These refugees are fleeing from the same psychopaths who perpetrated the atrocities in Paris –and before Paris, in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and several other places, although (in a topic for another day) those massacres didn’t get the U.S. media coverage that the Paris attacks generated.
Given all that, you might think that a man who wears his piety like a badge of honor, who talks about “Christian Charity” and the “generosity of Hoosiers” would embrace desperate people who’ve left their possessions behind, who have fled once-comfortable homes and once-thriving businesses and professions in a frantic effort to get away from the naked evil that is ISIS. You might think that heartbreaking photographs like the one of the dead three-year-old whose body washed ashore–photos that went viral and were hard to miss–would convey the urgency and human need of this incredible migratory flood.
You’d be wrong.
Instead of human compassion, we get grandstanding and political calculation.
Why do I think the Governor’s response would be different if the refugees were conservative Christians who looked more like us?
And over at the National Review, Kevin Williamson is right. His article, titled: Take a Bow, Species, rejected the constant drumbeat of what is wrong with America and the world in favor of a focus on what’s right. Here are some reasons for optimism that he lists:
* Polio has basically been eradicated from the globe
* Measles and rubella will be next
* The global rate of “extreme poverty,” currently defined as subsistence on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day, is now the condition of less than 10 percent of the human race. Take a look at how the World Bank recently plotted that change:
* The overall rate of violent crime in the U.S. has fallen by about half in recent decades.
* U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb.
* General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen.
Of course, you aren’t likely to hear about any of that from Republican candidates running for office in 2016. Unlike Ronald Reagan, none of them is remotely a “happy warrior.” Instead, they all seem obsessed with the belief that a country headed by Barack Obama must be in extremis.
This striking mismatch between the GOP’s gloom and doom worldview and our considerably more nuanced reality was addressed in a recent post at Political Animal that quoted a warning from another conservative Republican, W’s former speechwriter David Frum.
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
As the issue of inequality has become more politically and socially salient, researchers are increasingly “connecting the dots”–finding and measuring relationships between social phenomena that may not appear on the surface to be related.
It’s one thing to measure economic distances; to draw conclusions about the ability of low-income workers to afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment, for example. Such statistics represent only a fraction of the social damage done by rising levels of poverty and inequality, but they do offer a window into individual struggles that lead to other, less tangible and/or immediately obvious harms.
The United Ways of Indiana recently issued a comprehensive analysis of the financial distress experienced by “Alice”– Alice being an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These were households with income above the federal poverty level, but below the actual, basic cost of living. The research concluded that more than one in three Hoosier households cannot afford the basics of housing, food, health care and transportation, that 37% of Indiana households live below the Alice threshold, that these families and individuals have jobs, and many do not qualify for social services or support, and that despite the importance of their jobs to their communities, they are unsure if they’ll be able to put dinner on the table each night.
Other researchers are beginning to investigate the ancillary effects of living like Alice–including the consequences for physical and mental health of individuals, the diminished prospects of their children, and the effects of inequality on America’s social fabric.
The Brookings Institution, for example, recently issued a disheartening study about inequality and stress.
Income and opportunity are increasingly unequally shared in the United States. It turns out that there are also significant inequalities in happiness, stress, and optimism about the future… The poor have lower levels of life satisfaction than the rich, they are far more likely to experience high levels of stress and worry, and they are far less optimistic about the future. They are also less likely than the rich to believe in the American Dream: that hard work can get them ahead.
An important question is how far these inequalities relate to each other. One of most well-known connections is the one between income inequality and intergenerational mobility, labeled the “Great Gatsby Curve” by Alan Kreuger. The idea behind the curve is that inequality in parental incomes (and other means) will result in even greater inequality for their children, as children’s opportunities are increasingly linked to their parents’ means.
The report makes the case that stress related to issues of survival–can I pay my rent this month? Will I lose my job if I stay home with my sick child?–is significantly different in kind and impact from the sorts of stress experienced by middle and upper income individuals. Those issues–Will I get that promotion? Will I get into my first choice law school? Will Heather go with me to the prom?– just aren’t in the same league, stress-wise.
The whole study is worth a read, but I was especially struck by the finding that there was “a higher concentration of both stress and worry among the poor in more unequal MSAs. Stress levels among the rich, by contrast, were essentially the same across cities.”
