The View from Your Window

Andrew Sullivan at The Dish often posts an item called “The View from Your Window.”  A couple of times I’ve copied him with a view from my window.  I’m going to do that occasionally, but mostly, these will be views from South Bend (unless you want to send me one from somewhere else).  Above is Andrew’s view today from Rome, Italy.  Some of his other views are here, here, and here.  On second thought, maybe I don't want to copy this feature.  Andrew has some fabulous views here.  However, it is interesting that the last link is a view from Decatur, Indiana.

Wanna be a Keynesian?

Paul Krugman explains this depression: 

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family.
 Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.
And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day. 

The solution— 

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Bonus: Loudon Wainwright III sings the "Paul Krugman Blues."

Where Is the Science Lobby?

I like this paragraph from Sam Harris’s article “The Riddle of the Gun.” 

Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward “gun culture,” and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership? Where is the science lobby? The safe food lobby? Where is the get-the-Chinese-lead-paint-out-of-our-kids’-toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis. 

Amen.  To read about Harris on the other side, go to the article.

Tired of Terroists and Guns

I’m tired of reading about guns, gun control, and the second amendment.  And I’m tired of reading about the Boston bombing and terrorism.  But still, I can’t resist posting a bit from the New Yorker website by John Cassidy called “What If the Tsarnevs Had Been the ‘Boston Shooters’?”  From the title you can tell you will be asked to make a strange leap of imagination.  If you aren’t too tired of reading about these things yourself, you can read this excerpt or the whole thing.

If you’re a terrorist, this will happen: 

Set off in a public space a couple of crude, homemade bombs that you appear to have made using a recipe on the Web, and the state will make you Public Enemy Number One. To insure that you are caught and punished, there are virtually no lengths to which the authorities won’t go. They’ll assemble a multi-agency task force overnight, calling on some of the enormous investments in hardware, intelligence, and manpower that have been made since 9/11. They’ll haul in anybody who might be remotely connected to the crime scene, and, if necessary, shut down an entire city. Once you’re caught, they’ll interview you in your hospital bed without reading you your legal rights and then charge you with using W.M.D.s. If you weren’t born in this country, there will even be talk about changing the immigration laws. 

On the other hand, 

If you systematically shoot a classroom full of defenseless six-year-olds and blow off your own head, things proceed rather differently. To be sure, you, or your memory, will be hated and vilified. But the political system, in hock to the N.R.A., will classify you as a nut whose deadly actions have few or no policy implications. (With the demise of the gun-control legislation, that’s what it did with Adam Lanza.) Life and politics will go on as normal. The President will probably visit the scene of your outrage and say consoling things to the families of your victims. He’ll mean what he says, but he won’t be able to do much about it, and nobody will ask why the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. didn’t realize you were such a menace to society and lock you up preëmptively. Crazed shooters, after all, are something we’ve grown used to.

I have no comments;  I’m just too tired.

Song of the Week

Rest in Peace Richie Havens. "Here Comes the Sun."  is a song I heard him sing when I attended a Havens concert in South Bend long ago.   It was a good concert, but I was pregnant with Bridget at the time, and apparently the music made her kick up a storm. She was so active, it made us nervous, and we left before the concert was over.

Craft Project of the Year

Funky homemade storage units.  Wouldn't want it to seem like this blog has a theme.

Terrorism Here and Over There

Rafia Zakaria, writer for a Pakistani newspaper, says, “I’ve become adept at writing about bombings. Pakistan suffered 652 of these last year…”  She goes on to contemplate the response to the recent Boston bombing:  “Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.  And yet it can seem so.”

Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response….Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place. 

It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world’s allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy—the numbers dead and injured—but by the contrast between a society’s normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war….  

Zakaria’s short essay covered some of what isn't usually covered.  Most coverage seemed to come from the perspective that only we suffer like this.  Other, less prominent coverage, offered no sympathy at all for Boston and implied the U. S. wasn’t entitled to be upset when other countries suffer so much more than we do.  Zakaria covers both perspectives sympathetically.  And, I want to add, so does my friend Rich.   Rich is a marathon runner himself who has been met by his kids at the finish line.  He writes about how painful it was to hear of an eight-year old boy killed in Boston.  But he adds this:  “That made me think of all the people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else where there's a war going on who didn't ask to be in a war zone.” 

