Category Archives: Random Blogging

A Zero-Sum World

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me an email about recent remarks made by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. Deal wants Congress to repeal the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986. That’s the law–approved and signed by President Reagan–that requires hospitals to treat anyone in an emergency, regardless of citizenship or ability to pay.

In other words, if you are shot, giving birth, having a heart attack–whatever–and you make it to the nearest emergency room, they have to stabilize you before they determine whether you can pay and if not, send you elsewhere. They can’t just turn you away to drop the baby on the pavement or die from the heart attack.

To most sane people, this seems pretty reasonable, and by all accounts, the Act has saved many lives since it was enacted. 

I spend a lot of electronic “ink” wondering what’s wrong with people like Governor Deal. Why are they so adamantly opposed to expansion of Medicaid, increased access to health insurance, or a modest raise in the minimum wage? I could understand it if they were arguing about the best way to provide healthcare or alleviate poverty,  if they were offering alternatives, but they clearly aren’t–they are opposed to the goals themselves. And that’s what I’ve had so much trouble understanding.

However, I think I may have figured it out. These people live in a zero-sum reality.

In the zero-sum worldview, every social good exists in a fixed amount. If you get X, I lose X or its equivalent.

Thankfully, the real world doesn’t work that way. In countries with single-payer systems, for example, healthcare costs less, and everyone benefits. Studies have also confirmed that raising the minimum wage puts more money in the economy, and actually increases employment (counter-intuitive as that may seem.)

It must be exhausting to live in a zero-sum reality, where you must constantly on guard to protect your personal fiefdom. I know I need to cultivate some compassion for the denizens of that world, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for mean-spirited people.

On the other hand, maybe there’s a fixed amount of human-kindness, and they didn’t get any?

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Uncomfortable Questions, Depressing Answers

In a recent INforefront post, James Madison asked some uncomfortable questions about the role class distinctions play in (theoretically classless) America.

Does the Land of the Free have class distinctions? Are such distinctions inevitable? Defensible?

American notions of class aren’t grounded in lineage and tradition—at least, not to the extent they are elsewhere. Class in America gets confused with concepts of meritocracy and echoes of Calvinism, the belief that earthly success was a sign of God’s favor and one’s  “chosen-ness.”

The conviction that material wealth was evidence of moral merit was accompanied by the conclusion that poverty must signal moral defect. Over the years, these doctrinal roots of our belief in the comparative worth of rich and poor was lost, subsumed into a secular, class-based proposition: poor folks are lazy “takers” who lack “middle-class values.”

In a culture that celebrates (fast-disappearing) meritocracy and social mobility, it’s easy to conclude that poverty is a result of class-based attitudes and characteristics. And of course, if you’re privileged, it’s satisfying to attribute your good fortune to individual merit rather than the fact you were born (with the “right” race, religion, gender and sexual orientation) into a family with the wherewithal to feed, clothe, educate and endow you.

These attitudes foster policies that favor the fortunate, diminish the middle class, and make social mobility virtually impossible for the working poor.

There will always be winners and losers. There will always be some people who work harder than others, who are smarter or more entrepreneurial and deserve to do better. But a society that confuses individual worth with money and social status is a class-based society.

Right now, unfortunately, that describes America.

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Words Fail….Again

NOTE: HAVING INTERNET PROBLEMS. HERE’S TOMORROW’S BLOG. IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME FOR A DAY OR SO, I’M WORKING ON MY ACCESS….

This post from DailyKos mirrors two others I’ve seen, reporting the response of several Texans (!) to the use of a term derived from Arabic to describe a dust storm.

  • Hateful hubbub arises over haboob. The word, from the Arabic for “strong wind,” and, in particular, a dust storm in North Africa or the Arabian peninsula, has been used by meteorologists to describe such storms in the United States since the 1950s. But after KCBD News Channel 11 in Lubbock, Texas, posted a photo on its Facebook page with the caption “Haboob headed toward Lubbock,” some Texans went crazy:

“Since when do we need to apply a Muslim vocabulary to a good ole AMERICAN dirt storm?? …I take great offense to such terminology! GO BACK TO CALLING THEM DIRT STORMS!!”

“It’s called a dust storm..Texas is not a rag head country.”

“Never had a haboob until we got that Muslim boob for POTUS.” […]

America is doomed.

If this were an isolated instance, or even limited to Texas, it would be embarrassing, but this sort of assholery is everywhere. Including Congress.

It’s bad enough that people are this ignorant and bigoted; that they feel compelled to publicly express that ignorance and bigotry is really more than I can take.

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I Yield My Space

Paul Krugman’s column on The Dog Whistle deserves to be read by anyone and everyone who professes bafflement over today’s incoherent politics.

The only thing he omits is a discussion of the degree to which anti-Obama fervor is motivated by the color of this President’s skin. But then, that phenomenon is hard to miss for anyone who isn’t willfully ignoring it.

I can’t add anything to Krugman’s dead-on analysis. Go read it.

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An Exercise in Restraint….

The other night, at a dinner party, I practiced biting my tongue. Hard.

One of the couples present was visiting from Texas, and they looked—and drawled—the  part. Forgive me the stereotype, but if you’ve ever wondered who in the world votes for people like Rick Perry or Louis Gohmert, I think I know…

Parties aren’t the place for unpleasant behaviors, so I actually participated in two conversations: one verbalized, one in my head.

After some general chatter from those present about the unusually brutal winter, the wife smirked, “I guess that shows those liberals who are always talking about global warming!”

I was quiet.

I didn’t say, you twit. It’s climate change, and the escalation of unusual weather patterns is precisely what “those liberals” have been warning about.

A few minutes later, someone mentioned news coverage, and the wife once again spoke up. “I never watch NBC or CBS or—of course—MSNBC. I watch Fox, because Fox gives both sides.”

I choked. “Really?” I said mildly, wondering what my blood pressure might be.

I didn’t say, I guess you aren’t aware of all those studies showing that Fox audiences know less than people who don’t watch any news at all. (My husband, sitting across the table, later shared that he’d barely suppressed the impulse to tell her he prefers Al Jazeera. I would have given a lot to see her reaction….)

I remained pleasantly noncommittal when she speculated that Pakistani Muslims had probably hijacked the missing plane.

At that point, everyone at the table became aware of the husband, who had stopped explaining to a couple from London why “the King’s English” isn’t really proper English, in order to pontificate about America’s descent into socialism. After sneering about “those people” who were “going through” the assets of the entrepreneurs and “makers” who had earned them, he let out a knowing sigh. “They’ll never learn.”

I asked him—sweetly—what he’d done prior to his retirement. He’d worked for government.

You know—the institution that pays its employees with tax money that has been extorted from the makers.

I murmured something about a migraine…so sorry…and left.

My jaw should unclench in a day or so.

 

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