confessions of a former optimist

I have always been an optimist. Or perhaps I should say I was always an optimist until the last few years. This has little or nothing to do with my personal life experiences. I maintained an optimistic outlook during unemployment, poverty, cancer, divorce, and many other personal trials, and recent years have been kind to my husband and I in many ways. 

Moreover, my optimism had was not based on ignorance of the worlds problems and issues. My parents brought me up to be highly aware of the dire circumstance of poverty, war, brutality, pain and suffering that others in the world suffered. I was brought up to care about and fight for equality, freedom, and opportunity for others. I was a realist optimist. 

I can remember reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs in high school and she had this very apt description of Aquarius that fit me to a "T": 

"Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code." 
Goodman, Linda (2011-02-23). Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: Aquarius (Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Set) (Kindle Locations 175-178). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition. 

Later few years later in college I read Yevegeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography  and identified strongly with this passage: 

"My optimism which had been all pink, now had all the colours of the spectrum in it, including black, this is what made it valid and genuine." 

I made my career in sociology a discipline focused on understanding the realities of social life; and I focused on topics of inequality (wealth and poverty), economic and political power (its uses and misuses), and environmental problems. I became more and more versed in what was wrong with human societies, and still I retained optimism that if people properly understood the sources of those problems they could struggle together to make a better world. 

But some where in the past decade, perhaps just the past five years I lost my way. I have come to believe that many of the problems the world is facing can not be fixed, at least not in a way that allows human societies to move forward from where we are now. The inequalities have become so huge, the gaps in power so large, and the many of the environmental problems irreversible without immediate, dramatic reversals in energy, transportation, and food policies that I know will not happen because of those overwhelming inequalities and power differences. 

It feels to me on a daily basis as if those in control of the multinational corporations and the worlds' wealth are deliberately driving humanity towards the edge of destruction, because they believe that there is more profit and more power in creating impoverished and powerless masses, and that the accumulation of vast wealth will some how exempt them from the disasters to come....and who knows, enormous wealth provides a lot of cushion against catastrophe so perhaps they are right. Whether they are right or wrong they are acting as if they, and their children and grandchildren will be immune. 

I do not believe humans are headed to extinction - even as we drive many other species to extinction - but I do believe that we are headed to a lot of hunger, disease and death, and the break down of much of modern industrial society.  

I also believe that within that disaster lies the possibility for vibrant, localized, lower tech, sustainable communities to come out from the other side of the disaster - perhaps many decades on the other side. I also believe that there are people around the world who are doing enormously good things to build social capital, make connections, create local food webs, advance new forms of spirituality  and environmental awareness, and to create support networks that may be the tenuous bridges that we will need to reach that sustainable future on the other side of disaster. 

I know some of those people doing good work and dreaming good dreams. Most of them are far away from me and I only have contact with them through Facebook. It is this lack of direct connection that I think has given birth to my despair.  I want to be part of the bridge building, but no longer know how to make the connections.  I know longer feel it in my soul the way I once did. I feel weighted down by the presence of so many whose response to the uncertainty and fear that they feel in their bones is to cling to a mythical past that never existed and demand that nothing change or that changes should be to a more restrictive, narrower, meaner, less inclusive future. 

How Can We Value Necessary Work?

A friend of mine posted a link to a very interesting blog post:  Being Blog - The Work We Value, The Intelligence We Ignore: Is the Work that Made America Great Valued Any Longer?  The focus of the post was on the testimony from Mike Rowe, the creator and host of Dirty Jobs, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the current contradiction in the American labor force.  Today, while we have high unemployment, we also have thousands of skilled, blue-collar, manual labor jobs that are going unfilled. Here is Mr. Rowe's testimony in its entirety:

“Chairman Rockefeller, Ranking Member Hutchison and members of this committee, my name is Mike Rowe, and I want to thank you all very much for the opportunity to testify before you today.

I’m here today because of my grandfather.

