United We Stand, Divided We Fall

This week we have witnessed two tragedies that have consumed our news media, the bombing in Boston and the explosion in a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. In both cases there was tragic loss of lives and the causes and issues raised by each incident are quite different, yet they unite us in our concern for the families and friends of those killed in each incident.

Yesterday on NPR I listened to a curious report about two freshman senators who were brought together by these tragedies and who found their common humanity in similar reactions and concerns. Senator Ted Cruz from Texas and Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts discovered common concerns and interests and Senator Cruz expressed surprise at this, given the diametrically opposed political orientation of his fellow Senator.

This should not have surprised us nor Senator Cruz. Whatever our political beliefs and orientation, we are first of all Americans and more than than human beings with a concern for the welfare of our fellow human beings. I have often written in this space of urgent necessity of setting aside the things that divide us to find our common humanity, our shared values, and our love of our fellow man.

Why do we insist on dividing ourselves? Into red and blue states, into liberals and conservatives, into black and white, into rich and poor. We can find even more that divide us if we seek them. Yet who can deny the joy, the pleasure, of connecting with one another, of finding things than join us and unite us? I could not help but reflect on this as I heard the story about Warren and Cruz connecting. Sex divides them, race divides them, political orientation divides them. Yet they found common ground in their humanity as they confronted the issues surrounding the terrorist bombing in Boston.

We should all look more often for such bonds, for those things that draw us together. In that union and commonality we find that which joins us and we need so urgently to unite in the face of the many problems and crises we face today as a people and as nation. We need to be more tolerant of our differences and more dedicated to the idea that united we stand and divided we fall.

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Chemicals & Cancer - Clear Causality But We Dawdle

Anyone who studies even summarily the data on the incidence of cancer in our country and its relationship to our exposure to industrial chemicals and chemicals in our processed foods should worry about why we have a strikingly higher incidence of cancer than other industrialized countries like Japan. This article in the Times addresses only the issue of industrial chemicals, a topic fresh in our minds after the horrific explosion in the city of West in Texas in a fertilizer plant. The article is worth the read and is relatively short.

Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested? - NYTimes.com

So many of us know family members or friends struck down by cancer. When a child dies of cancer, the tragedy seems all the more poignant. At some level we know that this cannot be just bad luck or fate. Yet we spend little time thinking about it and no time trying to do something about it. The first step should be informing ourselves of the dangers posed by chemicals in our environment and our food.

Then we should consider taking action to press the government to do more to inform us of the incidence of cancer and its relationship to our exposure to not only toxic chemicals but to other chemicals whose toxicity may be unknown (at least by us). There are certainly numerous federal agencies who gather data and statistics on this. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) would be a good place to start.

We cannot expect businesses to look out for our health. Time and time again business has demonstrated that not only that it does not care about hazards to the public created by their products, but that it will go to great lengths to cover up any such knowledge. Three examples suffice: the tobacco industry that for years hid from us the fact that cigarette smoking causes cancer, the automobile industry that for many years hid from us serious safety hazards created by their cars which they did not want to fix (think Pinto) and finally the gun industry recently in the news that since the 1990s has suppressed the accumulation and publication of statistics by the CDC on gun deaths.

Ever since the muckrakers at the beginning of the 20th century began to make public the responsibility of numerous businesses for creating serious hazards to the public, they have demonstrated a virtually total lack of moral behavior when it comes to public health and public safety. If we are to be informed and protected from the dangers posed by industrial chemicals and chemicals in our processed foods, we must look to our government for help. No one else is willing to work on our behalf and private organizations lack the resources and above all the authority to do something about these problems. At best they can serve to increase our consciousness of the problem and mobilize political pressure on government to act.

We need to come together as a nation, and particularly as a middle class to unite in our conviction that we expect and even demand that our government protect us from these risks to our health and safety. It should not be a liberal or conservative issue but one of our well-being. We know that libertarian conservatives who would dismember government and leave us bereft of any protection against big business and financial interests would oppose such government action, but they are a small minority. How can we as a nation stand by as our environment is poisoned by toxic chemicals and our food and water are slowly, silently being poisoned by chemicals whose safety has never been tested?

 

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Independent Book Stores - a Renaissance?

