Travel Tales, or Civilization’s Discontents

Monday I participated in the final round of judging for this year’s We the People—an all-day exercise that left me and most of the other judges exhausted, but so impressed by the depth of knowledge and poised delivery of these high-school students from all over the country. Tuesday—yesterday—it was time to come home.

My husband makes fun of my obsessive-compulsive need to be at the airport well before flight time. Yesterday proved how wrong he is.

The Mason Inn, where we were staying, is on the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, just outside Washington, D.C.  When I arrived, the trip there by cab from Washington National airport took about 45 minutes. Ever the cautious sort, I scheduled a taxi for 8:45 for my 11:00 flight, and was gratified when it arrived about five minutes early. Plenty of time to get to the airport—or so I thought.

The cab driver told me it was still rush hour, so it would probably take an hour to get there. What happened next was absolutely surreal: the traffic on the (badly misnamed) expressway was stop and start nearly the entire way. I’ve seen gridlock, but nothing comparable to this; I kept looking for a reason—a wreck, a stalled car, merging lanes—anything that would explain the bumper-to-bumper traffic. I saw nothing.

It took us an hour and forty minutes to get to the U.S. Air terminal. I had thirty stressful minutes to get through Reagan’s always-long security lines (staffed, I might note, with people who took an incredibly laid-back and leisurely approach to their duties), and my flight was almost through boarding when I made it to the gate.

Other than confirming my belief that when you are flying, you should always allow more time than you think you will need, the slowed-to-a-stop traffic was a sobering cautionary tale. The moral?  Automobile travel is ultimately unsustainable. We cannot build enough highways, pave enough municipal landscape, to ease the congestion. If humans are to get from point A to point B, a substantial number of us will need access to public transportation.

A train from the Mason Inn to the airport would take perhaps thirty minutes. Furthermore, it would take a reliable thirty minutes that one could schedule and depend on.  (I might note that a train—or even express buses—would also emit far fewer pollutants into our atmosphere.)

If I had to drive in traffic like that I saw yesterday, I’d have an ulcer–or persistent road rage.

When you consider how much it costs to buy, operate, insure and maintain a car, and the hours of productive time wasted in lengthy and unpredictable commutes, you start to understand the insanity of America’s car culture and its negative impact on our quality of life.

I didn’t think I could get any angrier at the Indiana legislature for once again derailing mass transit for Indianapolis, but yesterday proved I was wrong–I can get angrier, especially when I wonder how long it will take for Indianapolis’ highways to look like those I traveled yesterday.

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Remember the One About the Frog…?

There is an old story–a fable, actually–about the most effective way to kill a frog. You just put that little creature in a pot of water and slowly but steadily increase the temperature of the water. Eventually, the frog is boiled to death, but because of the slow, incremental elevation of the heat, it doesn’t realize the danger until it’s too late.

I think that story is an uncomfortable analogy to contemporary America’s political situation.

Yesterday, several news outlets and blogs carried this story:

Republicans want to limit the number of bullets federal agencies can purchase so American gun owners can buy more.  Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas have introduced a bill that would prohibit every government agency — except the military — from buying more ammunition each month, than the monthly average it purchased from 2001 to 2009.

The purpose of this bill, according to the reports, is to prevent President Obama from making good on his plan to have government agencies buy up all the bullets so that patriotic gun-owning Americans won’t be able to buy them.

Think about that for a minute. And then think about that frog.

When I ran for Congress in 1980, I was pro-choice and pro-gay-rights, and I not only won a Republican primary in very Red Indiana, I was accused on several occasions of being far too conservative. In the years since, the GOP has moved steadily–to the Right, then to the far Right ,and then to the far far Right–and finally to paranoid conspiracy fantasy-land. The party of Bill Hudnut and Dick Lugar is now the party of James Inhofe and Ted Cruz.

In 1980, if any political figure had made the sorts of statements that our elected officials–mostly but not exclusively Republican–routinely issue these days, the media would have called for the men in the white coats. But the progression into delusion has been relatively incremental. Lawmakers have slowly but steadily progressed through the stages from ideological rigidity, to extremism, to bat-shit crazy.

The media and the electorate are the frogs who haven’t noticed that the water has gone from warm, to uncomfortably hot, to boiling.

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Much Better

Yesterday was day two of the We the People competition, and we judged another 14 teams. Although there were a couple of substandard performances,  most of the students we saw on Day Two ranged from impressive to phenomenal.

The opening question these teams had to answer was hardly a model of clarity. “In Federalist 51, Madison famously asserted that ‘it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.’ In what ways do the Bill of Rights and the amendments protect individuals from oppression by its rulers?”

In the process of considering that question, we posed such ancillary inquiries as: what did the Founders see as the source of our rights? What is selective incorporation? What was the purpose of the 9th and 10th Amendments? What is the difference between negative and positive rights? What is the difference between procedural and substantive due process? Why are property rights important? and many more.

The best teams answered these and other questions in depth, displaying a highly sophisticated understanding of the philosophical origins and historical context of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. At times, they made genuinely profound observations; one student, in a discussion of Madison’s description of majority and minority factions noted that size alone should not determine whether a faction is a majority or minority–that we should consider as well the power wielded by that faction. Another, during a discussion of incorporation (the application of provisions of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments) opined that such application was particularly important because smaller governmental units can more easily be dominated by special or powerful interests.

