JonLowder.com

Ugh

I think I'm getting old and cranky.  I read the letters to the editor in the paper or the comments posted on local news stories and I really kind of get hot and bothered.  Take this comment from a story on WXII's site about Andy Griffith's affirmation of faith with Grace Moravian Church in Mt. Airy:

"I grew up admiring Andy Griffith and his values. I was shocked and disappointed when he endorsed Obama, who is actively Pro Abortion. Christians need to stand up."

I'd LOVE to know the commenter's feelings about Obama's predecessor's stance on capital punishment. 

Yep.  Old and cranky.

Dying Anonymously

Yesterday I received a text message from one of my kids that said a girl from her freshman class had died the night before.  She didn't provide details so I replied and asked if she knew the girl.  She replied in the affirmative.  I then asked if they'd been told what had happened and she texted back that they hadn't.  All she knew was that during morning announcements the principal had said that this girl had died the night before.  She also said that one of her teachers had read an email from the principal that had provided a little more detail.  My last question was to ask if the school had provided any counselors for kids to talk to if they needed it and she said that she hadn't heard of any.  My son who also goes to school there said he assumed they had because they usually do, but he hadn't heard of anyone going to see a counselor or an announcement that counselors were available.

Later in the day I went to get my hair cut and while there the barbers told me that the girl had lived right across the street from their shop and that she'd had a tough life.  She didn't know her father and her mother had moved north without her or her brother and left them to live with the girl's grandparents.  Her great-grandparents lived next door and apparently they were all pretty close.  A while back both great-grandparents passed away on the same night and not long after that her grandfather died.  Her mother moved back home for a year but then left again to return north, again without her and her brother.  Despite all that they said she seemed to be a really happy kid, always with a smile on her face. 

All of this has been running through my head over the last 24 hours.  What's troubling to me is that when we lose one of our students under tragic circumstances like a freak accident on the football field or a car full of students killed by a drunk driver, we tend to pay a lot of attention and go to a lot of effort to honor those students' memories. That's as it should be. On the other hand when a student dies in quiet solitude we don't seem to react the same way.  If we speak of the child at all we do so in hushed whispers.  We don't come together as a community to celebrate that person's life or to acknowledge the impact of their loss on our community.  I think that's a shame and I think it robs our children of the opportunity to deal with the impact of losing one of their peers.  

Sadly a young member of our community died two days ago and very few of us know what we've lost.

The Bigot Belt

An interesting piece at the Freakonomics blog looks into the "bigot belt" which is the swath of counties from Texas to West Virginia that actually went more Republican from 2004 to 2008 in the presidential elections.  The question, simply put, was whether or not the reason was Obama's race.  The answer ended up being yes, but the details of the research offered some enlightening conclusions.

The author, Eric Oliver, looked at whether it was really just race or perhaps the fact that these counties tended to be in heavy coal mining and oil drilling areas had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was that these counties had a different racial breakdown than other areas.  His conclusion was very interesting: these counties tended to have large white populations in states that were otherwise racially diverse.  From the article:

The answer comes in looking at both the county and the state together. One of the biggest demographic differences between “scarlet” and “azure” counties is the racial composition of the state population: 72 percent of the “scarlet” counties are in states that are over 10 percent black compared to only 49 percent of the “azure” counties. In a multivariate regression analysis using all the variables listed above, the best predictor of a county’s Republican vote margin is its white racial percentage relative to its state’s black population size. In other words, the counties where Republican margins grew the largest tended to be predominantly white places in otherwise racially mixed states.

These patterns are consistent with research on individual racial attitudes. Historically, the greatest levels of racial violence occurred within white enclaves near larger black populations, particularly when these enclaves are poor and uneducated. Even today, whites who live in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods within more diverse metropolitan areas tend to be more racially hostile than whites who live in either integrated neighborhoods or within largely white regions. In more diverse settings, locally segregated whites have less contact with nearby minorities yet also feel greater competition for jobs and public goods. The combination of both increased racial competition and racial isolation seems to be a recipe for generating racial animosity.

As the author concludes we should not be fooled into thinking that this election has somehow catapulted us into an era of racially harmony.  The fear of "other" has been with us since we crawled out of the primordial ooze, and I fear it will be ever thus.

