Category Archives: Random Blogging

What Can One Person Do?

Early Wednesday morning, I got a call from my 14-year-old grandson. He wanted reassurance that there are limits to what Trump can do, that “checks and balances” will contain him. He wanted to know what I thought would happen now.

He wanted to know just how frightened he should be.

My grandson is a freshman at an excellent high school in downtown Indianapolis. Before high school, he went to a magnet school, also downtown. His friends include African-Americans, Latinos and Muslims. Some of his classmates’ families immigrated to the United States. He is Jewish. During this ugly, divisive campaign they’ve all heard what will happen to “their kind” when Trump is President.

So many parents asked the principal of his high school what they should tell their children about these threats that she sent out an article from the Huffington Post, addressing that question.

Tell them, first, that we will protect them. Tell them that we have democratic processes in the U.S. that make it impossible for one mean person to do too much damage. Tell them that we will protect those democratic processes ― and we will use them ― so that Trump is unable to act on many of the false promises he made during his campaign.

Tell them, second, that you will honor the outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated at your school.

I encourage those of you with children and grandchildren to read the entire article. But all of us who value fundamental American values of inclusion and equality–whether we are young or old, whether we have children or not, whether we are part of a minority group or as WASPy as they come–must resist the urge to “go along” with Trump’s efforts to undermine those values.

Many years ago, there was a television mini-series about the Holocaust that my mother and I watched with my children. After one episode, my mother said –with great conviction– that, had she been a German, she would never have gone along with the Nazis, that she would never have participated or stood by silently.

As I told her at the time, I wish I could be so sure of how I would have behaved. It’s one thing to sit on a couch in a free country and speculate on your response to a situation you don’t face, but when fascism (or any sort of authoritarianism) begins, it’s deceptively easy to convince yourself that this is just a “hiccup”–that really bad things aren’t happening, that the “other guy” would have been as bad or worse.

It’s so tempting to close your eyes to injustices aimed at other people. After all, we have lives to live, errands to run, houses to clean, offices to go to. How many of us would really, actively resist fascist measures that didn’t immediately or directly threaten us or our families?

It appears we are going to get the chance to answer that question.

In the wake of this horrific election and what a Trump Administration portends, every person of good will must resolve right now to be one of the “good Germans,” to be like the people who didn’t go along, who didn’t close their eyes, who didn’t make excuses for the early scapegoating, nativism and bigotry that ultimately enabled genocide.

This is a test. I can only hope we studied for it.

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It Seems We Aren’t So “Exceptional” After All

The election is over, but the racial and cultural resentments that led to the election of  Donald Trump are not over, and the incalculable damage he will do to America and the world is just beginning. Unfortunately, when the largely rural and less-educated population that voted for him realizes that he cannot deliver on his fanciful and frequently unconstitutional promises, they are likely to blame it on all the “others” they already resent–immigrants, Jews, Muslims, African-Americans. Uppity women.

Several people have compared this election to England’s Brexit, and there are obvious parallels (including, I’ll predict, significant levels of “buyer’s remorse.”)Nativism and white nationalism, not economics, motivated both votes.

A recent essay by Zach Beauchamp in Vox makes a pretty convincing case that–much as we like to believe America is somehow different from other Western democracies, as much as we pride ourselves on our “exceptionalism”–what we are seeing here is not that different from the nativist movements currently challenging European democracies.

It’s tempting to think of Trump as something uniquely American, but the truth is that his rise is being repeated throughout the Western world, where far-right populists are rising in the polls.

In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has started building a wall to keep out immigrants and holding migrants in detention camps where guards have been filmed flinging food at them as if they were zoo animals. In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by a politician who has attacked the pope for calling for dialogue with Muslims, is polling at more than three times its 2013 level, making it the country’s third most popular party. And in Finland, the Finns Party — which wants to dramatically slash immigration numbers and keep out many non-Europeans — is part of the government. Its leader, Timo Soini, is the country’s foreign minister.

These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia: They despise immigrants, vowing to close the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike, and are open in their belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous.

