Qualities of Life

Greatness, however you choose to measure it, can emerge from any society.  Even North Korea is able to produce incredibly skilled musicians and scientists.  So no society can really take too much pride in the achievements of the select few, it is how the regular person lives that should be sought as a laudable achievement.  It is all the more impressive if a society can come together to help the worst off: the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the aged.  The dignity of the marginalized groups of a country are the true measure of that society’s worth, and this is something we recognize implicitly even if we seem to forget it on a typical day.  As a continuation of my last post about education in the framework of the Second Bill of Rights, today I want to talk about the next topic FDR highlighted, social security.

Back in the 1930s more than half of all seniors were living in poverty.  The people who had worked hard their entire lives, raised families, built the country they inhabited found themselves living in a country that would not remunerate their services.  From one of the worst depressions on record, the United States decided that it was better that we all chip in some of our income so that there will always be a provision for our parents, for our retired, for all those who had made the world we now inhabit possible.  Today we still maintain that great tradition, we all have our Social Security cards, we all pay in and expect at some point to get our pay out, but times have changed.  The math behind the retirement age and the efficacy of Social Security has changed so much that we are at risk of drying up what has been one of the greatest projects this country has ever made.

And before I go on, let’s be clear that it is not just the simple changes of average life span that have affected these problems.  The United States government has borrowed against Social Security to the tune of nearly $3 trillion.  Starting in the 1980s we began to siphon off surplus revenue from Social Security coffers to pay for wars, government programs of all stripes, and tax cuts.  The mismanagement of this trust, by those who care much more about immediate politics than the actual interests of the American people, is downright obscene if not criminal.  It is a theft from those whom we have committed to protecting in retirement, in the same way we hope that future generations will protect us.  And worse, the false, self-made calamity has put many seniors in a position of having to choose either the continuation of their own benefits programs or those of coming generations.  If any solution is going to be viable in the long term, we need to ensure that such mismanagement is never allowed again, and punish those who would seek to do so.

However, even if we do solve the problems of fiduciary bungling on the part of some incapable politicians, we are still left with some rather odd math.  On the one hand we should all be ecstatic that in the 20th century quality and quantity of life has been able to flourish as people live into their 80s in a much healthier way than ever before.  The grim reality though is that if this is the case then we have a large and growing population of people who are living several decades past the point when their retirement benefits begin, rather than the few years that was initially expected.  A technically viable solution to this problem would be to increase Social Security taxes to pay for longer retirements, but then we face the question of who will bear the full brunt of those increases.  The younger, working population certainly owes a debt to the generations that came before, but to make these plans solvent in the long run could very well burden coming generations so much that the economy grinds to a halt.

One of the more realistic solutions that, at least in some form, I think we do need to accept is that the retirement age is simply no longer current.  Most countries put the retirement age in the mid to low 60s, although some like the US have bumped them toward the upper 60s.  And although I might agree that in some sense we should raise that age of retirement again to meet the problems of longevity, it comes with significant downsides.  First of all what are the effects of keeping people in the workplace longer?  Without the people in senior positions of companies retiring, or even those who simply stayed in manufacturing all their lives, the entry level positions never open up.  People of my generation and younger may have to wait until well into their 20s before they are able to find some gainful employment, particularly if we never address the living wage.  This means that people who pay into Social Security will have to pay that much more when they finally do enter the workforce, unless the retired population can accept reduced benefits for having worked that much longer.  But this all ignores an even more fundamental question concerning Social Security.

Are we defending the quality or quantity of life for seniors?  I mean even if we give in to the most conservative plans to scale back Social Security benefits, raise retirement ages until the 70s, or whatever else is deemed necessary, what kind of life are we providing for our seniors?  I don’t know how many of my readers have any experiences in retirement homes, interactions with people in advanced old age, or just an understanding of what aging means, but it is not always a comfortable retirement.  Modern medicine is indeed making 60 the new 50, but at some point you have to recognize that not all retirements are going to be peaceful extended vacations, and the realities of the limitations of what we can do needs to be acknowledged.  We can keep hearts beating for decades, we can keep air flowing through lungs indefinitely, we can extend life well beyond the point where people are actually aware that they are alive and that’s the problem.

As a society we fear death way more than is reasonable, which is why threats of terrorism and pandemics always attract great ratings in spite of all the evidence of how safe and healthy we are.  I’ve had more than a few experiences in hospitals where I got a pretty good idea of the fact that I am a mortal and just as there was a world functioning before me, there will be one after me.  And you know what?  When you have time with your thoughts like that you recognize that death as a proposition isn’t nearly as scary as being trapped in a functionless body or worse to be conscious of your brain slowly fading away.  When I get to my own advanced age, I’d rather not be hooked up to a dialysis machine and a breathing apparatus and anything else that is needed to meet the technical definitions of living, and that’s my personal choice.  I can’t expect everyone to come to the same point of view as me, but I would hope that when we talk about a subject like this we could be candid about what we really defend for our seniors.

Certainly we must continue to fight poverty for those who worked their entire lives building the world we enjoy today and we should pay back our debt to the generations that came before us.  We must be willing to treat our fellow human beings with the dignity that they deserve and that we would hope will be returned to us when the roles shift.  But we need to recognize the limits of economics, of medicine, of aging and act rationally with our compassion.  If all our efforts are in keeping people alive as long as possible then the conversation will lead to how we can keep them working as long as possible.  I don’t know whether to say this is an unfortunate or fortunate reality, but we need to be able to talk about what we want from old age as individuals and families and not as a matter solely of public policy.  Do we want to work into our 70s?  Do we want to be kept alive past the 100 year mark?  Until and unless we start answering these questions it is just going to become more and more difficult to address the problem of how we keep the great institution of Social Security thriving for all generations.

We Don’t Need No Education

At the height of the Second World War, a time when one would assume that all focus was solely on the war effort, President Roosevelt made an address to the nation on what kind of country and world we were fighting for.  When so much of the world was simply worrying about surviving through the next day’s fire bombing, he had the vision to state out loud the principles of what domestic policy must look like for a free world and a prosperous United States.  And for all the personal faults he may have had, for all the unwillingness to tackle the racial issues that were still untouched FDR still had a great conscience and wisdom in outlining a potential Second Bill of Rights.  Even for those who are incredibly skeptical about progressive politics, surely there is some great merit in using the Constitution as the start of a conversation for American politics and not as a divine doctrine to beat down reason and changing affairs.

I am of the same mindset of another president, Thomas Jefferson, in the belief that Constitution is a document that must be reviewed from time to time, though I would argue that just under two decades might be a little too frequent.  We need to be able to reconsider what is in the Constitution every generation or so to see if the values laid out in it are still what we choose to pursue or if there are stipulations within the Constitution that inhibit that pursuit.  So I believe it was in that tradition that we saw the Square Deal and the New Deal and the Fair Deal as possible corollaries to our founding documents for their own time.  And though it is true that the world has changed quite a bit since his 1944 address, I believe that Second Bill of Rights is worth giving a second glance today.  I want to talk about many of the points he brought up, but  I will start with the last and work backward because that’s just the way I roll.  Education is a fundamental right to every person who lives in this country, who grows up within our borders, who calls America home.

This, in and of itself, is not a particularly earth shattering claim to make at this point.  The idea of public education is such that basically everyone does get an education, but like so many things in this country we are addressing the quantity and not the quality of the matter.  In Chicago over the last couple of years more than a few schools have been shut down for budget reasons, and ultimately I don’t think this has to be a bad thing.  The sticking point that whose actually living in these communities bring up is that now kids are being required to walk much farther and longer in unsafe neighborhoods to get to their schools.  A proper education for everyone can be a solution to these problems of insecurity in the long run, but that still leaves children walking around, living among gangland in the short run.  It is this, and not the closing down of schools, which is evidence of the shoddy quality of American schools.

