Category Archives: Random Blogging

Heartwarming Pictures

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there have been some really heartwarming pictures and stories showing the various ways New York city residents (and others) are coping with the aftermath. They can be boiled down to one phrase: caring and sharing.

So we see pictures like the one of a house where residents have run extension cords to the street and posted a sign: “We still have power. Feel free to charge your phones.” In darkened neighborhoods, there are pictures of neighbors checking on each other, sharing flashlights and the occasional home generator, helping each other with food and blankets. My own son, whose midtown apartment never lost electrical service, has told friends to come over to “shower and power”–and tells me that many other residents of his building are doing the same. Mayor Bloomberg noted this morning that there hasn’t been a murder in the City for the past three days.

While first responders are evidently doing their usual great job, they can’t be everywhere. So New Yorkers are–as usual–depending on the kindness of neighbors and strangers. And those strangers are responding.

This should not be a surprise. New Yorkers–routinely maligned by folks who don’t like cities and fear people who don’t look like them–has a history of coping well with challenges. I recall stories from the blackout several years ago, where people who owned small restaurants opted to empty their refrigerators and cook up the contents–throwing impromptu dinner parties for passersby, choosing to do something for others rather than simply letting the food spoil.

It’s too bad it takes adversity to remind us that we are part of a human family, and we ought to act like it.

For that matter, it sometimes takes an event of this magnitude to remind us why government is important–and that, properly run, it works.

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No Snark Today

Today, the only appropriate sentiment is concern for those in the path of Sandy–and a fervent hope that the increasing number and severity of these atypical weather “events” jolts us out of our complacency and denial about global climate change.

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Reflecting Badly

When I was growing up in Anderson, Indiana, fewer than 30 Jewish families lived there, and there was a fair amount of anti-Semitism. The attitudes displayed by my schoolmates ranged from benign bemusement (“So you don’t go to church on Sundays?”) to suspicious curiosity (“Do Jews live in houses like real people?”) to outright bigotry (“My mom says you’re a dirty Jew.”) (For the record, each of these is a real statement made to me while I was growing up.)

Now, when you are a member of a marginalized group, and you know people will evaluate that group based in part upon your behavior, you tend to be sensitive to the consequences of your public actions and careful not to act in ways that might confirm stereotypes. I can still remember cringing at restaurants if a group of people who “looked Jewish” were being loud, or excessively demanding of the wait staff. I didn’t want their boorish behavior to reflect badly on other Jews. Many of my gay friends have reported similar reactions to inappropriate GLBT behaviors.

Obviously, a lot of Christians don’t have those kinds of concerns. Probably because Christians are in the majority in this country, Christian “bad actors” don’t seem to consider that appalling behavior in the name of Christianity necessarily reflects upon their co-religionists. And more well-behaved Christians usually give their fellow believers a pass–they rarely speak out to distance themselves from nastiness masquerading as Christian piety . Evidently, they don’t worry about being lumped into the same category with their more outrageous brethren. But really–shouldn’t they disclaim at least some of the folks who claim to speak for their faith?

For example, there’s a religious right activist named Gary Cass, who is a former Republican Party official in San Diego. He currently heads up a group called the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, and spends most of his time attacking the usual suspects–President Obama, Muslims,gays, and (interestingly) Mormons. I recently came across a clip of him delivering a long rant in which he accused Americans of having a “broken moral compass.” The evidence of our moral decline? We have been electing politicians who support things like reproductive choice and marriage equality.

Cass says the nation’s colleges and universities are “perverted factories of unfaithfulness,” especially Harvard which is now “animated by the spirit of Antichrist.”

My favorite, though, was this:  “you can’t be a Christian if you don’t own a gun.” Cass evidently believes that gun ownership and Christianity are inextricably entwined.

Perhaps my Christian friends don’t consider Cass and his ilk worth cringing over, or disavowing. (As a Jew, I want to make it clear that– if Jesus really requires that his followers be armed–he was reflecting badly on the rest of us Jews.) But criticism from members of other religions or none simply aren’t going to stop the “Christians” (note quotation marks) who are turning policy debates into religious wars.

Some good Christians need to tell the Florida pastor who burned the Korans that he is not speaking for them. Good Christians need to speak up when Mike Pence wraps himself in the mantle of faith in order to justify denying poor women access to medical services, or when Richard Mourdock defends his “God intended that pregnancy” remarks by claiming critics are “attacking his faith.”

We need more Christians willing to join the Nuns on the Bus.

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Nature/Nurture

I came across a fascinating study the other day (hat tip to Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). There has been a good deal of research suggesting that racism has a biological element–several studies show the amygdala lighting up in reaction when a person of a different race appeared, for example. However…

“In a paper that will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Eva Telzer of UCLA and three other researchers report that they’ve performed these amygdala studies–which had previously been done on adults–on children. And they found something interesting: the racial sensitivity of the amygdala doesn’t kick in until around age 14.

What’s more: once it kicks in, it doesn’t kick in equally for everybody. The more racially diverse your peer group, the less strong the amygdala effect. At really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared entirely. The authors of the study write that “these findings suggest that neural biases to race are not innate and that race is a social construction, learned over time.”

The upshot of the study, at least as I understood it, was that humans do have strong “tribal” instincts, but the preference for ones own tribe is not based on any particular characteristic. It’s enough to be different–the nature of the difference is irrelevant. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with sufficient diversity while we’re young, the differences that divide us, that bring out our tribal instincts, can be overcome.

That “nature versus nurture” argument just gets more and more complicated….