Eventually, perhaps we’ll recognize that remedying the costs of social dysfunction is more expensive than a social safety net, and far more expensive than paying people a living wage.
I know I’m going to get a load of blowback for this, but I’m posting it anyway.
In Bangladesh right now, religious extremists are murdering advocates of secular democracy. Recent religious conflicts in East Timor, the Ivory Coast, Bosnia, Ireland, India and many other countries have been persistent, vicious and bloody.
Meanwhile, here in the good old U.S. of A., college students are irate over insensitive Halloween costumes and fundamentalists are whining about Starbucks unadorned coffee cups.
I have to agree with Asher Miller, who wrote in a recent Resilience column
If offensive Halloween costumes and throwaway holiday coffee cups can generate this much discord and animosity, what happens when Americans are faced with far more complex and challenging situations? I’m afraid that in the coming months and decades there will be no shortage of these …
In this our mainstream media and politicians are doing us no favors, as they feed on anger, resentment, and an “us vs. them” mentality to capture eyeballs, votes, and dollars. Nor is modern communication technology, which fosters an expectation of immediate gratification and instant answers, while allowing us to filter information and interactions to those that reinforce our cognitive biases.
What is really worrisome about our homegrown conflicts is not that they exist, nor that they reflect different perspectives on our common culture. We live in a diverse society, and we should expect–and to the extent possible, accommodate–such differences. What is troubling is the lack of proportion.
So many of these “culture war” conflicts–some manufactured out of whole cloth, some vastly overblown–are what my youngest son calls “First World Problems.”
Let me stipulate that people have every right to criticize clueless folks who appropriate others’ identities or insult minorities by their choice of Halloween costumes. It’s insensitive and tasteless behavior. In the scheme of things, however, it ranks considerably behind machete-wielding in Bangladesh (or for that matter, racist bullying and gay-bashing in the United States).
Coffee cup hysteria is harder to justify. When people’s real lives and liberties are so secure that they have to go looking for offense at Starbucks, we can only assume that they have a very tenuous relation with reality and a deep-seated psychological need to see themselves as victims.
Americans can and should discuss differences in our perceptions and approaches. We should try to understand each other, and appreciate where other folks are coming from.
But we also need to recognize the difference between actual threats to personal safety and/or liberty, and First World Problems.
Here in Hoosierland, we like to grade stuff. Well, some stuff.
We assign grades to public schools despite the dubious nature of some of the criteria used. We are less enthusiastic about the grades given to our infrastructure by the Corp of Civil Engineers, although we’ve seen some grudging acknowledgment of those scores, given that our crumbling roads and bridges are hard to hide or ignore. (A former student tells me that a big chunk of the bridge from I70 into downtown Indy just fell off yesterday…)
You may recall lawmakers’ promise to make ethics reform the centerpiece of the last session :
During the 2014 legislative session, a top Republican House leader, Rep. Eric Turner, privately lobbied his fellow Republicans — who control both chambers — to scuttle a proposed ban on nursing home construction that would have hurt his family’s business. A House investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but he was later stripped of leadership roles and stepped down after being re-elected. Department of Transportation official Troy Woodruff took advantage of an ethics law loophole that allowed him to skirt a one-year cooling-off period and become an independent contractor for an Indianapolis firm he’d regulated. And former state education superintendent Tony Bennett only had to pay a $5,000 fine for questionable campaign practices, including the use of state staff and computers, even though the state’s inspector general condemned his actions as wire fraud and misuse of state resources. Bennett wasn’t charged.
Ultimately, legislators approved an ethics reform law, effective in July. But even during the reform debate, two lawmakers floated proposals that drew conflict of interest charges and sharp criticism.
To be blunt, the vaunted “reforms” were more atmospheric than effective. Indiana earned F’s in numerous categories, including public access to information, political financing, state budget process, judicial accountability, ethics entities and civil service oversight. The only B’s were earned by the state pension systems (B+) and internal auditing practices (B-).
Ironically, Indiana’s score was better in 2012. Before “reform,” we earned a C-.
Knowledgable observers cite many reasons we consistently fail to clean up our act: lax enforcement of guidelines, a culture of quid pro quo, and most of all, a gerrymandered state where 80% of the legislative seats are uncompetitive, making it highly unlikely that unethical behavior will be punished at the ballot box.
That’s what happens when lawmakers choose their voters, rather than the other way around….