Education does not begin at first grade and it does not stop when the bell rings, the education of children is as much a consequence of the social surroundings outside the school building as it is in the lessons in the classroom.  In the United States we have set up a system where schools are temporary pauses from the woes of inner city at the best of times and the mere continuation of the socio-economic pressures of the community at worst.  Kids are not free to study and learn if they are constantly terrified about gang wars within and without the schools, lack of adequate food, persecution from police, and the lack of support outside the walls of their schools.  No wonder that the kids who emerge from these schools do not perform well on tests or show signs of promise to outside observers.  Nonetheless a select few always do emerge from all the obstacles and are held up as proof that nothing needs changing because at least the exceptional students can still succeed.

Outside of the cities, in the rural parts of America where there are indeed still people living and working and raising children the education system is no less problematic.  The less urbanized areas of this country have to either force their kids to make long treks to get to school, accept slim resources for smaller local schools, or else attempt to home school.  There are children who emerge from home schools better off than those in the standard education system, but there are many more who simply learn to believe whatever their parents told them to believe.  There are those who emerge from the sparse resources of rural school districts fully prepared to excel in public and private universities, but many more either hold out for a sports scholarship or accept that the end of high school is simply the end of a deferment from menial labor.  And the states that produce these disillusioned children often accept the state of affairs and decide that since they aren’t seeing a return on investment with low funding they might as well cut the last cords and create larger classrooms with fewer teachers.

We have, as a country, accepted that any education that comes before kindergarten is the luxury of those families that can afford it and not the necessary first steps for all American children.  We have furthermore accepted that higher education is the domain of the elites or else a financial burden for the students to bear and not the society that benefits from an informed population.  We have allowed our education system to be so maligned and mistreated as to make claims to end the Department of Education the platform of serious presidential candidates and not the utterances of those requiring mental help.  And implicitly we have accepted a future of ignorance and poverty in a world that grows ever more interconnected and competitive.

Our acceptance of short school years, limited years of education, low funding for public schools, erosion of supplemental education organizations, and lack of support for higher education notwithstanding, the nation’s children still learn.  They learn that it is alright to take money from public schools that teach the poorest in society, so long as the richest can get subsidies for private and charter schools.  They learn that school curriculums do not have to be based on facts or evidence, so long as a majority on the school board can agree that the bible has adequate lessons on the origins of life in the universe.  They learn that school is a tool parents can use to avoid their children as they try to scrape together a living, when they should be seeing their education at home and in school as working hand in hand to build up the next generation and the next generation.

But here’s the one confounding detail that should offer a little hope throughout this whole story, in spite of every obstacle that we keep throwing in the way of emerging generations, there are objective metrics to show that this generation is on track to be smarter than the last, which was smarter than the last.  Every generation that goes by bemoans that the next generation hasn’t heard about a novel that was important to them or a scientific proof that they found interesting, but it is not because the standards of education have dropped so much.  The world changes and with it our understanding of what is important and accurate information.  History classes always have to make the decisions of what to skip because, shockingly, history didn’t end 50 years ago.  Science classes always have to be revisited as our understandings of theories and principles evolve.  Math is among the courses that needs the most modernization as we now live in a world where everyone has a machine capable of fairly complex problems in their pockets.  And in case you think that this is just circumstantial evidence, just consider how IQ tests are in a near constant state of reevaluation to keep up with better educated generations of kids.  If it were just a matter of being smarter than the generation that came before we might come out alright doing little, but the fact that the whole world is growing and learning and competing means that we have to work that much harder to ensure real opportunities for coming generations.

So if I could conclude on a point that would have been poignant 35 years ago, Pink Floyd’s lyrics should be taken as literal with the double negative.  We do need education and we need to see its quality as intrinsic to the rights of humanity as the right to the quality of life we all enjoy in the “first world.”  The education of this and all generations is the cornerstone of our security, of our economy, and of course of our very humanity.  If nothing else, we must resist the urge to sell out our humanity along with our children so cheaply, because it will inevitably cost us dear.

Atheism in America

Every so often I like to watch debates that concern either the validity or the goodness of religions.  Some of the best include the now late Christopher Hitchens arguing against the influence of religion, which he believes “poisons everything.”  But he is particularly interesting in other conversations he has had, in which he freely admits that if he could eliminate religion from the world he wouldn’t, if for no other reason than to keep a boisterous debate going.  But that point of view doesn’t seem to be as popular in other atheist circles that I’ve seen, and that’s a real shame.  One of the worst comments I saw said that religion is a mental illness, and I have to say that until I saw people saying this myself, I would have thought it was a straw man argument against atheism.  So today I want to talk about what role I see religion, atheism, and other related topics filling in politics and society.

First off, let’s address the rather extremist statements made by both sides.  I mentioned the stringent atheist claim, which is of course patently false.  There are incredibly intelligent people who are religious, there are incredibly decent people who are religious, and there are obviously others who fit the opposite extremes.  Religion has been a comfort for some, an inspiration for others, and a source of devotion for many in a way that seems altogether natural to me.  I think that we can quite easily imagine what the evolutionary advantages to religions might be, but I don’t think understanding the origins of religion or the rationalization on why some people believe things in contrast to evident facts is proof of religion as a mental illness.  What’s more I feel that the use of that kind of rhetoric is intentionally inflammatory and does nothing to win people to your side or create a more harmonious society.  Some people are religious and there is nothing at all wrong with that, I just don’t happen to count myself among the religious and would hope that same tolerance would be reciprocated.

Trouble is that there are more than a few inflammatory comments coming from the religious camps that are hurled against atheists.  If we aren’t being labeled as amoral or immoral, then we are being accused of secretly believing in god.  There are many ways to come to this line of belief, my favorite being the use of Psalm 14 “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”  The thought process then either discounts anything an atheist says or else they acknowledge that you are no fool and therefore believe in god.  It is among the most pure examples of circular logic imaginable, and again it is unproductive.  Only the religious community is so insecure in its own belief as to feel the need to send people door to door to spread the good news.  And I might find a small bit of pleasure in arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses that show up at my doorstep, I’d rather spend my time doing other things.

These are examples of the extreme of either sect, or rather the acceptable extreme.  We cannot forget that there are truly extreme forces both for and against religion who have done some truly horrible things in trying to get their point across.  The easiest examples of religion gone awry are terrorist groups waging holy wars, but there are also the governments that are so theistic that they create laws to punish the nonbelievers or else the other groups that are targeted by holy books, not least of which includes the LGBT community.  But let’s be fair, even though I can’t think of a country that was a brazen in its atheism to put “Gott ohne uns” on the belt buckles, I can think of more than a few regimes that have punished religion in all its forms.  Yes, as much as some atheist philosophers want to say that there has never been a regime that killed in the name of no god, there have been several that actively sought to eliminate the “opiate of the masses.”  But these are not the extremes we face in modern society.

We are well past the levels of extremism that hear the claims that x group should be eliminated from any form of existence, with perhaps a couple exceptions, and instead focus on proving that the other side is idiotic, insane, or lying to themselves and the world.  This is certainly a healthier state of affairs, but less than healthy regardless.  It remains true, at least in polls, that atheists are among the least trusted people in America.  This point is usually hammered home with statistics that put us on par with rapists in polls about who people would trust.  It is always at this point that I have to ask, who is trusting rapists?  I mean surely in these polls they will find an atheist, who would find atheists trustworthy, but I can’t imagine even another rapist saying that they would see rapists on the whole as a trustworthy cohort.

