Pattie just told me that MSNBC got complaint emails when they cut away from Barack and Micelle Obama dancing. That – along with the not insignificant visual of two million people on the Mall in Washington – sums up the significance of today for me. People wanted this day, people worked for this day, and now people are happy together basking in this day. Tomorrow we get to work, but today – this is pretty awesome.
I am not a science guy. I wish I were, but my brain won’t wrap itself around numbers as easily as it wraps around words. I do have an interest in science, though, so from time to time I try to read geared-for-mass-audience science books. I’ve just started Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, and a couple of chapters in I got struck by a question that I am not smart enough to see the obvious answer for:
If the light from various stars billions of years ago is just now visible because of the distance that the light has traveled, how did we get to this spot first?
My reading thus far has led me to the idea of cosmic inflation, which suggests that in the instants after the universe began there was a period of very rapid expansion, but A) I don’t know if I understand the theory yet and therefore B) I don’t know if it connects to the question I’m asking. So it looks like it’ll be back to the books on this one.
I’ve been relatively quiet on presidential transition matters, partially from being outright wiped out and partially because I feel a little disconnected. There are some Obama decisions I like, some I feel unqualified to comment on, and some that I think are flat-out bad ideas. But while plenty of commentators expressed their hurt and anger over things such as the invitation to Rick Warren, and I can see the case that they’re making, I can’t get myself to feel the same. Part of this might be a defense mechanism – after spending a lot of time, energy and money to help get Obama elected I don’t want to think that that was effort poorly spent. But I think I have a larger issue. I’m so resigned to disagreeing even with the public officials that I support that I can’t find the line past which disagreement turns to “Hell no!” If I were implementing my own society, it would probably resemble something from what gets called the Far Left of the American political spectrum. But I have so little confidence that such measures would find popular or electoral support that I have come to view political reform as a generational process, and so the best I’m hoping for in the present is a set of tactical moves that will pave the way for that better outcome. So I am constantly asking myself “Is this program that I disagree with on its substance acceptable as a tactical move that will make my substantial desire more likely in the long term?” And when you reduce politics and government to a tactical discussion it loses a lot of the passion and can make it hard to remember what you’re working for in the first place. So I’m gonna have to figure something out here – I’m just not sure what yet.
Last night Chris Lehmann posted about the way that many figures in the education world view teachers more as adversaries than vital resources in the effort to educate our kids. I’ve been mulling over Chris’s post in my head since then, and while I am far from an expert I think there are a number of reasons for this viewpoint. That means there are a lot of things teachers (and others) have to do in order to correct the problem, but maybe a rough To Do list isn’t a bad place to start.
I’ve been loosely following the goings-on in the Screen Actors Guild negotiations, and I admit that much of my info seems to come from the dueling statements by various factions which are reposted on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood site, but it strikes me that there’s a really interesting case study here of an idea I’ve seen expressed by Gandhi (and certainly elsewhere). In a nutshell, SAG has gotten nowhere in its negotiations with the main group of production companies, the AMPTP. In order to try to gain some leverage in the negotiations, the national board of SAG wants to hold a strike authorization vote. They don’t actually want to strike yet, they just want to make it clear that a strike is a possibility if a suitable deal isn’t worked out. Various factions within SAG, along with many unions and industry participants outside of SAG, make the argument that given the current economy, it’s a terrible time to strike and possibly put people out of work, and SAG should just hurry up and try to get the best contract it can now.
OK, so where’s the Gandhi come in? One of the major tenets of his strategy of non-cooperation was that no minority can exploit a larger group without that group’s permission and cooperation. If the larger group simply refuses to cooperate, then the smaller group can not accomplish any of the things it wants to accomplish and therefore can not benefit from the oppression. In the case of India, Britain could gain no advantage from its empire without the labor of the colonial subjects, the general acceptance of colonial rule, and the work of native administrators and officials. If every man, woman and child in India refused to do any work that would benefit the British Empire, the British in India would be at a loss and Britain itself would gain no raw materials or profitable market. The oppressed must go along with their oppression. Why would the oppressed willingly cooperate with their oppressors? Because the oppressors have the power to inflict suffering. They can take away what small amount of resources and freedom the oppressed have obtained for themselves. They can even take away the oppressed’s lives. And so, in order to preserve the small bit that they have, the oppressed cooperate and do not demand the much greater amount of resources and freedom to which they are entitled. You know the expression that no one is more dangerous than someone with nothing left to lose? Well, the flip side is that if you give someone just a tiny amount to lose, they become a whole lot less dangerous. Read the remainder of this entry »
After the 2000 election, I was pretty strongly in favor of electronic voting. Of course, what I was in favor of was an idealized form of electronic voting, one that I would describe as “functional.” Instead we wound up with many instances of buggy, non-secure machines that sometimes failed to operate and often could not be verified. And I began to wonder what had ever possessed me to support the idea in the first place. The Minnesota Senate race has reminded me. For starters you have the problems with paper ballots and scanning machines where the machines don’t properly count some votes. Then you get the ambiguous ballots where you have to figure out voter intent from a bunch of markings that don’t quite follow the instructions. (And let me just say how much confidence these exercises give me in all the standardized tests I’ve had to take in my life.) And now on top of that we’re seeing the inevitable result of a process that depends on taking hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and moving them around: stuff gets lost. If I’m following the story correctly, one Minnesota precinct has lost an envelope containing over a hundred ballots, so those ballots can not be recounted and Norm Coleman’s campaign wants to prevent Minnesota from using the original count.
