I know it will come as a real shock to those who read this blog, but I have opinions. A point of view. And admittedly, a regrettable tendency toward snark. (A Republican colleague at the University regularly greets me with “Hi, Snarky!)
I know those things about myself. At my age, I should.
Nevertheless, I was taken aback by a recent email from a reader agreeing with a column I’d written for the Indianapolis Business Journal. He informed me that such agreement with me was rare, and chided me for what he perceived to be a lack of respect for those holding contrary positions.
I thought about that accusation, and I decided that he is half right. Although I hope that I “walk the talk” with respect to my frequent calls for greater civility, civility is not respect. It is possible to be perfectly polite–perfectly civil– to someone for whom you have no regard.
So, what about the “respect” allegation?
I do have respect–great respect–for people who clearly share a commitment to important social goals (equal treatment under law, amelioration of injustice, official accountability and the like) but who disagree, sometimes strongly, about way we define those goals, or the policies most likely to achieve them. They are well-intentioned people with a perspective that is contrary to mine–a perspective I try (not always successfully) to understand.
But it is true that I do not have respect for people who are self-serving and intellectually dishonest, the self-aggrandizing and/or antagonistic types we all come across–the “look at me!” know-it-alls who clearly aren’t interested in leaving the world a bit better than they found it, or making things any easier for those having a hard time. They are the trolls, the race-baiters, the angry name-callers, the people who don’t engage with the specifics of any discussion but seem only to be looking for a fight. My lack of respect for them undoubtedly comes through, because I tend to simply ignore such people. There is no point in feeding animus.
In my own defense, I think respect has to be earned.
Everyone is entitled to be treated civilly. Not everyone is entitled to be respected.
No, I’m not about to break into a musical rendition from “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Instead, I’m commenting on a recent post from Juanita Jean at The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc. where the topic was a recent rant by Bill O’Reilly, accusing the White House of “spitting on traditional Americans” by bathing the facade in rainbow lights after the Court ruled in Obergefell.
As Juanita Jean reminds us
Traditional Americans? As opposed to Untraditional Americans? Well, I’ll be damned, against all odds O’Reilly did in fact find another way to divide this country.
Just think, if this country had traditional people running it we would still have child labor,women without the vote, slavery, poll tax, and a helluva lot of muskets.
Exactly.
In that “traditional” America, women couldn’t enter into contracts or get credit without the consent of their fathers or husbands. Birth control was outlawed under “obscenity” statutes. Abortion for any reason was illegal. Women had no protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, and were routinely paid less than men. Gays were in firmly closed closets. Blacks “knew their place.”
It’s the passing of that “traditional” world, and the loss of those “traditional” family values that (old, white, heterosexual) men are bemoaning when they proclaim that they “want their country back.”
The next time Justice Scalia (“Get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!) goes into a tirade about the need to protect even those “traditions” that most of us now consider fundamentally unfair–“traditions” that violate important Constitutional principles of equality and autonomy–let’s think about the many ways those sacred traditions operated to cement the privileges enjoyed by un-self-aware, self-important (white, male) curmudgeons like Bill Riley and Antonin Scalia.
Oh those Millennials! We older folks wring our hands, ascribing to the younger generation all of the bad habits that our own parents ascribed to ours. One of the more popular accusations is that they don’t vote, and aren’t civically involved.
But what do we really know about the voting habits of this particular generation? A recent survey shines some light; from it we learn that 30% typically vote in presidential elections, but not in local elections, while 38% typically vote in both presidential and local elections.
Twenty-eight percent don’t typically vote in either.
A whopping 91% say they plan to vote in the 2016 presidential election. (File this one under “remains to be seen.”)
So–for those who do actually follow through and vote, for whom will they be casting those ballots? Forty-one percent identify as Democrats; 21% as Republican. (That difference ought to be a wake-up call to the GOP, but I’m not holding my breath.) The rest either call themselves independent or claim not to identify with any political party (I didn’t see how the question was framed, so I’m not sure what difference there is between these two choices).
Interestingly, although 31% admit to being politically influenced by their parents or family, 32% say their families are highly unlikely to influence their vote choices.
And what about the widely-held belief that social issues are of primary importance to the Millennial generation? Forty percent say financial issues are primary, 25% say social issues, and 35% say the two are equally important.
There’s much more. Millennial will follow the 2016 campaign on TV (72%) and Facebook (56%), trailed by online news sources, newspapers, Twitter and other social media.
The survey has sobering news for the growing number of lesser-knowns who are running for President:
59% have never heard of Martin O’Malley
59% have never heard of Jim Webb
67% have never heard of Lincoln Chafee
51% have never heard of Scott Walker
55% have never heard of Bernard Sanders
58% have never heard of Bobby Jindal
57% have never heard of Carly Fiorina
49% have never heard of Ben Carson
Finally, a bit of good news for Hillary Clinton: 70% of women say it’s very important to them that the candidate they vote for is a woman; 30% of men think the same.
Some of you will remember my blog detailing the wild and woolly start of our trip to the West Coast–the mad dash to catch the plane, the belated realization that we’d left our car at the airport but we were returning by train…
That was NOTHING compared to the return.
