What constitutes a crisis?

Ted and David Gup

Ted Gup writes movingly about the opioid epidemic in the June 23 issue of the Washington Post. He writes that there were approximately 4,000 deaths from drug overdoses in his home state of Ohio. But what makes this all the more painful for Gup is that one of the deaths was his son David. He writes about proposed cuts in federal programs that would reduced the money for dealing with this problem.

Then he says,

As a nation, we seem fixated on the foreign and the sudden, incapable of focusing on what is near and constant. If the drug fatalities were all suffered in a single 9/11-like attack, we would be consumed; the steady seepage of lives scarcely moves us. The failure to address the drug epidemic is not an anomaly but a case study in the shortcomings of human attention and political accounting. From global warming to deteriorating infrastructure, from declining schools to the hollowing out of the middle class, the incremental gets short shrift. It seems beyond our political grasp and communal will.

 Read the entire article here.

Why Study History? Part 2

David McCullough offers some enthusiastic answers to this question. Still he doesn't mention the excellent reason from Adam Gopnik that history warns us of all the possible terrible unintended consequences of sincere action.

Who Were These People?

A few weeks ago I was reading history about the early first ladies of the United States. Now I'm reading the "history of humankind." It's slow reading.  I just finished reading about foragers or humans from the hunter-gather time period. I'll share a little information about these long ago people. Most anthropologists and historians think they had bigger brains than we do. Harari says," the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants." We don't need to find all of our own food, make all of our own tools, and have a detailed understanding of nature and our surroundings.... (48-49)

However, these foragers were hard on their environment. This "first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disaster to befall the animal kingdom....Homo Sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools."   One of the reasons the Galapagos Islands retained their unusual animals is because humans did not arrive there until the 19th century. (72-74)

Above is a picture of the Cave of Hands found in Argentina and painted about 9,000 years ago. Harari says, "It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world--but nobody knows what it means" (57). I found more pictures of the cave here.

Now on to Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution." 

Different Strokes

 

Philando Castile

In his most recent column, Leonard Pitts writes chillingly about the visceral impact of actually watching the video of Philando Castile's execution instead of just talking about it. He also points out a couple of interesting issues that I hadn't considered:

I thought of the NRA, which supposedly exists to protect law-abiding gun owners from government overreach. Obviously, that extends only to law-abiding white gun owners, because it’s been nearly a year since Castile’s death and, at this writing, the group has uttered barely a peep about a black man who was martyred for that cause.

I thought of all those people who assure me, with a smugness found only in the profoundly ignorant, that if black people would just treat police with respect and obey their commands, they wouldn’t get hurt. I would ask them to tell me which of those things Castile failed to do.

I thought of that time Sean Hannity explained how, when he is stopped, he informs the

officer that he has a legal firearm and it all goes smoothly after that: “ ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ writes me a ticket, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and that’s it.” I thought of the frequent inability of white men to recognize privilege even when it’s shooting a black man in the chest.

                                                                                                     

Rich People and Taxes

I love what John Scalzi has to say about his taxes. He's rich and he doesn't need a tax cut. You should just read his whole article. However, I can't resist copying some of it here. 

... So these days, whenever I see how much I pay in taxes annually, my first thought is always something like HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of money. I could totally use that! As someone who grew up poor and has worked his way steadily up the income ladder, it’s a freakin’ huge amount in terms of the raw dollars.

And then I pay my taxes and I discover that anything I would have used that ridiculous wad of tax money for, I still have enough in my net income for. I literally cannot think of a thing I want — or need — that my post-tax income can’t handle. Because as it happens, even with federal, state and local taxes, my tax burden is reasonable. I don’t pay taxes in 1980, when the highest marginal federal income tax rate was 70%; I pay taxes in 2017, where top federal tax bracket maxes out at just under 40%....

So even with literally the full (pre-deduction) tax burden someone in Ohio can pay — we max out all the marginal rates — there is more than enough left over for pretty much anything that we want to do, individually, as a couple or as a family. We save a lot, invest a bunch, and thus take that money out of the short-term income pool we use for bills, household spending and, uh, “consumer activity,” and we’re still just fine, thanks. I suppose it’s possible that we could spend so much of our post-tax income that we’re left with little or nothing and thus would wish we had some of the money that we paid in taxes back into our hands, but speaking from experience, this takes effort, and some willful stupidity about your money....But if you’re not the sort of person who spends $30,000 a month on wine, you’re probably going to be fine.

