April 2010 – Sheila Kennedy

I Will Never Understand

I always thought that advanced age would bring wisdom—or if not wisdom, at least a greater understanding of the world and the human beings who populate it. I was wrong. There are things I will never, ever understand.

A month or so ago, a federal judge in Mississippi ruled that the rights of high school senior Constance McMillen were violated when her high school refused to allow her to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend to the Itawamba Agricultural High School prom. The school promptly cancelled the prom rather than allow Constance to attend. Federal Judge held a trial on the matter later and reaffirmed his ruling, but stopped short of requiring the school board to reinstate the prom, as parents had already formulated their plan to hold a private prom.

As one report put it, “There was a private prom all right.” On the Wednesday before the Friday prom date, the school’s attorney announced that “the prom” would be held at the Fulton Country Club. Constance, her date and seven other kids (two with learning disabilities) showed up—only to find that the “real” prom was being held elsewhere. The parents had moved it to a secret location out of the county.

What is wrong with these people? What on earth would cause these parents, who are presumably adults, to do something this cruel and hurtful? Are they that terrified of difference? That devoid of human compassion?

All I could think of when I read the stories about this event was a photo taken at Little Rock High School, when National Guard soldiers sent by President Dwight Eisenhower escorted an obviously terrified young black woman through a crowd determined to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In that famous picture, a young white woman of approximately the same age, her face contorted with hate, is spitting on the black girl.

And again, I ask the question for which there is no satisfactory answer: what makes people act like this?

The easy answer is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the “other.” Fear of a world that seems increasingly unfamiliar. We can see this in the “Tea Party” gatherings, with their misspelled signs, the accusations of Nazism and Socialism (terms most of them rather clearly could not define if their lives depended on it), and the not-very-veiled racism. We’ve seen it in the American past, with the periodic emergence of groups like the Know Nothings, the Nativists, and others we’d rather forget.

The problem with the explanatory power of this theory is that we all are fearful from time to time. But we don’t all express it in such a hateful and destructive fashion. So what is the distinguishing characteristic? What makes one person decide to put her fears to use by working with others to solve our common problems, while the next person channels it into rage and recrimination?

In a related question, I have always wondered about people who engage in vandalism. Theft I can understand—you want something I have. (I don’t condone it, but I do understand it.) But wanton destruction? Smashing property just for the sake of smashing? That, I have never understood.

After five children and four grandchildren, I know firsthand how fragile all teenagers are, how easily their egos can be damaged and their hopes and aspirations dashed. I also have a gay son and a lesbian granddaughter, and I have watched their struggles to separate their self-images from the hurtful social stereotypes that are still a huge part of American society. I sometimes marvel that any gay child grows up undamaged and whole, given the often thoughtless cruelty of some of those attitudes.

I just cannot imagine purposely doing to any teen what those Mississippi parents did to this child. And I will never understand why.

Policy and Polarization

Numbers cruncher Nate Silver took a look at the recent New York Times poll of people who consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement, and noted that media habits were the most salient predictor of such support.

According to Silver, “Tea-partiers are disproportionately attached to, and perhaps influenced by, FOX News. And they are particularly enamored of Glenn Beck. Nationally, just 18 percent of people have a favorable opinion of Beck (the majority have no opinion whatsoever about him). But most tea-partiers do… 59 percent of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea-party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television.”

It isn’t just Fox. Increasingly, the television programming you watch, the newspapers, magazines and blogs you read, and the other media you access have become predictors of the reality you inhabit.

Over the past eight years, I have team-taught a course with James Brown, Associate Dean of IUPUI’s Journalism School. The course is titled “Media and Public Affairs” and it enrolls both journalism and policy students. Its purpose is to explore the mutual dependence of the media and government. When we first taught the course, it was a relatively straightforward exploration of the history of American journalism and freedom of the press: today, we aren’t even sure what “the media” is. And that’s a problem, not just for the classroom, but for the country.

In a large and diverse democracy, the ability of citizens to make informed decisions about public policy is critically dependent upon the quality, objectivity and completeness of the information available to them. We are seeing dramatic changes in the ways in which Americans access that information. At a time when the relationship between government and media has become increasingly important, that relationship has become increasingly problematic.

The media’s role in American policymaking involves two supremely important functions, that of “watchdog” and that of information provider. The watchdog function is intended to keep public administrators honest; the information function allows the public to make reasoned judgments, not just about their government’s actions and decisions, but about the all-important context within which those actions are taken and decisions made.

Governments depend upon a properly functioning media in order to make sound policy; citizens require a properly functioning media to ensure that their own policy judgments are informed.

The ideal of journalism is objectivity, difficult as that often is to achieve. Every journalist cannot be Walter Cronkite, but we cannot function as citizens without genuinely impartial and trustworthy sources of information. When we substitute commentators for reporters, when supposedly reputable news sources act like stenographers—giving us “balance” (i.e. “he said, she said”) without fact-checking who’s telling the truth—we end up in a black and white world where we can choose the “facts” we prefer to believe.

And then we wonder why everyone is so angry.

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Patriotism and Taxes

Much of today’s angry rhetoric is constructed around two dubious claims: (1) taxes are unjust, because my money is the result of my own hard work; and (2) people helped by government are indolent leeches.

One problem with the latter claim is that people who look down on welfare recipients who are poor have a remarkably benign view of welfare recipients who are rich. They see nothing wrong with paying USA Funds and similar enterprises lots of money just to give away federal dollars for student loans—a cushy deal with absolutely no downside risk—or with politicians who rail against government “handouts” while raking in big farm subsidies. (Tennessee Congressional candidate Stephen Fincher, a darling of the anti-tax folks, gets $200,000 a year from the government; “anti-socialist” Rep. Michelle Bachmann gets $250,000.)

The more insidious claim, however, is the first: I worked hard for my money and government has no right to tax it for anything other than police and armies to protect me and my property.

Ian Welsh points out some “inconvenient truths” about that claim. He compares the average American to the average citizen of Bangladesh. The average American makes $43,740 annually; the average Bangladeshi, $470.

Why the difference? American children are less likely to suffer from malnutrition, which adversely affects intellect later in life. American children are far more likely to get good educations. When a Bengali child grows up, there are fewer available jobs. If he starts a business, the market will be much smaller than the equivalent American market. As Welsh says,

“The vast majority of money that an American earns is due to being born American. Certainly, the qualities that make America a good place to live and a good place to make money are things that were created by Americans, but mostly, they were created by Americans long dead or by Americans working together. ..Since the majority of the money any American earns is a function of being American, not of their own individual virtues, government has the moral right to tax.”

Welsh isn’t the first to come to this conclusion. Thomas Paine, perhaps the most eloquent of the Founders, expressed similar sentiments in his pamphlet “Agrarian Justice.”

“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”

Patriotism isn’t just about being willing to die for your country. It’s also about being willing to pay your fair share to maintain the social infrastructure that makes life more pleasant—and more profitable—for us all.

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