My husband has long wanted to take a train trip across the Western U.S. We are big train buffs, and whenever we are in Europe or Asia, trains are our primary means of travel. Almost without fail, those trains have been modern, immaculate, fast and reliable.
Amtrak, unfortunately, cannot claim to be any of those things.
We boarded in Emeryville (just outside San Francisco) on Friday morning for a trip that was scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 3 pm Sunday. We had made (nonrefundable) reservations on a Megabus to Indianapolis for 6:00 p.m.–giving us three hours. Plenty of time.
Our first disappointment was the “top of the line” sleeper; not only were the cars 40+ years old and tired, but the design of the sleeper was baffling—when the lower bed was out, there was no room to walk and no way to use the washbasin. The upper bunk was much higher than necessary—nice for the person on the bottom, but making it impossible for the person on top to sit up. There were none of the clever storage solutions we’ve found on European trains—virtually no place to put even the most common items–and the tiny bathroom/shower left a lot to be desired.
And there was no Wifi. Fortunately, my techie son had explained how to tether our phones to our devices, but we burned through our data plan and then some.
As we went across the country, the scenery was magnificent, and the other passengers we met were interesting and pleasant. (I should note that the train appeared full–people really like trains!) But we steadily lost time; due to the condition of track, there were many places where the train had to slow down.
As we entered Nebraska it became obvious we’d be well behind schedule. Before we even reached Omaha we were three hours late, so we made new Megabus reservations for six p.m.(couldn’t change the existing ones, thanks to that company’s requirement that changes be made five days in advance). (Did I mention that these tickets are non-refundable?)
Then we got to Omaha, where we were told that storms in Iowa the day before had washed out rail, and we were being re-routed onto a freight line’s track. Despite the fact that Amtrak obviously knew about this problem well before we left Emeryville–and well before they allowed other passengers to board in Denver without informing them of the problem–this was the first time anyone mentioned the fact that the previous day’s train was still stranded in Iowa.
The new route involved waiting for a new crew; we sat in Omaha for six hours. Although announcements were few and far between–and, in our car, thanks to an antiquated PA system, basically inaudible–we were finally told that the estimated time of arrival in Chicago would be somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. Monday. Yesterday.
Another nonrefundable ticket purchase from Megabus, this time playing it safe: 6:00 a.m. And given the schedule, no sleep.
The train finally arrived at Chicago’s Union Station. At 6:02 a.m. We waited 40 minutes for the checked luggage to appear (and when it did, it had evidently been dragged through a large pile of dirt.) No one was working in the baggage claim area, so there was no one to ask about the reason for the delay-or the dirt.
Our final non-refundable Megabus tickets got us on the 9:30 a.m. bus to Indianapolis.
The bus ride was uneventful until we hit the bridge repairs on I65, which brought traffic on that incredibly busy interstate to a virtual halt for over a half-hour. By which time, I was ready to throw myself off the damn bridge and end it all.
We finally got home at 2:30 in the afternoon. Dirty, sweaty, tempers frayed. We’d had no sleep and nothing to eat since Sunday afternoon. Amazingly, we’re still married….
So what have I learned, other than I’m an old broad who should just stay home and tend my (nonexistent) garden?
One of my father’s favorite sayings was: things worth doing are worth doing right. Other countries seem to get this; in the U.S., however, lawmakers seem averse to the concept of infrastructure maintenance. Our bridges are dangerously substandard, our rail beds deteriorating, our trains far past their prime. But rather than fixing our embarrassing rail system, Congress continues to degrade its ability to provide service by cutting Amtrak’s budget.
We sure seem to have plenty of money for weapons, though.
Sightings is a twice-weekly publication of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. One of the newsletters is written by noted religion scholar Martin Marty; the second is an essay by another religion scholar. They are always thought-provoking, but I was especially struck by a recent contribution by one Bruce Rittenhouse:
My own research on consumerism supports the conclusion that the reason Americans remain attached to a consumeristic form of life is because it performs the religious function of providing them with an answer to the existential problem of meaning.
In my research, I defined consumerism as a form of life that sacrifices other consciously-valued goods in order to maximize the consumption of economic goods, despite the fact that this consumption exceeds any objective measure of need.
Rittenhouse offers a variety of research findings to bolster his contention that even the most economically challenged U.S. households prioritize consumption over savings, and he identifies the role that consumerism plays in the American psyche. He notes–accurately–that “economic goods are never simply objects of use.” Consumption becomes consumerism when the intent is to procure “social recognition,” when it is the way in which the consumer signals his or her “personal significance in a community,” allowing the consumer to “transcend personal mortality.”
In other words, in the absence of a different source of meaning, owning stuff serves that purpose– the consumerist lifestyle is “psychologically essential to the person who uses it to secure his or her personal significance.”
Rittenhouse’s conclusion is grim:
So long as American culture fails to provide a ground of personal meaning that calls for self-sacrifice for the common good and for future generations, the United States will remain unable to meet its current economic, demographic, and environmental challenges.
If Rittenhouse is right–and there is a depressing amount of evidence supporting his thesis–we have a very big problem, because the health of the American economy rests on our ability to generate consumption. One of the most persuasive arguments for raising the minimum wage is that consumption requires disposable income.
A change in the culture of consumerism won’t come without considerable economic upheaval. Assuming it comes at all.
