it far more accessible, and if men like Tyndale, Luther, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples had not translated new versions of the Bible into English, German, and French so that most people could actually read it, we would not have had the revolution in the relation between individual and God that Protestantism created.

The most influential historical legacy of Protestantism derives less from its protest against the corruption of state religion than from its encouragement of each individual believer to pursue a personal relationship with God, mediated through the reading of the Bible.

As more and more believers interpreted the Bible on their own, the Protestant movement rapidly fractured into more and more individual religious sects--ranging from Lutherans and Calvinists to Huguenots, Methodists, Anabaptists, Quakers, and Deists--and the slippery slope of individual interpretation produced Christians who believed that the Bible was literally true we well as those who denied the divinity of Christ and eventually nonbelievers who came to reject the Bible as the revelation of God.

Not surprisingly nonbelievers demonstrate a similar heterogeneity of ideas about the existence of God. A quick perusal of Wikipedia's entries on atheism finds practical and theoretical varieties as well as links to “agnostic atheism” and “theological noncognitivism.” There appears to be just about as many different ways of talking about unbelief as there are talking about belief in God.

Of course, the hostility towards atheism in our culture has always had a lot less to do with religious differences than with a widespread fear that atheists are inherently immoral.

Philosophically I myself occupy a kind of boundary between believers and nonbelievers in that I was raised as a Missouri Lutheran and still hold myself to the Christian principle of “loving one's neighbor as one's self” even as I have come to doubt the existence of God.

So while I do not feel the hostility of a Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens towards those who hold religious beliefs, I do share a sense of impatience and even anger when I come across the canard that secularism/humanism/atheism is destroying the moral fabric of our nation and that the tiny fraction of Americans who do not believe in God are somehow responsible for all the social ills of our culture.

So I was encouraged when I read that among the responses to the atheist/religious billboard wars was an effort to build bridges between believers and nonbelievers.

A former president of the Atheist Alliance International, Margaret Downey and her colleagues, had underwritten a billboard reaching out to other atheists in Philadelphia. When a local church responded with a “pro-God” billboard, Downey and her group did not respond with escalation in rhetoric, but rather with an invitation to join forces to help a local charity.

The congregation of the Light Houses of Oxford Valley accepted Downey's olive branch, and the Christians teamed up with the atheists "to spend a half-day sorting and packaging food for the needy." Downey calls her approach "positive atheism" -- an effort to convince the public at large that most atheists share the same moral values as most other Americans.

I endorse Downey's efforts and in the spirit of such outreach, I will venture to offer my readers “Reason's Greetings” as well as my hope that all of us, believers, nonbelievers, the unaffiliated, and the church-goers will put aside our feelings about the existence of God and instead share our mutual commitment to loving our neighbors as ourselves and to helping those in need.

It's time to tear down the dichotomy between belief and unbelief that artificially divides us when the unmet needs of poverty, ignorance, injustice, and so many other forms of suffering are crying out for people of faith and people without faith to put their energies into solving our social ills and not in debating who holds the moral high ground.

Ladies Who Lunch

2008-12-09T10:48:00.002-07:00

It's a very strange feeling to be in the middle of the worst credit crisis and a serious recession and suddenly find that you have more leisure time (and that you're actually enjoying yourself) than you've had in a long time.

Since I moved back to California and started looking for a job, several unexpected things have happened:

the university where I'm spending most of my energy searching has instituted a hiring freeze;
I can't get an emergency credential for substitute teaching until January when I get to take a basic competency exam and undergo a background check;
and a couple of writing gigs are taking longer to put together than I'd anticipated.

So while my deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic tells me I'm not trying hard enough to become gainfully employed, the more pragmatic side is telling me it's time to relax a little and enjoy the holidays without all the frenetic multitasking that usually involves.

Having this unanticipated gift of time on my hands, I've also been able to reconnect with a whole social network of moms like me, who are not working outside the home, and whose children are old enough that their mothers can find time for coffee, a game of Mahjong, a long walk, or the occasional leisurely lunch that doesn't have one glancing at the clock because you have to get back to the office.

It's such fun to be able to talk to other women without kids interrupting, or having to rush to get to work or having to rush to pick them up from daycare or lessons or practice.

I've discovered the guilty pleasure of having a whole space of hours in the day when I can finally spend at least some of time just the way I want to, and boy do I feel guilty about it. I feel so bourgeois, so decadent, so far from the woman who taught Feminist Theory and who still writes letters supporting the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

“What's happening to me?” I wonder. “Am I turning into my mother? Will I start 'getting my hair done' every week and going to Tuesday Musicale?” It's a scary thought.

My whole life I've been going to school and working and juggling family and work to establish a professional identity, and now when that identity is temporarily in abeyance, I feel an odd disjunction between how people look at me and who I really feel I am.

No longer just “X, Y or Z's mom” or “Dr. Wahl,” I have the sense that I can just be “Beth,” someone's friend or confidante, the lady who walks her dog to the park every day, the woman who chats with the cashiers at the coffee shop, and who actually finds time to read the newspaper or listen to nearly as much NPR as she wants.

So let my Puritan conscience take a nap for a while; I have faith that soon enough, the job will be found, the hours will fill up again, and once again, I'll be facing a balancing act again and resisting the pressure to rush, rush, rush through life. For now I am one of the ladies who lunch, who can take life at a slower pace and savor all its simple, daily pleasures. For now I am happy having the time to just be me.

The Scents of Christmas

2008-12-06T20:48:00.007-07:00

For me getting ready for Christmas is not so much about decorating the house or planning what gifts to buy or even caroling or attending an Advent service. Instead, what evokes Christmas for me n a visceral way are the smells of Christmas: the sharp scent of pine needles and the spicy mixture of ginger, cinnamon, cloves I associate with Christmas baking.

As a child the Christmas season always began when my mother got out the huge crocks she used to make enormous batches of German cookies: lebkuchen, springerle, and pfeffernusse. The day she bought her heavy duty Kitchen-Aid mixer was a cause for celebration: no more taking turns turning the heavy, sticky batter for what seemed like hours with a wooden spoon.

I still have that mixer more than thirty years later, and every time I turn it on, I think about my mom, and I have to smile, remembering that she was always a little careless around machinery. I used to curse under my breath cleaning up after she dumped too much flour in the batter and turned the powerful machine on too high a setting-- sending flour and batter in a spray that coated the counters, the floor and even the walls. I remember finding the overlooked stray drop still stuck somewhere as late as January.

With the baking came the stories of how German relatives, especially my father's mother, had made dozens of cookies in crocks the size of garbage cans and then buried them to keep out larcenous little fingers from making off with them ahead of time.

Traditional German cookies are truly a labor of love because the recipes are complicated and date back centuries to days before refrigeration. Almost none of them use butter, and the eggs and sugar are not simply creamed but rather whipped up to a pale froth – 15 minutes on a high speed mixer or an hour by hand. Then the dough needs to be chilled, rolled out, and the cookies themselves shaped from wooden molds or carved wood rolling pins, to be laid out on baking sheets, dried overnight, baked at relatively low heat for almost twenty minutes, and then aged for a couple of weeks in air-tight containers to let the flavors emerge.

For my paternal grandmother, with her five boys and one girl, it was a definite challenge to make sure the goodies lasted until Christmas. My mother had only four kids to keep track of, but it was my father who was mostly likely to sneak a cookie ahead of schedule.

I remember how good the kitchen smelled with the windows all steamed up and the cold Michigan winter kept at bay outside while my siblings and I helped or simply watched and then argued over who got to lick the bowl. Strangely enough I didn't even like eating some of the cookies until I was in my teens and had developed a taste for the unusual flavors like anise and the hard texture which make them perfect “dunking” cookies in a steaming cup of coffee. The pleasure was in the preparation and the shared company.

Even now I warn friends who haven't tried them that these cookies can be an “acquired” taste. Unfortunately, it's a taste my husband and three boys acquired early on, and they wait anxiously during the first few days of December until I assure them that yes I am baking again this year despite my occasional threats to stop because it's just so much work.

As the years have gone by, I've done a little research into the origins of these cookies and discovered to my surprise that their flavorings – the anise, the almonds, the cloves, the white pepper, and even the cardamom – were ingredients that were added not so much for taste – but rather to show off the wealth of the families who could afford to bake with such exotic ingredients. Some of the cookies made from elaborate molds were painted and put on display; they were not even meant to be eaten!

For me making and baking these cookies is also a kind of display, but it's a display of sociability, of my cultural heritage, and a source of pride that even I, who have few, if any, manual talents, can still produce a damn good cookie.

It's also a ritual that connects me to my siblings as I call up to ask about a variation in recipe or commiserate if the springerle didn't rise so well as last year. If I had just one Christmas wish, it would be the hope that some day all of us could gather again one December afternoon and bake our springerle, our lebkuchen and our pffernusse together. For nothing evokes the happiest memories of my childhood Christmases like the warm spicy scent of cookies baking in the oven.

Don't Blame the Religious Right, It's Republicans Who Lost the 2008 Election

2008-12-05T15:42:00.002-07:00

There's a lot of bickering, finger-pointing, and maybe even a little soul-searching going on in the Republican party about why the John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket went down to defeat. Many political observers have pointed out that by holding on to their socially conservative religious base, the party lost the support of moderate, independent voters who were more concerned about their economic well-being than abortion or gay marriage.

Members of the religious right argue defensively that they turned out in record numbers, just not enough, to overcome the record turnout of voters who were energized to vote for Barack Obama and not against him.

I am not a political pundit or a poll-taker, and I have little sympathy with ideological stances of the religious right, but in this case, I have a strong sense that they are not to blame for their party's defeat.

Rather, I feel that the Republican party has generally treated its base like the “safe” girl or boyfriend you can depend on to take you to prom, even as you secretly hope and hint for someone more glamorous, albeit more fickle, to ask you. But in 2008, Republicans nominated John McCain as their candidate, someone not beloved by the religious and socially conservative wing of the party, and you could almost sense the underlying anxiety of campaign advisers that their “safe” date to the prom might choose to stay home on election day rather than go with John McCain as escort.

This led to the brash and ill-conceived gambit of persuading McCain to choose Sarah Palin as the pretty new face of social and religious conservatism, with her star appeal intended to complement the wisdom and experience of the not-so-lovely, not-at-all-youthful man at the top of the ticket.

The problem for Republicans turned out to be the rest of the American electorate, who were not taken in by appearances but actually wanted some substance beneath the “hockey mom/former beauty queen/Jane Six-Pack” exterior. When Sarah Palin turned out to have little understanding of foreign policy, domestic issues, or the constitutional role of the vice-president, the public found her wanting as a candidate, not to mention a poor reflection on her running mate's judgment.

But worse, the choice of Sarah Palin as the best the Republicans could do for a vice-presidential candidate confirmed the impression that many across the political spectrum have gained of the party's deeply cynical attitude towards voters in general and its inherent contempt for the intelligence of the American public.
Perhaps having succeeded in passing off George W. Bush as the answer to American fears about terrorism, Republican strategists believed that they could sell any candidate to voters, so long as that person was attractive, personable, and able to read a teleprompter with ease.

