Reaping What We’ve Sowed

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, political science professors Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox asked more than 4,000 high school and college students if they would be interested in running for political office in America someday: 89% of them said “no.”

Think about that.

This aversion to public office certainly isn’t because young Americans don’t care about their communities or about the common good. Their generation volunteers at rates higher than preceding age cohorts. Their Facebook posts and tweets focus significantly on issues of justice and “fair play.” They are demonstrably concerned about the environment. Surveys confirm that they are less bigoted and more inclusive than previous generations, and that they feel an obligation “give back” to their communities.

But they’ve written off the political process. Whatever “public service” may mean to them, it doesn’t mean participating in government.

Evidently, they’ve looked at the current, toxic political environment–where SuperPacs and billionaires evidence the disproportionate influence of money, where pundits and politicians alike flaunt anti-intellectualism and tribalism and engage in the politics of personal destruction; where electoral success requires pandering to rabid and uniformed “base” voters–and they’ve decided to put their time and effort elsewhere.

I wonder what sort of students are in the remaining 11%–those who do express an interest in running for public office, who haven’t been turned off and disillusioned. Are they the idealistic ones? Or do they find the current cesspool attractive–and if so, why?

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Accentuating the Positive….

Some readers may be old enough to remember the Sammy Davis Jr. hit song, the one that advised listeners to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative…and don’t deal with Mister In-Between.”

I think Governor Pence took that advice too seriously.

A couple of days ago, an Indianapolis Star article trumpeted the governor’s “good news” that “From February to April, Indiana saw a .5% decline in the unemployment rate, from 5.9% to 5.4%. That’s the 5th largest decline in the nation in that time period.”

That sure was accentuating the positive. The negative–which certainly was eliminated by both the Governor and the Star’s coverage– was reported by  the Institute for Working Families, which noted that during that same time period, 18,800 Hoosiers had dropped out of the labor force.

Per Derek Thomas, senior researcher for the Institute:

As a percent of the labor force, that’s the second largest exodus from the labor market in the U.S. during that time period – just behind Wisconsin. This means that the unemployment rate decline can be explained – in part – by the number of Hoosiers leaving the labor force. Workers are only counted in the unemployment rate if they are actively seeking work. If someone finds no success in the job market, gives up the job search, and leaves the labor force, the unemployment rate goes down – but not for good reasons.

The Governor also took credit for GM’s recent decision to invest 1.2 billion dollars in upgrades to its Fort Wayne plant. During an interview on a local radio show, he attributed the decision to passage of Right to Work and repeal of the Common Wage, implying that Indiana’s efforts to neuter labor unions were the key to GM’s decision.

Ironically, not only is the GM plant unionized, but the company’s massive retooling will be done by union construction workers pursuant to precisely the sort of project labor agreement that Pence demonized in television ads this spring.

I understand accentuating the positive, but inventing the positive takes real chutzpah.

I wonder what the weather is like in the reality the Governor inhabits.

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The Retreat of the Puritans

Last week, Irish voters overwhelmingly voted to recognize same-sex marriage. Leave aside, for now, the question whether fundamental rights should ever be subject to popular vote, and consider that Ireland has long been considered a very religious country.

Whatever it may mean to be “very religious” today, for growing numbers of people, it’s clear it doesn’t mean obediently following the doctrinal pronouncements of the relevant clerics. Increasingly, the ways in which people connect with their religious traditions have changed.

Earlier this week, my friend Art Farnsley had an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post, addressing this decline of religious authority. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Art notes the recent, widely-discussed Pew poll showing a decline in the number of Americans identifying as Christian, and suggests that numbers don’t adequately tell the story:

.. behind the story of Christian decline and the rise of “nones” is a long-standing debate about what religion theorists call “secularization,” the broad process by which religion gradually loses its social influence….

By the last two decades of the 20th century, secularization theories were in retreat for a number of good reasons. Most people did not stop being religious in the sense that they still had beliefs, intuitions, feelings and practices they defined as sacred. Modernity had not pushed spirituality out of their lives in America, and maybe not even in Britain or the Netherlands.

As Art notes, whether secularization has grown depends upon how you define the term.

Sociologist Mark Chaves redefined secularization as declining religious authority back in 1994. He suggested we stop worrying about whether individuals thought of themselves as religious and focus instead on religion’s social influence.

The evidence for this kind of secularization, the decline of religious authority, is everywhere. It is quaint to think of a time stores did not open and liquor was not sold on the Sabbath. But that is a small, symbolic change compared with the massive growth in individual choice at the expense of tradition, especially religious tradition.

Understood in this way, secularization is an inevitable consequence of modernity. We no longer see diseases like smallpox as indicators of God’s judgment; we call a doctor. We no longer ask the minister or rabbi to mediate our disputes; we call a lawyer.  For most inhabitants of modern, Western countries, religion is an incubator of values, not the source of binding law. So we have cultural Catholics, social Protestants, ethnic Jews…individuals still attached to their respective traditions who nevertheless feel free to pick and choose aspects of the relevant doctrines.

Change in the role of any social institution is never linear, of course, so we still have a number of the folks I called Puritans in God and Country-– the “old time religion” fundamentalists who continue to wage war against religious diversity, women’s rights, same-sex marriage and any effort to grant LGBT citizens equal civil rights.