His name was Carl Knobel, and he made his living in Baltimore as a master electrician. He was also a plumber, a mechanic, a mason, and a carpenter. Everyone knew him as a jack-of-all-trades. I knew him as a magician.

For most of his life, my grandfather woke up clean and came home dirty. In between, he accomplished things that were nothing short of miraculous. Some days he might re-shingle a roof. Or rebuild a motor. Or maybe run electricity out to our barn. He helped build the church I went to as a kid, and the farmhouse my brothers and I grew up in. He could fix or build anything, but to my knowledge he never once read the directions. He just knew how stuff worked.

I remember one Saturday morning when I was 12. I flushed the toilet in the same way I always had. The toilet however, responded in a way that was completely out of character. There was a rumbling sound, followed by a distant gurgle. Then, everything that had gone down reappeared in a rather violent and spectacular fashion.

Naturally, my grandfather was called in to investigate, and within the hour I was invited to join he and my dad in the front yard with picks and shovels.

By lunch, the lawn was littered with fragments of old pipe and mounds of dirt. There was welding and pipe-fitting, blisters and laughter, and maybe some questionable language. By sunset we were completely filthy. But a new pipe was installed, the dirt was back in the hole, and our toilet was back on its best behavior. It was one of my favorite days ever.

Thirty years later in San Francisco when my toilet blew up again. This time, I didn't participate in the repair process. I just called my landlord, left a check on the kitchen counter, and went to work. When I got home, the mess was cleaned up and the problem was solved. As for the actual plumber who did the work, I never even met him.

It occurred to me that I had become disconnected from a lot of things that used to fascinate me. I no longer thought about where my food came from, or how my electricity worked, or who fixed my pipes, or who made my clothes. There was no reason to. I had become less interested in how things got made, and more interested in how things got bought.

At this point my grandfather was well into his 80s, and after a long visit with him one weekend, I decided to do a TV show in his honor. Today, Dirty Jobs is still on the air, and I am here before this committee, hoping to say something useful. So, here it is.

I believe we need a national PR Campaign for Skilled Labor. A big one. Something that addresses the widening skills gap head on, and reconnects the country with the most important part of our workforce.

Right now, American manufacturing is struggling to fill 200,000 vacant positions. There are 450,000 openings in trades, transportation and utilities. The skills gap is real, and it’s getting wider. In Alabama, a third of all skilled tradesmen are over 55. They’re retiring fast, and no one is there to replace them.

Alabama’s not alone. A few months ago in Atlanta I ran into Tom Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture. Tom told me about a governor who was unable to move forward on the construction of a power plant. The reason was telling. It wasn't a lack of funds. It wasn't a lack of support. It was a lack of qualified welders.

In general, we’re surprised that high unemployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage. We shouldn't be. We’ve pretty much guaranteed it.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree. And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber — if you can find one — is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.

I came here today because guys like my grandfather are no less important to civilized life than they were 50 years ago. Maybe they’re in short supply because we don’t acknowledge them they way we used to. We leave our check on the kitchen counter, and hope the work gets done. That needs to change.

My written testimony includes the details of several initiatives designed to close the skills gap, all of which I've had the privilege to participate in. Go Build Alabama, I Make America, and my own modest efforts through Dirty Jobs and mikeroweWORKS. I’m especially proud to announce “Discover Your Skills,” a broad-based initiative from Discovery Communications that I believe can change perceptions in a meaningful way.

I encourage you to support these efforts, because closing the skills gap doesn't just benefit future tradesmen and the companies desperate to hire them. It benefits people like me, and anyone else who shares my addiction to paved roads, reliable bridges, heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing.
The skills gap is a reflection of what we value. To close the gap, we need to change the way the country feels about work.”

The gap that Mr. Rowe speaks about is entirely real. There are many fields of skilled, blue-collar, manual labor where jobs go unfilled, and workers are desperately needed. But his analysis of why we have this problem is woefully simplistic and lacking. This is no simple matter of attitudes and values, but the result of a complexity of forces that have reshaped our economy and the choices of individuals within that economy.