The election of 2008 proved those strategists wrong, but it make take yet another election cycle for those in charge of the party to stop pointing the finger at their socially and religiously conservative base of supporters, and take a more probing, honest account of their own failures to put forward candidates who have less style and more substance.

Carpool Censorhip, Or Letting Kids Talk about the Election

2008-11-16T22:11:00.010-07:00

Today I read about the ugly aftermath of the recent election that will bring the first African-American president to power in the United States. The Associated Press reports that the number of death threats against President-Elect Obama far exceeds the usual number that follow an election. In Snellville, Georgia, Denene Millner reported that a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

I've been thinking about these incidents because I've been increasingly upset about a directive I received from other parents the day after the election. I had driven nearly three hours to pick up my son and other 4th graders from a camp where they had been staying in Coloma, California, the town the originated the 1848 Gold Rush.

"There's to be no election talk. It's absolutely verboten," one mother told me in the bathroom as I prepared to pack up the car for the return three-hour trip. "They're absolutely obsessed with the election," she added, but then informed me that we weren't to tell them who won. "They can't handle it."

"Says who?" I thought to myself, furious that I was receiving this information from another parent rather than from my son's teacher directly. When I signed up to drive for this field trip, I certainly didn't sign away my first amendment rights at the car door, and I felt both foolish and resentful as I rushed to cover the morning papers I had placed on the front passenger seat.

Of course, the kids saw the headline that proclaimed Obama's electoral victory. And why shouldn't they see it? Why should I have to feel guilty that I had the morning's newspaper on the front seat of my car?

No one had informed me in advance that election talk was to be absolutely "verboten" in a private car, or asked me if I agreed to that policy before I agreed to spend six hours in my car, chauffeuring kids on the day after the election.

And of course, the kids were obsessed with the election. So was every American citizen and just about everyone else on the planet. Why shouldn't they be excited about one of the most historic elections the world had ever witnessed? And why should they be denied the right to know the outcome of that election? Or to discuss the election freely with one another?

I disagree absolutely that nine and ten year olds are not prepared to handled the discussion of an American election, especially one that changed history. Properly mediated by a responsible adult, there is no better occasion for children to exchange views, respectfully, civilly, but also openly and truthfully, with one another.

Yes, somebody's feelings may be hurt. But this is not about emotion but about teaching children how to back up emotion with fact and reason. All three recent presidential elections have been hotly contested and left hard feelings for those who lost, whether those feelings were warranted or not. The salient point is that the United States has successfully passed the reigns of power peacefully for over two hundred years, and where there have been questions of electoral misconduct, those questions have been referred to the courts, and the majority of Americans have accepted those court rulings, even if they disagreed with them.

I feel very strongly that we do a disservice to ourselves and to our children if we censor their discussion of a hotly contested election. If there was ever a "teachable" moment in history, this election was one, and not to address it openly and frankly, in my opinion, is an act of cowardice.

Yes, people are angry that Barack Obama won, but those children who chanted, "Assasinate Obama," will not become more reasonable or rational, if they are simply censored rather than engaged. This is the moment to ask those kids, "Why are you saying this? Why do think it's okay to encourage someone's death because you disagree with his policies or don't like the color of his skin?'

Racism will never go away if we simply force people to suppress rather than encourage them to express feelings and then engage them on a rational level.

I remember my own fourth-grade teacher, who is a man I still respect above all others. He spoke to my class after the resignation of Richard Nixon. We were a class of nearly all Republicans with one lone Democrat in our midst. "Don't believe everything your parents tell you," he said to us. "Learn how to think for yourselves."

I know that as a fourth-grader I was ready for this message of encouragement to think for myself. I am furious with myself for letting other parents intimidate me into stopping my own fourth-grader and the others in my care during that long car ride home from finding out just how much history had changed and expressing their views about it.

If you truly believe in free speech, you know that there's no such thing as too much speech. Keep talking and eventually you will find that the answer to hate is simply more speech and more speech and more speech.

The Twilight Saga, or Why We Keep Trying to Censor what Teens Read

2008-11-16T15:42:00.009-07:00

In carpool a couple of weeks ago, a fourth-grade girl I've come to think of as a surrogate daughter, mentioned that her mom didn't want her to read Twilight, the teen vampire love story that's been such a huge publishing success and will soon hit the big screen.

“Oh, my son Tomas read that,” I told her, and “I read it too while I was recovering from a bad fall.” (And I didn't feel capable of reading anything too complicated, I thought to myself, but I didn't say that out loud.) “There's nothing bad in it,” I said to her, "and if you want me to tell your mom that I've read it and that I think it's okay for you to read, I can do that,” I promised her.

“Oh, could you?” she asked hopefully. “I told her I'd rather read Twilight than get my own cell phone and that tells you how much it means to me.”

“It sure does,” I laughed, and then I started thinking to myself about the perennial question of why we as parents get so worried about what our kids read that we want to censor certain books.

So I started asking people – okay, other moms--what they thought about Twilight. [If I'd asked any dads, they would mostly likely have give me blank stares, but that's another blog topic.)

My sister told me that the book was a source of controversy at her daughter's Christian school. I found out that the mom of my would-be-Twilight-reader wasn't nearly as worried about the book as her college-aged daughter was because her oldest daughter thought that the heroine wasn't a “good role model.” “What I think really upsets her,” my friend told me, “is that wanting to read this book shows that her little sister is growing up too fast.”

After all Twilight does touch on all those adolescent issues that raise parental (and big sister) hackles: falling in love, wondering about sex, having relationships (platonic or otherwise) behind a parent's back, having your daughter getting involved with wrong kid of guy (where “vampire” stands in for any race/class/religion/or other difference that makes you uncomfortable).

For my friend's older daughter, Twilight also seemed to send the wrong kind of message to her little sister: in it the heroine spends a lot time wondering if she's good enough for the guy; he tends to be controlling, even bullying on occasion, and his outrageous good looks, material wealth, and “I know more than you do, little girl” attitude isn't quite enough to offset his equally out-sized angst about how he might endanger her or even worse give in to the temptation to turn her into a vampire like himself.

But the real question that lingers for me about the Twilight phenomenon isn't so much about whether it's a “good” book or a “bad” book, but why we worry so much about what adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, read.

I'd be the first to admit that I share my friend's oldest daughter's concern about her little sister reading books that start to erode the boundaries of childhood. There are good reasons for having “children's sections” in public libraries in order to provide a rich, age-appropriate environment in which young people can begin to explore their world, including its darker sides.

Yet children's books like Holes, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret?, and Bud, Not Buddy treat topics that a generation earlier we might not have considered “safe” for children: including abuse, abandonment, puberty, and the juvenile justice system. However, the authors of these same books write about these experiences in a way that children and adults can understand without being psychically threatened by them.

One of the hardest transitions we experience as parents is watching our children move from the relative innocence and wonder of childhood to the increased worldliness and skepticism that they begin to feel as young adults. If there's anyone I identified with in Twilight it was the well-meaning but easily fooled father who has no idea what's going on in his daughter's head or taking place in her bedroom where a vampire spends most evenings watching her sleep and trying to protect her from other vampires.

Perhaps what bothers parents most about what their teens are reading is this realization that we can no longer fully protect our children from the world and all its dangers.

In a strange way, it may seem more feasible to us keep our children safe from the fictional dangers contained in the pages of a book than to have to face our own limitations in keeping them safe from the world at large. Censorship can seem to offer a certain comfort to a parent, even if we're just like the father in Twilight, futilely trying to ward off threats we can't even see.

As the mother of three sons, two of whom are over the age of fifteen, I confess I've largely ceded the battle of trying to protect my adolescent children from any and all “negative” influences of media, video, books, music, pop culture, and their peers. I also have to confess that I might be a little less laissez-faire if I had a daughter. I just don't know what difference gender might make.

But what I have realized is that all I can really do at this stage of children's lives is to give them the skills to ask questions about what they hear, what they watch, and what they read.

They're going to read what they want, not necessarily what I want them to read. But I also know that if I'm willing to take the time to read some of the same books, we can at least start a conversation, even an argument, about what those books mean and why we value them differently. And that's one good way to recognize their passage to young adulthood.

For more good discussions of Twilight, see The Christian Science Monitor's "Chapter & Verse Blog," "I Don't Want my Kid Reading that Book"

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/15/i-dont-want-my-kid-reading-that-book/

Finding Your Real Friends

2008-11-15T18:07:00.002-07:00

It's a truism that that you only find out who you're real friends are when you're in a crisis. Now that many Americans are losing homes, losing jobs, even losing their faith in themselves, many people are testing that truism in real time.

I returned home to California in August and discovered how much friendship meant. When my husband and I needed a place to park two large moving vans until our tenants could move out of our house, we had friends who let us leave the trucks outside their homes, despite neighbors' complaints. We also had friends on vacation who said, “Stay in our house as long as you need,” so we didn't have to camp out with sleeping bags among boxes and disassembled furniture. Friends offered us meals, welcomed us back, said those sweetest of words to a returning family, “We really missed you.”

Since those late days of summer when we were heady with the excitement and joy of returning to a place we love, my family has also experienced the downside of a rapidly deteriorating economy. I'm not finding a job as quickly as I had hoped. My husband just lost his, and we have to plan carefully how we will use his severance and our savings to start a new company in a business climate where starting a new venture seems crazy to most people.

But we aren't crazy, and we aren't cock-eyed optimists. We have creativity, energy, and vision, and most of all we still have real friends – people who are there to share ideas and advice, to give a referral when we need it, and to listen when we have a down day.

Of course, there are always people who offer to help you network, or to meet you for coffee, and then never follow through, or who listen politely but with barely concealed skepticism to your dreams, or who promise to help in some way but make it clear that you are way down their list of priorities. Those are the people you cull from your mental list of “friends,” often with some pain, but also with the realization that you've tested a relationship and found it wanting.

Sadly, some of the friends you may test and find wanting may be members of your own family, but even so, you can take courage and hope from the unexpected expressions of friendship that come from people you never thought would be willing to come through for you. And even more valuable are the people who hoped you could depend on and who proved that your faith was warranted: those are the friends worth keeping – in good times and in bad.

P.S. Since posting this blog, something kept nagging at me, and I realized that I don't actually "cull" friends as ruthlessly as I seem to imply. If did, I would have written off my best friend and the man I married over twenty years ago. He was one of the major testers of my definitions of friendship. I wrote him a letter the summer he took a bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Portland, Oregon after having been hospitalized for severe asthma. I just wanted to be sure he got home okay, but my well-intentioned letter received no response, and I returned to school the next fall determined not to have anything more to do with him. Fortunately, he made a determined effort to win my good will back, and he's not the only one on the list of people who don't answer emails for six months or return phone calls for years etc. that I've welcomed back into the fold of those I call friends. After all, you're not really a good friend unless you can forgive a breach of friendship.

Grace Under Fire

2008-11-06T09:51:00.006-07:00

On Tuesday evening, Senator John McCain gave the best speech of his campaign: he conceded victory to President-Elect Obama, and more importantly, he acknowledged the historic nature of that win.

Up until this past year, I had admired Senator McCain, and not just for the obvious reasons: the heroism he had shown in war or the principled stances he adopted on campaign finance reform and immigration. I also deeply respected his decision not to engage in the ugly racial smear tactics that were used against him by Karl Rove in North Carolina in 2000 when phone calls suggested that he had a black illegitimate daughter.

