The other day, I had breakfast in one of those modestly-priced hotels/motels where breakfasts are included. A man in his mid-thirties was going through the buffet with his young son, who looked to be seven or eight. I didn’t catch the first part of their exchange, but I heard the son say to his father, presumably about yet another traveler who was filling a plate “But that’s not the way we do it. That’s wrong.”
The father used that exchange as a teachable moment. “Different people do things differently. That doesn’t make one person wrong and the other one right. They’re just different.”
I wanted to kiss that guy.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all parents taught their children that simple principle? Wouldn’t the world we live in be more pleasant, more comfortable, if people would just learn that “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “wrong”? How much richer would our lives be if we enjoyed people where we found them, if rather than trying to make everyone do things the way we do, we chilled out and accepted the wonderful variety of life?
We could use a lot more fathers willing to use a mundane experience to underscore an important life lesson.
It has become a commonplace for those of us who live in Indianapolis to complain about the lack of substance in the Star. I was recently rude enough–and it was rude and I shouldn’t have said it–to complain to Matt Tully about the lack of coverage of city hall. His defense was that the paper had covered the Litebox and Duke Energy scandals. True–but what about the multiple issues that haven’t been covered (or uncovered). After all, when a major daily paper has exactly four investigative reporters, there’s a limit to what they can do.
As I often (too often??) remind people, when I was in city hall, there were three full-time reporters and a couple of stringers covering city government. The Hudnut Administration would never have gotten the “pass” that Ballard (and Peterson) have. When I edited a book about the Goldsmith Administration, contributors got most of their information from contemporaneous newspaper accounts.
I thought about this again this morning, because our daughter Kelly told me she’d been going through some memorabilia–old newspapers she’d kept as reminders of important events–and was shocked by the difference between those old issues and the current, pale imitation that Gannett puts out. Not only was the paper physically larger, it was packed with information about city and county government, news of the state and nation.
Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
As Kelly pointed out, it isn’t so bad with respect to national news, because we can access the New York Times and many other sources of national news online. But there is no local substitute for credible, fact-checked reporting. We have some thoughtful local bloggers who bring issues to our attention, but they aren’t reporters, and don’t pretend to be. So there’s a lot going on in our city that we don’t know about; there are details about the things we do know that would change our opinion of them (cases in point: the Broad Ripple garage evident boondoggle, the parking meter giveaway). Mentioning something is not the same as reporting on it. Reprinting or rephrasing a press release isn’t reporting.
I’m glad the Star reported on the Litebox fiasco and Duke Energy’s ethical lapses. But patting the paper on the back for two good stories is like giving your teenager a pass for five F’s because he got one A.
I don’t always agree with Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, but in this post, he hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head.
What contemporary Republicans are selling is reheated and reconstituted Social Darwinism. (And just for the record, Darwin never used the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Herbert Spencer coined it; Sumner used it.) Social Darwinists twisted Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify wide disparities of wealth and well-being, melding it with a superficial Calvinism to conclude that those who prospered did so because they were a talented and hardworking elect, and those who were poor suffered because they were morally defective.
Not that they put it that way. Instead, the rich were lauded as creative entrepreneurs, while the poor were scorned for lack of diligence and work ethic. In effect, they were told to “take a bath and get a job.”
A recent report in Salon quotes Frank Luntz as being “very scared” of Occupy Wall Street. Luntz, for those who don’t know, is the GOP “messaging” genius who came up with terms like “death tax” to rebrand the estate tax, and who urges Republicans to abandon use of the word capitalism in favor of terms like “economic freedom.” His concern about OWS is obvious: the movement threatens to re-frame the debate–to shift the focus to the undeniable hardships created by lax regulation coupled with unbridled greed.
As George Lakoff demonstrated in “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” framing is a powerful tool. We all have mental “frames,” culturally transmitted worldviews that act as lenses through which we view reality. Those of us who teach try to expand those mental paradigms, enlarge the lens, so that students can see and consider facts they might not otherwise encounter. Understood as an inevitable consequence of human socialization, the act of framing is descriptive of our mental processes–and morally neutral.
What isn’t morally neutral is the use of framing to distort reality, to push people’s “buttons,” to obscure relevant information and harden, rather than relax, our worldviews. The hired guns who do this for the political parties are not concerned with reality–they are concerned with winning. So social programs become “giveaways,” feminists are always “strident,” and concerns about social justice are “socialism.”
I think it was Tallyrand who said that “words are given to man to conceal his thoughts.” The ability to name things is an essential tool of communication. The ability to mis-name things is a weapon employed by the amoral.
Linda Greenhouse’s column in this morning’s New York Times discusses an absolutely appalling policy being applied in Florida. It is aimed at illegal immigration, but I hesitate to classify it as an immigration policy, because it is aimed squarely at young citizens whose parents lack documentation. The state refuses to authorize residential tuition rates for these young resident citizens who enroll at Florida’s public colleges.
It’s as if Worf, from Star Trek the Next Generation, is making policy in Florida. Klingons, as you may (or may not) recall, believe that “dishonor” passes from parent to child. Several episodes of the series drew their dramatic impact from the viewers’ sense of the terrible injustice of holding Worf responsible for crimes his father was alleged to have committed.
Klingons are fictional. Rick Scott, the criminal who is governor of Florida (I use the word deliberately; his company defrauded Medicare of billions) unfortunately is not.
As Greenhouse notes, the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids punishing children for the crimes of their parents.
““Corruption of blood” was a familiar feature of the common law in England. A person found guilty of treason and certain other crimes would be barred from passing his estate on to his children, who would thus inherit nothing but the corrupted blood line. The framers of the United States Constitution considered and forcefully rejected the concept. Article III, the judiciary article, contains this sentence: “The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attained.” As James Madison expressed the thought more directly at the time, the purpose was to prevent Congress “from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.”
There are two questions here, both pertinent: Where was Florida’s Attorney General while officials were deciding to implement a policy so clearly at odds with what the Constitution requires? And perhaps more importantly, what happened to these policymakers’ human decency?
