How would you react?

A friend posted a link on Facebook to a video on racial profiling.  I couldn't figure out how to post it here, but there's the link.  I was shocked at the reactions of others and shocked at my own.  There's a part of me that thinks this video can't be true, but I can't think of a real argument to say it isn't.  If you have time (4:41 minutes), give it a look.  I'd like your opinion.

Guns: Location, Location, Location

In the June 5 edition of Newsweek, Christopher Dicky explains one of the complications that makes talking about gun regulation so difficult.  Rural dwellers and urban dwellers see the issue differently and may actually have different needs.  In rural areas with low numbers of police officers, guns may provide additional safety.  In urban areas, it's different. 

The embattled streets of the city and the gunland of the heartland are wildly different places, and the failure to understand that difference, and overcome it, is the great American tragedy of our time. 

Mostly, the discussions about firearms are framed as a question of constitutional rights for gun owners. But what about the gun owners in Tyquran’s world [high crime urban areas]? Are the rights of the 223 people shot to death in New York City last year, or the 435 in Chicago, or the 414 in Los Angeles being protected by the right to bear arms? In big cities across the country, gun control doesn’t hurt gun owners, other gun owners do, especially if they are people of color. Recent Pew surveys show that 82 percent of the nation’s gun owners are white, and most are outside metropolitan areas, but 72 percent of gun-homicide victims are black or Hispanic, and live—and die—in the cities. 

This article is packed with interesting information and presents a slightly different perspective to the gun issue.  The conclusion of the article talks a lot about New York city crime reduction.

Where it's @

John Brownlee writes (more than I want to know) about the @ symbol.  Interestingly, he does not give it a name.  He talks about @ or the @ symbol.  However, some cultures have colorful names for the ubiquitous @. 

In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.

Música para el domingo

It's a cute song and maybe a spanish lesson:  Viene de Mi.

Knowing You Already Have Your Ticket

Many of my friends have heard me mention “my favorite blogger” Ta-Nehisi Coates. I've mentioned him here as well. Yesterday he posted an article that illustrates why I appreciate him so much.  He has recently criticized President Obama for lecturing and shaming predominantly black audiences when he speaks to them.  One of his readers asked Coates what kinds of things he would say if he were to address a group of high school students.  Here are some excerpts from Coates’ answer. 

[W]eirdly enough, I often do get asked to speak to predominantly black schools. …What I generally try to do is avoid messages about "hard work" and "homework," not because I think those things are unimportant, but because I think they put the cart before the horse. The two words I try to use with them are "excitement" and "entrepreneurial." I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their imagination. 

I'se been a-climbin' on...

After reading The Warmth of Other Suns, which, from time to time, quotes the poetry of Langston Hughes, I wanted to review his well-known works and see what else he wrote.  The introduction to The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes says he was controversial, loved by many and accused of doggerel by others.  Below is what I consider one of his touching and familiar poems.  Below it is a poem less touching, less familiar, and less lasting.

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Don't let this stop you from reading my blog!

Jared Keller sorts through information about what seems to be an ever-growing need to be connected to electronic media.  

As Stafford explains, our love for the Internet is rooted in the fact that human beings, in Ghose’s words, “compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs.” The cognitive-reward structure offered by services like email and social media are similar to those of a casino slot machine: “Most of it is junk, but every so often, you hit the jackpot.” This is a symptom of low-risk/high-reward activities like lotteries in general. As researchers found in a 2001 article in International Gambling Studies, systems that offer a low-cost chance of winning a very large prize are more likely to attract repetitive participation and, in turn, stimulate excessive (and potentially problematic) play. Although the stimuli are different (the payoff on the Internet being juicy morsels of information and entertainment rather than money), Stafford says that the immediacy and ubiquity of Internet “play”—i.e. being able to check your tweets or emails on your phone with no major transaction cost—only increases the likelihood that someone will get sucked into a continuous cycle.

"Leaving Forever"

 There is no mistaking what is going on; it is a regular exodus.  It is without head, tail, or leadership.  Its greatest factor is momentum, and this is increasing, despite amazing efforts on the part of white Southerners to stop it.  People are leaving their homes and everything about them, under cover of night, as though they were going on a day’s journey—leaving forever.  (The Cleveland Advocate, April 28, 1917) 

The Warmth of other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a story of the Great Migration, a period in the United States between 1915 through 1970 when six million African American people fled the oppression and lack of opportunity in the south for the suns of the northern and western states.

A Little Sunday Music

While it's still spring:  "Spring."

Mom Gets Old

Adam Gopnik explores his feeling about parental love as his son prepares to leave for college:

What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigor that once was ours.

How to Be Compassionate AND Practical

Paul Krugman explains why the proposal to cut food stamps is so wrong. 