McCain made many mistakes in this campaign and in recent weeks stooped to tactics that were not worthy of him. But he never played the race card. There was no Willie Horton in this campaign, and for that I continue to respect him.

But I was also moved and saddened by the emergence of his former self in his concession speech. In the past few months McCain has seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, perhaps regretting his moves to the right to court the Republican base, perhaps unnerved and disheartened by the bigotry displayed at his own campaign rallies from people who called Obama a “Muslim” and a “socialist” as if those were two of the seven dirty words you can't say on the air.

On Tuesday night, McCain hushed the boos from the audience; he took full responsibility for his loss. “The failure is mine,” he said, but not before he had alluded to the seismic change this election represents in American history.

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

This is the John McCain who believes in the power of American democracy and not just winning elections, the man who can recognize that the expansion of the electorate and the record numbers of Americans who cast their votes, many of them for the first time, was something to celebrate and not something to try to suppress, the man who can acknowledge the “special pride” of black Americans who know that the United States truly is a land of opportunity when a man who might not have been able to vote freely a half century earlier in the American south can now lead this country as its President.

I appreciate Senator McCain's long service to this country and I hope to see the real John McCain, who exhibits grace under fire, continue to serve in the United States Senate for many years to come.

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

2008-11-04T21:38:00.003-07:00

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

I have just witnessed history. Tonight America elected its first African-American president.

I supported the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama because I felt that he was the best candidate. But I am also proud to have cast a vote for him as a white woman because I feel that his election is an important symbolic and material step towards the healing of America's racial wounds and the ugly legacy of slavery.

Today is a first for me on many levels:

It is the first time my oldest son cast his vote in an American election.

It is the first time in my lifetime that I can face my children and say candidly, “Anyone can grow up to be the President of the United States.”

It is the first time that millions of voters cast their vote for the first time and joined me in the privilege of exercising the right to vote in one of the world's great democracies.

I know that tonight is a moment of disappointment for many Americans, not least of which are many of my family members, who have been Republicans for generations. But I hope that they will join me in my hope that the election of Barack Obama is a moment of healing for America's racial divisions and a step towards the recovery of America's reputation as a leader on the world stage.

Barack Obama's campaign brought millions of new voters to the electoral process, especially young voters, Hispanics, and African-Americans, and whatever your party affiliation, we all can only benefit when the number of register voters expands and the number of registered voters reaches historic highs.

Whatever anyone feels about the outcome of the election, this voting experience is historic on so many levels, and we should all celebrate an election in which so many of us participated and so many could see tangible evidence that another barrier to the Presidency crumbled to the ground.

Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

2008-10-22T10:11:00.002-06:00

Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

With only thirteen days left to Election Day, you may be sure that most candidates aren't out there telling you how much they admire their opponents.

Far from it. This is the time of year when the media, the pundits, and especially the voters who haven't put their TV in a closet, complain that the airwaves are saturated with negative advertising.

So I'm sitting here feeling just a little guilty that I've contributed to that saturation. To come completely clean, I admit that over the past year I've made modest monthly donations to political campaigns and political organizations that put up ads on your TV set.

And yet I haven't seen a single political ad myself either for or against any political candidate.

The truth is that I don't watch TV, not out of moral indignation, or fear that it will rot my brain, or any other ideological reason. It's just that when a commercial comes on, and the volume goes up, it's like nails on a blackboard for me, and if somebody doesn't hit the mute button, watch out!

In fact, as I ask myself why I fund a form of communication that I consider as much a form of torture as listening to Celine Dion, I have to confess that I don't have a very good answer.

Who am I trying to convince, after all?

If it's the small sector of undecided voters who still remain undecided after a seemingly never ending presidential campaign, then I have to admit that I pretty much agree with Ezra Klein who wrote that “from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible” as The Undecided Voter, (“Undecided voters? Studies show that most actually have chosen a candidate,” The Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klein12-2008oct12,0,6236237.story).

After all we've had two years of news articles, TV debates, blogs, internet sites with reams of data, for the undecided to digest, and few could argue that John McCain and Barack Obama present anything other than a definitive choice for two very different ideological approaches to politics.

So why am I spending my hard earned money trying to sway people whose state of indecision I find almost incredible, given the amount of information available about the candidates who are running for office?

And yet as Klein also points out, “Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).”

I also agree with Klein's contention, based on recent research by political scientists that many of the Undecideds are not really as “undecided” as they claim but are already leaning in one direction or the other, and may in fact not want to state publicly the name of the person they will probably vote for. And sure there are probably a few who just enjoy reveling in all the media attention they get every four years.

The fact is that I consider this particular election to be so important that I will spend my money trying to push a few people over the line towards the candidate they may be leaning towards. I'll press the Republicans who feel embarrassed at John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin to ask them to question his overall judgment. I'll press the former Hillary voters who aren't comfortable with a black man as President to look again at Colin Powell's endorsement. And I'll keep those ads coming.

So apologies to those of you who've already made up your minds. Just keep your finger poised over the mute button. And to all of you, Decided and Undecided alike – Get Out, and VOTE!

Guilt by Association: Obama and the “Secret Muslim” Charge

2008-10-21T23:45:00.000-06:00

Guilt by Association: Obama and the “Secret Muslim” Charge

The most striking part of Colin Powell's interview with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press Sunday was not his endorsement of Barack Obama but rather his disapprobation of the political tactics of the Republican party in trying to associate Obama with the specter of the 9/11 terrorists.

I have long admired Colin Powell, but I have never admired him more than on this past Sunday when he stated that he was troubled by the “approaches” of the McCain campaign and the efforts of the Republican party to taint Senator Obama with the insinuation that he is a secret Muslim and therefore potentially a terrorist sympathizer.

In Powell's words, the party has created an atmosphere in which:

It is permitted to be said such things as, 'Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America.

Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Yet it is not just the more recent threat of Islamic terrorism that Republicans are seeking to evoke in this smear campaign, but also the older, deep-seated association of “radical” black movements and figures from the 60's like Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and The Nation of Islam.

If Republicans can create enough links between “black,” “Muslim,” “radical,” “socialist,” and “terrorist,” in the minds of voters, already nervous about Barack Hussein Obama's uncommon name and mixed race origins, they believe they can frighten them into voting for John McCain or at least into staying away from the polls.

What Colin Powell states powerfully is the fundamental American belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that Americans should have the right of free association, and that no one should be tainted or smeared because of their association with an individual or group that happens to be unpopular.

Sadly, in contemporary America, where the drumbeat against the threat of terrorism has generated suspicion of anyone who appears to be of Middle Eastern origin, as a Presidential candidate, Barack Obama has not dared to enter a mosque and has met leading Islamic figures privately rather than openly.

This has left many Arab-Americans feeling rejected by both parties, even as many also feel the need to forge a common voice in the American democratic polity.

“'What's upsetting to me is you're completely discounted by both parties,' said Ahmad Ezzeddine, an associate vice president at Wayne State University” according to a recent Boston Globe article. “Ezzeddine, who immigrated to the US from Lebanon 20 years ago, said he voted twice for President Bush, but now feels politically orphaned, adding, 'There's no attempt to reach out. Obama wants us, but is so afraid because he doesn't want to be labeled, and the Republicans . . .'” (Michael Paulson, “Arab Americans Yearning,” Boston Globe, October 21, 2008, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/10/21/arab_americans_yearning/?page=1).

Since the Powell endorsement, Republican campaigners have simplified the guilty by association tactics even further by talking about the “pro-America” parts of the country and in the case of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a call not only to investigate the “anti-American” aspects of Barack Obama but of the entire Congress.

Now by extension we can accuse Obama of being a secret Muslim, radical, socialist, terrorist, anti-American. The perfect bogey-man, made-up and marketed on every TV channel just in time for Halloween.

But it's not just the guilt by association tactics that should concern every American but the associations that are being tainted with guilt. It is no crime to be of Arab descent in this country, and no Arab American should be suspected of any criminal activity simply because that individual is of Arabic descent. Arab Americans are a diverse group in themselves, comprising both Christians and Muslims, and representing a wide geographic distribution from the horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula.

After November 4th, these ugly campaign tactics will likely cease, but the rhetoric that sees every person who looks Middle Eastern as a Muslim and that suspects every Muslim of terrorist sympathies will continue to infect our public discourse until more of leaders find the courage of a Colin Powell to say: “Let every Muslim American child and every Arab American child dream that he or she can be be President of the United States, and let us make certain that those dreams can become a reality by overcoming our fear.”

Cut Sarah Palin No Slack Nor the Man Who Chose Her

2008-10-01T13:18:00.001-06:00

Cut Sarah Palin No Slack Nor the Man Who Chose Her

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, Senator McCain proved his knight-errantry by rushing to the defense of his damsel-in-distress, Governor Sarah Palin, whose performance in a couple of TV interviews with Katie Couric has demonstrated that like “there's no 'there' there.”

At least not when it comes to foreign policy, whether or not the financial crisis will lead to a another Great Depression, or any specific examples of Senator McCain supporting regulatory legislation during his twenty plus years in office.

Her floundering responses made many viewers, and a growing number of conservatives, think out loud that this choice of a running mate was not the brilliant strategic stroke it seemed at the Republican Convention, especially since Governor Palin is clearly not ready for prime time, much less the White House.

But this morning Senator McCain, who seems to think it a virtue to stick with a decision once made, however impulsive and wrong-headed, still insisted that Palin was a good choice, and a better one than Senator Obama or Biden, a comparison you'd think he would have avoided rather than sought.

Asked “what specifically do you believe that Alaska's proximity to Russia adds to Palin's foreign policy qualifications,” McCain responded with a vague reference to “the fact that they have had certain relationships,” and then immediately turned the question to Palin's energy experience, knowing full well that he was not going to be asked what those “certain relationships” might be, much less how they might relate to foreign policy.

McCain then made the tired political rhetorical gesture of suggesting that all the fuss over Palin's lack of qualifications was nothing more than “Georgetown cocktail party” gossip (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95240063).
In fact, listening to Steve Inskeep interview Senator McCain, I could not help thinking that the Senator hopes that voters will be lulled into what Jonathan Swift once defined as “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves,” (“A Digression upon Madness” from A Tale of A Tub).

When Senator McCain defends his choice of Sarah Palin and the paucity of her qualifications, he is either a knave or a fool. When he claims that her critics are a group of cocktail party lightweights, he ignores a growing chorus of criticism from conservatives ranging from Senator Chuck Hagel to David Frum to George Will and Kathleen Park.

In some ways, Palin has been given a more sympathetic response from many on the left, who seem to feel almost a need to apologize for the position McCain's handlers have put her in before they can bring themselves to criticize her. For example, NPR's Nina Totenberg started her assessment of Palin by stating, “There's no way to sugarcoat this. After a brilliant debut at the Republican National Convention and a speech that electrified the delegates and the country, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is struggling in her second act,” (Morning Edition, 9/30/08, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95196691).

A bracing dash of cold water on this “pity party” comes from Salon's Rebecca Traister, who writes that: “Yes, as a feminist, it sucks -- hard -- to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it's because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics,” (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/09/30/palin_pity/).