Now, given all the problems we’ve discovered with the actual implemented version of electronic as opposed to my idealized version, maybe we need to accept these drawbacks. Or maybe we should be looking for a way to combine electronic voting with paper documentation and backups to ensure that when we have an election, we can actually figure out who wins.
(Then again, if I’m truly honest, this Minnesota election looks like it’s so close that any human error might change the result. This seems to me like the kind of situation that calls for a run-off election. It might be failsafe you only have to use once in a lifetime, but boy wouldn’t it come in handy once you do need it?)
Another thought that’s been running through my head, in part based on the idea that I heard in last night’s presentations and elsewhere that these days twenty-somethings are more likely to spend some time after college in an extended period of gathering their thoughts and figuring out where they want to go – possibly returning home to live with parents or taking some time before beginning their careers. In an odd coincidence of timing, I had just been talking to one of my officemates at St. Joe’s about how many of my future options and choices were shaped by the decision I made to major in philosophy as an undergrad: a decision I made at the age of 18 in large part because as a college freshman I had a history class I hated and a philosophy class I loved, and I couldn’t drop the former without dropping the latter. I never took another history course as an undergrad. So when I decided to pursue a graduate degree, philosophy seemed the most logical course. And when I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in secondary education, all of a sudden I found myself in a graduate degree program that did not match up particularly well with my overall career goals. So now here I am finishing up a second graduate degree. How different might all of that have been if I had loved the history course and disliked the philosophy class?
Read the remainder of this entry »
This post is a short thought that I’ve been trying to develop into a larger one for a while, but I was finally moved to just start typing based on a couple of things I saw the other day. One was a Daily News column questioning the amount of money that Philadelphia spends on overtime pay for police officers who are summoned to court to testify on days off or when they are working nights. The other was the number of Eagles stickers I saw on cars while walking home. Bear with me a minute.
It has long seemed to me that we underpay police officers, firefighters, and combat troops. There are ethical and practical reasons for this. On the one hand, you are asking people to possibly run into a burning building or get shot or otherwise put themselves in harm way to protect you. It is all well and good to say “Thank you, we value and honor your service and your sacrifice,” but when it comes time to put our money where our mouth is, as a society I think we collectively fall down. And from a practical standpoint, if people feel underpaid and underappreciated, that does bad things to morale and effectiveness and makes it harder to attract people who can do the job exceptionally well.
And as a point in comparison I often ask myself why someone can get paid $10 million to play first base when that job is so much less essential to our well-being. (If we had no professional sports teams, we could still have viable public safety units like the police and fire departments. If we had no police and fire departments, I doubt we’d be able to support professional sports teams for very long.) And the answer is that the sports team has the $10 million to give to the first baseman but the city or the federal government don’t have the money to give to police and firefighters and soldiers. (I grant you there are many more police officers than first basemen, but I’m not saying every officer needs $10 million either.)
But it’s not just that we are more willing to buy tickets to games than we are to pay the taxes that would fund higher salaries. Sports teams and entertainers get big bucks from the merchandise we buy to show our support, like those car decals or the Phillies t-shirts I buy or the half dozen movie posters behind me right now. I don’t have any police officer action figures or firefighter T-shirts. And maybe I should. I mean, I’m totally willing to buy into the pro-sports-as-city-unifier thing. I loved all the red T-shirts I saw as the Phillies won the World Series. I still smile when I see ’em. But let’s get real – those teams are full of part-time residents who represent our city for a while and them move on elsewhere. Police officers and firefighters (and other municipal employees whose job descriptions don’t involve lethal danger) are the city – they don’t just represent us, they make our existence as a city possible. Likewise with soldiers and other federal employees making our existence as a nation possible. And I can’t help but wonder why I don’t get the same thrill of showing loyalty and support to them as I do to a baseball team.
So my urban ed class tonight was full of presentations on various books/reports on what the heck is wrong with schools and kids these days. I actually have a number of thoughts/rants based on mine that I’ll try to roll out over the next couple of days. Two different classmates discussed a book that complains about how all this technology is making the Millennial generation more insulated, concerned with self-image, and unable to pursue and retain real knowledge. The subtitle of the book was Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. So in a small act of rebellion I decided to update the Facebook profile that I have mostly left dormant, and so I accepted a few friend requests and made a few of my own. I admit I was a little taken aback by how much information I suddenly had about what was going on on my friends’ sites, so I can tell it’s gonna take a while for this whole social network thing to click with me. And, of course, I am now blogging about social networking, which is all hopelessly recursive and probably still a couple of years out of date. But to hell with it, I’m too wordy for Twitter.
If this study gets further verified, I’m bringing a pillow to my office. I often like to say that mentally I don’t feel like I’m older or see the world very differently than I did when I was 21. I know I am and I do, but it doesn’t feel that way, especially when I start singing along with my 90s playlists. But I think lack of sleep hits me earlier and harder than it ever did back then, and I really gotta train myself to accept that I just need to go to bed earlier. (Like, say, now, instead of blogging.) Now if the world would just agree to shut itself down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, think of how much more we could get done.