First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line. 

But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.

Bonus:  The Krugman Blues.

Hope: a Reasonable Response

I just discovered the website TomDispatch.com, and I’m in the process of deciding if the entire site is as useful as the first essay I've read from the site.  It’s called “Too Soon to Tell: the Case for Hope” by Rebecca Solnit.  I suppose writing this blog is a tiny act of hope.  Solnit’s essay teaches that hope is a step that leads to or allows action.  The excerpts below, however, mostly focus on rational reasons for hope.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement…. 

 For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa). 

 Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.”... 

What You Said

If I could incorporate into my life Marshall Rosenberg’s ideas, expressed below, I would spend less time worrying and more time being happy.  As it is, I like what he says, but I'm not sure I believe it. 

…As we’ve seen, all criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feeling and needs behind a message.  The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.  When we receive messages with this awareness, we never feel dehumanized by what others have to say to us.  We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves.  As author and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggests, “What will they think of me?” must be put aside for bliss.”  We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain. 

From Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

Twelve Articles About Guns

1.  How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

Here, “Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14.”  For example, the number for today, May 27, is 4,387.  It’s as simple as that and serves as a reminder of why something needs to change.

2. “The Cultural Fight for Guns” by Adam Gopnik.

Here Gopnik explains the tenets of our gun culture.  It’s an articulate argument written by an observer but not a member of the so-called gun culture.

3. “Armed Correlations” by Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik argues that there is a strong correlation between strong gun laws and less gun violence, and in this case, correlation is related to causation. 

4. “The Gun Report” by Joe Nocera.

Nocera provides a daily report of news about guns.

5. “Battleground America:One Nation, under the Gun” by Jill Lepore.   

This is one of those long New Yorker articles.  It was published in April of 2012 before Sandy Hook but after Trayvon Martin.  Lepore provides an interesting history of gun regulation, gun attitudes, and gun tragedies.

6. “Regulate Guns Like Cars” by Carl Gibson.

The title gives you the gist of the argument.  Gibson, unlike some of the other writers, owns and enjoys guns (and cars).

7. “The Simple Truth about Gun Control” by Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik talks about the element of opportunity present in criminal behavior.  More control of guns, he says, will lessen the opportunities for gun crimes.  

8. “The NRA Is Wrong: The Myth of Illegal Guns” by Matthew Parker.

Here Parker also makes the argument that serious background checks would create hurdles that could reduce some gun misuse.  Parker writes from the perspective of a convicted felon. 

9.  “Guns Need Food,Starve Them” by Marc Ambinder.

Ambinder suggests regulating ammunition.  Ammunition, unlike guns, deteriorates and must be replaced.

10. “So You Think You Know the Second Amendment” by Jeffrey Toobin.

Toobin explains how, in the 1970s, a new interpretation of the Second Amendment evolved.

11.  “Who Is the NRA Leadership.”

This site “shines a light on the background of members of NRA leadership, in large part by allowing them to comment on the issues of the day in their own words. It is intended as a resource for those who cherish moderation, civility and principled advocacy in American politics.” 

12. “How The Gun Industry Funnels Tens Of Millions Of Dollars ToThe NRA” by Walter Hickey.
Once again, the title explains the main point.

Another Song about Sunshine

"Your Are the Sunshine of My Life":  Stevie Wonder sings at an interesting venue.

Song for Sunday

To evry thing there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and the season is SPRING!

The Changing NRA

Five days after Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, Thomas Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation restricting mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles. The N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, Franklin L. Orth, testified before Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” 

The above is from "Battleground America" by Jill Lapore, New Yorker, April 2012

How many people have been killed by guns since Newtown?

4,156.

From Slate.

The Little Hater

Jay Smooth describes the little hater in his head that tells him his work isn't good enough.  Can you relate?

How did they get to Sesame Street?

I love this account of how Sesame Street became Sesame Street: 

The name Sesame Street is credited to Virginia Schone, a writer for the show. Almost everyone on the staff disliked the name. There was concern that young children would have trouble pronouncing it. But time was running out and the show needed a name. Finally, Executive Producer Dave Connell put out a memo to the staff saying “if nobody came up with a better idea, as of Monday we were going to call it Sesame Street.” As Joan put it, “We went with it because it was the least bad title.” 

Creativity is a funny thing.  It’s hard now to imagine the show named anything else.  Now, of course, we associate the name with all manner of cuteness.  But still, The Video Classroom and 1-2-3 Avenue B., names that were also considered, just couldn't have been as catchy.

How Great Is Gatsby?