Traister is absolutely right that the 2008 campaign has proven to be one more betrayal for those, men and women like, who hoped that this election season, women would be judged on their merits, not their looks, and that any woman who had a reasonable hope of making it to the White House would not be going there as an “arm piece” or just because she's a woman.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin was a slap in the face, not only to all the Hilary Clinton supporters who were so devoted to her because of her hard work, her intellect, and her grasp of complicated policy issues, but also to the many highly experienced and articulate Republican women he could have chosen – like Elizabeth Dole, Olympia Snow, or even Condi Rice. (And wouldn't she have enjoyed playing the role of Dick Cheney for a change?)

The fact that Sarah Palin has already performed so poorly in the few interviews she has given should not set the bar lower for this Thursday's upcoming debate. Instead, this debate should be viewed as her last chance to stop mouthing platitudes and giving her convention speech over and over, and prove to the public that she really does know something about the major domestic and foreign policy issues she will need to face if she makes it to the White House.

After all, this is the woman that John McCain cynically handed to the voters as a possible Hilary Clinton replacement. Let her prove that the comparison is anything but laughable.

Yet Palin also has another reason to prove herself at Thursday night's debate. Voters cannot help but consider that if John McCain is elected, his age does raise the prospect that Palin might have to take on the responsibilities of president alone.

That possibility offers a very serious reason to treat Palin's performance as more than just a debate but rather as a dress rehearsal for the White House. And finally, however well or badly she does on Thursday night, her performance must also be taken as a reflection on John McCain, and the judgment he showed in selecting her as his running mate and his possible replacement in the Oval Office.

McCain Sounds A Bit Like My Mother

2008-09-26T22:54:00.003-06:00

McCain Sounds A Bit Like My Mother

Don't get me wrong. I agree with the initial pundit response on the first McCain Obama debate: 1) namely that it was an actual debate and not just an exchange of sound bites; and 2) that both candidates performed well, playing to their strengths and minimizing most of their weaknesses,

But there was one area in which I found Senator McCain just a little bit irritating, and that was because his constant references to his age and experience, and his repeated mantra of “Senator Obama doesn't understand x, y, or z” started to sound a lot like my mother.

I well remember my mom saying to me as I reached my high school years,
I'm 62 years-old, and I don't need some smart-ass teenager telling me what I know about x, y, or z.”

Substitute McCain saying, “I'm 72 years-old, and I don't need some smart-ass 40-something junior senator telling me what I know about x, y, or z” and you have the same effect.

Senator McCain was born in 1936, a spring chicken compare to my mother who was born in 1918 and died in 1989, but the rhetorical effect is still the same: “I'm older than you, there I know more” had the same resonance in 1980 as it does in 2008. I still thought, “Hey, mom, you voted for Ronald Reagan, even though he's planning to cut the very social security benefits that are intended to help me fund my college education, and I personally think you're nuts for doing this.”

Similarly, Senator Barack Obama countered Senator McCain's condescension with a consistent reference towards his ill-judged decision to support the Iraq War in the first place when it has provided such a distraction from and diversion of resources from Afghanistan, which is the real center of Al-Queda insurgency.

Senator McCain's repeated, almost hypnotic use of the refrain, “What Senator Obama doesn't understand,” combined with his rude refusal even to make eye contact with his opponent, underscores the generational divide between them.

Many voters, from the 40-somethings on down, and I count myself among them, do not want want condescension from our presidential candidates. We want accountability for the terrible decision to go to war with Iraq and to continue to spend $10 billion per month on a conflict we never needed to engage in. Senator Obama has been much more clear-eyed and cogent about the real national security threat facing our nation, and this threat has never been Iraq.

If there is anything either Senator and the American public “needs to understand,” it is that as little money as possible must be expended in a war with Iraq than we can ill afford, and that resources need to reallocated to actual, contemporary threats, both military and domestic. That will be the true test of leadership for our next president, particularly if the next terrorist threat comes from Afghanistan or Pakistan, which are underfunded and underestimated by the current administration, and the current Republican nominee.

Who Will Bail out the Taxpayer?

2008-09-24T14:54:00.003-06:00

Who Will Bail Out the Taxpayer?

The American financial system has lurched from crisis to crisis all summer, resulting in government interventions whose shock value has increased from a stinging slap in the face to a full body blow in the latest proposal to bail out $700 billion in “toxic” assets held by a wide range of domestic and foreign financial institutions.

First the Bush Administration found it necessary to save Bear Stearns from bankruptcy. Then Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke engineered a national take-over of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That was still not enough.

A short time later the Federal Reserve announced that it would take a nearly 80 percent interest in the insurer American International Group in exchange for a two-year, $85 billion loan.

Why did the U.S. government have to bail out an insurance company? Well, it turned out that AIG had engaged in a new unregulated financial instrument, selling so-called “credit default swaps” which are essentially insurance on debt.

And when firms borrowed money to finance debt that included subprime mortgages and other “toxic” assets, the unregulated free-for-all that has been the U.S. financial markets for the past four years finally threatened to implode, .

Only in the case of Lehman Brothers did market capitalism actually play out in full leading to the bankruptcy of that institution.

The rules of capitalism are supposed to be simple. As Don Boudreaux, a professor at George Mason University puts it: “[Y]ou are free to take whatever risks you want as long as you are willing to bear the costs for those risks. And you get the upside of it too. If you have huge gains, great, you get the gains. But no one helps bail you out or subsidize you,” (“Do Federal Moves Take up Back to the New Deal?" All Things Considered, September 18, 2008). http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9477132

That's no longer true in this new world-turned-upside-down view of American capitalism where government intervention is now the name of the game and where it seems that if you win, you win, but if you're about to lose, you ask someone else to pay your bill.

So this week Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke are back on Capitol Hill, hats in hand, begging for a sum that makes these other billion-dollar interventions bail in comparison, and with even less oversight and less accountability to the real people who will be paying the bill – you and me, the American taxpayers.

Fortunately, despite the real crisis at hand, legislators of both parties have finally found the backbone to stand up to the Bush Administration and say, “Hey, wait a minute!”

In blunt and often angry utterances, these representatives are insisting that the details of this proposed gargantuan bail-out get fleshed out, that there is oversight of how the Fed and Treasury will implement the plan, and that the taxpayers get something back if this bad debt proves to have any ultimate value.

Congress is finally reflecting the outrage of an American electorate that has been sold an expensive and unnecessary war in Iraq and now is being asked to fund a similarly expensive financial rescue plan with just about as much planning and oversight as the Bush Administration put into its invasion of Baghdad, i.e. Let's just start a war and worry about the details later.

It's not just that Paulson and Bernanke have cried “wolf” once too often this summer and never actually saved a single lamb from slaughter, but they also have to take responsibility for the disastrous policies and regulatory performance of an administration that will go down in history as one of the most spendthrift, deceptive, and incompetent in American history.

To add insult to injury, the proposed Paulson-Bernanke plan contains no financial relief for the individual taxpayers who are being asked to bail out Wall Street while receiving no assistance with the housing crisis, or with shrinking incomes, or a growing unemployment rate.

As many housing advocates and economists will tell you, the financial industry has done a dismal job so far helping homeowners facing foreclosure restructure their debt. At the very least, any bailout of the financial industry must include some provision for individual taxpayers to restructure their debts, particularly for those who are in danger of losing their homes.

If Congress does agree to some form of the Paulson-Bernanke plan, it should be with some very serious strings attached. Any institution agreeing to participate should be required to disclose all of its debts, to fire its top management without any gold parachutes attached, and to agree to profit-sharing with the Treasury should its “toxic” assets ultimately turn out to have some value.

Then Congress needs to repeal its ill-judged revisions of the personal bankruptcy laws to make it easier for homeowners facing foreclosure to refinance their debts and not worsen a deteriorating housing market.

And finally, it's time for the American public and its leaders to decide whether we really are a capitalist society or not. If we offer corporations a safety net, we need to make sure that we not only have the appropriate regulations on the books, but regulators who enforce those laws thoroughly and seriously so that Wall Street doesn't once again have the opportunity to go to Vegas on the taxpayers' dime.

It seems almost certain that in resolving the current financial crisis, the American taxpayer will get stuck paying the check, but as voters we can also press our representatives hard to reduce the size of the final bill.

P.S. For an excellent overview of the financial crisis, see Gretchen Morgenson's September 21st New York Times column, entitled "Your Money at Work, Fixing Others' Mistakes."

Why are Americans so crazy about oil?

2008-09-16T22:54:00.000-06:00

Why are Americans so Crazy about Oil?

I watched the American rage over rising gas prices this spring with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation – sympathy for working people who can barely afford another cost of living increase and who have to drive to get to work – exasperation with all those other Americans who bought gas-guzzling Hummers, Expeditions, Siennas etc. and are now complaining about how much they cost to fill up.

Then I watched the spectacle of Rudy Guiliani cheerleading Republican conventioners in a chant of “Drill, baby, drill” and felt a mixture of stunned amazement and outright disgust.

“What is it about oil that makes Americans so crazy?” I wondered. A gallon of milk goes over the four dollar mark, and people grumble but they don't get on CNN and threaten their lawmakers with public mayhem. Gas prices hit that point, and people are ready to riot.

It may be the gas prices are one of those “in your face” costs of daily living that we can't help but notice. Stores may bury the equivalent cost of various brands of peanut butter on those little tags you can barely read, or keep prices the same but artfully reshape your box of cereal or your ice-cream container to be a little smaller. You barely notice, and for the most part, you keep buying.

Gas prices, by contrast, are posted in eye-popping dimensions on huge signs for all to view and to seize on as a source of outrage. I doubt that many people can tell you how much the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are costing per week ($2 billion) or how big the current deficit is ($370 billion so far in 2008), but just about any American can tell you how much he or she paid per gallon at the pump at the last fill-up.

But it's not just that so many Americans are irrationally fixed on the price of gas; a majority are also displaying an equal degree of illogic when it comes to reducing energy costs because they focus primarily on the supply side, and then pick the longest range solution – more domestic oil drilling.

This is ironic since the most recent fall in oil prices and accompanying declines in gasoline prices have resulted from a three-year decline in the number of miles Americans drive. In other words, simple conservation (and perhaps declining economic activity worldwide) have already had a far more dramatic impact on prices than any other action either politicians or oil companies could take. On September 9th, OPEC member voted to cut overall output by more than 500,000 barrels a day as a reaction to falling demand. Yet no leader in Washington is out there cheering the American consumer for doing the right thing.

It's enough to make economists wring their hands in despair. Reduce what you consume and producers have to cut their prices. “It's supply and demand, stupid,” one might image their slogan saying.

But what is worse that the lack of understanding and appreciation given to energy conservation is the reckless rhetoric of Republican leaders like Rudy Guiliani, and sadly, John McCain, who seeme determined to seduce Americans into thinking that they can have their SUVs and cheap gas, and that “drilling at home” will not only lower gas prices but create an energy independent America. Oh, and they'll throw in a bridge for good measure.

Senator McCain, who has missed eight votes to extend alternative energy tax cuts, including one that took place while he was in Washington, is not only missing the boat on a new energy industry, but even doing it at the expense of potential jobs in his home state. As Pulitzer Prize winning author, Thomas Friedman, pointed out in a recent interview with Terry Gross, the biggest solar project is ready to launch outside of Phoenix, Arizona, but Senator McCain hasn't bother to show up to vote on an extension that could bring clean energy and good manufacturing jobs to his constituents, (Fresh Air, 9/8/08).