There are many geographical and emotional reasons why it has been easier for me to relate to Boston than Syria.  These two writers gently remind me that the Boston bombing is a tragedy but can also be a bridge to empathy and concern for those suffering attacks outside our country.

Energy Efficient Food

For a while, I’ve wondered why, when we talk about using too much fossil fuel, we don’t talk about the fuel used to produce food.  According to the Dish, Michael Pollan is trying to remedy that in a new book Cooked.  Here is the beginning of his Dish interview: 

The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.  For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.

 But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.

Oh, Little Bird

I discovered a birding blog recently.  I love its name:  "The Zen Birdfeeder."  Yesterday the writer, Nancy Castillo, gave a few facts about the ruby-throated hummingbird.  “While you were sleeping,” she writes “a Ruby-throated Hummingbird flew 600 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico.”  This bird weighs about as much as a nickel and burns off about a third of its body weight during the flight.  Hard but wonderful to imagine.

Happy to Be Alive

Brian Kimberling writes about watching birds: 

A Bird-Watcher is a kind of pious predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.

Sleeping at O'Hare

Friday night was fun with a side of bizarre.  I met my sister Linda in Chicago.  She was there to attend a workshop Saturday at the O’Hare Hilton.  So my daughter, grandson, and I went in to spend Friday

afternoon and night with her.  There is a spot where the end of the CTA’s blue line, the airport, and the Hilton merge. So for about 14 hours, I was staying there at this unusual intersection of Chicago Transit, international airport, and upscale hotel.  I can see, under certain circumstances, this could be very convenient, but I’m enough of a small town person to find it strange, maybe even disorienting.

However, this is not the first time I’ve spent the night at O’Hare.  A few years ago I was flying back from Tucson.  The plan was to fly into O’Hare, and then I would catch ground transportation back to South Bend.  However, the plane was delayed and I ended up missing the day’s last bus to SB by about five minutes.  It seemed silly to go to a hotel at midnight and then try to get back to the airport by 6:00 AM, so I just decided to try and doze in the waiting room for ground transportation.  It turns out I spent the night with a few other travelers and a number of homeless people.  I spend an hour in conversation with a homeless woman who smelled from a lack of consistent bathroom availability.  She implied to me she could find shelters, but she wouldn't be able to drink her wine if she stayed in them.  There was something charming and dangerous about the live she described to me.

I’ve written before that one of the benefits of travel is the way it reminds us that there is so much in the world we don’t know or understand.  And yet I’m part of that world as are the people sleeping in the O’Hare Hilton and the waiting room at ground transportation.  Sometimes, I just don’t know what to make of these deep and strange connections.

(The picture above is a generic shot of walking from the CTA train into the airport.)

Song of the Week

"What a Wonderful World"
by
Louis Armstrong.

I keep forgetting I'm partly blind.

Jack Kornfield tells this story from Alan Wallace in his book The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace:

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground.  As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot!  What's wrong with you?  Are you blind?"  But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you actually is blind.  He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern:  "Are you hurt?  Can I help you up?"  Our situation is like that.  When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion.

Dear Senator Dan Coats:

It’s a good thing there is nothing in the constitutions that says Americans have the right to own and drive cars.  If there were, you might want to ban automobile registration, license plates, driver’s licenses and tests, and mandatory liability insurance requirements.  You seem to be using the second amendment as an excuse to do nothing instead of an invitation to give serious thought as to how to deal with dangerous weapons.  It gives me the feeling you are working for the NRA instead of for me and my fellow citizens.

The Right to Not Get Shot

Andy Borowitz reports on action today in the Senate:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senate Republicans today vowed to filibuster a controversial bill supporting the right not to get shot.

G.O.P. leaders lambasted the bill, arguing that the right to go to school, work, or one’s home without fear of being shot was not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Waiting for a Villian

Maybe like me, you want to know who committed the atrocity at the Boston Marathon while at the same time, you don't want to know.  Tim Wise speaks today about white privilege.  

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI. 

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation. 

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of Time McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and...

 I’m afraid there is peace in not knowing.