The Atlantic's December 1 issue features at article by Ann Patchett on her new independent book store Parnassus Books in Nashville and more generally on the resurgence of interest in independent book stores. We have lived through a period of consolidation when many book stores merged, consolidated, and then there was a severe pruning of the survivors, most notably of Borders, a large chain that left many, many customers in the lurch with options being principally Barnes & Noble for a physical presence or Amazon on the web.

Patchett is a writer who has published nine books, seven of them novels, and she took on this challenge of starting Paraussus Books with her partner Karen Hayes. I don't want to summarize or pre-empt the article. Read it in The Atlantic in Patchett's article that is enjoyable and encouraging.

What encourages me is the idea that there may in fact be a resurgence of interest in the reading public in out local communities to get back the independent book store, a place to spend quality time, to listen to readings and get authors' autographs, to expose our children to books again, to pass a few quiet hours away from the rush of modern life, and to instill hope that e-books may not be the only and inevitable option for the reader. That would make me very happy.

I hope a lot of people read this article in The Atlantic that some of them might be inspired to take up the challenge and open up independent book stores in their own communities. It's a worthy cause for a community of readers to take up and I would like to do my part to encourage it. Pass the word along and find out more about Parnassus Books in Nashville. Maybe you can do something similar in your own community. Spread the word.

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College Education Critical but Our of Reach for Middle Class?

Study: College Degree Holds Its Value : NPR

From Thursday´s National Public Radio program All Things Considered comes the following report by Claudio Sanchez: "A new study shows college graduates have fared much better in the economic recovery than those without a degree. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reports that nearly all of the jobs recovered since the economic downturn have required a post-secondary degree. And despite the struggles of many recent graduates, workers with college degrees still enjoy a substantial wage benefit over those with only a high school ¨

It's a important story and I urge you to click on the link and listen to it. Basically NPR reports that it is becoming essential to have a college education if you want to have a reasonable chance at good, continuing employment. The economic crisis that began in 2007 has eliminated millions of jobs that non-college graduates held and the Georgetown University study asserts that many of those jobs either will not be coming back or will be replaced by better-paying jobs for college graduates.


This story in itself is perhaps not surprising to many of us, but when you stop to consider the sky-rocketing cost of a college education, the problem posed by this change in our employment market takes on a lot more meaning and represents a very worrisome development for the future of our country. Another element of the situation that plays a vital role as well is the conservative campaign to cut back on support for student loans.

All of these factors playing together then paint a picture that calls into doubt the future of my grandchildren and their children. They will need a college education to get a decent job that pays well enough, but will they be able to afford it? Is our society being transformed by the conservative governments at federal, state and even local levels into one where college will be for children of wealthy families while middle-class children will not be able to afford it or get student loans to help pay for it?

There may be other forces in play, some of them inherent in the market. As ability to pay becomes more of a factor, will universities finally look for ways to bring down the costs of post-high school education to more reasonable levels? This may provide some relief, but perhaps not enough.

With the tremendous economic pressures on middle-class families increasing, are we heading for a crisis in the not-too-distant future in which a quality education at a front-line university will be out of reach for the middle class? Will the only option become Community Colleges, two-year schools, and other more educationally limited and cheaper alternatives that will lock middle-class children into a generation of mediocre, poor-paying jobs?

Apart from the impact these factors may have on our future generations, do we as a nation want to continue to limit access to a quality college or university education to wealthy families? If the trend strengthens, the effect this can have on our nation and its ability to compete in the global market is a motive for grave concern. When a college education becomes essential to gainful, remunerative employment, can we afford for it to be transformed into a privilege instead of a basic right for all qualified citizens needing it to provide a better future for their families?

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Jed Perl: Individualism of Matisse & Renoir

Once again, this time in The New Republic, Jed Perl illuminates the world of art for us in a way that is totally accessible to laymen like me, who know what we like but are far from experts in art history and art criticism. I have been following the columns of Jed Perl in TNR and in New York Review of Books for several years now and continue to be impressed by the exceptional sensitivity Mr. Perl exhibits in his writing and the way he makes the art word accessible to me in a way that no other art critic or writer on art has done. In this column he writes of two exhibitions, one at MoMA on Matisse and the other on Renoir at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He illuminates for me modernism in the art world and what he considers to be a new angle increasingly used to understand modern art and interpret its meaning for each of us in a way that goes further than likes and dislikes.

