I nearly lost my temper this week. One would think I'd have learned by now to divorce my emotional reactions from the crazy-tea-party emails that are designed to inflame them. But, it remains a challenge, I have to admit. In this case, John Stossel, stop signs, and the Amer. w/ Disabilities Act was a provoking mix of stimuli.
Then, while moving bags and boxes (it seems as though the stuff in the old apt. has sex and multiplies overnight) I managed to catch an NPR program I've never heard before, Speaking of Faith. It made me smile. It helped me to remember that there are places where people go to have reasoned, grounded discussions of important matters.
And that's when I decided to give it my own shout-out right here. Or, rather, below the fold...
GO VOTE!
If you live in a state with a primary today in which you can vote, please do so. New York alone should provide plenty of fireworks for the late evening newscasts.
But first, the Unconstitutional governmental impingement on personal freedom otherwise known as stop signs
John Stossel (I won't bother with the link, but you can find him pretty quickly if you feel the urge) is pretty well known for his libertarian-based reporting on broadcast television in segments such as, "Greed is Good." He sets out to overturn contemporary liberal and pro-big-government thinking with exposés on, in this case, unnecessary stop signs and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Or, according to that email I mentioned above...
It’s always a source of frustration for me to, say, stop for signs when I’m the only one around, or sit at a traffic light for a minute or more when there’s not a single car coming from either side of the intersection and six other cars behind me. Within half a mile from home, I can probably identify at least a half dozen stop signs that shouldn’t be there at all, or traffic lights that are unnecessary. Inside our tiny, tiny subdivision, there are 3 signs that are totally unnecessary...
I found vindication when I watched a John Stossel (of 20/20 fame on ABC) show a few days ago. He had a traffic expert from England as guest. This guy has done lots of experiments in England on traffic control. They found that when all signs and lights were removed in a medium-sized city, there was a significant drop in traffic accidents and people were able to move around faster. He said something about human beings’ innate ability to adjust to the absence of traffic lights and stop signs. He showed a video of this experiment. Drivers slowed down in intersections, slowed down for pedestrians and children, but went when there were no more obstructions on the road. There was order and cars were able to move more quickly and faster.
I'll Be The Roundabout
Well, I did some investigating of my own. Turns out that small town in England didn't just remove all their evil gov'mint stop signs and become overnight successes of unimpeded efficiency.
They replaced them with roundabouts.
A roundabout is a type of traffic circle, the type of which we rarely see in the US, at least in my experience. Drivers approach the circle, merge, and select the exit off the circle that puts them in the direction they wish to go. There are some of these in Washington, DC, but they are heavily ladened with traffic lights and stop signs. The kind Stossel reported on, without telling his viewers anything about them, were a variant with no traffic lights or stop signs. That motorists were not driving into each other was attributed on the show to the genius of simply removing the stop signs that inconvenienced them in the first place. But, what, I asked, of the genius of the design and government-backed zoning and construction of the roundabout itself? In making his report only about stop signs, Stossel left out at least half the story. How convenient.
ADA
He also went after the Americans with Disabilities Act in this report. For my email interlocutor this was all about how incredibly unfair it is that there are multiple handicapped parking spaces in the front of stores while the rest of us have to walk further in 100 degree heat. The selfishness of this position is only one of many reasons I have not been swayed to join the tea party, despite many appeals from this relative to do so. Stossel reported that, as a stutterer, he would have never been allowed or encouraged to become a professional broadcast journalist had the ADA been passed before he began his career. He would have, obviously, been given some paper-shuffling desk work in a corner that wouldn't have required him to speak out loud, thus accommodating his work to his disability instead of demanding him to overcome it to achieve something greater. How he knew all this, he didn't bother to say. I suspect it's the same way my daughter knows that cookies grown on cookie trees and that I should have planted one a long time ago so that she could have all the cookies she wants today. Instead, we're stuck with trips to the grocery store.
Speaking of Faith
Then, I flipped on the radio, and heard this:
Ms. Tippet: You talk about the limits of charity, and I sense that you are critical, in a way, of a move in our culture to locate justice strictly within faith communities, or to put a lot of the responsibility for this kind of practical justice on faith communities. Is that right?
Dr. Hilfiker: Yes. Yeah. I don't count the work at Christ House or Joseph's House largely as justice work, I count it largely as charity work. My understanding of the difference is that within the Christian tradition, there is a mandate that we give charity and that we work for justice. And basically we give charity for ourselves. We give charity because it's the right thing to do for our own spiritual health. We are in control of charity, we decide where it goes, who gets it. Often we decide what people have to do with our charity. We're the ones on top, they're the ones on the bottom. I mean, there is a whole host of problems associated with charity. I don't criticize charity. It's mandated, it's something that we should do, and it's what I've spent most of my career doing. But it's different from justice.
Justice is working to change the structures so that the charity becomes less necessary. And that's what is so essential and that doesn't get touched by this turn in our country towards saying that faith communities will take care of the poor. I mean, there are practical reasons why that won't work, but I think there's a deep spiritual reason that charity is not enough, that we have to change these structures that benefit us and hurt them.
