Category Archives: Random Blogging

At a Loss for Words About a Loss

My friend Paul Chase died last week in a senseless automobile accident. He was only 58. Wednesday, I attended a memorial for him–as did several hundred other people.

Paul wasn’t famous, wasn’t a celebrity, wasn’t rich–He wasn’t the sort of person whose memorial attracts wanna-be hangers-on or people who are there to be seen. The people who attended were grieving the loss of a genuinely good person.

What can I say about Paul? Even for someone who writes all the time, it’s hard to find the words.

Paul was a handsome, brilliant lawyer who chose to work for social justice and sound public health policies rather than joining a silk-stocking law firm and making a lot of money. But he was never strident, never holier-than-thou, never anything but incredibly funny and thoughtful and kind.  A look around the crowd confirmed the breadth of his impact–legislators from both parties, statehouse lobbyists, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and lots and lots of friends–white, black, gay, straight, young and old.

As coworkers, friends and relatives shared their memories, I couldn’t help thinking that Paul Chase was a poster child for the “family values” that intolerant folks insist they are “protecting” by discriminating against LGBT people. He’d met his partner Terry when they were 18-year-old college students, and they’d been a devoted and loving couple for 40 years. Their respective families continued to love and embrace them both  (Terry’s sister reminisced that her mother had adored Paul so much that she made every dessert he liked when they came to visit–and served them all at the same meal).

The day of his death, the Federal Court struck down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriage, and Paul was thrilled that he and Terry could finally get married. It wasn’t to be.

There was no hate in Paul, no evident resentment of the people who would deny him a place at the civic table, no vitriol for the vitriolic. Just an abundant kindness, an inner serenity and a killer sense of humor.

The memorial program carried a favorite quote from the Dalai Lama: “To be kind, honest and have positive thoughts; to forgive those who harm us and treat everyone as a friend; to help those who are suffering and never to consider ourselves superior to anyone else; even if this advice seems rather simplistic, make the effort of seeing whether by following it you can find greater happiness.”

Paul lived by that creed. He left us much, much too soon, but very few people–even those who have lived much longer–have left as enduring a legacy in the hearts and minds of those left behind.

He will be missed.

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Did John Locke Doom America’s Social Safety Net?

The first issue of the Journal of Civic Literacy has been published, and is available at the link. We’re pretty proud of it; it features an introductory essay from former Supreme Court Justice Souter, several academic articles, a book review by Steve Sanders, and an argument for/example of effective civics instruction by Charles Dunlap, head of Indiana’s Bar Foundation.

It also includes an article–you might even say a meditation–on America’s difficulty with the concept of the social safety net.  The thesis is that Americans have internalized John Locke’s libertarianism in a way that does not accurately reflect his philosophy, and by doing so have made it incredibly difficult to have reasonable public conversations about programs like Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

Given the abysmal level of civic knowledge these days, it may seem almost fanciful to revisit Hobbes, Locke and other towering Enlightenment figures (we can hardly encourage people to reread works they’ve clearly never read or even heard of), but a careful consideration of where we come from can often illuminate how in the hell we got where we are.

Anyway, if you’re interested in a somewhat wonky deliberation on our intellectual forebears, I hope you’ll give the article–and the others in the issue– a read. (Admission/disclosure: I am a co-author of the Locke article.)

And if you want to remind yourselves what a really good Supreme Court Justice sounds like, read Justice Souter’s essay.

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We’re Number One!

Over the past couple of decades, a number of conservative politicians have championed a distorted American Exceptionalism characterized by the jingoistic boast, “We’re number one!”

According to a recent report highlighted by The Hill, one area in which we are indeed number one is child poverty. Currently, more than 46 million Americans live in poverty, and more than a third of those are children. The U.S. child poverty rate is 22 percent – the highest of any of the rich countries.

Congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan and state-level politicians like Indiana Governor Mike Pence blame child poverty on single mothers, and insist that the way to address the problem is to incentivize marriage. That “solution” ignores the fact that in countries with similar rates of unwed motherhood and a more robust social safety net (think Scandinavian countries), child poverty rates hover around 3 percent.

Attributing child poverty to low rates of marriage also flies in the face of a good deal of recent research suggesting that people who enjoy financial security are more likely to get and stay married. Indiana Governor Pence recently shared a statistic that upper-income folks and college graduates are more likely to have stable marriages as evidence that marriage brings financial security. Actually, it’s the other way around; people who aren’t sweating the rent are more likely to stay married.

As we academic types are wont to point out, correlation is not causation.

If unmarried mothers are not the cause of childhood poverty, what is? At a recent conference hosted by The Roosevelt Institute, the Century Foundation and the Academic Pediatric Association, participants considered the causes and consequences of poverty experienced by a significant percentage of the nation’s children.

Low-wage jobs are an obvious culprit. At least 30 percent of poor children live in homes where one parent works full-time. Full time work at the current minimum wage, however, cannot lift a family of three above the poverty line. Worse, most minimum and low-wage jobs are tenuous. Not only are benefits rare, but parents who miss work to care for a sick child are likely to see their pay docked while also risking termination.