That aside, we need to address the whole framework religion plays in our politics, because we seem to be setting ourselves up for a lot of further failure.  There are many, myself included, that tend to believe that President Obama is at least an agnostic on the religious front, and that for political expedience he chooses to keep up the facade of religiousness to be acceptable to main stream politics.  Just for an example, of our 100 US Senators only three are willing to even claim to be unaffiliated with a specific religion.  This is not an outright claim to a lack of belief, just a refusal to identify with a single religion.  There are notably no declared atheists, though you have to assume that these people enduring the political process have long since realized that there is no god in DC, save perhaps the almighty dollar.  And to be quite honest, this really doesn’t have to be a problem for the atheists of America with some important caveats.

The United States, for all its faults, gets the subject of religion spot on in the founding documents, the trouble is the people enforcing it.  The US is and was always meant to be a secular republic, where people of any faith or none can set aside those differences to choose representatives who will support a state that allows for any religious practice, so long as it is not destructive to others.  I don’t think there is a group claiming religious exemptions on murder so they can perform human sacrifices, but I feel confident in saying that those religious rights would be superseded by the victims right to not be sacrificed.  Anyway, in a system such as the one we’ve set up it should make no difference whether or not there is a single atheist representative in the Senate or otherwise, because our rights to disbelieve are as valid as any other.  Here’s the thing, in practice it clearly does matter.

Religious groups are continually attempting to reintroduce religious tests on public officials in the face of the Constitution.  Religious groups are attempting to rewrite history, science, and whatever offends their sensibilities in spite of such things as reason, facts, and evidence.  But as I’ve said so many times, the trouble here is not religion, it’s who has been allowed to claim the banner of religion in this country.  I know many good and decent religious people who understand and accept evolution, climate change, the scientific method etc.  I am related to a fair number of religious people who do not use religion as an excuse to condone or promote intolerance.  But sadly this vast population of reasonable, religious people is excluded from the common understanding of the religious community.

The only people who seem to be holding up the banner of religion on a national stage are the people who could arguably be labeled as mentally ill, which I believe is the origin of that atheistic claim at the beginning.  If the Focus on the Family, Moral Majority, The Family, etc groups are going to be allowed to represent the whole of the religious community then I think we are going to have some real problems.  The actual religious community is immense, and if these extremist groups are allowed to be the public faces for all religious people well then we’ve lost any sense of the secularism that has protected not only the irreligious, but the religious as well.  That same secularism that has defended my right to doubt also defended the Lutherans and Catholics from the Baptists and the Methodists.  And until we can at least settle on this fundamental level of secularism, I am going to have to acknowledge that my more extreme brothers and sisters in the atheist community have some reason to think this is crazy.

Genetics

With every advance of technology we are faced with the questions of should we do something long after we realize that we can.  This in a nutshell was the moral message behind “Jurassic Park,” and although it might be entertaining to talk about that movie for a while, I’d rather discuss another Frankenstein’s monster that we have created.  Human history has been defined, at least in part, by how humanity feeds itself.  We’ve come far since the agricultural revolution and farther still since the advent of mechanized agriculture, but there is another potential revolution to our food supply that remains something of a contentious issue.  That’s right, today we’re talking about genetically modified organisms, but sadly still not dinosaurs.

GMOs are touted by their supporters as the next great leap forward in agriculture.  Never before have we had the technology, not simply to increase yields, but to engineer crops to environments, against diseases, etc.  GMOs can be seen as the logical end of practices that have long been the foundation of agriculture, which is to say unnatural selection.  If you’ve ever taken a course in evolutionary biology you might remember natural selection which is any number of forces that select certain traits in organisms to be inherited because they are advantageous to the survival of the species.  An example of this would be the eye, which over the course of millions of years evolved from light-sensitive cells to the much more complex and effective structures we all enjoy today.  Well those of us without sight problems anyway.  Unnatural selection is similar in that certain traits are beneficial to a species survival and so allow them to pass on their genetic material better, but the difference is that we choose what is beneficial.  An example of that being the diversity of dogs that we’ve bred over the years to all shapes, sizes, and purposes.  GMOs too are the result of unnatural selection of a type, but whereas for millennia we simply planted the best seeds, bred the best cattle, etc now we are able to reach into the genome of various organisms and swap them in and out to select for desirable traits.  Which this brings us to the detractors.

GMOs are incredibly new, and like all new things they’re not as tested as many people would like.  We know the negative results that came with industrialized agriculture, e.g. diseased animals pumped with dangerous levels of growth hormones and antibiotics.  We don’t know what the long term consequences of diets full of GM foods are for us, and there are reasons to believe they may be negative.  The introduction of GM foods correlates with skyrocketing obesity levels, but as any statistician will tell you correlation is not causation.  What’s more we don’t know what the consequences of putting GMOs into the wider environment are, and considering the effects of invasive species that were naturally created but transplanted across the globe, this is not a trivial point either.  And this is avoiding the larger problems associated with the corporate practices of many of the companies that create these GMOs.  But simply putting up two opposing arguments doesn’t really get us anywhere, so let’s start by acknowledging that both sides are wrong.

Ok, maybe that was a little too easy.  The truth of the matter is that GMOs are an answer to serious problems we face as people, we just don’t know if it’s the right answer or a right answer.  With a global population of seven billion people and growing, there are concerns of how we feed people, and perhaps more pressingly how we do so without destroying the environment in the long term.  Since the industrial revolution the number of people needed to grow the food the whole world eats has shrunk so significantly that many people live their entire lives without ever seeing where their food comes from in the first place.  This reduction in the number of people involved with agriculture is the direct result of the massive increases in efficiency of practices over the years, and yet there are still people starving.  Paradoxically though we waste literally tons of food each year, and these two concepts are causally linked.  See, we don’t have a food production problem, necessarily, we have a serious problem of distribution and market forces.

We have the food and the means to get that food anywhere in the world, technically, but we don’t have the market incentive to do it.  The populations that need food live in disconnected and/or impoverished areas, two words that are problematic for solutions.  If it were simply a matter of getting food to disconnected areas we could do it, if those areas were willing and able to pay for the added costs.  The starving of the world, I’m sure, would be willing to pay dearly for their food, but simply aren’t able.  So the only way a market can solve this problem is by increasing efficiency so much that the price of products drops out enough to match supply and demand for those areas.  This is all a convoluted way of saying, we don’t lack food, we lack cheap enough food and GMOs offer a solution to this.  Science has proven itself capable of solving insurmountable problems of starvation before, and GMOs can be seen as the continuation of that tradition by creating bumper crops, year after year, without concern for disease or infestation.  The trouble is that even the more natural scientific solutions came with big downsides.

Cost-cutting agricultural practices favor monocultures for the same reason that a factory favors uniform, replaceable parts.  If you have one crop that works basically everywhere efficiently, then you tend not to worry too much about the diversity aspect of things.  The trouble is even with defenses against disease, there is always going to be that one unforeseen blight that attacks your crops, and if you put all your eggs in one basket you are just asking for it in the long run.  The people that are being fed now by GMOs are only one blight away from their food supplies running dry, but people don’t care because of a principle that has long been understood by every person scraping by.  You can’t eat tomorrow’s bread, and today there is bread a plenty for people who use GMO crops, so why make the ideal the enemy of the good in this instance.  And to that point I kind of have to say, “fair enough.”

