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New Year’s Eve in Front of the TV
As one ages New Year’s Eve rituals get more and more constricted. Â At first you get tired of spending your New Year’s Eve in public places among strangers so you restrict yourself to private parties with friends. Eventually you wind up spending it at home among family and eventually just in front of the television. You end up realizing that time zones are artificial inventions so you don’t have to stay up until midnight. Whenever you go to bed it has become a new year somewhere and upon awaking you will find it has become one for you. This is not an inevitable straight line progression; everyone goes through it in their own unique way. I bet however that everyone has gone through each stage at some point in his or her life. At one point in my teens I even went to Times Square to watch the ball drop. Â This was neither as memorable nor as enjoyable as it was cracked up to be. For the last few years I have restricted myself to television watching and early bed times. Â This brings me to the real subject of this essay: televised New Year’s Eve shows. When I was a kid the only thing on New Year’s Eve was Guy Lombardo. A mummified man who came out once a year to play music that was decades out of date with an orchestra that was stunningly un-hip. He was eventually replaced by the perpetually young looking Dick Clark whose “Rockin’ New Years Eve” promised to be a music show for the rest of us. It proved to be about ten years out of date but an accurate barometer of how youth culture was mis-perceived by mainstream culture. It has since become as much of an institution as Guy Lombardo and has fossilized as well. The transfer of the institution to Ryan Seacrest and the pale imitators like Carson Daly are just signs of this fossilzation. The institution has become a recap of what became popular in pop music culture that year.
For the last few years I have satisfied my longing for a counter cultural New Year’s Eve television experience by watching CNN. That’s right I said CNN. It is hosted by Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper in a morality play whose depths go on and on. In this play Griffin portrays the forces of chaos being barely contained by the uptight Cooper. Now think about that for a moment. The establishment is being represented by a gay Vanderbilt heir while the counter culture is being represented by a straight white woman who is an icon in the gay community. She has built a career out of taking down popular cultural figures in the Joan Rivers’ “Can we talk?” confessional mode. He has built a career not by denying his sexuality but by ignoring that it makes a difference. Talk about an inversion of roles. Â It is all an act of course. Â She is not really an agent of chaos but a skilled performer who knows exactly how far to push and what lines not to cross. He is not as establishment as he could be and she taunts, cajoles and brings out the sides of him that he works so hard to suppress. The moments of his laughter, embarrassment, and discomfort offer glimpses into the man behind the straitlaced persona.
I could go on about this morality play, but that is not all the program offers. CNN doesn’t have much money to put into the show and it does not try to compete by providing performances like the others.  It is however  broadcasting from the same spot so it can show you far off shots of the Ryan Seacrest and other network shows. Some of the guest on those other shows occasionally come over for interviews before or after their performances. Griffin uses those interviews and long shots to offer meta-criticism of the other shows which highlights both their artificiality and how much more money the networks have to spend. What CNN has used its money for is to have its correspondents report from locations they feel have interesting (read unusual) New Year’s Eve celebrations. These celebrations have ranged from odd local ones to a Miami one in which a drag queen is lowered at midnight in a giant high heeled slipper to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” which has become a stereotyped anthem of the gay community.
Let’s face it mainstream New Year’s Eve television programming will never really be counter cultural. We won’t see indie bands, hard core hip hop or political stuff. Even an ironic hipster viewing of the Ryan Seacrest ilk is not enough. At least on the CNN broadcast we can see how the mainstream can change if only to misrepresent the margins.
When looked at objectively sports fandom is a silly thing. One allows one’s emotions to be ruled not by your own accomplishments or actions, but by those of millionaires running around in funny clothes playing children’s games. They are doing nothing significant like curing cancer, ending hunger, or fighting injustice. Â They are playing a game with arbitrary rules in a confined space for a prescribed time. Yet those accomplishments of others can become the way stations to measure your journey through life. Â I suspect it has been this way for others. So it has been with me and the New York Mets.
For me sports fandom was an addiction perpetrated on an unsuspecting 12 year old boy in 1962. It was in that year that a new National League team called the Mets started playing baseball.  As a first time sports fan it seemed appropriate that my interest in baseball and the new team began at the same time. I watched that team win only 40 games and set a mark for losing and breaking my heart that stands until today. The ace of the pitching staff, Al Jackson, lost 20 games. Their manager Casey Stengel is purported to have said “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Through the next few years I suffered defeat after defeat with my heroes, so much so that defeats in my real life became easier to bear. Then came that magical year and a half that began in January 1969.  I had expanded my fandom to other New York ball clubs including the Jets in football and the Knicks in basketball. The greatest year and a half in New York sports history began with the Jets winning the Super Bowl behind Joe Namath’s guarantee, continued with the Miracle Mets winning the World Series in October, 1969 and ended with the New York Knicks winning the NBA championship for the 1969-70 season. Other New York sports teams have won championships in other years but for me as a fan of those teams this was the pinnacle of success: championships in three different sports. More to the point it made me optimistic about life. As B.F. Skinner was to argue later intermittent reinforcement was a powerful thing.  It meant that even in the darkest of times one would hold onto hope. The rise of the Mets from perennial doormats to world champions proved to me that anything was possible.