The Body and the World

Yesterday I wanted to write about walking and exercise, but I wasn’t ready to put it into words.  I find walks wonderful and magical, but that’s pretty vague.  I’ve been under the weather lately and not getting as much exercise as usual.  Without my usual exercise, my days can be too long, my mood less peaceful.

Yesterday, I joined a group at my gym called Citi-walk.  It was the first time for this group, so there were five of us starting in the lobby of the gym.  We took the stairs down to the sidewalk below and walked on Michigan Street towards Memorial Hospital.  We entered a building across the street from the hospital called Skywalk.  We took the stairs to the third floor, to the actual skywalk. We crossed Michigan Street looking down at the cars driving beneath us.  Then we walked through a few hospital hallways, down a stairwell, and came out in a different building.  It took me a minute to get back my sense of direction.  We continued walking through some neighborhoods around the hospital and almost exactly an hour after we left the gym, we returned.

I have spent weeks hiking in Spain, and it is indeed a profound way to tour another country.  Hiking the streets of South Bend is ordinary in comparison, but still, it makes me happy.  Rebecca Solnit says, “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world” (Wanderlust: A History of Walking).  “Knowing the world through the body,” is a helpful explalnation.  Is there anything we do without the body?  But walking and exercise deepen the connection between world and body.  That’s a rich reward.

That’s mostly what I wanted to say yesterday.  Then, between then and now, a celebration in Boston, of the “engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” was attacked.  It adds an insurmountable layer to these reflections.

Song of the Day

"Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros--reminds me of Lucy L. and Tucson.

I Don't Ask for Much

A friend asked, “I don't think I understand what your position is concerning gun control. Do you think that individual, private ownership of firearms by US citizens is a good thing or a bad thing?

I think individual ownership of guns is an unavoidable thing.  I grew up on a farm and there were guns in the closet.  They were used to kill game which was part of our harvest.  I think some people have legitimate uses for guns, but too many gun owners don’t see to be responsible owners.

 I support universal registration of guns.  I think a registry of gun ownership would be just fine.  Keeping guns away from mentally unstable people requires a lot of thought, and I’d like to see a serious start to that conversation.

I support a ban on assault weapons. 

I would like to see present laws enforced.

As I study this issue, I will probably support some other restrictions.  Yesterday I read about safety latches on guns that would keep children from accidentally shooting people.  That sounds very helpful.

I would like to see our legislators operate independently of the NRA.  I would like to see my legislators earn a D or F from the NRA.  I would like to see a reduction of the gun culture.  I would like to see our legislators have sensible concerned conversations about this issue and not be cowed by the NRA.

 

The Gun Report

For approximately two month, Joe Nocera and his assistant Jennifer Mascia have been publishing a blog in which they “aggregate articles about shootings from the previous day.”  I discovered  “The Gun Report” at the New York Times website.  I don’t know how often I can stand to read their lists of shootings, but in my mind, it makes my congressman’s line about supporting the second amendment sound pretty lame.

 

Nocera writes, “Of all the stories we link to, the ones I find hardest to read are those about young children who accidentally shoot themselves or another child. They just break my heart. Yet Jennifer and I find new examples almost every day.”  He goes on to suggest that guns, like medicine bottles, should be child-proof.  The technology to do this already exists, but the NRA “claim[s], absurdly, that a gun that only can be fired by its owner somehow violates the Second Amendment.”

According to Nocera, "In mid-April, Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, plans to introduce a House bill requiring that all guns include personalization technology within two years."  Like air-bags and child proof lids, this change will require pushing and effort.

How many people have been killed by guns since Newtown?

3,367.

Home!

This is a picture of the earth from a distance of more than four billion miles taken from Voyager 1.  Earth is the dot showing in the middle of the bright right streak.

Sunday's Song

I stumbled across this Holly Near song today.  I had forgotten about her power and how rousing a good activist song can be.

The Secret Life of Birds

My bird feeders are usually swamped by visits from house finches and sparrows.  They’re rather ho-hum in appearance, partly because they’re drab in color and partly because there are so many of them.  I have other more distinctive bird visitors, but my favorite is the cardinal.  I’m not alone in this; seven states have the cardinal as their state bird including Indiana.