We want to keep the world from starving and we have solutions now.  Let’s put them in place to solve immediate problems and once we do, then we can start addressing these other issues that could cause problems in the long run.  I find it odd, but not altogether surprising, that issues surrounding GMOs are really only an issue to people who are quite financially secure and can afford to not buy GM foods.  I understand that we don’t want to be sticking people with foods that lead to shorter lives, but if the alternative is a much shorter life due to starvation I know which camp I stand with.  Now this is all setting aside some other issues though, like the labeling of GMOs.

I like the idea of knowing what is in my food, and I think most people would appreciate that as well.  I’m not opposed to eating GM foods, but I’d rather know that the crackers I’m eating used wheat with DNA from a jellyfish if it’s all the same.  All the arguments against it seem to stem from the bad rep GM foods have, and if the producers of GMOs think it is an unfair reputation then they should have no problem labeling their food so long as they can continue to make their point.  Beyond that I find it incredibly problematic that certain business practices have been allowed to persist, such as the patenting of life or the banning of collecting seeds.  Both of these seem like monopolistic practices that stifle competition, raise prices, and diminish quality.  But as far as the production of GMOs goes, I’m just not that opposed to it… at least in the mean time.

Glory

I’ve talked before about what I see as the impossibility of a “just war,” as well as the problem of electing politicians who have no moral qualms about war in general, but I don’t think I’ve touched on the glory war still has in American hearts, and it is an important issue to address.  Let’s face it, for the bulk of human history war has been the subject of a lot of good press.  In history and literature classes, we are overwhelmed with works talking about glorious Achilles, clever Odysseus, Alexander the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Great Khan Temujin, and Charlemagne.  This glorification was not without its detractors here and there, mourning and singing about the terrible losses and destruction of war, but they are mostly forgotten in popular culture.  And this continued pretty much unabated through the 19th century certainly and made its high-water mark in 1914.  With the whole world at war, the destruction and disease, the hunger and misery, the brute numbers of dead and wounded, the idea of war as glorious kind of stopped being a thing.  Some of the most famous writers in history came out of this era, which spawned more than a few new schools of art.  But despite the popularity of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “A Farewell to Arms,” or the poetry of Wilfred Owen, the lessens that Europe had learned were not keenly felt in America.

It could be argued that this was not an altogether bad thing because the power of war’s glory in propaganda almost definitely contributed to the Allied efforts in WWII, or that it was because of the lessons Americans did learn that it took until the Japanese attacked us for the US to get involved in the actual fight.  But there really is no denying that America came out of WWII still pretty gung-ho about wars.  This certainly continued up until the Vietnam War, but I would argue that much like the effects of WWI, it persisted still.  There was enough public outcry against this specific war, but not against the concept.  To the point that you still hear war hawks and pseudo-intellectuals pondering the idea of a good war to stimulate economies, completely missing the point of the broken window fallacy at least.  And here we stand gearing up for another conflict or war or peacekeeping mission or however it will end up being labeled, and you can hear the echoes of war’s glory in the voices of many politicians.  I, for one, believe this needs to stop and the first step in finding a solution to a problem like this is to look for its origin.  So why does America still see war as glorious in a way that most other countries do not?

The easiest answer is because we haven’t experienced a prolonged war on the home front since the Civil War, and even that wasn’t enough to convince people of the horrors of war.  The same Civil War remained, for quite some time, a symbol of glorious war to many people, not least of which being the man who would be president, Theodore Roosevelt.  TR, that one human being who somehow managed to become a caricature of himself, is emblematic of what imperialists believed war was.  He thought of war as a wonderful adventure where you dodge bullets, capture hills, and yell “BULLY!”  The fact that he was a miserable novice at actually leading troops had nearly no effect on his own self image, or the country’s belief of the honorable aspects of war.  But even in the places of the country that were most affected by war in the 19th century, which is to say the South, war remained a glorious thing.

Perhaps it’s because they quickly created their own mythology of the tragic heroes that should have won the war, but for the ruthless industry of the North.  The genius of such greats as Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the courage of the fine troops of Dixie was just not enough to save the South.  Perhaps it was the deep-seated belief that the defeat was temporary, that the South would indeed “rise again.”  For that belief it became a near necessity to believe in the glorious power of war in uprooting the tyrants.  But my guess is that there simply wasn’t a universal enough effect on people for there to be a lasting memory.  Sure there are stories that come out of the South, like “Gone with the Wind,” that depict the suffering they felt, but how many citizens of the US actually lived on the battlefields and suffered more than the inconveniences of temporary shortages?  Certainly for Americans on the West Coast there was no immediate sign of war, nor for those in New England, the upper Midwest, and so many other parts of the country that basically avoided the horrors of war.  The medium of photography was revolutionary in bringing the horrors of war to people, but it lacks the pressing urgency of movement and life.

So then the next big wars that Americans experienced were the World Wars, because let’s face it Americans just don’t remember wars like the Spanish-American War, or the other conflicts that America participated in throughout the 19th century.  What was the difference between America’s experience of the wars and that of France, the UK, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan?  Well, the occupation of France, the battles over the UK, the leveling of Germany, the decimation of the then USSR, the near annihilation of China, and two nukes (among countless other bombs) dropped on Japan really put the attack on Pearl Harbor in perspective, don’t they?  America never had to endure the hardship of plowing fields littered with trenches and land-mines after WWI.  Although some Americans did see “the best minds of [their] generation destroyed by madness,” America came out of the war, comparably, unscathed and ready to fight another war and another war and another war.  And it just so happens that we’ve kept up this tradition of fighting distant wars for quite some time.

I think the best evidence of the effects of this isolation from the consequences of war is bourn out by the experiences of Americans, and how little we notice.  I, for instance, was born in 1990.  I was born after the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War.  And despite the fact that I have lived in the most peaceful time of humanity’s history, I have not lived a single year of my life without my country being at war somewhere.  Let me just hammer this home, in my 24 year life there has not been a single year of peace for my country, but if I’m entirely honest I can’t say that I’ve noticed.  Our soldiers are always sent far away to fight in countries that most Americans would struggle to find on a map.  And as much as we may want to dress things up by saying that declarations of war weren’t declared in these instances, if American soldiers are fighting and dying and killing, then that sounds an awful lot like war to me.

The problem here is that I actually do believe that the impending war against ISIS is necessary.  Less because of any imagined immediate threat that ISIS poses and more for the fact that the area they’ve taken over was destabilized by us and we owe it to the people we claim to have fought for to ensure that this “caliphate” withers and dies.  What’s more is that I believe the US has and has had an obligation as the biggest player on the block in stopping genocides against Bosniaks for example.  But I fear that the normalization of war as a tool to solve problems is both the cause of many more problems internationally as well as the perpetuation of a gruesome tradition that we would be well rid of.

Maybe it’s because I have family and friends serving in the military that I worry about their lives being put at risk for no real reason, maybe it’s because I’m just a bleeding heart liberal who better learn to keep his mouth shut, but I just don’t see what is so glorious about sending our sons and daughters on endless missions to kill the sons and daughters of others.  I would love for this kind of point to be brought up in at least one public discussion, particularly if we aren’t planning on actually helping those men and women who do offer themselves up to fight on our behalf.  Sadly, I’ve grown all to accustomed to the constant drumbeat of war keeping time in American politics to actually expect us to have these kinds of talks in a serious way.  Maybe a nice bit of American music would soothe my weary soul.  Oh look, there’s a nice rendition of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The Greatest Threat

The United States has some of the best doctors in the world, in some of the greatest medical institutions in the world, and hospitals in short enough distance from the vast majority of people that there is no reason a disease like Ebola should ever worry us at home.  The reason why Ebola is a threat to anyone on this planet has only to do with the lack of adequate medical attention for large populations of people.  The countries that are enduring outbreaks of Ebola have underdeveloped healthcare institutions, and those that exist are not always close to great swathes of the people in those countries.  But if there is one thing America should fear from seeing this, it is the threat of what happens to countries where the people do not seek medical attention.  For these affected nations it is often because of a lack of medical equipment, personnel, and a distrust of Western medicine; however, for the United States it remains the sheer cost of medical attention that puts us at risk.  But even this risk is not the greatest threat.