Which means that it is an issue too complex to be dealt with in one little blog post. However, let's look at two issues briefly: 1) the physical demands of the jobs, opportunities for advancement and retirement, and 2) the issue of health care.

While it is true that most young people think only about the job they will get when they graduate, how much it pays and what its like, their parents and teachers often encourage them to think about longer term issues, such as opportunities for advancement, and how the job will fit them as they age. The skilled manual labor jobs that are going unfilled in our economy are jobs for younger people, with flexibility and strength. The majority of people are unable to continue with physically demanding jobs past their fifties.

Unlike Mr. Rowe (who puts the check on the counter and comes back to work completed), I've been present and actively observing all the plumbing, septic, electrical and construction work done to install my new double wide. What I've noticed is that all the men (no women) who have been using shovels to dig, climbing in ditches, crawling under houses, and climbing ladders have been under 45, and all the men who have been yelling instructions, checking paper work, assigning tasks, and supervising have been over 55. Now the problem is that for over 55 year old doing supervisory work, there are three to five young men carrying out the physical labor, meaning that not every young man who goes into manual labor will have an opportunity to become a supervisory worker or construction business owner. So what does that person do when they hit 50 and their knees no longer bend easily, and their back spasms every time they try to crawl under a house, or pick up a load of bricks, or climb a ladder to install wiring?

Part of the problem of getting young people to go into skilled manual labor fields of work, is the problem of what happens to them when they hit middle age and can no longer handle the physical demands of that job. W have to think seriously and realistically about how to provide work for older blue collar workers, that doesn't treat them as surplus labor to be thrown on the heap of long term unemployment and disability. As a society we are not currently doing well for your 45 to 65 year old blue collar workers. Young people know these workers as their parents and grandparents, and seeing what has happened to them is part of what deters them from going into those fields.

Related to this, of course, is the issue of retirement. A person going into manual labor, has to have a realistic expectation that they will be able to retire while they still have some strength and vitality (early to mid-60's at least) and have adequate income to live comfortably. We're not doing a good job as a society of providing young people with any kind of assurance that social security, much less private pensions will be there for them.

The second issue is health care. When I graduated from college in 1973, during a recession, I took a secretarial position paying minimum wage ($1.80 an hour). With that income I paid not for rent, food, transportation and clothing, but I was also able to afford to buy my own, individual health insurance policy from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The skilled manual workers at the businesses where I was employed made considerably more money than I did, and could afford health care not only for themselves but for their families as well.

Although young people are more cavalier about their needs for health insurance than older people, health insurance coverage is one of the incentives that a occupational choice may offer someone. Physical labor, puts greater demands on workers, and although actual accidents are usually (but not always) covered under workman's compensation, the general wear and tear on the body's joints and systems is not.

A truly universal health care system, that seriously attacks the costs of medical care and medication, would go a long way towards allowing young people to consider a wider range of occupational choices. If health care stops being tied to jobs, than jobs can be chosen for reasons other than health care coverage.

These are only two of the dozens of complex issues that affect occupational choices of young people in this country, and must be addressed as part of a multi-faceted approach to develop the workforce we actually need to move this nation forward.

a return to the 1930's

In Paducah, Kentucky there are more homeless families than there are shelter spaces, and some of the families (as well as individuals not in families) are being referred to "Tent City," an unimproved campground area in nearby woods.

It's time to make Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath required reading again.

how shall we live? part 1

My attention has returned in recent days to a theme that has long concerned me, a theme that has popped up in several very interesting blogs.

Will of Zen Agnostic sums this theme up nicely in this quote:

"most of what the doctors are calling mental illness, clinical depression, neurotic behavior - this not illness. It is a natural reaction to an insane culture and a dying planet....Part of the problem in this insane screwed up world is that people can't be open about their grief and anger. Our emotions are natural and healthy - but society at large labels us as unhealthy if we don't put on a smile every day and joke about the weather and sports and the latest celebrity DUI arrest. Simply writing about it, naming it, not hiding from it, is an act of resistance."