Mr. Perl debunks what has been for such a long time the conventional or popular interpretation of 20th century art as an evolution toward abstraction and suggests instead that pay more particular attention to the artists themselves and the role that their individual artistic temperament played in the evolution of their own art. He asks us to consider rejecting the ideas about avant-garde and of the labelling of our modern artists as radical or conservative, and focus on the role their individual temperaments played in discovering and selecting the rules they chose to apply to their creative efforts.

I urge anyone even moderately interested in art to read this article in the August 12 issue of TNR and of anything that Jed Perl writes. He has a gift for conveying to us the issues related to art and art history that bring all these artists to life for me in a way so vivid and accessible that I immediately wanted to arrange a trip to Philadelphia and New York City to see these two exhibitions before they close and move on.

Mi missing partner

Spending this weekend alone at home as my wife is taking care of our grandchildren at their home 1 1/2 hours away. I do OK without her and she probably does better without me, but my life seems disordered when she is not here at home.

Another racist incident

I was reading today in Slate, the political on-line magazine, about the Justice of the Peace in Louisiana who refused to give a marriage license to an interracial couple.  As some of Slate's readers commented, one wonders whether his refusal is in fact legal under prevailing law, but I think that issue is less important than the underlying racism that led him to refuse to do his duty towards that couple.   Many of the readers who commented in Slate expressed varying degrees of shock, surprise, rejection and dismay at the fact of it.

We should not any of us be surprised or shocked by this news from Louisiana.  Nor should we use this incident to tar the image of Louisiana.  I know there are many in Louisiana who are not racists and who would never support this kind of behavior on the part of a local public official.   This kind of racist sentiment displayed by the JP there can be found all over the US, and not just in southern states.  But I am absolutely convinced that it does not represent more than a minority, fringe part of our nation, and I believe that the election of Obama in November 2008 amply demonstrates that the vast majority of our country is moving in a totally different direction.  But we must never think that the problem is resolved by the fact that our President is Barack Obama.   Intolerance in our public discourse has grown considerably in the last decades, and our political leaders, particularly in the Republican Party have worked hard to exploit our different opinions and beliefs to promote their own political fortunes.   The intolerance is not only about racial issues, but about political philosophy, ideas of social justice, and about sexual orientation, among many others.

There has been an appalling failure of moral leadership from our political class in the widespread exploitation of our differences to gain a political foot up on the opponent.  It grew to its worst extreme so far with the elections in 2000 and 2004 with the political strategies devised by men such as Karl Rove who long ago lost his moral compass and who hides behind his political philosophy to justify his actions.   But I digress.  The saddest aspect of this situation has been the silence of the vast majority of our political leaders in both parties  before these political tactics that have so severely and dangerously divided our nation.  I am referring here not only to our executives (President, governors, mayors) but also to our legislative respresentatives at the federal and state levels.    We have always had political fault lines and political differences and we should expect that we always will.  But the lack or moral responsability on the part of our political candidates is shocking and disappointing to anyone who has followed the history of our nation.

Since the late 1990's, this corruption of our political morality has extended to our judiciary, especially to the federal courts and our Supreme Court.  Disgracefully, our leaders and legislators have since the second Clinton administration in particular politicized the nomination of our judges to the detriment of justice in our country.  We can see evidence of the intolerance I bemoan here in the workings of our Supreme Court, as the findings our the justices increasingly are guided by political and social philosophy to the exclusion of legal reasoning, which must be the foundation and bedrock of their decisions if justice is to be served.

The strength of America has always been its diversity, and now our politicians, especially in the Republican Party, have turned that virtue of diversity on its head and have succeeded in turning Americans against one another by exploiting our differences and stoking our fears and insecurities in this insecure world in which we live.   We used to agree to disagree and worked within the context of our democratic practices and principles to find ways to live and work together and to tolerate willingly and openly our differences. The quality of our political leadership, not only in the Presidency but even more so in Congress and in the Supreme Court has fallen in recent decades and the result is the current climate of fear and intolerance that our politicians have stoked. We must continue to seek and elect leaders who promote openness, tolerance, and a willingness to work even with those with whom they disagree to resolve the problems and difficulties our country faces.

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