Congressmen earn a base salary of $174,000 per year, so it is probably not surprising that few of them seem to understand the stresses poverty exacts from children. These children grow up in very unstable circumstances, with caregivers (usually mothers but increasingly grandparents) whose struggles to make ends meet sap time and energy that the more fortunate can devote to parenting.

If Congress is unlikely to recognize the social and human costs of an inadequate safety net any time soon, there are at least some state and municipal-level initiatives that hold promise. Several cities, most notably Seattle at $15 per hour, have recently raised their minimum wage. And the Massachusetts legislature has just approved a measure that will gradually raise that state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2017, up from its current $8 level. Governor Deval Patrick is expected to sign it into law.

New York City and Memphis, Tennessee are experimenting with cash transfer programs, and a variety of cities have instituted home visitation programs meant to provide education and other services to low-income families, in an effort to improve cognitive and health outcomes for children in those families.

As promising as several of these experiments are, they are no substitute for a wholesale rethinking of this nation’s approach to poverty, especially as it affects our children.
The past decade has been dominated by a political rhetoric that can only be characterized as Social Darwinism – the belief (bolstered by a distorted Calvinism) that people are poor because they are somehow morally defective, that they are “takers” or lazy or “lack middle-class values.”

Little by little, those stereotypes are being challenged by sound research and by the stories of real people – by the nascent movement for a living wage and ample economic research demonstrating that a living wage benefits the entire economy, not just low-wage workers. That story needs to be told, and retold.

When it comes to child poverty, America should not be number one.

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What Color is the Sky in Your Universe?

It has been obvious for quite a while that Americans occupy different and incommensurate realities. But in the midst of the partisan and religious vitriol (often fed by an appalling lack of basic constitutional, economic and scientific knowledge), there is some evidence of–dare I say it–a creeping rationality.

 As millions of Americans continue to struggle in a sluggish economy, a growing portion of the country says that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The poll shows a significant shift in American opinion on the causes of poverty since the last time the question was asked, nearly 20 years ago. In 1995, in the midst of a raging political debate about welfare and poverty, less than a third of poll respondents said people were in poverty because of issues beyond their control. At that time, a majority said that poverty was caused by “people not doing enough.” Now, nearly half of respondents, 47 percent, attribute poverty to factors other than individual initiative.

America’s porous social-safety net is largely attributable to a stubborn belief in individual responsibility for social mobility and a corresponding insistence that only lazy people or those who are somehow morally deficient find themselves at the bottom of the economic heap.

Rooted in Calvinism (earthly success as a sign of divine favor) it is a worldview that conveniently overlooks all the ways in which government helps the middle and upper classes and focuses opprobrium on anything that could be labeled “welfare.” (Corporate subsidies are economic development; Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs, etc.).

As a country and society, we perversely refuse to recognize the systemic and institutional causes of economic disadvantage until the pain is widely enough shared and its roots impossible to miss. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that people were willing to recognize the need for even a minimal social safety net. The NBC poll is just one data point. But there are others.

Sane Republicans are speaking out about climate change. Dick Cheney is increasingly seen as the bad joke he has always been. Young people are demonstrably more inclusive than their elders. Same-sex marriages are close to being fait accompli everywhere. There are more tolerant Americans than there are Theocratic Christians, and the ranks of the former are growing while those of the latter are declining.

Although Obama’s election unleashed a depressing torrent of hitherto suppressed racism, the fact remains that we did elect an African-American President. Twice.

There are signs that it’s getting better. If we can just survive the Crazy…

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Capitalism? Or Corporatism?

Inequality has become the topic du jour–and as with so many other topics Americans debate, what anyone means by “unequal” and if and why inequality matters depends on one’s perspective.

In a capitalist system, some people will do better than others. There is nothing wrong with that; the promise of a bigger reward for building a better mousetrap spurs innovation and benefits us all. It’s only when the disparity in rewards becomes disproportionate and  especially when those rewards become disconnected from actual economic productivity that things get seriously out of whack.

When what people make is a reflection of their connections and/or the success of their lobbyists, it’s time to consider whether we still have a capitalist system, or whether what America  currently has is corporatism–a system where power is exercised through large organizations in pursuit of their own economic agendas, to the detriment of the common good.

Capitalism creates opportunity; corporatism keeps it “all in the family,” exacerbating inequality. Consider the following statistics and draw your own conclusions:

Between 1947 and 1972, the average hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, rose 76%. Since 1972, it has risen 4%.

In 2011, the poverty rate for female-headed families with children was 40.9%

In 2009, CEOs of major corporations were paid a wage that was 269 times the average compensation of American workers.

Between 1979 and 2007, wages for the top 1% rose ten times as fast as those for the bottom 90%–156.2% versus 16.7%.

There’s much more, but you get the picture.

The question is, how do we return to a system where the market actually decides the winners and losers, rather than the oligarchs?

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