Beauchamp dismisses the notion that this wave of anti-immigrant activism is rooted in economics or even rejection of globalization. In his analysis, what is driving this is something far more primal: fear of difference and social change.

A vast universe of academic research suggests the real sources of the far-right’s appeal are anger over immigration and a toxic mix of racial and religious intolerance.

Beauchamp cites research done by Roger Peterson, who wanted to understand why social change led to attacks on minorities in some situations, but not others. Peterson argued that in order to understand what triggers ethnic violence, we need to understand and appreciate the role of resentment, which he defined as “the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn’t previously held it.”

Peterson concluded that a major cause of ethnic violence was change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups, change that is met with a sense of injustice, because members of dominant groups believe they deserve to be dominant, and deeply resent it when members of other groups advance their status or pose a challenge to their pre-eminent positions.

During the 2016 campaign, that resentment–against minorities, against immigrants, and especially against women–was repeatedly found to be a more reliable predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other personal or economic characteristic.

It is that fury over social change that offers the best explanation we have for why the forces of intolerance are currently on the rise in the West. If we want to understand the world we live in today — and the one we’ll be inhabiting for years to come — we need to understand how immigration and intolerance are transforming the way white Christians vote. We need to understand that the battle between racist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism will be one of the defining ideological struggles of the 21st century. And we need to understand that Donald Trump is not an accident. He’s a harbinger.

People of good will have our work cut out for us.

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How Did We Get Here and Where Do We Go Now?

This semester, I am teaching an elective course that I “invented” some years ago; it is called “Individual Rights and the Common Good,” and the readings and class discussions center on the proper role of the state, and the optimal balance between respect for individual autonomy and the needs/interests of the society.

Because it is an elective, the students who choose to enroll tend to be engaged, and the discussions have generally been thoughtful and substantive.

The class meets on Tuesday nights, and Tuesday–today– is election day. In consideration of that fact (and, admittedly, the probability that several of them would skip class in order to watch the returns), I decided to forego our usual class meeting in favor of an effort to connect the more abstract principles we have been discussing with the very immediate realities of America’s political environment.

Here is the assignment I gave them. What would your answers be?

________________________

The 2016 election campaigns have been among the most contentious in our history, and have displayed wide—perhaps unbridgeable–disagreements among Americans not just about the comparative merits of individual candidates, but about the proper role of government and the nature of the common good.

Our next class is scheduled for election day. As these campaigns conclude, and in lieu of holding that class, I am asking you to consider the opposing views and attitudes that have been revealed during the course of these campaigns, and to write a 2-3 page essay addressing the following questions:

  • How would you characterize the Presidential candidates’ visions of the common good/national interest?
  • How would you describe their respective approaches to balancing protections of individual rights against the interests of the country as a whole?
  • In the wake of the election, how do you see Americans resolving our very different perspectives and deep disagreements? (In other words, given the incredibly acrimonious nature of the campaigns, do you see efforts at reconciliation or continued animosity, and in either case, with what result?)
  • In your opinion, what is driving Americans’ current partisan polarization and anger?
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Call My Car….

There really are things going on in the world other than the upcoming election (which can’t come–and go–soon enough!).

For example, Architectural Record recently weighed in on the apparently inevitable advent of the driverless car.

First it was Google, mapping the known world with autonomous vehicles. Then it was news of various efforts to perfect the technology, and an announcement that Pittsburgh is going to be the site of an actual demonstration.

In fact, the day when a phantom chauffeur will charge an electric vehicle on its own, analyze the route, exchange up-to-the-moment information with other cars on the road, and pick you up for work—or your kids for school—is no longer sci-fi fantasy. Many of the manufacturers expect fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), requiring no human supervision or backup drivers, to hit the market around 2020—letting you sleep, read, work, or entertain guests as an unmanned sedan ferries you door to door.

As the article notes, the most important promise of driverless cars is a vast improvement in safety. The least reliable part of a car is the driver, and worldwide, 1.2 million people are killed in car accidents every year. Ninety percent of automobile accidents are attributed to driver error.

Architectural Record then explored the questions we should all be asking: assuming the inexorable shift to such vehicles, how will that change both the built environment and our housing choices? How might it change the way we go about our days?