We do just fine. The other people I know who have similar or better incomes than we have also do just fine. The ones I know with substantially better incomes than we have are also doing just fine. No one at my income level or better actively misses the money they spend on taxes, because they’re still rich after they pay taxes.
Would I like to pay less in taxes? When I look at the raw number of dollars I send to the IRS, sure. When I think about the actual impact on my day-to-day life having that money would make, versus the actual and positive impact on the day-to-day life of millions of other people, when people like me pay our taxes? Nope. I have certain (in more than one sense of that word) opinions about how those taxes I pay in should be used, and whether they are being used effectively, and whether I’m getting value for what I pay, to be sure. Those are different issues, however...

Rich people don’t need any more tax cuts. They’re doing just fine. They will continue to do just fine. And no, their tax burden isn’t onerous. Trust me, I know. I live that tax burden daily. It doesn’t hurt. What does hurt is knowing that people I know and care for will likely die sooner and sicker than they should just so someone like me gets back a few more dollars they won’t notice. Don’t come at me with “but the rich earned those dollars.” Dude, I earned my dollars, too. I earned them in a country that helped me get where I am in part through taxes. I earned them understanding that getting rich came with an obligation to the society I live in and benefit from, an obligation discharged, in part, by paying a perfectly reasonable amount of taxes.

How often do you get pulled over by police?

Trevor Noah, who has lived in the United States only six years, says he has been pulled over by police officers eight times. He offers an interesting theory about institutional versus individual racism here. And here, he talks about the shooting of Philando Castile.

Sometimes I think I didn't really start studying history until I had been out of college for twenty years or so. In high school and college, history felt like lists of events and dates with an occasional heroic or tragic story thrown in. I didn't realize it was my history too.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Ties That Bound by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. It was an unsettling book and I didn't write about it right away. It is about three of the four first, first ladies,¹ Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison, and how they related to their “slaves.” ²

I always thought that along with being cruel to the enslaved human beings, slavery must be crazy-making to the so-called owners. As a child a woman may be your wet nurse and caregiver; then, you grow up, and she becomes your property.

Even more insane is how male slave owners often impregnated their female slaves and then ended up being fathers of their slaves. This story from Martha Washington's family is a good example of the madness of it all, and I don't think it was unusual.

Martha's father, John Dandridge, had a relationship with a woman of “mixed ancestry.” This resulted in the birth of Ann Dandridge who lived her life enslaved. Martha took her to Mt. Vernon after her marriage to George Washington. Later, Ann had a son, believed to have been fathered by Martha's son Jacky. This went beyond even the norms of the time where white men fathered enslaved children. This union produced an unseemly problem. The son looked white. People were not comfortable with white slaves. Martha was not comfortable with legal manumission. Therefore, she just omitted his name from the property list and he was free by default.

Why study history?

Some answers according to Adam Gopnik:

What history generally “teaches” is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.

The historical question to which ISIS is the answer is: What could possibly be worse than Saddam Hussein?

Studying history doesn’t argue for nothing-ism, but it makes a very good case for minimalism: for doing the least violent thing possible that might help prevent more violence from happening.

What history actually shows is that nothing works out as planned, and that everything has unintentional consequences.

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners. And a few sessions of humility can often prevent a series of humiliations.

When Being Number One Is Not Good

Last night I watched 13^th, a Netflix documentary about the prison population of the United States. Other than saying it paints a depressing picture of the United States penal system I have nothing coherent to say. Instead, for now, I'll just include below a partial list of facts from the film.

The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prison population. (This sounded so outrageous that I had to fact check it. The New York Times gives the same statistics.) The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

It appears that the prison population started growing in the 70s. Here's the progression.

1970—357,290

1980—513,900

1985—759,100

1990—1,179,200

2000—2,015,300

2014—2,306,200

Black men make up 6.5% of the total United States population and 40.2% of the prison population.

One of three black males is expected to go to prison.

30% of black males in Alabama have lost the right to vote as the result of criminal convictions.

You can watch this documentary on Netflix on full screen. If you don't have Netflix, you can watch it online here in a partial screen.