Want to Dump Your Teenager? Move to Nebraska

In a true example of unintended consequences, Nebraska's recently passed "safe haven" law that allows parents of unwanted infants to drop off their babies without any questions asked was written in such a way that parents (or other caregivers) of older children can also legally drop off their kids with no questions asked.  Of course the law was intended to address the problem of babies being left in dumpsters and such places by young parents who don't want them, but so far the first three cases of people taking advantage of the law are caregivers of a 15-year old, a 13-year old and an 11-year old.

As the parent of a teenager I can tell you that there are occasions when you're ready to throw in the towel, or at least throw your kid, but I can't imagine literally just dropping them off somewhere and saying "adios" forever.  Of course I think we have great kids and we've never had real nasty issues to deal with, knock on wood, so I'm not going to sit in judgment of these people without knowing the whole story. However, it seems to me that if you make it easy for parents to give up then more than a few are going to do it.

Who knows, maybe it will end up being better for the kids.  After all, you need a license to drive but any fool with a hormone can be a parent.  That doesn't mean I think this is a good thing, though, because in my mind people need to be held responsible for their actions and a parent being able to just abandon their child because things get tough just doesn't seem right.  If nothing else the state should make sure the parents are held accountable for the child's future care until the child is 18 through something like child support payments.  In addition maybe they could require counseling for the parents with the goal to move the children back into the parent's home if appropriate.  Anything would be better than enabling abandonment with no questions or consequences.

Troubling Trend

In 2006 more women under the age of 30 who had babies did so out of wedlock.  I won't delve into the moral arguments here, rather I'll focus on the practical.  First and foremost, I can't imagine being a single parent at any age.  Being a parent is exhausting and when you don't have someone to share the burden it is doubly so.  Second, as a single parent you're fighting an uphill battle financially.  Even if you get child support you still have to find a way to make ends meet and that means either working, living on public support, living on family support or some combination of the three.  Third, you're not going to have a lot of spare time to spend with your kids.  Where do they turn for the attention that you can't give them?

This trend is troubling because in the end it will impact all of us.  As the person who conducted the study cited in the article said:

The inequality of incomes in these families is unbelievable,” said Sum, who has written numerous books and articles about the job market, young families and poverty. “Forty percent are poor, or near-poor. A large fraction is dependent on public assistance. Unless the mother is very well-educated and has a bachelor’s degree or above, there’s a huge fiscal cost to the rest of us.

Hat tip to Ed Cone for the link to the article.

The Human Network's Future

An interesting presentation titled Hyperpolitics, American Style given at Personal Democracy Forum on June 24, 2008, provides some interesting factoids about human networking, past, present and future.  Full video below, but first some interesting data shared during the presentation:

• Half of all people on earth have mobile phones
• It took one decade to go from 50% of people not having phones, period, to 50% having a mobile phone
• It took one decade to get to 1 billion mobile users
• It took four years to get to 2 billion mobile users
• It took 18 months to get to 3 billion mobile users
• Some time in 2010-2011 there will be 5.1 billion mobile users (75% of humanity)
• 43 billion text messages were sent last year

Here's the video:

Watch Your Mouth

This morning my mom sent me a link to an NPR piece about a blog called "Stuff White People Like."  She also included a message that said she was glad that I don't feel a need to be outrageous in order to be read.  Since my mom is a member of an exceptionally small readership consisting of a few blood relatives and some close friends I'm thinking that it would be a little presumptuous of me to consider myself as read. 

I visited the blog, which apparently has garnered 4 million hits in just one month, and I have to say that I find it hysterical.  I think the guy does a great job of poking fun at our politically correct society, and of upper middle class folks in particular.  Several comments on the NPR discussion page devoted to this story point out that this is more a socio-economic commentary than a racial commentary and I think that's accurate. 

What I find funniest about this site is that people might get their panties in a twist over satire aimed at white folks.  Is that equal opportunity or what?  Of course some people see it as a kind of back-door satire of non-whites, but my take is that if you look at every problem as a nail then every tool will look like a hammer.