Just as Americans wisely rejected Senator McCain's proposed summer gas tax “holiday” as a cheap gimmick, they should cast a gimlet eye at his proposal that we can drill our way out of our oil addiction. In an election year, politicians will claim you can have your cake and eat it too, but unless you want a severe case of buyer's remorse, voters should pay more attention to who is funding those politicians than to any promises they make.

As The Washington Post reported, “campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Senator John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling,” (7/27/08, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/26/AR2008072601891.html).

Contributions rose to $1.1 million in one month from $208,000 in May, $283,000 in April, and $116,000 in March.

The solution to America's energy needs doesn't have an easy answer. It will require creative thinking, multiple explorations of new cleaner energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, natural gas, biofuels, and carbon capture. It will also require “sacrifice,” on the part of the American consumer, if you can call the conservation efforts so many are already taking part in a “sacrifice.”

But if conservation isn't sexy – it still is the cheapest and most effective solution we have at hand. The least we can ask of our leaders and of our presidential candidates is that they encourage conservation rather than undermine or mock these efforts. They also need to promise voters that their decisions on energy policy will be determined by the advice of the best and brightest among our scientists, economists, and engineers, not the slickest sales pitches of lobbyists representing the old energy industries (oil, gas, coal, and nuclear).

Americans may find the price of gas infuriating, but they shouldn't let that rage make them crazy. At least not crazy enough to fall for the political huckstering we saw at the Republican convention and in the false promises too many politicians are making about the effects of oil drilling.

Because this election is about more that the high price of oil and gas. It's an opportunity for Americans to lead an energy revolution and reinvigorate our economy or find ourselves still trapped in our old addiction while Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and the like laugh all the way to the bank and keep on writing campaign checks to John McCain and the Grand Old Party.

The Day the Unthinkable became a Reality – A 9/11 Remembrance

2008-09-11T11:14:00.001-06:00

The Day the Unthinkable became a Reality – A 9/11 Remembrance

So many of us will never forget where we were when the news came. My husband and I awoke to a phone call from his brother around 6:00 a.m. and I immediately thought, “Someone must have died.” I was right, of course, but not in any way I could have expected or even imagined.

I remember turning on the TV to see the first plane explode and the first building collapse, and I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. “I don't want the kids to see this,” I said turning to my husband, already knowing that this was not only a tragedy but a potential media spectacle.
Recalling how I felt that morning I can't help thinking of Auden's lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along.

I was sleeping peacefully when people leaped out of windows or called loved ones to say farewell or raced up stairwells to try to save people, and that realization makes me feel strangely guilty and yet lucky at the same time as I think, “There but for an act of fate, go I.”

That morning except for the eerily silent skies—no planes were passing overhead-- we determined to go on as normally as we could. I drove the kids to school, I met a friend for lunch as we had planned, my husband went to work. It was only later after we put the kids to bed that we turned on the television and watched and wept.

America lost more than thousands of lives on 9-11. We lost our innocence and our sense of invulnerability from foreign attack in a way more palpable than any experience since Pearl Harbor.

Many people resolved that such an attack would never happen again on U.S. soil, but I don't believe we can prevent every act of terrorism from occurring, whether it results from the actions of another domestic terrorist like Timothy McVeigh or a foreigner like Mohamed Atta.

Yet I do believe that we can do a great deal more to honor those who have lost their lives, and not just by building another memorial, or reciting a list of names, or standing together in a moment of silence.

Those are all honorable acts, but we are capable of a more profound form of remembrance if we take every opportunity to teach our children not only what happened on September 11th but how strongly we must strive to prevent religious extremism or racial, tribal, or ethnic prejudice from allowing us to forget our common humanity.

The terrible acts of September 11th, 2001 were not simply a strike against Americans but against every citizen of the world. They made the unthinkable a reality, and they diminished our sense of our own decency and regard for the sanctity of every living person. If we take this anniversary as an opportunity to affirm those values as a global community, we can make no better tribute to the lives of those we lost on this day seven years ago.

Sarah in Wonderland

2008-09-09T17:35:00.002-06:00

Sarah in Wonderland

It seems incredible that the single nomination of a relatively unknown woman, governor of an enormous yet little populated state, who was mayor of a small town just a short while ago, could have had such a sweeping influence not only on her party but also on media perceptions of the presidential race. But John McCain's nomination of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate seems to have had generated a storm of popular interest, to the point where admirers and detractors alike call her “Hurricane Sarah.”

Trying to figure out just who Sarah Palin is, and what she stands for, much less how she might govern, is a bit like looking at someone in a fun house mirror. Every time you think you've focused on one aspect of the image, you realize that you're just seeing another distortion. To conservative women, especially white conservative women, Sarah Palin is the new Hilary Clinton, a “feminist” they can love because she's so “like them.” For conservative men, Palin seems to be the equivalent of the “trophy wife,” the vice-presidential arm-piece who makes an old and not very inspiring John McCain suddenly seem the man to be envied. And for women on the left who are used to having the “feminist” label to themselves, albeit at the price of being mocked as “feminazis,” Palin is a conundrum: a woman with ambition, drive, and charisma, but who also espouses policies and beliefs that most self-described feminists wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

And then there are the women—of the left, right, and middle-- who don't necessarily want to judge Palin for her individual choices regarding work and family—but who find some of those choices disturbing, not just because Palin has a larger family than the norm but because she has a family with special needs running the gamut from the baby with Down's syndrome to the pregnant teen.

However, Sarah Palin does have a political record, if a brief one, and it tells a story of some interesting reversals and contradictions, especially if you hold it up against the image of Palin we see through the prism of her political handlers or left-wing bloggers or even her own convention speech.

I found it interesting that Anchorage Daily News columnist Michael Carey,who has followed Palin since she ran for governor, described her convention speech “very uncharacteristic” in it partisan attacks. In his judgment, these attacks on Democrats and particularly her attacks on Barack Obama were "probably inserted by some guys who think they're very smart and are from Washington.”

Noting that Palin's political battles in Alaska have been waged more within her own party than across part lines, he added: “People find... it hard to understand that her biggest problem in Alaska has been with the most conservative elite Republicans and with the oil industry. It hasn't been with the Democrats. She's worked well with the Democrats in the legislature. Legislation has passed that she wanted with their assistance, and it's crucial to her to have the Democrats up there,” (“Finding the Real Sarah Palin in her Convention Speech,” Weekend Edition Sunday, 9/7/08, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94365311).

Palin may compare herself to a “pitbull with lipstick,” but in fact her governing record on spending tax dollars has been less ideological than pragmatic. When it suited her interests to lobby for millions of dollars in earmarks, she did so, even as she now criticizes Obama for also engaging in earmark spending, something you'd be hard pressed to find any Congressperson not guilty of. The infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” to which Palin claims she said, “thanks but no thanks,” was in fact a bridge that she supported during her 2006 campaign for governor. She only formally rejected the project after Congress deleted wording specifying funds for the bridge and when it was a political dead horse (see Politifact.com http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/680/).

What voters may want to consider in thinking about Palin is not just the relative brevity of her tenure as governor (18 months), but the fact that she has been governing a state with a substantial surplus and no major crises. Apart from her success in negotiating with oil companies and getting a new gas pipeline, Governor Palin has undertaken no other policy initiatives. Ironically, one of her biggest detractors is Republican State Senate Leader Lyda Green, who said she thought it was a joke when someone called her to tell her that Palin had been selected as McCain's running mate. "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" Green told The Anchorage Daily News (8/28/08 http://www.adn.com/politics/story/510249.htm). Green is also from Palin's hometown of Wasilla.

Finally, although Palin has been upfront about her pro-life ideology and open about her religious beliefs, she has yet to provide full disclosure of her views on the separation of church and state and to what extent her religious views will inform her public policy.

Many conservatives have condoned and even celebrated Palin's teenage daughter's choice to have her baby as palpable evidence of her pro-life credentials, even though the pregnancy also violates the conservative belief in abstinence before marriage.

But what does Palin think about teen pregnancy and public policy? Does she remain committed to abstinence only sex education in the face of this personal instance of its failure?

And what about her views of the Iraq war as a reflection of a divine plan? "Pray [for] our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country — that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," Palin told the Wasilla Assembly of God this past June.

Some might wonder about how this view of U.S. military policy would play in international circles, particularly in Muslim countries where an explicitly Christian rhetoric evokes fears of age old Western assaults on Islam as President George W. Bush found out when he used the term “crusade” to describe the war.

Before voters assume they know who Sarah Palin is, they should be asking some hard questions about Palin's past and contrasting her record in Alaska with the new political makeover of Sarah Palin as Vice-Presidential messiah to the Republican party.

California Dreaming

2008-09-09T15:47:00.001-06:00

California Dreaming

Every day I seem to hear yet another news story about the demise of the “California Dream.” From Sacramento to Fresno to Los Angeles to San Diego, people seem to be losing their homes, losing their nerve, and seeking their dream of a better life outside the Golden State. I hear their complaints: plummeting housing prices, a high cost of living, traffic, too many people fighting for too few resources, and my rational side says, “Of course, they're right; California is overcrowded, overpriced, and overrun.”

But my California dream is located in a beautiful corner the Bay Area peninsula, where the housing crisis hasn't reached the same monumental proportions that people have seen in other parts of the state, and where my memories of fog rolling over the Santa Cruz Mountains, or the sun rising over the South Bay still tug at my heart strings.

So my family is bucking the trend of the California exodus. We just moved back to Palo Alto, California from Albuquerque, New Mexico this summer, primarily because of me, a 45-year-old not-quite-stay-at-home mom. I want to reclaim my California dream, which means getting off the freeway, out of the car, and back into a suburb with a small-town feel, where I can bike to get groceries, and my kids can go to good public schools.

Huh? Yes, New Mexico did live up to its reputation as a slow and easy land of mañana, but I also discovered that getting around Albuquerque meant spending a good part of every day in my car, and ultimately I was willing to trade the beautiful wide open spaces I could see from almost every part of the city for a more densely populated suburb where just about everything is accessible on foot, bike, bus or train.

Now it takes me about two weeks to empty my gas tank, and I love that feeling that every trip I make on my own power is one less contribution to the smog that is the downside of daily life in the Bay Area.

In fact, it nearly deflated my euphoria at the prospect of coming home to see the brown haze spread all over Silicon Valley when we first crossed over from I-5 in the middle of August. I hadn't remembered the air quality being quite that bad, and after the clear, intensely blue skies of the Southwest, I did stop to think, “What in the world am I doing to my lungs moving back to this?”

It still gives me a twinge every time I climb the hills behind Stanford University where I have an unrestricted view of the valley from San Francisco to Oakland to San Jose and see the smog that hangs over the whole expanse, especially in the hot still days of late summer when there's no breeze to blow it all over to the Central Valley (another source of guilt for Bay Area residents).

But if home is smoggier and more crowded than I remember, it's also full of friends who have welcomed us all back so warmly that I can't believe my good fortune. It seems that every day I run into someone else who says, “You're back! We're so glad you're back with us!” and I think that wherever you live, the real sense of being at home comes from the community you find and build there.