A major consequence could be a radical reduction in parking space. And slots could be packed tight, given robotically nimble maneuvers, not to mention the area saved when no one needs to exit or enter a parked vehicle—ever. (After dropping you off, the car would “valet” itself.) Even curbside spots could become unnecessary, allowing for narrower streets—an efficiency boosted by sensing-and-reaction mechanisms that permit AVs close driving distances, increasing road capacity. The gains could be huge. As Ratti puts it, “Parking infrastructure in the United States covers around 5,000 square miles—an area [43-percent] larger than Puerto Rico.” The freed-up land could be converted to creative and socially enriching uses, providing for art or recreation..”

It’s an open question whether self-driving cars will promote urban density—or suburban sprawl. The article suggests arguments for both options. Some of the potential changes AV’s may usher in have the sound of science fiction:

“Autonomous vehicles promise to have dramatic impact in blurring the distinction between private and public modes of transportation,” says professor Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. “After taking you to work, ‘your’ car could give a lift to someone else in your family—or to anyone in your neighborhood, social-media community, or city—rather than sitting idle.” While the average automobile in the U.S. is unused an estimated 95-percent of the time, a robo-vehicle has the potential to reposition itself continually, with network-optimized efficiency, from one passenger to the next. Theoretically, self-driving could lend everyone—including the blind, elderly, and very young—unprecedented mobility, providing a shared system of individually customized, on-demand travel with a fraction of the cars currently on the road.

Reading the article (which I recommend) leaves me with a question that is becoming a daily preoccupation: how can humans be so good at science and technology, so innovative and creative–and so terrible at governing ourselves?

We can invent wondrous things. Why can’t we learn to live together harmoniously?

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Journalism and the 2016 Election

Wednesday evening, the ACLU of Indiana hosted one of its “First Wednesday” programs. These are brief, hour and a half presentations focused on current civil liberties issues. This one was titled “Election 2016 and the Media: Free Press or Free for All?”

John Ketzenberger moderated the panel, which consisted of two television reporters, Russ McQuaid and Marc Mullins, the opinion editor of the Indianapolis Star, Tim Swarens, and Mary Beth Schneider, who recently left her job at the Star, where she had been their long-time statehouse reporter.

Rather than focusing on the coverage of the 2016 election, as the title had suggested, the panel mostly bemoaned the challenges of today’s media environment, particularly the impact of digital media on longstanding business models. In response to an audience question (posed by my husband), they did agree that Trump had “played” the press to his advantage for much of the election cycle.

Despite the focus on the challenges posed by the Internet, most of the conversation avoided recognition of the actual state of traditional media. At one point, one of the broadcast representatives did note that media companies had become too dependent upon young reporters with little experience in lieu of (more expensive) seasoned journalists. But there was absolutely no discussion of the constant, punishing newsroom layoffs by Gannett, the loss of reporters like Mary Beth whose work was informed by institutional memory and deep knowledge, and the utter lack of print coverage of state and local government.

At times, Tim Swarens seemed almost delusional. He made the point that newspapers can gain/keep readership if they provide consistent, high-quality journalism (no argument there), then repeatedly and proudly claimed that the current iteration of the Star produces such journalism. There was no acknowledgment of the evisceration of the paper’s news staff, the dwindling ratio of actual news to sports and entertainment coverage, the virtual absence of reporting that used to be routine–stories about school board meetings, City-County Council committee deliberations, agency decisions and the like. (On the rare occasion that there are such reports, they tend to lack the context and background necessary to understand their significance.)

Our local business paper, the Indianapolis Business Journal, actually does a much better job on that front, recognizing that area businesses need to know what their government is doing.

The panel did recognize that the frantic competition for “clicks” and eyeballs too often drives coverage, posing a danger to the accuracy and completeness of stories.

I certainly don’t have a remedy for the very real problems journalism faces in an era of rampant on-line news and propaganda, declining revenues and outmoded business models. But I do know two things: 1) Americans need reputable news sources that tell us not just what we want to know, but what we need to know; and 2) you can’t fix a problem if you refuse to admit you have it.

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