This reminded me of some thoughts I had after church on Sunday.  During his sermon the pastor had talked about the need to keep in mind how women had been treated during Jesus' lifetime and then related it to modern society.  He also referred to the racial divisions of the day and compared it to modern times.  In the process he did not shy away from using words like "rape" and "nigger" and thus his sermon carried a great deal of weight, relevance and resonance.  It also grabbed my attention because I can't remember the last time someone used the word "nigger" even in the process of bemoaning the fact that racism still exists today.  That's a shame.

While I'll never believe that using words to intentionally hurt, scare or intimidate another person or group of people is an okay thing to do, I also think we do a great disservice to our society by censoring those words completely.  I should not have to resort to code words when arguing against bigotry, because when I do use code words I think the import of what I'm saying is lessened. If I'm having a debate or argument with someone then I want both of us to use whatever words we feel best represent what we're thinking and feeling, not some watered down terms that we feel are politically correct.

Somehow we've gotten to the point that when sitting at the dinner table in our own home our children say things like, "Today at school Jimmy called Danny an n-word and Danny slugged Jimmy and got suspended, which I don't think is right."  Why do they have to use "n-word"?  If they simply relate the story the way it happened it's still clear that they don't agree with Jimmy calling Danny a nigger and they think that Danny was fully justified in what he did.  Worse, instead of focusing on telling the kids that maybe violence wasn't the answer I'm instead worrying about explaining why in this context they could have actually said "nigger." 

Now imagine if the child tells that same story to a friend in the school cafeteria and a teacher overhears it.  There's a very real possibility he'll be disciplined for using a derogatory term, even though he was simply telling a friend what had happened.   

Now I think, or at least hope, that most school administrators and teachers would use common sense in the situation I described above, but here's a section from the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System's Student Parent Handbook that might give you an idea of how they might deal with provocative language:

Article V. Academic and Personal Freedoms and Responsibilities
A. Freedom of speech. Students have a right to express their thoughts and opinions at reasonable times and places. This right is guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The school is an appropriate place for debate, discussion, and the expression of ideas. However, certain kinds of speech, whether spoken, written or symbolic, may be prohibited at schools. Understanding the meaning of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech is an important responsibility that students must accept in their learning process. The following types of speech are not generally protected by the Constitution and are prohibited at schools or at school related activities:
1. Profanity: words that are clearly considered profane by contemporary community standards of behavior.
2. Obscenity: words that describe sexual conduct and which, read as a whole, appeal to a prurient interest in sex, portray sex in a manner offensive to contemporary community standards and do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
3. Fighting or abusive words: words that are spoken solely to harass or injure other people, such as threats of violence, defamation of character or defamation of a person’s race, religion or ethnic origin.
4. Disruption: speech, be it verbal, written or symbolic that materially and substantially disrupts classroom work, school activities or school functions, such as demonstrations, “sit-ins,” “boycotts,” or simply talking in class when told not to do so by the teacher.
5. Lewd, vulgar or indecent speech or conduct.

Schools can deal with kids who break these standards with various levels of discipline. I truly have a problem with this approach.  Of course I find it despicable when derogatory comments and racial slurs are used, but I think we do our kids a disservice when we take the approach of saying "you can't call people names" and then turn them loose in a world where that is done all the time.  Rather than teaching them how to stand up for themselves, or how to deal with a racist on their own, we simply say "you can't say such things and if you do we'll suspend you, and little Johnny whom you insulted will live happily ever after in his little cocoon of love and affirmation."  Is that what happens in the real world?

A better approach would be to teach kids how to mediate these situations themselves, how to approach racism, how to engage in conversation and not shouting matches.  In other words we need to teach kids that it's not the words they use, but how they use them, and that the most effective way to fight harmful speech is not through censorship but to refute it with intelligence and wit.

The Disemvoweller

Xeni Jardin is one of the co-editors of Boing Boing.  She posted a piece on Edge.org called Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands that essentially fleshes out the thinking behind her very descriptive title. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to it).  Among the very smart things she wrote I found this bit to be flat out brilliant:

Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.      

We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone's misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.

Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I'd underestimated the power of dedicated  human attention.