About a year and a half ago, I reread The Great Gatsby.  I had forgotten what a grim story it is.  A few days ago, I watched online a preview for the new Gatsby movie.  I’m sure the movie will manage some of the darkness of the story, but the trailer, in comparison to the novel, was outrageous, over-the-top, ludicrously extravagant.  It made my decision not to see the movie.  So I was pleased to read this in Ta-Nehisa Coats’ wonderful blog: 

Maybe because of its title, and Fitzgerald's outsized persona, people think that The Great Gatsby has to be a big budget extravaganza. But the book actually reads like a French film or an American indie. It's not so much that Gatsby can't be filmed. It's that it can't be filmed by this Hollywood. 

Kidnapped: Fact and Fiction

Yesterday I began writing an introduction similar to this one by Jon Michaud.. 

Since the news from Cleveland broke earlier this week, I have been thinking about Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. Published in the autumn of 2010, Room is narrated by a five-year-old boy named Jack who, along with his twenty-six-year-old mother—“Ma”—is imprisoned in a one-room structure by a man referred to only as Old Nick. Jack is the product of rape, but his mother strives to keep the truth of their situation from him, maintaining the illusion that their eleven-foot-by-eleven-foot prison is the extent of the real world and that everything else is TV.  

I imagine anyone who has read Room, has thought of Donaghue's novel as the painful details of the kidnapping in Cleveland emerge.  I read Room fairly recently, and the novel is a bizarre shadow to the Cleveland story.  Even though the novel is a story of a horrifying situation, it is told so as to leave the reader with hope.  I even found some of the scenes between Ma and Jack rather beautiful.  However, Ma's adjustment to freedom is quite painful.  I can’t imagine what the three Cleveland women are going through right now.  The similarities between fiction and reality are curious and unsettling.  

The Last Great Lesson

Yesterday morning, while driving my car, I heard a piece of an NPR interview with Amy Grant.  I’m not a follower of Grant, but I found very idea very touching. 

In the last few years, just through different circumstances, I've learned some really amazing tools in life. The biggest thing is framing difficult circumstances in a way that helps you see the value can change everything. And the first time that I really was stopped in my tracks with that experience was when I was really having a throw-down fit one night with a trusted friend of mine. It was late one night. We were outside. This was a few years ago. My mom and dad both needed 'round-the-clock care, and I'm frustrated and angry and they didn't deserve this. And my friend, who had already buried both of her parents, she just looked at me and said: Take a deep breath. She said: Don't you see, this is the last great lesson your parents will teach you?

Who makes the most money?

This link is to a map that shows the "highest paid employee" of your state.  For my state and most other states, that person is a football or basketball coach.  Of course, for Indiana it's a basketball coach.  This is unsettling, even discouraging news.  But I suspect something is missing.  It misses the "workers" who receive part of their compensation in stock options and other perks.

Songs My Mom Used to Sing

It was interesting listening to "I Love You a Bushel and a Peck:" Mom only knew some of the words. I don't know if I've ever heard the whole song before I looked it up today.  It's kind of cool.

It was harder to find a video of "You Are My Sunshine."  The one I found is a bit strange.  I also learned that this is the state song of Lousiana and you can get is as a Ricky Nelson ring tone.

Oh my gosh!  I found this video of "Maizy Doats" and started crying.  It's a regular time travel machine.

Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy article in the April 12, 2012 issue of the NewYorker magazine.  The facts below look like something I’ve posted before, but they stand out as an important part of the strange incongruity of our national discussion about guns. 

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.…The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five. 

However, this minority of gun owners seems to have disproportionate power.  I says seems because it looks to me like the NRA is the group with the power—that is, they’re the group with the money.  And, according to Walter Hickey of Business Insider, “The bulk of the group’s money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.”  Hickey goes on to say, 

There are two reasons for the industry support for the NRA. The first is that the organization develops and maintains a market for their products.  The second, less direct function, is to absorb criticism in the event of PR crises for the gun industry. 

This sounds like a great deal for the gun industry, a strange and possibly compromising arrangement for the NRA, and a set of handcuffs for politicians worried that the NRA will spoil their chances for re-election. 

Please, tell me you don't know.

“I don’t always agree with me,” says Tim Kreider of his own writing. I like that.  I think there is value in writing, even when you haven’t yet resolved the issue being explored.  He continues on this theme. 

The one thing no editorialist or commentator in any media is ever supposed to say is I don’t know: that they’re too ignorant about the science of climate change to have an informed opinion; that they frankly have no idea what to do about gun violence in this country; or that they’ve just never quite understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in all honesty they’re sick of hearing about it. To admit to ignorance, uncertainty or ambivalence is to cede your place on the masthead, your slot on the program, and allow all the coveted eyeballs to turn instead to the next hack who’s more than happy to sell them all the answers. 

I don’t completely agree with that.  The part I don't agree with is that all writers are like that.  I follow some writers who don’t proclaim to have all the answers.  But I could stand to see more “I don’t know.”  Ta-NehisiCoates is one writer who is open about what he doesn’t know, and below he expresses some unusual ideas about writing.