Over at CommonDreams.org Robert Jenson writes:

"To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse."

And Dave Pollard at how to save the world writes of the dissonance between the messages from our bodies (physical survival, avoidance of pain, procreation of our genetic material), our culture (values, beliefs, attitudes and norms), and from our environment or biosphere which he labels gaia. Dave argues that:

"this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down."

Like these three bloggers, everything I know, everything I study as a sociologist, as a observer of human society and culture, suggest to me a world in collapse, that has already "overshot" the material basis (resources, food, energy) on which its existence depends. I strongly recommend reading the work of Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth (1972), Beyond the Limits (1992) and The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (2004). Meadows, Randers and Meadows wrote in their first book (1972) that:

"If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity."

By 1992, Meadows, Randers and Meadows were convinced that those limits had already been reached in several areas (for example world wide grain production peaked in the 1980's), and by 2004 the conclude that we were approaching other limits much faster than their original hundred year time line.

Most people in modern industrial societies have lost awareness of how deeply the health of society is tied to the health of the environment. They think of our technology as lifting us above the vicissitudes of weather and changes in climate. Yet all one has to do is examine the extent to which "normal" daily activities in our society are fouled up and even stop dead, when it gets too snowy or too hot, or when a hurricane stops the pumping of oil for the Gulf, to realize that our technology has made our societies more rather than less vulnerable to changes in our environment.

We are on a path that is unsustainable in human social terms, not just in environmental terms. The two are so intimately intertwined that we cannot deal with one without dealing with the other. Our economy is not only unsustainable in terms of its use of resources and energy, but it is unstable and unsustainable in terms of the ever increasing disparity between the tiny percentage whose wealth is growing and the other 95 percent whose wealth is declining. We are impoverishing our people and our society as well as our ecosystems and biosphere.

[I realize that this is a larger topic than I can do in one post, given all the other immediate deadlines in my life, so I'm going to make this a multi-part post, with this installment just identifying the problem and linking to some great blogs. more on the actual question posed in the title another day.]

ta-da! kittens!

Early this morning -- certainly earlier than I got up -- mama Tabitha kitty gave birth to four kittens. I wasn't certain about the fourth one this morning (it's so dark it was camouflage by her tail). But this evening when Tabbie was ready to leave them for a few minutes to scarf down some food, I got a good look and a good photo or two.

Names and personalities will arrive later. Right now they are a tiny mass of light and dark kittenness.

I am quite fascinated by how much genetic programming there is in a mother cat. All by herself, Tabbie, like all normal mothers, found a safe corner (not the nice box I prepared by the way) and gave birth alone. She cut the cords with her teeth, cleaned all the placenta off the kittens, especially their mouth and eyes, and licked them so that they would start breathing and nursing. She ate all the afterbirth as well. Leaving her little nest clean and dry. I had been worrying for days about whether such a small young cat as Tabbie would manage, but genetic programming and instincts came through. Tabbie harbors no dark doubts about her abilities to mother.

Human females have none of these instincts. We have to learn from others what is required to give birth and nourish our babies. In traditional societies girls observed and assisted at births, and had close contract with nursing mothers. The knowledge of mothering was part of daily life. We might question today, how good that traditional knowledge was -- especially in agricultural societies where infant mortality rates were extremely high -- but women in those cultures did not worry about how to be mother. Today, modern societies make knowledge of birth and mothering something that requires formal instruction, and often raises many concerns and anxieties is mothers to be.

My own mother frequently tells me the story of how she cried and cried in the hospital because she was terrified she wouldn't know what to do with me and would hurt me. The 1950's were perhaps an extreme period of isolation and lack of knowledge (with traditional means of learning to be a mother disappearing and little formal instruction to replace it yet) for new mothers, but I have heard other new mothers today express similar, if not quite intense fears.