As Art concluded, they aren’t likely to win that war.

“In the struggle for authority with modern individualism, American religion is slowly losing.” That would be my headline for the recent Pew report. “Christians are declining in America” is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Tell Me Again How There’s No War on Women…or Common Sense

This makes me crazy.

The Nation reports:

In 2009, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation donated over $23 million to the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, a five-year experimental program that offered low-income teenage girls and young women in the state long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs)—IUDs or hormonal implants—at no cost. These devices, which require no further action once inserted and remain effective for years, are by far the best method of birth control available, with less than a 1 percent failure rate. (The real-use failure rate for the Pill is 10 times higher.) One reason more women don’t use LARCs is cost: While they save the patient money over time, the up-front price can be as high as $1,200. (Even when insurance covers them, many teens fear the claim forms sent to their parents would reveal they are sexually active.)

So–this sounds great, right? And the results?

The results were staggering: a 40 percent decline in teen births, and a 34 percent decline in teen abortions. And for every dollar spent on the program, the state saved $5.85 in short-term Medicaid costs, in addition to other cost reductions and the enormous social benefit of freeing low-income teens from unwanted pregnancies and what too often follows: dropping out of school, unready motherhood, and poverty.

In June, the original grant will run out, so the state legislature had to decide whether to continue funding the program. One would think continued funding for so successful a program would be uncontroversial–but one would be reckoning without today’s GOP.  After the bill providing  funding passed the Democrat-controlled House, Senate Republicans killed it.

And what were the highly principled reasons for refusing to continue a program that reduced teen pregnancies, reduced abortions, and saved money? According to Republican State Senator Kevin Lundberg, using an IUD could mean “stopping a small child from implanting.”

Besides, teenagers shouldn’t be having sex. “We’re providing this long-term birth control and telling girls, ‘You don’t have to worry. You’re covered,’” said Representative Kathleen Conti. “That does allow a lot of young ladies to go out there and look for love in all the wrong places.” (Because the fear of pregnancy has worked so well to keep girls virginal.)

Let me amend that “War on Women” accusation. These moral scolds aren’t waging war against women, they are waging war against women having sex. Especially sex without “consequences.”

If these lawmakers were really “pro-life,” they would support programs that substantially and demonstrably reduce the incidence of abortion.

As this travesty in Colorado clearly shows, however, their real objective is to punish women. Preferably, at taxpayer expense.

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Saving Remnant? Or Leading Edge?

I was recently in a meeting where courteous, educated and concerned citizens shared different perspectives on promoting the common good. I couldn’t help wondering whether  gatherings of this sort might be evidence of incremental positive change, or whether, instead, part of what biblical folks might call “the saving remnant”–the relatively small segment of society that keeps the lamp of reason burning through dark ages.

One of my sons recently characterized my reactions to contemporary politics as “bipolar” noting that I alternate between despair over destructive stupidity to hopefulness sparked by emerging signs of rebellion against our “Gilded Age” status quo.

I’ve shared a good deal of the despair on this blog: the evidence of persistent, widespread racism; the efforts to roll back women’s rights; the descent of a once-responsible political party into fantasy, bigotry and anti-intellectualism; the systemic, legal and structural barriers to change; the growing gap between the rich and everyone else; the outsized influence of money in politics….and the list goes on.

When I focus on these aspects of our poltical/social landscape, it’s hard to be cheery and upbeat about the future.

But there are also emerging signs of change–signs that a challenge to the status quo may be in the offing. And there’s the fact that American history is filled with examples of such change.

Survey research provides evidence that younger Americans are less bigoted, more inclusive and far less in thrall to religious fundamentalism than their elders. The  movement to raise the minimum wage is gaining traction. The dramatic change in public opinion on same-sex marriage should be a wake-up call to the proponents of all sorts of “traditional” stereotypes, not just of LGBT folks, but of women and African-Americans.

Rush Limbaugh continues to lose market share. Despite the anti-science posture of so many lawmakers, recent surveys show that 80% of Americans accept the reality of climate change and want government to do something about it.

And all around the country, people are taking to the streets to demand change. It isn’t just Ferguson and Baltimore protesting police excesses; it’s fast-food and hotel workers and Walmart employees demanding fair treatment and pay, and Moral Monday activists reproaching state-level lawmakers’ disregard for the common good (shades of the Social Gospel!). In Washington, it’s bipartisan recognition of the need to reform America’s criminal justice system. Here in Indiana, it was the overwhelming pushback to passage of RFRA (followed by the “Pence Must Go” signs still popping up all over the state).

While social media and the Internet can be used to create a bubble that reinforces our pre-existing world-views, they can also inform us of injustices we wouldn’t otherwise  know about. They can connect us with others committed to change. The ubiquity of cellphone cameras allows documentation of events that were previously “he said/she said.” The same technologies that disorient and threaten my generation are allowing those who’ve grown up with them to create new kinds of communities.

The structural barriers to change are formidable, but entrenched privilege has been toppled before. I’d say it’s 50/50….and my mood at any given time depends upon which 50% I’m looking at.

Saving remnant? or Signs of emerging social change?

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