Right now there are growing numbers of children who are sick with a strain of enterovirus, many needing to seek the attention that can only be received in hospitals.  As of yet, not one child has died of this disease and there is no reason they should as only children with respiratory issues should have any real risk associated with it.  The problem is that this is a numbers game and eventually one of the children that gets sick is going to be from a poor family, or perhaps one that is simply distrustful of modern medicine, who does not go to the hospital if symptoms get worse.  In the case if a child does not have access to oxygen therapy, respirators, etc then there is reason to fear this disease that so far every child has walked away from no worse for wear.  We need to get to work in making a healthcare system that doesn’t scare off people who need the kind of medical attention you just can’t get at home.

The ACA was a great step forward in ensuring that everyone has access to healthcare, but even a supporter like myself can acknowledge that it is an imperfect system.  Although the ACA has brought costs down for many people who had never before been able to afford healthcare, we as Americans are still paying the most for our healthcare in the world by a large margin.  As a percentage of our GDP, we spend more than 17% on healthcare, or about $8500 per person.  If you compare that to the next most expensive system, Norway, we’re talking about $5600 per person, which equates to just over 9% of GDP.  And despite, or rather because of the cost of healthcare, our results are terrible.  Now these numbers came in before the full implementation of the ACA, so it will get better, but we still have a ton of work to do in making sure that healthcare is treated as a right to all people within our borders.

I can already hear the detractors saying that it isn’t a right.  Let’s set it aside for just a moment, and look at the effects of policies that treat it as if it were a right.  Let’s look at countries that pay less than us for their healthcare, because people seek it early and often, and get better results in terms of longevity and quality of life, again because people are able to seek healthcare early and often.  Let’s now look at infant mortality rates, where America now places just behind Cuba despite the fact that in 1950 their infant mortality rate was more than double ours.  Life expectancy here is about on par with Costa Rica and significantly behind war torn Israel.  So things seem to be going pretty well for countries where healthcare is treated as a universal right.

But now let’s get to the meat of it, healthcare is a right of the people.  The Declaration did not list the only three rights in existence, just that “Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And even if you did want to argue that those were the only three, then certainly healthcare falls under the purview of life.  Any country that has built up the means to treat its people, but still chooses not to make it fully available to those people has a serious problem in terms of morals.  But if you are uncomfortable in talking about the morality of this issue and see it simply in terms of the finances then you should still view it as a right, otherwise the efficacy of healthcare will always be stunted.

As mentioned earlier, systems of universal healthcare have better outcomes at a fraction of the cost than our private healthcare system, but the “trump card” that is always played is that there is a lack of doctors in these countries.  This is patently untrue, and you should recognize this fact if you’ve ever been to an American hospital that WE are understaffed.  At 2.42 physicians per 1000 people we are behind UK, France, Germany, Israel, Sweden, Spain, Russia, Netherlands, and Cuba to name a few.  Now it should come as a slight compensation that we do beat out Canada’s 2.07 per 1000, but the Canadians actually seem to prefer their system to ours by a pretty hefty margin.  And the complaint of Canadian lines at hospitals should seem a little rich coming from us, unless you’ve never had to experience the horrors of waiting in an American ER or worse to wait for a nurse to actually attend to your call button once you are in the hospital.  These problems are all alleviated once countries stop depriving their citizens of their right to quality healthcare.

So even if we wanted to set aside the moral question, something I think we do at our own peril, the creation of a universal healthcare system would remain the only appropriate decision to make.  It is often at this point that someone will mention the freedom not choose healthcare.  This usually emanates from people who set down their tea, see Kool-Aid, long enough to hold up a Gadsden Flag.  Ok, even if you chose not to seek healthcare because you want to live in sickness or trust “alternative medicine,” a subject I’ve also covered in a previous blog post, then there is still a problem, and it nicely brings us back to the issue that started this post. https://cojsmithblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/alternatives/

In America we like the expression, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”  In the same way, your freedom to ignore infectious disease ends at the nostrils of the man who breathes in your pathogens.  So if you want to go off into the Alaskan wilderness and live out your days in utter isolation, then fine enjoy all the freedom you want, but the moment you enter into society you have to recognize that the world doesn’t revoke around you.  There are consequences to our actions as well as our inactions, and the duty of society to heal the sick is not simply moral, but practical.  In a world as deeply interconnected as ours is it is essential that we ensure that no person avoids seeking medical attention, for their sake and all of ours.  We live in a world of contagious and evolving diseases and the last thing we need is for our brothers and sisters to become petri dishes for the next plague.  But even all of this, in my mind at least, is a secondary point.  Even if diseases weren’t at all contagious, and even if universal healthcare were more expensive, we should still pursue the goal of making healthcare so ubiquitous that future generations would laugh at the very prospect of not seeking medical attention.

I am a human being, I am a human being with a family and friends, and what’s more I am a human being who has experienced profound sickness.  I know what it is like to gasp for any breath during the tiniest respite from vomiting endlessly.  I know the searing and tearing pain that seems to pop out of nowhere and simply doesn’t go away.  I know the horror of after the terrible bowel movement, seeing a toilet bowl covered in bright red blood.  I know the humiliation of having to run out of a room in the middle of a conversation to find a toilet.  And I know that there are others out there who go through all of that with the added burden of not being able to afford the medical attention to treat it.  Yet all the worst parts of disease that I have endured is nothing to the simple pain of seeing a loved one suffering.  The all encompassing feeling of fear and powerlessness in wanting so bad for a family member to no long be in pain, but only being able to give a hand for them to squeeze.  The very thought that there are others in this country, in this most wealthy and powerful country, who endure all of that without the comfort of knowing a doctor or nurse is around the corner to do the work you can’t is the most sickening part of all.  The greatest threat that faces our country is not a disease or a terrorist group or economic catastrophe.  The greatest threat we, as a country and people, face is seeing our family, our friends, our neighbors, our fellow human beings as mere statistics to be argued over and not the people who deserve and need defending.

Cincinnatus is Dead

We love to build myths, and I’m not talking specifically about religion here.  Humanity has always had a fondness for myths as a means of teaching lessons, morals, even entire histories.  The myths we create as a society don’t necessarily have to be a negative, but I find it odd that so many of us hold onto myths in a way that undermines their purpose as problem solving tools.  We defend ourselves from the most brutal parts of reality with these stories in a way that keeps us from being able to address problems, and it is particularly apparent in American politics.  So although I would say that the ability to dream and hope is a constructive trait for our nation, it also comes with a dramatic downside when taken to certain extremes and we should probably talk about that.

First let’s start by addressing a myth that is as foundational to our sense of democracy as a similar one was to another famous republic.  Among the many reasons why George Washington is remembered as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” is due to a parallel with the story of Cincinnatus.  Cincinnatus was a Roman patrician who in a time of dire conflict was made dictator.  When the threat had subsided he decided to relinquish the powers of dictatorship and return to his farm, even though by all right he could have kept on ruling until his death.  This became a model of Roman virtue, the ideal to which all Roman politicians should aspire, taking only as much power as is needed and always wishing to be rid of the burden of ruling.  People see President Washington in the same lens first because he chose to be president and not king and second because after two terms he too decided to pack up and return to Mount Vernon.