[To write for others], you have to actually be curious. You have to not just want to be heard, but want to listen. [David] Brooks makes the point that the detached writer's role should be "more like teaching than activism." I would say that it should be more like learning than teaching. The stuff you put on the page should be the byproduct of all you are taking in -- and that taking in should not end after you get a degree from a selective university. Keep going. You must keep going.

Some times I look at what I post here and wonder, what am I doing?  Even if it doesn't look like it, learning and curiosity are a big part of it.

Energy Efficient Food, continued

“The fastest way to reduce climate change…just requires us all to eat fewer animal products,” says an article at Salon.com.  David Sirota says, 

[W]hen you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what’s needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn’t intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences — more precisely, by American consumers’ unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year. 

Depending on how much you enjoy eating meat, this is good news.  It doesn’t require a lot of infrastructure investments, just a change of cultural habits.

Song of the Week

This is the Leal School Song, and it is surprisingly sweet.  Cheryl Silver of Urbana posted this on YouTube.  Cheryl went to high school with my daughter Bridget, and I'm pretty sure Cheryl's son is in this video.

Let Rumi Speak

 THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
    translation by Coleman Barks

Head Over Heart

I just read yesterday's post about compassion and wondered, will I ever move compassion beyond the intellect and into the heart?

Look at the Sky

My health insurance company has started a new program called “Positively Well™”.  They sent me a kit yesterday which includes a little journal where I can record my positive feelings. The first targeted feeling is compassion.  I’m ambivalent about my insurance company’s foray into my personal life, but I’ve been thinking lately about compassion and what often seems its opposite, judging.  I spent many years as a writing teacher, a job that involves so much judging.  Many of the excerpts I include in this blog are judgments about the state of the country.  Can I write about these things and still be a compassionate person?

I guess I should start with how I define compassion.  I once mentioned compassion to a friend, and she asked, “Do you mean pity?”  No, I do not.  Some describe compassion as empathy which is a pretty good synonym.  However, I think it means understanding the shared humanity between myself and others, understanding that they, like me, struggle.  They experience the same joy and suffering.  I think this understanding can move from an intellectual idea to a knowing in the heart.  When I manage to feel compassion for Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA, I’ll understand compassion much better.  I want to spend some time contemplating and writing about this compassionate way of perceiving the world.

There is a song that says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”  Peace with what exists seems also a form of compassion, especially compassion for oneself.  Of course I want to be more peaceful, but will it make the world more peaceful too?  I like this suggestion about making space for peace by Pema Chӧdrӧn from her book Taking the Leap. 

The next time you’re getting worked up, experiment with looking at the sky.  Go to the window…and look up at the sky.  I once read an interview with a man who said that during the Second World War, he survived internment in a Japanese concentration camp by looking at the sky and seeing the clouds still drifting there and the birds still flying there.  This gave him trust that the goodness of life would go on despite the atrocities that he was witnessing. 

Looking at the sky, even thinking about looking at the sky, reminds me that we all live together here under the sky and all alike celebrate and struggle.

I keep revising this post.  There must be a better way to describe this.  There probably is.  What helps you practice compassion?

The Weird Times We Live In

Yesterday, my six-year-old grandson went to the post office with his dad.  They bought some stamps and then went over to a table to put the stamps on envelopes.  My grandson put his backpack down, apparently not near enough to himself and his dad, and soon, a PO employee came out to warn Dad that unattended backpacks were not allowed.  Dad apologized, Grandson put on his backpack, and the frightened customers relaxed.

The Great Migrations

I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown….
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps to bloom.
                        —Richard Wright 

This is the first page of Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns.  I started reading it last night, and at 538 pages, I’m not sure I’ll read the entire book.  But so far, I’ve found it very moving.  Between the years of 1915-1970, “six millions black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.”  Historians called it the Great Migration.  On some level I vaguely knew this, but I hadn't attached this movement from the south to the concept of migration.  I didn't know the vast numbers.  Moving is an interesting change; migration is a leap.  Fifteen pages into Wilkerson’s book, I felt as if I had important new information about how this country developed.   

The initial quotation from Wright spoke to me personally.  In the last year I’ve studied the history of my own family which appears to be entirely Irish in its origins.  I’ve read some 19th  century Irish history.  I (and most Americans) come from people who flung themselves into the unknown hoping to be nurtured by the warmth of other suns.  There is much to relate to.  But I am expecting to find that those with dark skins found it more difficult to transplant themselves in alien soil than those of us who are “white.”

Still, many of our ancestors shared a common motivation.  Wilkerson concludes an early section with this: 

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American.  Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.  They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable….They left.

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.