With all our medical and technological progress, have we lost something we need to retrieve from the past?

seeing beauty versus photographing it

I live in a beautiful place. There is certainly some ugliness -- mostly in the form of strip-mines, but also a lot of litter on the road sides -- but overall this is a beautiful place. Hills and mountains close in around the narrow valleys and hollers, where communities form like Christmas lights strung along the creeks and streams, and narrow ribbons of asphalt thread among the houses.

Every day, as I drive to and from work, or go out to run errands and go shopping, I see beautiful, inspiring scenes that make my heart sing with joy. Yet when I contemplate photographing this beauty I run up against rarely discussed, yet nonetheless existing "rules" about what makes a beautiful photograph.

For example, electrical wires, light poles, transformers, and other such things are not suppose to "mar" a beautiful photograph of nature. Yet, almost every view I have of the mountains, forest and sky has such things within it. Over the last several years, as I've done more and more photography, I've thought a lot about this.



The human eye in daily life, looks past things like wires and poles, street lights and traffic, and is inspired by the natural landscape beyond them. In our minds we edit out these things, they do not distract us from the view. But the literal eye of the camera locks these trappings of modern industrial society into view, creating images that do not conform to social conventions of natural beauty.

Some man-made objects are acceptable in nature photographs -- the older the better! Old barns, old fences (at least wooden ones), old houses, antique cars (not your old rusted clunker on cinder blocks), old wagons, old tools hand tools (not old rusting mining equipment!). But the kinds of man-made structures (untidy utility poles, trailers and double-wides, pick-up trucks, gas stations and Dollar General Stores) that often end up in one's view around here don't qualify as acceptable backdrops or foregrounds for nature photography.

The biggest problem with this disparity between people's daily experience of nature, and social standards for natural beauty as represented by nature photography, is that it can lead to degradation of the environment. Places like this are often viewed by those with the power to make such decisions as not beautiful or scenic enough to be worth saving.

Between 1976 and 1982 as I did the research for my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation in the nearby mountains of southwest Virginia, I observed a distressing scenario unfold. The United States Forest Service was developing the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area and had selected the theme "Rural Americana" for their development. To achieve the idyllic rural vistas that the Forest Service desired for tourists, they decided it was necessary to obliterate several existing rural communities, such as Fairwood, condemning property through eminent domain and bull-dozing homes and outbuildings. Real rural Americans were not "rural" enough for the Forest Service.

It is this type of mindset that also leads decision-makers to say, "what's one more strip-mine?" in eastern Kentucky? How can it matter to anyone whether yet another mountain top gets denuded of forest and turned into rubble. But it does matter.

I live in a beautiful place -- for now.

reflections on fashion

This morning I was standing waiting for the elevator and noticed my reflection in the lobby doors. I was wearing a new dress, a nice snuggly cotton knit "corduroy" in a dark, rich garnet, just the right warmth and weight for November. The hem of the dress, swung just at my ankles revealing just an inch or two of black cotton stocking. For a moment I marveled at the vagaries of fashion that have allowed me to wear, in middle age, the long dresses that I longed for in childhood.

In the 1950's, I pined for the fashions of an earlier century. I fancied myself in the graceful sweep of long skirts and rustle of petticoats--the sprigged cotton florals, delicate cotton lawns and bright calicoes of the previous century. When I was ten, I learned to sew and the first thing I made was a dress in blue flowered cotton with fitted bodice, long puff sleeves, and full gathered skirt that reached the floor. It was my "Pioneer girl" Halloween costume inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. The next year, I modified the same dress' sleeves with lace and gathered the full skirt into poofy panniers over a long pink underskirt, and became "Colonial girl" -- inspired by a series of books about "little maids" of various revolutionary battles. The year after that, I made another dress in rich, dark red plaid and sewed a hula hoop into a full petticoat to be "Civil War girl." You get the picture -- inspired by Louisa May Alcott. You get the picture.