Unlike Day One, students on yesterday’s teams didn’t hesitate to criticize court rulings, or even to disagree with what James Madison said in Federalist 51.

Most of the students were high school juniors and seniors. However, after a very good presentation by one team, we discovered that the students in that team were high school freshmen, a fact making their accomplishment particularly impressive. It was obvious that–for all of the students–the process of studying the material, preparing themselves for a public examination of their knowledge, and co-ordinating responses within their teams had sharpened their skills and given them a degree of self-confidence and poise unusual for those so young.

Today, the top ten teams will compete in sessions held at the U.S. House of Representatives. If yesterday’s performance was any indication, it will be very hard to choose an overall winner. On the other hand, all these students are winners, because they understand their country’s history and government far better than most citizens.

These kids already know more than most of our lawmakers.

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Citizens for a Totalitarian State?

Okay, I’m officially worried.

I’m currently in Fairfax, Virginia, on the (really beautiful) campus of George Mason University; I’m here as one of the 71 judges of the national “We the People” finals. For those who don’t know anything about “We the People,” it is probably the single most effective civics curriculum being used in the U.S. Unfortunately, its use is entirely voluntary–teachers can choose to adopt it for junior and senior government classes, but it is entirely up to them.

Students in WTP classes study the history and philosophy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When they c0mplete the semester, most know a great deal more about the nation’s founding documents than most adults. The conclusion of the course–which was an outgrowth of Warren Burger’s Bicentennial Commission–is a competition modeled upon congressional hearings. Each class is divided into six teams, each assigned to one of the six units in the textbook. The teams are grilled by three-judge “panels” to ascertain their mastery of the subject-matter, first in competitions held in each congressional district, and then at the state level. The state winner goes to the national finals.

I am a member of one of those three-judge panels, and my team’s assignment was Unit 5–the Bill of Rights. Our assignment was focused upon the First Amendment, and our questions were intended to determine what the students knew about the philosophy and jurisprudence of Free Speech. We saw 14 teams yesterday, and we will see another 14 today.

The good news is that all of the students on all of the teams displayed impressive knowledge of the origins and jurisprudence of free speech. They could quote the Founders, they could recite the case law, identify the jurists, and report the reasoning of each case.

The bad news is that students on most of the teams we reviewed accepted the logic of those cases without question. If the Court said that suppression of expression was acceptable in a particular situation, then it was. The case of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, for example, held that high school newspapers can be censored by school administrators. The decision has been heavily criticized in the 25 years since it was handed down, and in some states, legislatively overruled. And yet many of the students, when asked, dutifully parroted the holding and defended its logic by arguing that students “need to be protected from ‘inappropriate’ information.” They similarly had no problem with the decision in Buckley v. Valeo that money equals speech, and expressed no qualms that Citizens United might result in giving some speakers the ability to drown out the speech of those with fewer dollars to spend.

When questioned about efforts to restrict speech during wartime, several students defended the right of government to impose censorship “for public safety.” And in at least two cases, they seemed willing to give in to the “heckler’s veto”–to agree that government could suppress public speeches if those speeches had potential to create public disturbances.

Students were generally unwilling to disagree with or criticize past Court decisions, even those that have subsequently been narrowed or abandoned. If I had to characterize their approach, I would call it docile or submissive. If there’s a law, these kids will obey it, no matter how unreasonable it may be. We didn’t see many  who are likely to protest, or engage in civil disobedience, and even in this era of anti-government sentiment, we saw a troubling number who seemed willing to believe that government always knows best.

I hasten to say that there were many exceptions, and that we only saw half of the competing teams. Three or four of those teams (including one from Indiana) were outstanding–thoughtful, analytic and articulate. And I understand that we’ll see some of the stronger teams today. But most of the competitors are here because they won a state-level contest, and I can’t help wondering about the prevalence among them of a meek and unquestioning acceptance of authority.

They’re teenagers, for heaven’s sake! If they aren’t going to question authority now, how docile will they be when they have children and a mortgage?

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Letting It Out

Every once in a while, I glance at “Let It Out,” the Star feature that showcases reader remarks. Yesterday, I was stunned to read the following:

“It appears our President is more willing to risk the lives of people flying than to cut entitlements. A sad and dangerous state of affairs.”

In two brief sentences, the writer displayed two of the traits most responsible for today’s toxic and retrograde political environment: ignorance and lack of empathy. Ignorance, because the flight delays resulting from the sequester—while inconvenient—pose no risk to safety; because the terms of the sequester (a result of Republican intransigence) gave the president no discretion to determine what budgets would be affected; and because the power to “cut entitlements” rests with Congress, not the president.

It’s one thing to be uninformed or willfully ignorant of basic facts. What struck me most forcefully about the remarks, however, was their mean-spiritedness, their absolute lack of awareness or empathy for the recipients of what the author dismisses as “entitlements.”

Despite the disproportionate attention paid to them, flight delays are merely an annoyance—albeit an annoyance to the more privileged among us. Other consequences of the sequester have included delay or termination of cancer treatments for people on Medicaid, and cutbacks to Head Start, to nutrition programs serving pregnant women and children, and to Meals on Wheels, to name just a few. That these cutbacks are causing real pain to less fortunate, less politically-empowered people evidently hasn’t occurred to the commenter–or doesn’t matter.

Too bad those who contribute to “Let it Out” don’t have to sign their names. We’d know who to avoid.

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