I suspect Ed is hunting for a Typepad version of the disemvoweller as we speak.  If I got more than my normal quota of one comment per millennium I probably would.

Calling the Po-Po in Greensboro and Winston-Salem

Greensboro blogger Billy has gangs using the house across the street from his and he's not sitting still for it.  Fec points to Michael Levine's solution and having had Mike rent our basement when he was still with the DEA (and I was an awestruck teenager) and seeing him in action I'm certain Mike's solution would work.  The man doesn't screw around. 

From Billy's post:

Over 15 years ago my neighbors and I drove the gangs out of the exact same houses where they are today. I had hoped I would never have to spend another night sneaking around in the dark armed with my .357 revolver, sawed-off 12 gauge magnum pump and 7.62 rifle. I had hoped the Marlin 30-30 Winchester carbine I bought new could be passed along to my son upon my death without ever having been fired as that would make it far more valuable...

Greensboro was woefully short on police officers 15 years ago and the cowards on City council have only made the problem worse.

I'll never forget the night then GPD Chief Sylvester appeared on national television along with the then chief of the Denver, Colorado PD and told the nation there were no vigilante groups acting in Greensboro. I'll never forget shouting, "You lying Bastard!" at the chief as he lied to the world...

Earlier this week police dispatchers told me that sending officers to gang houses wouldn't solve the problem. They say everything calms down until the officers leave and then it starts right back up. So in the meantime the gang activity continues to grow and children in east Greensboro are prisoners in their own homes.

A little closer to home the Winston-Salem police arrested six men after a sting operation at Hobby Park.  Charges included soliciting crimes against nature, public self diddling (I changed the term because I really don't feel like dealing with the comment spam that using the correct term would attract), and drug possession.  The police conducted the sting after receiving complaints about lewd and inappropriate behavior. 

Hobby Park is popular with mountain bike racers and remote control (RC) enthusiasts which means it's just a little popular with kids so I'm glad to see that the police dispatcher didn't say "Well, they'll just come back after we leave" when they took the citizen complaint calls.  Let's hope that Billy can get the same kind of response in GSO pretty soon.

Would I Have Done the Same?

Often when I get into discussions about history I often wonder how I would have handled things if I'd been living then.  For instance if I'd been a wealthy land owner in the South around 1850 would I have been a slave owner?  If I'd been living here in Winston-Salem 50 years ago how would I have handled segregation?

Today I read two pieces that prompted me to re-visit these questions.  First was an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal titled "Confronting History".  The editorial is about a man named Peter Hairston who was a descendant of plantation owners.  He opened up his family archives, without setting limitations, to a historian so that there would be a full understanding of his family's past.  From the editorial:

Hairston, a former judge and legislator, was candid, too candid for some. For example, in 1991 he told the Journal that, while he hoped he wouldn't have owned slaves, "it was the labor system of the time, and anybody who grew up and saw the mill villages of the early part of this century knows full well that the slaves were far better treated ... It would have been very easy, I think, for someone now to have a guilt trip, except that the effort, the sheer effort of looking after these people, letting them come and go but also keeping them in very old age ... has long since bridged any gap of who owes whom what."

Yet this was the same man who talked his local school-board members into submitting to integration without a fight in 1969 by appealing to their sense of practicality, Henry Wiencek writes in The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.

Hairston, a central figure in that 1999 book, freely opened his family's history to Wiencek, wanting nothing but the truth. "He encouraged me to dig into it no matter where it would lead ... Someone else would have just as soon let these things stay silent," Wiencek said last week.

The result was a groundbreaking work that eloquently chronicled the histories of the white Hairstons, the slaveowners; and the black Hairstons, their slaves - including their shared blood.

The second piece was an article on The Washington Post's website about Drew Gilpin Faust the woman recently named to be Harvard's next president.  It ends up that when Faust was nine years old she wrote a letter to President Eisenhower to let him know how she felt about segragation.  At the time, 1957, she lived in rural Virginia in a fairly prominent local family. Here's an excerpt:

The child's plea for an end to the separation of the races, so at odds with what she heard at home and at her all-white Millwood school, was forever fixed in her memory as she became a leading scholar on the Civil War South and an advocate for a bigger role in national life for minorities and women...