Seize the Day

2008-07-16T14:08:00.003-06:00

Seize the Day

New Mexicans joke that this state is the land of “mañana,” and before I leave I am going to purchase my favorite T-shirt which has the slogan: “Carpe mañana.” However, now that my sojourn here is winding down to its last thirty days, I'm thinking more along the lines of the original Latin - “Carpe diem” and trying to take advantage of all the unique experiences Albuquerque has to offer.

First and foremost that means early morning bike rides along the “bosque,” the forested area of cottonwoods and native trees that runs along the Rio Grande about a quarter mile from my house. In this area of New Mexico the Rio Grande is not very impressive - “el rio no muy grande” (the river that is not very “grande”) is a family joke, but the ribbon of green that borders the river on either side is very impressive, a striking vision of green in a landscape that otherwise paints itself in muted tones of browns, yellows, and the darker blues and greys of the mountains.

At 7:00 a.m. with a cool breeze blowing across my face, it's just about the most wonderful thing I can imagine to bike along side the river and have the city disappear from view as the green space on either side and the gentle slope of the hills create the illusion that there are no housing developments over the horizon. A gentle curve brings me face to face with the Sandia Mountains, bathed in the soft light of the morning sunrise or cloud-covered as they are so often now in monsoon season.

A family of geese will waddle across the bike path; a rabbit will dart in front of me; or a road-runner disappear into the brush with a lizard in its mouth. Only once or twice have I seen a coyote, but I know they are there as well, waiting in the shadows.

For a brief hour I can imagine there really still is a “wilderness” in this metropolis of 600,000, and even when another biker or walker or roller-blader crosses my path, there is the pleasant exchange of “Good morning” or “Passing on your left,” followed by “Thanks” and a wave.

I kick myself for not having discovered this pleasure when I first arrive, for letting the goat thorns that deflated my tires, or the homesickness that made any sight of the desert unwelcome, keep me from the pleasures of speeding or strolling along a path that brings me in view of all the beauties Albuquerque has to offer while conveniently obscuring its urban sprawl.

Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

2008-07-09T20:02:00.002-06:00

Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

It's the fate of a progressive Democrat. You keep hoping this time your party is going to tie the knot and make all your dreams come true, and there you find yourself all alone at the chapel, jilted one more time as Democrats make nice with the Bush administration allegedly to court the “center” of the electorate.

Actually, I've never been that naïve about any political party, but it has been a hard slog these past eight years watching the Bush Administration and a Republican-controlled Congress eviscerate the regulatory authority of agencies from the EPA to NEA, try to deep-six any factual information about climate change, and wreak havoc with the Constitution, especially when it comes to Americans' civil liberties.

But I really feel betrayed by Democrats over the recent so-called “compromise” FISA legislation which is less “compromise” than “capitulation” by the one group of politicians progressives have supported through thick and thin, mostly thin, for the last eight years.

What is going on with the Democratic party? Here we have a piece of legislation that will tear the guts out of a law Democrats sought as a check on unbridled executive power when Nixon authorized the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters that created the Watergate scandal. And yet Democrats are voluntarily lying down in front of this legislative steamroller, led by Representative Steny Hoyer, and Senators Pelosi and Reid, as if they had never heard of Nixon, Watergate, and have suffered collective amnesia about the Bush administration's repeated attempts to subvert constitutional checks on its power at every turn. Have they even read any of Bush's recent signing statements?

I hate to seem paranoid, but I can can only wonder what the telecommunications lobbyists have been up to on Capitol Hill lately. According to Wired, for example, “Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to [Senator Jay] Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon),” (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/dem-pushing-spy.html). Jay Rockefeller is one of the main proponents of the “compromise” legislation.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has “dozens of lobbyists [with] political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate,” according to USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-23-mccainlobbyists_N.htm).

According to statistics compiled by MAPlight.org, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave contributions averaging $8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for the telecommunications companies and $4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity. 88% of the Democrats who changed their position to support immunity(83 of 94 Democratic representatives) received PAC contributions from telecommunications companies affected by the proposed legislation during the last three years.

As the late Molly Ivins used to say, “It's not that they sell themselves that hurts, it's that they sell themselves so damned cheap.”

From the 69-28 vote in the Senate today, it's clear that Democrats really don't want to fight the administration any longer to protect Americans from whole-sale spying. Instead they've been buying into the Republican spin that we should protect and even thank these “patriotic” corporations for their assistance in the fight on terrorism. Oh sure, please read my email, listen into my phone calls – does anybody really care about unreasonable search and seizure anymore?

I wish I could still find words to convey a sense of outrage that this latest assault on the very values we once fought an empire over – the right to free from government intrusion on our lives – has now been turned on its head – and any resistance to government intrusion recast as “unpatriotic.” But frankly, I feel exhausted by the accumulation of eight years of being told we have to give up our civil liberties in order to be “safe” without anyone debating whether we really want to be safe at that price.

But I should remind Democrats that in an election when every vote counts, they may have sold their patriotism cheap. The same progressive anger that fueled the rise of internet political actions groups like MoveOn.org can easily turn off a significant portion of their base support if voters like me are so disgusted with their so-called compromise that we keep our money in our pockets and turn out as merely opponents of John McCain instead of partisans for Barack Obama. Change needs to mean something, and one of things it has to mean is a serious commitment to restoring Americans' civil liberties and putting real limits on executive power.

Alienation at the Art Museum

2008-07-07T20:47:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago I visited the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and it sparked an epiphany: I really don't enjoy viewing art in the constrained circumstances that many museums now impose.

I still love going to a museum like The Metropolitan in Manhattan where you can get lost in small rooms where only one or two visitors ever venture or where you can see so much art (the Egyptian tombs, for example, or the amazing new installation of Greek and Roman statuary) in natural light.

Of course, I recognize that many art works cannot be placed in natural sunlight without suffering damage, but does that mean that the artificial lighting in so many museums has to be so poor? At the Blanton I simply gave up trying to look at one Frederic Remington painting because the glare from the artificial lighting on it made it impossible to see one section of the canvas; no matter where I moved, it was obscured by a stubborn bar of refracted light.

More and more art museums also seem calculated to keep the viewer at distance and to impose a sense of constant surveillance more in keeping with a prison than an institution designed to let people see and enjoy art. Between the checking of bags, the security gates, and the fish-eye you get from the guards, you might find an eerie resemblance to the TSA. “Will they ask us to take off our shoes next?” I wondered to myself.

For example, if you have any kind of purse (especially the small backpack kind), a guard will descend on you and tell you it's not allowed because you might back into an artwork. I'd like to hear of an actual instance of this happening, and every time I have to listen to this rationale delivered in the falsely apologetic tones of a customer service operator, I want to ask the guard: “Oh really, and when did this last occur?” I really can't imagine backing into an art work because viewing art is a visual experience, stupid, and what would be the point of approaching it backwards?

However, in this instance, I once again divested myself of wallet, keys and other ID to the relative security of a coin-operated locker and returned to the gallery where I hoped I could browse undisturbed.

At the Blanton, before you can enter any gallery, you first have to pass through an enormous hall that opens up to the second story with a broad staircase that is blindingly (and I mean literally blindingly) white. Each time I ascended and descended this staircase, I kept my eyes firmly fixed on my feet hoping I wouldn't trip and fall.

The hall has all the charm and warmth of an operating room; as far as I could tell there was no artwork whatsoever in it – no tapestries or wall hangings or anything to break the sterile expanse of whiteness stretching in every direction. It made me want to run for cover.

Once past this alienating entryway, I did discover one of the best collections of contemporary Latin American art that I've seen in recent years, and my mood had improved a good deal while I was wandering through it. Yet here there were also not too subtle messages keeping me at arm's length, this time in the form of lines drawn around various installations and signs indicating that one should never touch the art work or cross those clearly demarcated boundaries.

And I thought to myself, “Why should art only be seen and not touched?” Public art rarely has this “Noli me tangere/don't touch me” aura about it so that students can happily rub the protruding foot of a statue of a former Yale president without anyone frowning at them, and even hold weddings in front of Rodin's “The Gates of Hell” on the Stanford campus without anyone giving them notice of trespass or bad taste.

I remember looking at late paintings by Monet and wanting so badly to touch the thick swabs of paint on the canvas and trace their swirls with my fingertips. Sacrilege, clearly. But would it be so out of bounds for modern artists to consider making their work a little more interactive? Maybe they could provide even a sample section of canvas for visitors to touch and hold and add a tactile dimension to their visual experience.

I believe this need to touch art is deeply embedded in our psyche from childhood. Who can't remember seeing something both crafted and beautiful as a young child and wanting to hold it but being told, “No, no, don't touch, just look”? For me these early aesthetic experiences were intensely frustrating, resulting in furtive attempts to hold a figurine or a china cup when I wasn't being observed.

I was reminded of this tension between “art” as object only to be viewed and “art” as object to be touched when I was in the Dallas airport during the holidays, and a voice came over the PA system to request that the “parent or person responsible for the child climbing the public art work please retrieve him.” I knew immediately that the child in question was my youngest son, and I was torn between fury that he had disobeyed my strict injunction not to climb the art and my frustration at the utter stupidity of this rule.

After all, place a steel structure that looks like skyscrapers fused together at odd angles with a hollow interior and convenient little fissures that look just like foot and hand holds in an airport terminal, and what would you expect a normal five-year-old to do? “Just look at it?” I thought incredulously as I ran over to retrieve my son and listen to the same-old, same-old spiel from the security guard. “If he'd fallen, he could have been killed,” he lectured me, adding the threat of mortal danger to the relatively innocent faux pas of not keeping an eye on my kid.

It didn't surprise me at all when I read the other day that one of the things mothers wanted most from the developers of a new shopping mall was “art their kids could play around or climb on.” What could be more natural?

And what could be a greater act of poetic justice? After all, a good deal of modern and post-modern art is all about the impulse to shock its bourgeois viewers out of their complacency. Why not turn the tables and break the conventions of viewership? Let's break at least a few of the barriers keeping art at arm's length and bring more artworks into the public sphere that can be touched, walked on, even surmounted by little boys with good climbing skills.

No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

2008-06-19T10:31:00.002-06:00

No Summer Vacation for Attacks on our Civil Liberties

It might seem that June has been a great month for advocates of civil liberties, particularly with the Supreme Court's stinging rebuke of the Bush Administrations to deny prisoners at Guantanamo due process and the rights of habeas corpus.

But if it seems that enemy combatants will finally get a chance to confront their accusers in court, Americans at home are facing the prospect of more spying on every phone call, every key stroke, every text message they send.

Nor will they ever be able to find out if their telecommunications companies spied on them and how extensive that spying was.

Why? Because it appears that Democrats may be getting ready to capitulate to a lame duck administration and effectively grant these telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution.

Even more cynically, they are dressing up this capitulation with a legal fig leaf. Congressional aides have leaked the information that a new bill will allow the “federal district court deciding on retroactive immunity [to] review whether there was 'substantial evidence' the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.”

In other words, these companies only have to demonstrate that the Bush Administration told them the spying was legal and they're off the hook, not just for the spying they've allegedly engaged in, but for all future spying. As long as our government gives them a “Get out of Jail Free” card in advance, they can spy on as much as they want, and we'll never know if, when, or how much.