There are other reasons to like or dislike President Washington, but he nonetheless remains an important myth in American society.  Although it should be noted that we have a much more healthy fascination with him now when compared to the near cult that started to form around him.  If you don’t believe me just look at the Zeus-like statue of him made by Horatio Greenough.  And I see no reason why people shouldn’t be free to admire his example and to look for traits of his in elected officials and people seeking elected office, but the fact that not everyone is a Cincinnatus has caused a bit of a problem in American politics.  A lot of politicians are glorified right up until the point where they are proven to be human and then people lose interest, or else they simply distrust all politicians and wait for a democratic messiah to emerge.  This is not how you operate a representative democracy.

We have literally chiseled the faces of presidents onto the sides of mountains, but those gleaming images are myths.  As much as there is a lot to admire in Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln there are also blotches on their records and personality.  It’s good to remember that our elected officials aren’t perfect so we can stop making the ideal the enemy of the good.  President Clinton is often brought up by people on the Left as an example of a great political leader shoe was less than stellar in personal affairs.  I would say this too glosses over a lot of the social and economic ills that were either continued or started in his administration, the housing bubble comes to mind.  But his image, for better or worse, is pretty well established in the hearts and minds of his fans and detractors and pesky things like facts aren’t really going to fix that.

And I get it, not everyone spends their every waking moment thinking about history and politics.  There certainly are more pressing matters like keeping a roof over your head that can make a nuanced subject like politics something of a nonstarter, but we need to stop creating these myths around former leaders, because then we start measuring the current, real practices of politicians to the myths and surprise, surprise they don’t live up to them.  The result is the general malaise around politics in general, which is perhaps best reflected in our abysmal voter turnout.  But worse still is that we keep expecting Cincinnatus to rise up through the ranks in spite of all obstacles, because the best cream will always rise to the top.  The result of this never ending hope is that we allow serious problems to just keep going unresolved so that the political messiah can set it straight whenever he or she shows up.

This is what particularly bugs me whenever I hear people complaining about the influence of moneyed special interest groups, individuals and corporations on politics in America.  There is a reason why our representatives are always on the campaign trail, always raising money, always writing books and going on tours to sell them.  The reason is that this is the game that is set up if you want to stay in power, and you need to stay in power to get anything done.  Politics is understandably based on the ability to form relationships, build trust make deals, etc all of which take time.  Two years may sound like quite a bit of time, but let’s look at what the calendar really looks like for a congressman or woman.

The first primaries on the electoral calendar start in March, which means if you have an opponent from within your party perhaps your entire second year will be spent on the campaign trail.  Even if you are in one of the states with a very late primary, your opponents aren’t going to just wait around forever for you to hit the trail.  What’s more if you won your election you’ve likely spent all the money you collected during the course of the last campaign, which means that over the course of your first year in office you are trying to recoup any losses you may have incurred and build up a stockpile for the next election.  Is it any surprise why people try so hard to draw safe districts?  If every election was a competition only the richest would win elections, and even in the system we set up that is already the case.  More than half of the House and Senate is filled with millionaires.

So when I hear people complaining about how their representatives spend all their time fundraising or selling out to lobbies all I can think as that your heart is in the right place but your assessment is wrong.  The fact that our representatives are so desperate to fundraise is the symptom of the disease, the disease sadly stems from another American myth.  We want so badly for the answer to every problem to be a private sector solution, because then it’s something we as individuals can work to solve.  But I’m here to tell you that sometimes the private sector makes problems, and the fact that we privately fund elections is the problem here and there’s no way around it.  I’ve mentioned many ways I think we can fix our government, including longer terms and mandatory voting, but these all kind of take a back seat to getting private money out of elections.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being naive.  The rich and powerful are always going to have their voices heard above the rest, and greedy people are always going to look for ways to get their palms greased.  But recognizing that we can’t solve every problem is not a concession in saying we can’t solve any problem, and this is a big one that can be helped at least.  Mandatory public funding for elections has all the same problems as private funding, most notably the disenfranchisement of those who don’t fit within existing parties, but it solves the biggest problems of keeping our elected officials working as long as possible and away from outside money as much as possible.

This only becomes more important in a world post Citizens United, where private groups can give unlimited money to SuperPACs without even disclosing who gives how much. But we need to start admitting that wishing for the best leader ever, just isn’t working out for us.  We need to recognize that most of the time we’ll be led by mere humans and build systems that recognize these facts.  I’m sorry kids, but Cincinnatus is long gone and even if he came back today he wouldn’t be able to even get close to the dictatorship without first selling his ideals off to the highest bidder.

Legislating Morality

There are countries and states and groups that make it their goal to ensure that everyone acts in as moral a way as is possible, but we are not that country, we are not that state, we are not that group.  It’s not because we are an evil people, it’s because those groups tend to be more than a little vicious in making perfection on this earth.  We know the names of these groups and we are gearing up to go to war with at least one of them, but wouldn’t you know it there are people here at home who want to follow the same policies of legislating morality.  Now I’m not going to go as far as some in saying that x group is the American Taliban or something along those lines, but we do need to recognize some truly frightening similarities between groups that claim to be as ideologically opposed as you can get, but in reality seem to be doppelgängers.

This is not a particularly new phenomenon.  I mean look at the struggle between Nazi Germany and Communist USSR, an ultra-right wing state against an ultra-left wing state and yet they turn out to have similar policies: elimination of dissident voices, extreme militarization, disregard for the individual in favor of the state, etc.  So it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that ultra-conservative Christian groups have more than passing similarities with ultra-conservative Islamist groups, though of course to different extremes.  There are those who argue that the only reason why conservative Christian groups are less violent than Islamist groups is because they’ve already had to give so much.  History is rife with examples of the Christian equivalents of the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and today we still have plenty of conservative Christian groups that are quite violent around the world, particularly in Western Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe.  And even though I could expound on the conservative Christian groups that remain quite violent in the US, that’s not what I want to focus on.

Let’s talk about the simple idea of legislating morality, because that is what much of the conversation between mainstream conservatism and the rest of the country really revolves around.  I should first make clear that I don’t believe that it is possible to completely eliminate the practice of legislating morality, nor should we even desire that goal.  After all isn’t it a moral decision we’ve made to create societies that ban murder?  And you might very well say that the basis of that kind of morality is an evolutionary trait, but then it’s just a shifting goalpost of which moral legislations fall in that same category of basic evolutionary morality.  But now I’ve strayed far from the point.

Marriage equality, now there’s a nice place where we can start talking about “moral legislation.”  See there are essentially two sets of morals that are conflicting here, one that says it is immoral that homosexuals should be wed and one that says it is immoral to treat consenting couples differently based on their gender and sexuality.  And although the conservative groups will claim that their position is based on the bible, I would retort two things.  First of all no it’s not.  There is nothing in the bible that says that a man may not marry a man, or a woman lie with a woman.  There are a few bits about a man not lying with a man as he lies with a woman, but I can tell you as a gay man I certainly don’t lie with men the way I do with women because I don’t lie with women.  In that sense you could say god really has a bone to pick with bisexuals, “pick a side dammit.”  And this brings me to the second point, who cares if the bible did say that.  So don’t worry bisexuals, I’ve got your back.