When the maxi-skirt hit the fashion runways in the early 70's I grabbed on tight to that fashion trend, and never looked back.

obesity and air conditioning

One of my students posting something today that caused the proverbial light bulb to go on over my head. She said that one reason kids are obese is because in the summer time no one wants to go out in the heat.

It dawned on me -- when I was a child 50 years ago, air conditioning was extraordinarily rare in homes. Only the most affluent had air conditioning. Even fans, which were made of metal and relatively more expensive were not within the reach of many people.

This was of little consequence in the San Francisco Bay Area community where I grew up with its mild climate. But in much of the U.S., sweltering summer heat and humidity forced people, and especially children, out of doors, to seek summer breezes and shade and cooling sources of water. I spent part of many childhood summers in Virginia and a vivid part of those childhood memories is smothering damp heat, and the various ways we attempted to stay cool, with cool drinks and splashing in water (lawn sprinklers, wading pools, creeks and streams). Riding bicycles, roller skating, even running around in the shade of the back yard was cooler than sitting still inside.

The heat and humidity affected how we cooked and ate. No one wanted to heat up the house with the oven -- which can easily be avoided these days by using your microwave. One also felt less like eating a heavy meal on the hottest days.

Makes me wonder to what extent the prevalence of air conditioning (and microwaves) in American homes has helped turn us into a nation of overweight couch potatoes, computer and video junkies. Of course, no one is taking my air conditioner except from my hot dead hands (to paraphrase Charlton Heston).

a new tool for those who love numbers

A new, free resource on the Internet is Wolfram:Alpha, an astounding computational tool. While there will certainly be debate among mathematics instructors at all levels about whether or not students should be allowed to use this tool, there is no question that this is an amazing computational machine.

Not having any particular mathematics problems that needed solving this morning, I tried a few of the suggested demonstrations -- such as inputting my birth date. I learned that I am 21,311 days old, and that as I had long suspected I was born on Chinese lunar day zhenghue 1, 4648 (Chinese New Year). I was also born before sunrise, on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras).

I also input the town where I work: Whitesburg, Kentucky and found that the exact coordinates of the town are 37.12 deg N, 82.82 deg W, and the current temperature is 59 degrees F, 15 degrees C. I was able to see a five week history of hourly temperatures -- including the unusually low temperature for last Friday night/Saturday morning.

You can put in a phrase like: "Poverty rate Kentucky" and get back not only the most recent, available poverty rate (16.3% in 2007), but also the median household income and the percapita income for the state (with years give for each piece of data).

Great stuff!

The Wilderness of Spring

My fellow blogger, e.r.dunhill, at Blue Island Almanack has a wonderful post today "Where the Wild Things Are" that tells about the National Wildlife Federation's certified wildlife habitat program for individuals and organizations.

I was so excited when I read this. We have about 3/4 an acre with a lot of mature trees (and plenty of young one's too), tangled thickets of blackberry and wild rose, blow-downs (from last summer's storms), and unmown islands of native plants around our big trees. We have lots of plants that provide pollen, seeds, and even berries.

I followed the link and discovered that our property already qualifies to be certified, and was already to click the button, donate, and get a sign. Then I discovered that what I consider deliberate choices to provide good land stewardship and habitat, my husband as a badge of shame.

John thinks he's suppose to have a yard that looks like those of everyone else in the neighborhood -- with nature properly beaten into submission. He fears that the neighbors will think that the reason our yard doesn't look like all the neighbors' yards is because he is too lazy to take care of it. It would seem that despite his conversion to Buddhism, that old Protestant work ethic still has him firmly in its grip.

So he doesn't want a sign that would call attention to our yard. I thought it would be a good thing to generate questions and perhaps create "teaching moments." But the last thing John wants is for anyone to ask him about his yard.

Part of the problem with changing to a greener, more environmentally sound society is that so many Americans hold cultural values and attitudes that put them at odds with nature. Nature is viewed as the enemy of civilization. My husband is only one of millions of men in America (and dozens in our neighborhood) who equate responsible middle/working class masculine adulthood with beating back nature so create a manicured lawn.