A New York Times June 18^th editorial entitled, “Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights,” notes that “approving [such] immunity would be tantamount to retroactively declaring the spying operation to have been legal.” Even worse, according to this editorial, is that the new “compromise” bill would give the government “too much leeway to acquire communications in the United States without individual warrants or even a showing of probable cause, greatly reduce judicial review, and remain in force for six years, which is too long.”

What should anger all Americans is that this important legislation which undermines our Constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure is being passed in the last days of a Presidential administration when voters are on vacation, distracted with high energy costs, and generally not paying attention to anything except the election campaigns.

Sidelining this legislation would do nothing to jeopardize current and ongoing efforts to fight terrorism. Current FISA legislation still lets the Bush Administration spy now and get a warrant later.

So why is Congress rushing to pass this ill-considered immunity for telecommunications companies and an even worse sell out of our civil liberties? And where is the Democratic leadership of Steny Hoyer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and yes, Barack Obama, on this issue?

Maybe Americans should call their representatives and tell them that even if they're on vacation, they're not out to lunch when it comes to their basic rights and corporate accountability.

Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

2008-06-19T09:54:00.001-06:00

Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

This past week I attended “family orientation” at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn't quite sure what this was going to turn out to be.

After all, when I went off to college twenty-seven years ago, my mother dropped me and my trunk off at my dorm room and left the next day. My husband's family simply put him on a plane and trusted a family friend to transport him to campus. They didn't ask for information about my classes or student support services or safety on campus, although my family, I must admit, was half hoping I'd become desperately homesick and think about attending a school closer to home.

But here I was, almost thirty years later, in a beautifully appointed, air-conditioned ballroom with hundreds of other middle-aged men and women listening to administrators, college kids, and deans reassure us over and over with the mantra: “We're going to take care of your kids. We're going to take care of your kids.”

At first this seemed like a kind gesture, and then it started to feel almost a little creepy, as if they were all expecting us to burst into tears and grab our kids saying, “You can't have them! You can't have them!”

A couple of days later after I had had some time to think about this some more, I began to wonder what motivates this kind of concern on the part of universities and colleges to try to make parents feel comfortable about leaving their kids in a “safe” environment.

Is it because college costs so much these days that schools feel they must treat families like customers and make them feel better about the “product” (a college education) they are purchasing?

Is it because more families are sending their kids to college and this elicits more anxiety in families who have never sent a child away to school?

Is it because of media coverage of sensational crimes on campuses like the shooting at Virginia Tech?

Are we all now living in a culture of fear that may magnify the real dangers we face in everyday life?

Are middle-class kids so much more sheltered now growing up when they spend most most hours of the day supervised at day-care, school, after-school activities, and sports that the transition to the independence of college living is a much bigger step towards adulthood than it used to be?

For me, thinking about this anxiety about the safety of my children made me realize once again how ambivalent I feel about our cultural obsession with eliminating every possible danger.

At some point, it seems counter-productive, the same way we've discovered that using anti-bacterial household products have made our homes “too” clean so that our kids may be underexposed to enough germs to generate a healthy auto-immune response or that we may be risking creating “superbugs” that our drugs can't treat.

If my kids hadn't biked to school on their own, or taken public transportation on their own, even traveled by themselves, I'd be a lot more worried about how my oldest son would make the transition to college.

But with a functioning cell phone, common sense, and his karate training, I don't worry too much about his physical safety. We don't live in a perfectly safe world, and I know that really terrible things can happen when a young person is the wrong place at the wrong time, but I also trust that most of the time we are perfectly safe, and perhaps safer than we assume

So after we get back home from orientation, I'm going to put my son on a plane to college by himself and trust a family friend to help him get his stuff to campus. Even after thirty years, I don't think the world is a much more dangerous place for most of us.

So thanks UT-Austin for the pep talk, but I already know I can't keep my son under my care and supervision forever, and I don't even want to. He's ready to taken on his new-found independence and so am I.

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long - The realities of off-shore oil drilling

2008-06-19T09:16:00.003-06:00

Instant Gratification Takes Too Long! The Realities of Offshore Oil Drilling

When I hear politicians like John McCain, Dick Cheney, John Sununu, and now more shamefully, Mel Martinez, tell the American public that off-shore oil drilling will lower gas prices (eventually), I can only think of that moment in the movie Postcards from the Edge where Meryl Streep mutters “instant gratification takes too long” as she's lying in bed in a rehab center while her mother (Shirley McClaine) chatters on about her career, oblivious to what her daughter really needs.

Once again politicians are also playing the role of overbearing stage mother, telling Americans that if they just let a little oil drilling take place off shore, all will be well again, just trust them, okay? Yeah right. Even if we were to open up every coastline and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling tomorrow, the earliest we'd see a drop of that oil at the pump would be in seven to ten years.

The only instant gratification that anyone is getting in this sorry political sham is the gratification of politicians who are running scared from the anger of their constituents over soaring prices at the pump. They think they've hit on a quick fix to placate the voters and they're trying to sell this snake oil, hoping that emotion rather than reason will hold sway over Americans, at least until November.

Scamming the voters only becomes sweeter if you're a politician who has accepted money from oil and gas interests, or if you and your friends have substantial investments in these industries.

For years Republicans have preached the same mantra to American energy needs: drill, drill, and drill some more, just at they respond to every economic bump by chanting: cut taxes, cut taxes, and cut taxes again, especially for those at the top 1% of the income scale.

Before Americans are taken in by this mantra, they might want to remember the rosy scenarios for oil prices that Republicans fed them before the Iraq War, and look how much that war has cost us, not only at the gas pump, but in terms of our national debt, and the lives of families who have lost sons or daughters or seen them severely injured both physically and mentally.

Is this really the party we want to trust to direct America's energy future?

Certainly Americans are right to be upset about the sharp spike in gasoline prices that has caught everyone off-guard, but that anger should be directed at both Republicans and Democrats for always directing energy policy first towards supply and hardly ever at demand.

In fact, most Americans are voting with their feet on gas prices by keeping them firmly fixed on the brakes instead of the gas pedal and reducing the number of miles driven for a record six consecutive months, an historical record.

Congress and the Bush administration could encourage and reward these grass-roots conservation efforts by creating tax credits for the purchase of hybrid or high mileage vehicles or by offering emergency funding to towns and cities who are finding themselves overwhelmed by increased use of mass transit, or even by providing block grants to states to fund additional forms of public transportation.

Even if some portion of the current rise in oil and gas prices stems from market speculators, Americans must face the new reality that they are competing globally with expanding economies in Asia for a limited supply of energy, and no amount of raving at your representative or senator will change that.

Americans should reject the quick fix of politicians who tell them oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters will do anything to help them with today's energy realities.

Republican politicians are taking the approach of those quick weight loss ads telling Americans that they can shed 10 pounds in two weeks and refusing to face the harsh reality that oil prices are simply and stubbornly set by supply and demand. The statistics are stark – the U.S. has roughly 3% of the world's oil reserves and consumes about 25% of current supply.

We can no longer drill or fight our way into an adequate supply of oil. Instead, it is time for Americans to look seriously at what they can do to reduce their demand.

Many of us are already doing this; it's too bad politicians can't follow their example because in the case of energy, instant gratification really does take too long.

Saying Good-bye, Saying Hello

2008-05-24T18:18:00.000-06:00

Just about two weeks ago I made a major decision about my future. After spending three years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I followed my husband (and his start-up job), I decided that it was time to return home to California with the kids.

This means leaving my husband behind for an indefinite period of time, turning myself into a single mom for the duration, and finding out what a commuter marriage is like. The prospect is both frightening and strangely exhilarating.

For months I avoided making this decision, thinking that I could make it through one more year in New Mexico even though I really haven't found full-time work that I enjoy. I had also been giving into pressure from my teen-ager who feels ambivalent about leaving, now that he's made good friends here as well as back in California.

But I soon realized that I was letting fear drive my decision-making, choosing the comfort of my safety net here with my husband and family even as I felt constricted by those same bonds.

“What's wrong with you?” I asked myself. “If there women who can endure eighteen-month deployments of their husbands to Iraq and Afghanistan, surely you can survive in Palo Alto?”

So here I am, forty-five, an unemployed Comparative Literature Ph.D. about to broach the job market in Silicon Valley with my two kids in tow, and a determination to get my career back on track again after a three year hiatus.

The more time that passes since I reached this decision, the better I feel about it, especially since I know I can count on my husband to support me, to talk to me, to sense how I'm really feeling and respond accordingly.

It was a risk moving to Albuquerque three years ago, and in some ways, it's a risk going back to California on my own, but what better time to take risks than in middle age when the worst thing that can happen to you is getting stuck in your ways? I'd rather fall on my face taking a chance on my own than hunker down in my comfortable domesticity for twelve more months. And that more than anything is the reason I'm saying good-bye to the many good friends I've made here in the southwest and hello again to the friends I left behind me.

California Courts Overrule the Ban on Gay Marriage

2008-05-16T16:48:00.002-06:00

California Courts Overrule the Ban on Gay Marriage – But are Americans Ready to Accept It?

Until yesterday gay marriage seemed to have fallen off the radar screen of hot button political topics, as the public and politicians increasingly looked to “civil unions” as a solution to the problem of offering homosexual men and women a way to legalize their unions without touching the sacred cow of heterosexual marriage.

But now the California Supreme Court has blown that strategy wide open by ruling that the state's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and effectively treats “gay individuals and same-sex couples [as] in some respects second-class citizens” (http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S147999.PDF).

In other words, the Court sees “civil unions” as akin to the “separate but equal” schools that segregationist states once offered black citizens; in both cases, the Court deemed these alleged “alternatives” equal only name only.

Suddenly, the idea that a state with 12% of the nation's population and an even larger proportion of its gay citizens could offer those citizens a legal recognition of their same-sex unions is not just a theoretical prospect; it could become a reality in as little as 30 days.

But while gay rights supporters rejoice, they also must face the sobering prospect that this ruling is not a definitive one, and the memories of the short-lived celebrations of gay marriages in San Francisco under Mayor Gavin Newsom in February 2004, could make many people reluctant to celebrate too soon. For conservatives are already gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution specifically to exclude same-sex couples from marriage rights.

At the same time, moderates who support civil unions as a first step towards gay marriage, may feel uneasy at this precipitate move by the California Supreme Court, fearing a backlash from social conservatives who not only oppose gay marriage, but also gay civil rights.

In the presidential race, the Democratic front runners, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, will have to walk a tight-rope between gay rights advocates, and those who either think civil unions are good enough or those on the socially conservative spectrum of the Democratic party who might bolt to the McCain camp if the candidates get too far ahead of mainstream public opinion on controversial social issues like gay marriage and abortion.

Certainly, gay marriage opponents have been quick to condemn the California Court's ruling in statements rife with words like “shock” and “outrage.” Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, told Alex Chadwick of NPR's Day to Day that this ruling made people like her “who think that marriage is the union of husband and wife exactly like bigots who opposed interracial marriage” and argued that they “will be treated like racists in the public square,” (May 16, 2008).