We live in a secular society, not because there is a lack of religion, but because there is way too much already.  Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of religious people, and religions can do incredible good in the world.  But if you spend more than a few minutes in American society and think there isn’t enough Christianity floating around, then I’m sorry but you might need to see an optometrist.  And it is exactly because there is such a majority of Christianity in our society that we need to ensure that our laws are not facsimiles of Christian doctrine.  I have talked about this before, but it bears repeating that the wall of separation between church and state that Thomas Jefferson wrote about comes out of a desire to protect Christians from Christians.

I was quite explicit in my original framing of the two moralities to start from a point where I didn’t say that one group was making a religious moral claim and the other wasn’t because that simply wouldn’t be accurate.  The Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church(more specifically ELCA), the Metropolitan Community Church, the Presbyterian Church, just to name a few have all come to take their place alongside the LGBT community and officiate marriages to gay couples.  So to impose legislation that bans marriage equality on a Christian grounds would negate the beliefs of literally millions of practicing Christians.  But again, so what?  Even if it were the case that all the churches were 100% opposed to gay marriage, then the church still shouldn’t get to enforce its morality on the subject, as not all Americans are Christian.  More than a quarter of Americans definitively claim not to be Christian, and this doesn’t count the vast number of people who claim to be nominally Christian even though they don’t actually practice their religion.  So why should morality based on religion be forced down the throats of non-believers?

If you think this is a moot point, or one that only centers around an institution like marriage that has more than a few ties to religion, then I’m sorry but you’re wrong.  One of the oddity headlines that’s been making some waves is a story about a kid in Pennsylvania who is facing jail time for “desecration of a venerated object.”  Now, I’m a firm believer in property rights, so if this kid was damaging property he should pay for the damages, but that’s not what happened.  He took some stupid pictures where he made it look like the statue of Jesus was in a compromising position.  Was it stupid? Yeah, in the way that the humor of teenage boys is.  Was it illegal? As it turns out there is a law in Pennsylvania that applies to circumstances like this.  Should it be illegal? Hell no.

See, one of the major problems people in the West have with Islam is the way its most extreme believers attack those who make images of their venerated, e.g. the prophet Muhammed and Allah.  The fatwas against Danish cartoonists are now legendary.  But the price you pay for living in a society that prizes freedom of expression is having to put up with images and words that you might find distasteful.  If someone is forcing you to look at an offensive image, that’s one thing, but you don’t have the right to tell people what they can think, what they can find humorous, and what they do so long as they aren’t being destructive.

It is at this point that a dissenter might claim that I am merely legislating my own morality, but that my morality is simply less religious than that of others.  And although it would certainly be true that my morality is certainly less religious than that of others, I don’t think it is the case that this counts as legislating an atheistic morality.  I am for legislating the kind of morality that states that you are not allowed to do things that actively hurt others, and perhaps in some indirect ways as well because I am in favor of environmental protections to keep people from poisoning water supplies for example.  But there has to be a limit to the morality we expect to be put into law, otherwise we are painting ourselves into a very dangerous corner.

People are imperfect, people make mistakes, and creating legislation to punish us every time we fail to live up to perfection would simply put us all in jail.  Make laws to punish people who drink, drive, and kill innocent bystanders but don’t make laws to punish people for either drinking or driving.  If you want to live in a society that punishes those activities, feel free to live life as a woman in Saudi Arabia.  As for me, I am more than content to live in a country that allows me to try and live up to my own standard of morality, while of course putting up some basic laws to punish those who harm others.

A Little Truth

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell.  It’s really satisfying when you find a quote that just perfectly encapsulates how you want to frame a conversation.  The only trouble with using a quote like this is if I take a firm stance by the end of this I might be inadvertently calling myself stupid.  Well regardless, I’m going to press on with what I have to say and it concerns the trouble with a little truth.  As human beings we don’t know everything, in fact of the near infinite quantities of things, we probably know very little.  It is important to remember that when talking with people, it’s all the more important when talking about politics.

Ebola is a terrifying virus.  Since its discovery in 1976 it has jumped to the forefront of out imaginations of just how terrible a disease can be.  Like the Black Death it creates terrible images in our heads and becomes a shorthand for all illness in popular culture.  It starts off harmless enough like a cold or the flu but then the symptoms become ever more horrifying until finally the poor soul that contracts the disease feels the sweet relief of death.  There is more than a little truth in the depictions of how horrid a disease this is, and the threats to societies in West Africa are real, but we need to get a little context here before we completely flip out.

Since its discovery in 1976 the disease has mutated so little that doctors treat it as one unchanged strain, in stark contrast to influenza which is constantly changing and has multiple iterations.  The variety associated with the flu is why you need to get a shot every year, and why some years the best predictive power of scientists isn’t enough to predict the strain that does cause the most trouble.  And although Ebola has a high mortality rate, anywhere between 50-90%, this is not even half the story.  With proper medical care the disease is surprisingly treatable, you just need to have constant monitoring of the patient until their own immune system builds up its defenses, which is why so far every patient brought to America with disease is still alive.  Furthermore it is very hard to spread.  You are only contagious when you are showing systems and even then you need to be swapping bodily fluids to transmit the disease.  All of these problems are easily treated in a country with adequate sanitation and quarantine protocols.  And now let’s get to the real story, because there is a reason I brought up the flu a few times so far.

So far the number of people that have died of Ebola in the history of the disease is about 3000 people.  The flu kills around 36,000 people each year just in the United States, but you don’t see people flipping out when they catch the flu.  Diseases are serious and if you don’t know if you’re alright then you should definitely check with a doctor, but the world doesn’t stop turning just because there’s a new outbreak of an obscure disease.  The fact that more than 12 time the number of people die annually in a first world country to a disease like flu than have ever died of Ebola should be testament enough to what our priorities should be, yet the headlines are filled with horror stories and worse that make people act crazy.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people worrying about terrorists or infected people or infected terrorists that are crossing our border “RIGHT NOW!”  Media organizations are at their most profitable when something is going devastatingly wrong.  9/11 was great for TV news ratings because everyone wanted to know what was going to collapse next, why we needed to be afraid, who we needed to fear.  Never mind the fact that the closest Al Qaeda has gotten to repeating their despicable performance was to strap non-functioning explosives to the underwear of one guy, terrorism has just never been that great a threat to the United States.  And it seems almost too obvious to say this but in the grand scheme of things we have more to fear from tomatoes, which may carry foodborne illness, than ISIS.  This is not to say that ISIS is an ignorable problem, just that we need to remember that there is more to the story of what is actually going on in the world than their threats to attack the White House.

ISIS has been successful because there hasn’t been anyone to stop them, the Iraqi armed forces literally fled rather than fight them.  But when they are confronted, by say the Peshmerga forces of the Kurds, then it becomes quite clear that this is not Nazi Germany poised to conquer all of Europe.  There are many reasons to fight ISIS, and security is among those concerns, but the fear that they are going to come invading the US is as laughable as Ronald Reagan appearing on the GOP ticket in 2016.  But again the media has failed in its task to inform viewers, instead choosing to scare them and the results are in and of themselves a little scary.

The latest numbers I saw showed that about 16-17% of all Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim, whether openly or secretly.  It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that these are almost all Republicans who believe it, but I digress.  I bring this up only because of the massive stink people made over President Obama’s association with Trinity United Church.  But the small truth that Barack Obama spent part of his youth in Indonesia, a Muslim country, and has expressed some nostalgia for the call to prayer in the morning is enough to trump the actual truth of his religion.  This would seem to be a small issue, and in a secular republic like our own an utterly unimportant one, but I think we all know why this matters.