 

The female cardinal is quietly elegant, but there is no doubting the male cardinal’s flamboyant grace as he flies into his landing spot on the feeder.  There’s a certain breathtaking beauty that continues to amaze me.  Time after time I spot him nibbling sunflower seeds from the food tray, and I break into a smile.  What, besides bright red feathers, is his attraction?  I've concluded that there is something in his demeanor that reminds me of a desirable human quality.  He seems to pay such good attention to his surroundings.  He has the curious and engaged look I like to receive from a companion.  I don’t mean to anthropomorphize him; it’s just how he appears.

 

This curiosity about the cardinal prompted a cursory Google search.  I was amazed by this short list of facts.  Cardinals in the wild have a lifespan of 15 years.  They weigh 1.5 to 2.0 ounces.  They have three clutches of eggs each season.  That last fact is practically amazing.  I’ve never seen a baby cardinal.  I’ve never even seen a cardinal nest.  This affirms the idea that precipitated this search.  These birds come to my artificial feeding station, eat their fill, and then return to what is to me, a secret life.  I don’t know where they live.  How far do they come to eat at my feeder?  What happens to all those baby cardinals?

 

One of the benefits of a bird feeder is the opportunity to watch an interesting slice of bird life.  Another advantage is the reminder, once again, of how much I don’t know.  “My birds,” especially the cardinal, serve as a gentle bridge to the unknown, and I think a reminder of this is a good thing.  Also my birds remind me of our connectedness too.  Trite, but true, we are all one.

 

 

How Does the NRA Rate Your Legislator? A to F

The New York Times answered this question last December 21 with this handy interactive map.  Let's hope some of the A grades have dropped in the last three months.

Reducing Gun Culture

This blog had been mainly inactive until the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.  After that, I was doing so much reading about gun use and regulation, I decided I might as well report on my findings.  I’m not writing so much about guns now, but it’s still a recurrent thread.  A few days ago, I recommended an article by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker website.  (Link below at “Guns, More that a Correlation.”)  I thought Gopnik’s article was so good, I barely quoted from it.  I just said “read it.”  Now Gopnik has another post, and I recommend it as well, but I’m going to try picking out some relevant quotations, ones I can send to my legislators. 

One of the oddities of the gun-control debate…is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million—or was it two million? It kept changing—bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don’t….Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot—and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.

And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily “cultural.” Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered

And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power.  

As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.” 

It's hard to stop quoting.  The article is so clear and insightful.  Gopnik believes we need to be open to understanding gun culture even when it is foreign to our own experience.  Then we to to work toward changing it.  He also points out that statistically, massacres such as Newtown are not the main danger of our gun culture.  But massacres like these, like 9/11, take a toll that goes beyond the actual loss of life as tragic and heartbreaking as it is.  Here is part of Gopnik’s conclusion. 

Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small.

How am I today? Just fine--wretched.

For the last few months, I've been surprisingly peaceful and happy.  However, through this almost blissful time, I have kept in mind the adage, “this too shall pass.”  Since Tuesday I have a hideous and at times alarming cough.  My temperature fluctuates between normal, chills, and fever.  Is it possible to be peaceful, happy, and sick?

 

I think, yes and no.  On one level, I’m miserable.  On another level, this is, in some weird way, fine because—hey!—it’s life.  And, this too shall pass. 

 

I went on line for some wisdom from Pema Chӧdrӧn and found this:

 

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose—you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together. 

Her words are helpful, and I feel their truth.  I’m obnoxious enough as it is.  If life were glorious all the time, I know I would be unbearable.  So, I’ll drink some tea, take some drugs, and, as much as possible, accept my wretchedness.

Sam Harris on Wealth

This is an interesting article on fair taxation.

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Many of my friends are in the same position: Most of us attended private schools and good universities, and we will be able to provide these same opportunities to our own children. No one in my immediate circle has a family member serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the only sacrifice we were asked to make for our beloved country was to go shopping. Nearly a decade has passed, with our nation's influence and infrastructure crumbling by the hour, and yet those of us who have been so fortunate as to actually live the American dream--rather than merely dream it--have been spared every inconvenience. Now we are told that we will soon receive a large tax cut for all our troubles. What is the word for the feeling this provokes in me? Imagine being safely seated in lifeboat, while countless others drown, only to learn that another lifeboat has been secured to take your luggage to shore...

So what should we do?