When, having decided as a historian that she ought to track down that childhood letter to the president, and having found it at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan., she realized it was probably inspired by something about the battles over Virginia school desegregation she had heard on the radio while being driven home from school by her family's black handyman, Raphael Johnson.

In a 2003 article in Harvard Magazine, Faust said, "I asked Raphael if what I had just understood was true, whether I would be excluded from my school if I painted my face black. I came and wrote these very words in my letter, not now as a question but already transformed into a declaration of outrage to the president. 'If I painted my face black I wouldn't be let in any public schools etc. My feelings haven't changed, just the color of my skin.'

"What I remember is that Raphael did not answer my question. My probings about the unarticulated rules of racial interaction made him acutely uncomfortable; he was evasive. But his evasion was for me answer enough. How was it possible that I never asked that question or saw those realities until I was nine years old? How could I have not noticed before?"...

When Faust opened the copy of the letter sent from Abilene, she was surprised at the religious arguments she used, because she did not remember her family being such serious Episcopalians. Jesus Christ, she informed the president, was born to save "not only white people but black yellow red and brown."

If anything, she said, the instruction she remembered at church seemed to reinforce the old values with which she was so uncomfortable, in regard to both race and gender. She remembered the Sunday her father had to substitute for her Sunday school teacher. After a discussion of the story of Samson and Delilah, he asked the class what was the moral of the tale. When none of the children spoke up, he gave his view: "Never trust a woman."

What struck me about Hairston is that he was unflinchingly honest about slavery.  Realistically, how many people running a large plantation in the south in 1850 would have risked their livelihood by not having slaves?  If I had to be honest with myself I'd have to say I might have dealt with the situation by making sure that all of my people were treated well, but I probably wouldn't have totally rebelled against the system.  But again, I really don't know.

The article about Faust seemed a little more relevant to my life, which makes sense since I was born just 9 years after she wrote the letter.  I was too young to remember the state-sanctioned segregation, but I definitely remember the early years of de-segregation.  Ironically though I think my best clue about how I might have handled segregation comes from my middle school and high school years.

In 8th grade the country was in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis.  Because we lived in Arlington, VA I had a lot of international students in my school, including quite a few Iranian kids whose parents had worked for the Shah's regime and were now essentially refugees in America.  Being 13 and 14 year olds we didn't understand the nuances of the crisis, we just knew that Iran was now our enemy.  You can imagine how some of the Iranian kids were treated, but I'm happy to say that while I had no close Iranian friends I wasn't afraid to be seen with them in the halls, working together in class or sitting together in the cafeteria.  I couldn't understand how they could be held responsible for what was going on in Iran, especially since they'd been living in the States for years.  I just didn't buy the concept of judging people by what nationality or religion they were.

On the other hand I'm no rebel.  I'll stand up for what I believe, but I don't think I'd have been a civil rights marcher.  If I'd been born in 1936 instead of 1966 I have a feeling my approach would have been to treat everyone, black or white, decently within the social context of the time.  I'm pretty sure I'd have voted for anyone advocating civil rights, but I seriously doubt I'd have had the guts to risk bodily harm by standing arm in arm at a protest.  I'd also have probably gone to Vietnam rather than protest.  Like I said, I'm no rebel.

In today's world I can tell you that I'm made uncomfortable by any person or institution that treats people a certain way based on their race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.  People are complex and they should each be judged on their individual actions.  I've met plenty of religious folk who I'm pretty sure are going to hell, and I've met atheists who might end up in heaven despite themselves.  I've met people of all races who I'd like to call friends for life, and I've met people of all races who are grade-A assholes.

It's really very simple: I ask only that I be treated with the same respect I hope that I show others.  That means that I'm ashamed that I probably wouldn't have had the gumption to buck the system in the past, but I'm awful glad I never had to confront those situations.  I'm also very impressed by those who do have the gumption to stand up and fight. 

In today's world we're confronted by issues like homelessness, renewed religious strife (anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-Jew), homophobia and any number of other issues that divide people based on what they are.  I find that I'm not the fighter that people like Cara Michele are, but I hope that what support I do give somehow helps.