The second trip of the Mets to the World Series came in 1973. Â I had just moved to go to grad school with my new bride. Â When we left New York in August the Mets were mired in a morass in the National League east division. Â With so much change in my life I must admit that from August on I gave them scant attention. Â When I finally looked at the sports pages in October lo and behold the Mets were going to the World Series. Â I did not know how this had happened and it was totally unexpected. Moreover they were playing the Oakland A’s who were a local team in my new northern California environs. It was therefore splashed all over the local news and newspapers. I was now in enemy territory and my rooting for the Mets had to be somewhat circumspect. Â I had to endure the ravings of many Oakland fans. Â I had not been around for Tug McGaw’s “Ya gotta believe,” exhortation but the Mets pitching staff of Seaver, Koosman, and Matlack revived my hope. As it turned out that hope was in vain and the long trek into the desert of despair began.
The third Mets’ appearance in the World Series was in 1986. I was by then teaching in a small New England liberal arts school deep in Boston Red Sox country and surrounded by Red Sox fans. I had spent the early eighties there.  This was before the internet made it easy to listen to even far away ball games.  I would climb up to the highest point inside my house and if atmospheric conditions were just right I could  barely hear the dulcet tones of Bob Murphy as my radio picked up the Mets broadcast network from somewhere. I could not always hear it but each time I could there was the comforting feel of home as I listened to the voice and the team of my youth. The success of the 1986 team did not come to me as much of a surprise as the 1973 team. However I was once again behind enemy lines. In public places on campus the newfangled large screen televisions played the games watched by hordes of adoring and equally long suffering Red Sox fans. Given that most of my students were such fans I had to appear impartial and again be circumspect with my own allegiance. At home at least I could be myself and watch the games on my own small television. It was there that I could jump for joy as Mookie’s grounder rolled through Buckner’s legs and the tide was finally turned. I spent the next two days commiserating with my students on the outside yet whooping with joy on the inside.
The Mets’ fourth appearance in the World Series found me far away in South Africa.  I had gone there  in July to teach in my college’s study abroad program. With the inversions of seasons their semester was from July through November so I missed the last half of the American baseball season. It was also so far away that baseball was a foreign concept to them.  You could see and hear more than enough about rugby, cricket and soccer.  If you wanted to talk sports it had to be about one of those. South African whites knew more about American golf than American baseball and hardly anyone black or white had played or even seen the game. Again the Mets’ appearance in the championship came as a complete surprise to me. That it was against the hated Yankees and a true “subway series” only magnified how far away from home I was. The vast time difference even made it hard to follow the scores as most game were played  in what were the pre-dawn mornings in South Africa. As it turned out this was fortunate as the Yankees won the series in five games.
It is now fifteen years later and I am retired. I have been retired for enough years to have followed the Mets from the euphoria and the despair of the 2006 season (Adam Wainwright’s final curve ball to Beltran plays over and over in my head) to the Sandy Alderson’s rebuilding efforts of the last five years. The internet has made it easier to follow the team and watch games. Â Email has made it easier to commiserate and keep in touch with fellow Mets fans. The town where I live has a minor league team that is in the same league as the Mets triple A team, so I have even been able to see some of their youngsters on the way up. Even so I didn’t think this team as constituted in April would make it to the World Series. Â As late as July I still didn’t think so. The tinkering at the trade deadline, the return from injury of key players, and the influx of rookies like Syndergaard and Conforto have transformed this team. Since August they have played with a self-confidence, a belief in each other, and a penchant for making the right play at the right time, that has me beaming. Their post season victories over the league’s top pitchers (Kershaw, Greinke, Lester and Arrieta) and the performance of both their starting pitchers and their relief corps has me optimistic again. Still when you are a Mets fan disappointment and despair is never far away. They may win or they may lose. However I am not in enemy territory and surrounded by fans whose every scream of joy or look of despair inspires just the opposite in me. I no longer have to appear impartial or circumspect in my fandom. I am therefore going to sit back and enjoy this one. Â I’ve earned it.