There is a large contingent of the political Right that sees any cooperation with the president as tantamount to aiding Islamist extremists or else with some other conspiratorial group they assume President Obama works for.  They are unwilling to work with him on anything, even things they agree with, on the basis that he is “destroying our country.”  And they are able to justify this belief based on things that, in a vacuum, are not untrue.  It is true that Obama said “you didn’t build that,” but the thing he was claiming that you didn’t build were the roads you used to move the products of your business and not the business itself.  It is true that Obama said “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,” but that was only because he was quoting John McCain.  You may remember John McCain as the guy that Obama beat in 2008, in part because they had to keep talking about the economy.  And it is the fact that these little truths exist that make it nearly impossible to prove to people that they are wrong.

We can’t adequately address issues until we know what the truth surrounding them is, and this is problematic because the truth is a constantly changing thing.  But the changes over time get more and more minute, so the more we can agree on the bigger points the better.  Ebola is a dangerous and deadly disease, but it is the famine that is now striking these countries that is the real problem.  ISIS is a serious threat to global security, but only if they are left unopposed indefinitely.  President Obama is at least nominally a Christian, which should matter to no one other than himself.  But more importantly, he is doing his best to lead a fractured country that only pulls itself further apart because of really petty and ignorant stuff.  I am perfectly willing to be shown evidence that anything and everything I’ve said is wrong and I will adjust my point of view accordingly, but I see a great big population that won’t make the same concession.  A large number of people so certain that they couldn’t be wrong that it makes more sense to scuttle the country rather than to help in building it up.  And well, that’s just stupid.

Running

You may remember a little while back that I mentioned what I feel is a general incompetence on the part of Democrats in combatting the recent surge of conservatism, particularly in the form of the Tea Party.  If not, feel free to go back to my post “Let’s Make a Deal.” https://cojsmithblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/lets-make-a-deal/  And today I want to go a little in depth on what an impassioned position about the progressive world view, in the hopes that even one elected Democrat might read it and say, “hey yeah, I would enjoy the benefits of a backbone.”  More realistically, this will just be a nice opportunity to get a small rant out there, because who doesn’t enjoy a good rant?

Anyone calling to “repeal and replace” the ACA is calling for the death and misery of American citizens.  The ACA is one of the most significant steps forward the United States has taken in decades in the protection of its citizens and will go down in history alongside the implementation of the polio vaccine as a great moment of our moral, medical history.  Even though there are definitely things that need to be changed still with our healthcare system, the fact is that this was a crucial first step in ensuring that no American need worry about preventable illness while in their home, the richest and most powerful country in the world.  But just so you don’t think I’m blowing smoke for no reason, let’s remind ourselves of what the ACA does and does not do.

The ACA made the phrase “pre-existing condition” a terrifying relic of the past, and the people who want to get rid of the ACA are either too stupid to remember the problems of the private healthcare system before these regulations were put in place or are too callous to care about people who get sick, which is to say actual people.  And it is all well and good for the opponents of the ACA to say that they are in favor of the parts of the act that are popular, but they don’t realize that those are nearly all the parts of the entirety.  80% of Republicans, not even Americans, are in favor of the insurance pools that allow small businesses and those without insurance to have access to exchanges that give the same advantages large companies and groups get when pricing benefits.  A majority of Republicans favor providing subsidies in a means tested sliding scale to individuals and families that cannot afford insurance.  Most Republicans are in favor of mandating that large businesses provide insurance to their employees.  Most Republicans are in favor of allowing children to stay on their parents’ healthcare plan until 26 if they choose.  Just under 80% of Republicans are in favor of bans on those “pre-existing conditions.”  And all these numbers just get bigger when you talk with independents and Democrats, so forget the partisan bull, this is what America wants.

So what are the problems with the ACA?  It’s too expensive?  Actually no, on every level it is so much cheaper than what we had before.  Over the course of the next decade, the ACA is slated to save hundreds of billions of dollars for American tax payers.  Healthcare plans are now less expensive and more accessible than they have ever been.  How can this be?  Because for all the new stuff insurers are expected to put up with, they are assured a huge new pool of clients.  And I am perfectly happy to discuss improving, renovating, tweaking this new system, but if you are going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you’d better be prepared to wash a ton of blood off your hands.  Massachusetts is set to close in on full coverage by the end of this year, and there is not a single public official calling for the end of this wildly popular system.  I don’t think that the people of Massachusetts are more moral than the rest of the United States, but I think Massachusetts was able to avoid the kind of Right Wing fanaticism that made it impossible for us to get a perfect bill passed, which means we got this very good act instead.

Now for something completely different.  Taxes suck, I get it, but you know what sucks more?  Not paying taxes.  And I’m not just saying that because you don’t want to end up like Al Capone, I mean that we get so much more out of paying taxes than we could ever hope for by holding onto every dollar we earn.  Taxes pay for our roads, taxes pay for our schools, taxes pay to keep those who worked their entire lives from dying sick and cold in their final years, taxes keep us safe, taxes are what build America.  I have driven in states with lower taxes and higher taxes, and I tell you one thing you pay a lot more driving in states with lower taxes.  You pay more in gas trying to avoid the worst roads or else you pay more at the body shop.  One way or the other you are going to be paying for those roads, and it’s much better to pay up front.  Well kept roads mean easier transportation of not only your tukhus, but freight.  Better roads mean companies spend less on transportation costs, which equates to lower prices and higher employment.  But the roads ain’t free.

No one is arguing that everyone should be paying 100% of what they earn in taxes or even half, and to bring up that straw man is just a tactic to avoid the actual issue.  We are going to have conversations about what that sweet spot is, but the people calling for an end to taxes have spent too long outside of the asylum.  The tax code needs simplifying, but I for one like living in a world where I know that the kids who will be inheriting it get a quality education.  It just so happens that the states that have the best education tend to be the ones that will pay for it.  And just like those roads before, we all pay for it one way or another.  Derek Bok put it best on this one, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Next up, let’s jump to some social issues.  Families truly are the cornerstone of any great society, but simply saying you are pro-family does not make it so.  Taking away the subsidies that keep poor families above water is not pro-family.  Selling away the infrastructure that give poor families opportunities when raising their kids is not pro-family.  Demonizing devoted parents because they have a matching set of genitals is not pro-family.  And again trying to degrade the healthcare options of all Americans is decidedly not pro-family.  A government cannot replace parents, but it can give parents the tools that will help them do that most necessary of jobs, raising children.  It is not our job to sneer at the underprivileged of this world by questioning whether they really need WIC, it is our job to offer assistance like that to families that need them so they can get a leg up and help the next generation as much as their own.

Being pro-family means offering, and not forcing or ignoring.  There are those who are more successful than others in this world, and that in and of itself is a great thing.  It means that you can be compensated for your hard work, your perseverance, your grit and determination.  But when you climb to the top of society’s ladder you don’t kick it away so that no one else can climb up.  You help others up that ladder, so that you can make the peak higher still for yourself as much as for everyone else.  What we need now is not further isolation, but further cooperation.  What we need is to foster families and communities of families.  We need to remember our country’s true motto E Pluribus Unum, because we are so much more than a loose affiliation of 50 states or 313 some million people, we are the United States of America.

Families and communities are defined by what brings us together, by what unites us.  What we need now are common people working together and calling for justice and fairness.  What we need now is progress and there is only one party right now that has proven time and again that it is committed to that.  Only one party that stood for the right of all people to be covered in the inevitability that they too get sick.  Only one party has stood up for the investments that make our country great, even when it is so easy to just say tax breaks for all.  Only one party has truly been committed to helping families, to helping grow families, and to helping families step forward.  That party is the Democratic Party of the United States of America.  That is the party I vote for, and it is the party I hope every voter in this country votes for on election day.