Please check out erd's post, and click on the links. You too many have a yard that is already a wildlife habitat, or can achieve this with some minimal effort. It's a worthy activity, whether or not you get your habitat certified.

One Single Impression -- Equals

Some random thoughts late at night, prompted by One Single Impression March 22 prompt "Equals."


All men are equals
they say with sincerity
--except for the lazy.

Who are the lazy?
That's easy, they say, just look,
they're poorer than us.

©sgreerpitt
Sunday March 22, 2009

A central concept in sociology is inequality and social stratification. It's an important topic in every sociology course I teach, and I even teach an entire course entitled "Inequality." Teaching it right now as a matter of fact. My students are hugely ambivalent on the topic of inequality and equality. They insist adamantly, that everyone is equal, that no one is better than anyone else. Or at least, they insist, that is how it ought to be. But....when it comes to income, then inequality is right and good. It would be terrible they think if everyone made the same amount of money. Got to have inequality they say, it's necessary to motivate people.

Of course, they believe that despite the poverty of their youth, and the financial obstacles they currently face, that they will be among the winners. Any one can make it they tell me, any one can get a college education, there's no excuse they say for not getting a college education, anyone can if they really want it. Then later of course, when the contradiction escapes them, they will give me all kinds of excuses (my car broke down and I couldn't afford to fix it, my computer broke down and I couldn't afford to fix it, my Mam-maw was in the hospital and someone had to stay with her, I don't have any one to take care of my children, my employer changed my work hours, the creek rose and we got flooded out, they cut off my electricity, I had go to court...) for why they can't turn their paper in on time, why they need an extension, why they have to drop out. Like the Red Queen (speaking to Alice), my students believe six impossible things before breakfast every day.

I am mystified as to why American seem so dead set against equality of outcomes. We talk a good game about equal opportunity, but start talking about "sharing the wealth" and watch the hackles go up. But how can opportunities really be equal if outcomes are unequal. Unequal outcomes just sets up unequal opportunities for the next generation.

Did you know that the current per capital personal income in the United States is $35,328. That means that if you take all the income made in the entire United States, including all wages and salaries, all social security benefits, all retirement benefits, all disability payments, unemployment payments, all rental income, all business income, all royalties, then subtract all the taxes owed, and then divide that total by every living person in the U.S. all 300+ million of us, every infant, child, teen, adult and elderly person would get $35,328. That's a lot of money. Now think about the fact that 13 percent of Americans today live below the poverty line, which for a family of 4 is $22,050 (not $22,050 a piece but $22,050 for all four people). If personal income was distributed equally, a family of four would have $141,312. Obviously some one is getting way more than their equal share -- and some of them work for AIG.

Yes we can

"This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:
Yes We Can."

--Barack Obama, 44th President-elect of the United States of America

If you missed it the full transcript of the acceptance speech is available on Yahoo News along with video footage.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

ruminations

Recently through the wonder of Netflix we started watching the original 1975-1976 Saturday Night Live episodes -- episodes that I watched live while in graduate school. They are as entertaining as I remember them, and the humor still works after all these years. One staple of those early shows was fake commercials. Don't know if Saturday Night Live still does that, because my days of staying up past 11:00 PM are long gone.

In the very first show ever aired, there was one fake commercial that absolutely fascinated me. It was a parody of a razor commercial seen frequently at the time. The first double bladed safety razor, the TracII made by Gillette first went on the market in 1971, and was followed by many imitations in the next few years. One of the real commercials -- probably for the TracII itself showed an animated image of how the first blade in the razor lifted the hair and allowed the second blade to cut the hair closer to the skin. The fake Saturday Night Live commercial made fun of the whole idea of the need for two blades by carrying the image to ridiculous extremes (or at least they thought at the time was ridiculous extremes) -- the fake commercial featured a three bladed razor!

Imagine what the Saturday Night Live comedy writers of 1975 would make of today's five bladed razors!!