But if social conservatives are expressing anger, they may well find themselves swimming against a tide of public opinion that has turned away from their attitudes towards same-sex marriage in the intervening years since California voters passed a gay marriage ban in 2000.

The Pew Research Center finds that opposition to gay marriage has fallen 12% since February 2004, although it remained just over 50% in March of 2006. At the same time, 54% of Americans approve of a legal alternative to marriage for gay couples, and that support is rising, particularly among the young.

For many young people who go to school with growing numbers of their classmates who “come out” in high school or even middle school, the presence of gays in their everyday lives is increasingly perceived as “normal.” On college campuses, where gay couples are even more more common, fewer students are expressing the idea that their gay colleagues have any negative effect on their lives. One 2004 survey found that among those aged 15 to 25 “support for equal protections for gays, seems to cross partisan, ideological, and religious lines,” (http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/FactSheets/Attitudes%202.25.pdf).

Even among the majority of Americans over the age of 25, attitudes towards gays and towards same-sex marriage are also softening as the passage of legislation allowing gay marriage in Massachusetts and civil unions in a number of other states has definitely exploded the conservative canard that gay marriage poses a threat to heterosexual marriage, to young people, or to civil society in general.

Gays are marrying or forming legalized unions in record numbers, and the sky has not fallen. Rather, the public participation of gay couples in our society has made it clear that most of them are not very different at all from their heterosexual counterparts.

In fact, while conservatives like Maggie Gallagher argue that her organization simply wants to defend “marriage” and “religious liberty,” she, and others like her, who oppose gay marriage, never answer the question of how gay marriage injures heterosexual married couples or in any way infringes on their religious freedoms.

Certainly, many Americans do not like the idea of gay marriage, but that is not nearly the same thing as arguing that they are personally injured by its legalization. They are no less “married” in the eyes of the state or according their religious institutions than they were before, and they continue to exercise the same rights and benefits from their marriages as they did before the California Supreme Court ruling.

It may well be that the aftermath of this California court ruling provokes a much smaller and less intense backlash against gay rights than occurred in 2000 when hundreds of gay couples said their vows in San Francisco's city hall.

We may find that with the genie out of the bottle, so to speak, Americans are less fearful of same-sex unions as they live, work, and even worship with men and women who want the same rights as everybody else, the right to live with the person you love and to make that union legal in the eyes of the state and society.

If the California court ruling stands, and the November ballot initiative to write a state constitution ban on same-sex marriage fails, it is likely, as many conservatives fear, that some states will follow suit and that it will be increasingly difficult to maintain consistent legal arguments in favor of a ban on gay marriage. But perhaps, in any case, as more Americans actually see the results of legal gay unions in their communities, the battle over gay marriage may also turn out to be much ado over nothing.

Greening the Rust Belt

2008-04-22T14:02:00.001-06:00

Greening the Rust Belt

In general the news coming out of the industrial cities of the Midwest is fairly grim these days: we have the houses selling for less than $1,000 in Cleveland and Detroit, gas prices are taking a huge toll on the auto industry, and consumer spending, the engine of economic prosperity, has taken a nose dive.

Yet there are signs of hope in the Midwestern rust belt, as many cities and small towns look towards alternative energy sources as a way to save money during the current economic downturn and also find new sources of economic development. For example, in a rural school district in the “thumb” area of Michigan with lots of wind, the Lakers School district has received biodiesel grants, energy smart incentives and most recently, a biomass grant. Three years ago the junior high principal received more than a quarter million dollars from the Michigan Public Service Commission to purchase wind turbines that now provide almost all the power for the elementary school and the superintendent's home.

This spring Lakers junior high school students will press oil from soybeans and sunflowers for bio-diesel and learn how to use the anaerobic processor, which breaks down biodegradable waste into methane that can be used for power. Many see this exposure to “green” technology as a way of giving a new generation important job skills and of stopping the “brain drain” of the young who continue to move out of states like Michigan in search of better economic opportunities, (Amy http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89369909)

As the federal government has failed to provide incentives for energy conservation, Midwestern cities and local communities are taking the initiative themselves to cut their energy use and reduce their contribution to greenhouse gases. Ann Arbor, Michigan, is replacing the bulbs in its street lamps with light-emitting diodes (LED's) to reduce its energy usage. In Chicago, 15 million square feet of rooftops are being overhauled and landscaped with gardens that can keep reduce temperatures by as much as 70 degrees. The first garden which was planted on top of City Hall cut the building's power bill by more than 10% in the first year. (See Jim Carlton's article, “Nine Cities, Nine Ideas, The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2008 – http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120248655589254033-o_E8MSu_lUbSRP8Bp8Y_xHWoPVg_20090210.html?mod=rss_free).

These local initiatives represent more than just a way for cash-strapped cities and municipalities to save money.

Across the US more than 700 mayors have signed an agreement to follow the goals of the Kyoto Protocols, and their cumulative efforts are fueling grassroots demands that Congress and the Bush Administration get serious about reducing energy consumption and our national dependence on foreign oil.

Last November, governors of Western and Midwestern states followed suit by signing agreements to reduce carbon emissions and to create cap-and-trade systems to meet their targets.

Earlier this month attorneys general from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia, plus representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the cities of New York and Baltimore, and several environmental organizations filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency to force it to follow last year's Supreme Court ruling that that agency must decide whether to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, from motor vehicles, “States Sue EPA Over Global Warming,” AP, April 2, 2008. See http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iqGMrzmNKuHg8Hmz_YBFYQvY4J4AD8VPQO080.

So if you're feeling a little helpless on Earth Day as the headlines tell us the economy is tanking, gas prices are sky-rocketing, and many feel anxiety about the future of the US economy, it's reassuring to see what can happen on the local level, not just to reduce our energy consumption but to develop new technologies and new “green” industries that generate jobs at home.

Torture – Asking the Right Questions

2008-04-21T12:19:00.002-06:00

Torture – Asking the Right Questions

Despite the evidence that our military and CIA interrogators have used torture against prisoners held in Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the American public seems to have put aside concerns about what these practices are doing to our reputation abroad and to our own sense of ourselves as a people who uphold the rule of law, including the Geneva Conventions.

Instead, we have a President who sees himself as the “Decider” and who believes his role as Commander-in-Chief gives him carte blanche to ignore the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution so long as he feels his actions are intended to “fight terrorism” and “to protect the American people.” Given that the moral debate over torture has reached this impasse, we should consider the whole question of torture from a different angle. Instead debating the immorality of using torture, what the American public and the American media should be asking is a simpler question: Does torture work?

Let us for the moment grant the Bush Administration the premise that it might need to use torture under some hypothetical circumstances. What logically follows is a series of questions: What kind of information can be extracted under these circumstances? To what degree is it credible information? And given that our practice of torture renders our own soldiers vulnerable to the same techniques if they are captured on the battlefield, and that it gravely damages our reputation in the world, is torture really worth it?

Sadly, because of the history of torture practices around the world for many centuries, we already know the answers to some of these questions. People under torture will say anything, anything, and especially anything they think their torturers want to hear.

As Ron Suskind notes in his book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” when the United States tortured Abu Zubaydah, an alleged key conspirator of Osama bin Laden, the CIA quickly discovered that their suspect suffered from a host of mental problems and was probably schizophrenic. This unbalanced man under torture began to suggest that everything was a terrorist target, sending our defenses towards the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a number of large malls, in an enormous and ultimately futile expenditure of millions of tax-payer dollars to protect American landmarks that were never targets at all.

The only useful information Abu Zubaydah provided was the identity of the 9-11 central plotter, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who has himself has alleged that he was tortured in secret CIA prisons and has made so many extravagant claims in his Guantanamo Bay confession that many question his veracity as well.

For example, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and currently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University, maintains that Mohammed is a still “a very big fish,” even as he acknowledges that it is “extremely unlikely [he was] involved in all of the more than 30 plots listed” in a Pentagon transcript of his confession (“Sifting Through Mohammed's Confession to Plots,” All Things Considered, March 15, 2007.

Evidence of the damage to the United States' international reputation is unequivocal. Repressive governments like of Russia and China use the alleged threat of “terrorism” to justify the often brutal tactics the take against their own citizens.

Worse, resentment against US policies in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, especially the occupation of Iraq makes ordinary citizens less willing to help, even in the legitimate quest to fight terrorism.

Dr. Steven Krull testified before the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight on May 17, 2007 and noted that “Muslims share the worldwide view that the US does not live up to its own ideals of international law and democracy.” But anti-American feeling has also intensified in recent years. Dr. Krull pointed out that eight in ten people in the four Islamic countries he studied believe that the United States is intentionally seeking “to weaken and divide the Islamic world.” Because many Muslims see the United States such a great threat, they have begun “to suppress their moral doubts about al Qaeda.” The practical effect of this has “widespread support for attacks on US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, (http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/81.htm).

The United States is already perceived as a kind of “warlord” power in the Middle East, arrogant, hypocritical, and power hungry. Add to this perception, the reports and images of torture used against Muslims that have been disseminated through the news media in the Middle East, and you have a situation where US soldiers are rendered vulnerable even in situations where they are trying to help with reconstruction or just provide security in a situation of near anarchy like Iraq.

The worst effects of the practices of torture endorsed by the Bush Administration have, of course, been felt by the many innocent victims. Kahlid El-Masri, a German citizen, was picked up, flown to Afghanstan and tortured by the CIA and then released without charge after the Bush Administration realized it had the wrong man. Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was apprehended when in was in transit between flights in New York. Through the euphemistic “extraordinary rendition” program he was sent to his native country where he was was brutally tortured and then released without charge. Arar told Jane Mayer in a New Yorker article that “he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. 'You just give up,' he said. 'You become like an animal,'” (“Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America's 'extraordinary rendition' program,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6 ).

Dr. Steven Miles in a June 2006 Morning Edition interview about his book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror, claims that "torture has never been confined to narrow channels,” and argues against its utility on the grounds that it “yields bad information,” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5516533).

The book adds to the many documented accounts of people who have been sent to Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan or to secret CIA prisons where torture is freely practiced.

In one harrowing account Dr. Miles presents the case of a young taxi driver who, in yet another case of mistaken identity, was apprehended in Afghanistan by US soldiers and tortured to death over a series of days. The first autopsy found that Dilawar's death was a “homicide, caused by 'blunt force injuries to lower extremities'...later a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were 'pulpified' and that the body looked as if it had been 'run over by a truck.'” Dilawar's family ultimately received three different death certificates as the Pentagon gradually changed its claim that he had died “of natural causes” to admitting that he had been seriously beaten. No one was charged with murder.

So when we think about the relative merits of torture, even from a practical standpoint, the evidence against its efficacy is overwhelming. Torture is unreliable, damaging to our national reputation abroad, and ultimately responsible for causing irreparable harm to many when our government fails time and time again to substantiate its suspicions of terrorism or even terrorist intent.

As American citizens, do we really want to go on deluding ourselves that we're living in an episode of 24? Or do we have the rational principles and the moral stomach to look at what our government has wrought by using torture in the name of “protecting” American citizens and utterly reject this madness? If we continue on this path will we have any standing at all in the court of world opinion for claiming that we are different from repressive governments around the world whose attitude towards torture is at least more honest, if just as brutal? And when will we come clean with our citizenry about what we are doing to people in the name of fighting terrorism?