Social Justice
Not long ago, Glenn Beck encouraged anyone attending a church that supported "social justice" to leave their church. Too communist. Or socialist. Or fascist. Or something.
"Changing the structures so that charity becomes less necessary" sounds like a good thing to me, though. If done progressively.
I suspect the Health Care package was a change in structure. I suspect the end of combat operations in Iraq was a change in structure. I suggest financial reforms designed by and administered by Elizabeth Warren will be a change in structure.
Ms. Tippett: ...somehow the way we do charity now also keeps us at a remove from what you're talking about, which is real relationship.
Dr. Hilfiker: Yeah. Well, I think maybe that's the third leg of this. You know, we've talked about doing charity, which is mandated, we've talked about changing the structures, and the third leg is real relationships. And without those real relationships, you don't have any good idea about how to change the structures.
Fred whispering = relationship building, relationship building = structure changing.
John Stossel and Eggs
First, the eggs. Also from the same Speaking of Faith radio show:
Mr. Kamau: Once when I was young, I came home after school and baked a cake for my mom for dinner. I wanted to surprise her. She's a nurse and had been at work all day, you know, before starting her second shift as our mom. So I pulled down a box of cake mix. And after I emptied the cake mix in the bowl, I saw that the recipe called for eggs, and we were out. I remembered the stories my family would tell about growing up in the rural segregated South. Though Jim Crow blacks suffered severe institutional oppression, their communities were strong and neighbors were always helping one another out. People would come over and ask for a cup of sugar or a loaf of bread, and "if you had it, you gave it," my mom would say.
So that day, I went across the street to Miss Jessie, our retired neighbor, I got my two eggs and finished baking the cake. When my mother arrived, I presented her with the cake and proudly recounted all my efforts and resourcefulness. But the glow from her face quickly faded when I got to the part about borrowing the eggs. She called my father into the kitchen, and together they scolded me about going around the neighborhood begging for food.
It appears that in today's culture, strong communities are those where estranged neighbors live on islands with no need for one another. Where sharing is not a practice of healthy community-building, but an act of last resort for the desperate and destitute.
In October 2008, when the market began to collapse, I secretly hoped the crash would be so complete that our middle-class pretenses would fall. Instead, what I see is a president, a Congress, and a marketplace eager to maintain the status quo. But they're just taking their marching orders from us, the American people. It seems we're still willing to do anything to keep from knocking on our neighbor's door to ask for eggs.
I reject John Stossel's political opinions dressed up as journalism because they promote, in my political opinion, a running towards estranged neighbors living on islands, reluctant to share and support one another. But, I suspect, Stossel and my FIL would respond, "We do support our neighbors! We share, we care." And I wonder, "Really?" "Not just the ones closest to you in certain measurable demographics?" What about all your our neighbors?
I have 4 eggs, but I only need 3. Anybody want an egg?
TWLTW
- How to tie shoes really, really fast:
- Money may not buy happiness, but apparently there is a threshold above which people do not report being any more happy than those making more or less than they do, at least on a daily basis. Legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman contributed to the work, and found that threshold to be $75,000. In terms of overall life satisfaction, positive feelings continued to increase with income, but on a day-to-day "happiness" basis, 75 grand is where the plateau begins.
- Another WSJ report,showing that in at least one study done on teacher merit-pay, 2/3 of teachers in the top 20% of teachers year (measured by their students' test scores) fall out of the top quintile the very next year. That in any given year, only 33% of teachers manage staying in the top group of test scores from one year to the next. I wonder why that is? The article offered very little in the way of explanation, probably wisely, in not overreaching the underlying data.
- I just saw a tv commercial earlier tonight for Citi, showing an iphone app that lets you take a picture of your paycheck and deposit it to your Citi account by sending them the picture. The ad did not show what happens to your check after your picture message has been sent. It may just be me, but aren't there ways for enterprising check picture-takers to take advantage of this kind of thing?
- If you wonder that text messaging is killing literacy, this article may be a fun read!
- I reported in a TWLTW diary a while ago on the Stark County, OH, representative John Boccieri and how his vote on the Health Care package was playing out at home with the constituents. Apparently, it's still playing out...
“People in our city feel the health care law is going to hurt them more than it will help them. And some of their thoughts are that he was swayed by Nancy Pelosi... Mr. Boccieri’s district, which has been hit hard by plant closings in and around Canton, seems particularly hostile to the health care law. During two days in August, Mr. Boccieri was confronted at the restaurant by Richard R. Guiley, a Louisville councilman who told him the business community objected strongly to his vote; at the hardware store by Dave Kennedy, a teacher who accused him of voting against his constituents; and at the assisted-living center by Marge Johnson, the manager, who said she feared socialized medicine, “where you can’t go to your own doctor and you have to wait and wait and wait.””
And, Boccieri's reply?
“Is it everything that I wanted?” he would ask. “No. But we’ve got to start somewhere.”
The 16th Congressional District in Ohio was previously held by Ralph Regula (R) for 18 terms. Boccieri won it by 10 points in 2008. Obama lost the district by 2 points in the same year.
What Did You Learn This Week?