One of my hobbies is trying to reverse engineer what the Republicans think reality is like from their statements. What kind of world does Trump live in that he thinks he can say those things about Latino voters and still be elected? How can Jeb! Bush thinks he can say black voters want free stuff and persuade enough people to vote for him? Part of the answer is a belief in white supremacy. These mainstream white supremacists believe that members of other races all act alike (or most do so) and act in a way that demonstrates they are inferior to whites. Sometimes that superiority is restricted to whites of a certain class and sometimes it isn’t. Let’s examine those beliefs one at a time.  As President Obama said at the 2014 Washington correspondents dinner “As a general rule, things don’t like end well if the sentence starts, “Let me tell you something I know about the negro.† You don’t really need to hear the rest of it.”  The generalization that all or even most of an ethnic group behaves, thinks, feels or reacts a certain way,  is a sure sign that one’s experience, class position, or ideology has prevented him from truly knowing enough such people. When someone says about anyone or anything that they are all alike, it usually means that they have not absorbed enough experiences of the thing to be able to differentiate them. Stereotypes are the common first way of understanding phenomena of which you have little experience. Maturity is expanding your knowledge of such phenomena so that you change your initial stereotype. Class or rigid ideologies can prevent some from maturing past their stereotypes of the world. It is creating a false reality instead of the actual reality in the way say a historical novel or movie creates a false reality of the past while still claiming authenticity.
The stereotyping itself would be bad reasoning enough, but the implicit (or sometimes explicit) inferiority attributed to others makes it worse. Trump’s statements imply that there are are more rapists and murderers among Latinos than among whites. Â Jeb! implies that black people vote only to gain “free stuff” unlike whites who vote because of their “hopes and aspirations.” Any such assumptions are of course based on belief in the inherent criminality of other races or the “child-like” quality of other races which is satisfied with immediate gratification rather than long range planning. Hmm, where have we heard that before? Oh right from slaveholders, condescending bosses, and members of the upper class who propagated such white supremacy beliefs so strongly that lower class whites came to believe them even when it is to their detriment. Trump, Jeb! and others have found a way of encasing their racist beliefs in a rhetoric that in their minds and in their realities denies their racism.
Even more frightening is their belief that spouting such racially charged rhetoric will lead to their election to the White House.  They are convinced that such blunt speech will demonstrate that they have overcome the straitjacket of political correctness to provide straight talk that delivers uncomfortable truths. They believe that their message will hit home among those who believe as they do and that there are enough such voters to propel them into the presidency. Such people may believe they are not racist but realistic because the views expressed fit into their constructed reality. We will eventually see whether these candidates’ assessment of the American electorate is correct. I hope they are wrong.
I have long ago accepted that the advances in technology, particularly computer technology, have outstripped my ability to understand them. Still, I see myself as a reasonably intelligent person who tries his best to keep up.  With this in mind recently I have tried to upgrade to Windows 10. I am not usually in a hurry to upgrade my operating systems. I like to wait until there is enough feedback from real users to justify it. I had a bad experience with Windows Vista in the past and so I avoided Windows 8 like the plague. Both the reviews and the hype promised Windows 10 was a system with promisingly new capabilities.  The cherry on top was that the upgrade would be free since I was a loyal Windows 7 user.  In due course my free upgrade was made available to me and I have spent the last two weeks trying to install it.
While hardly an expert there are many people less technological  than I am and those who wonder at even my low level of technological prowess. As a Renaissance scholar once said “in the land of the blind the one eye man is king.” My experience with computers has taught me that if something works the first time it is an anomaly that should be accepted and not questioned.  It is not a verification of your expertise, but a fortunate coincidence that should be quietly understood as a gift from the computer gods who were apparently too busy to mess with you that day. So with some trepidation I proceeded to try the upgrade. The first installation attempt of course failed.  After looking up online the failures of others I erased files, unplugged various USB accessories and tried a few more times.  I got a little further in the installation each time before it crashed thus fueling further attempts. As B.F. Skinner the behavioral psychologist found intermittent reinforcement keeps the behavior going. Quite helpfully the installation program kept returning me to my old operating system so I could keep on going.
I have some sympathy for Microsoft. Â Unlike Apple which controls the hardware on which its software runs Microsoft has to write software that will work on may thousands (if not millions) of different hardware configurations. I use a PC custom built by my son that Microsoft is hard-pressed to anticipate. So some difficulty with the installation was to be expected. Eventually my repeated attempts to install and my erasure of files that might be potentially blocking the installation, broke Windows update on my machine and my free copy of Windows 10 evaporated. I could still go online and I found a few people in the Microsoft community discussion group who were having the same problems as I. Unfortunately they didn’t have a fix either.
At the end of my tether I finally called in my own IT staff, that is, my son, to help. Arthur C. Clarke the science fiction writer famously wrote  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I realize that he meant “to the uninitiated” and that the esoteric priesthood of the technologically savvy abhors this characterization of what they do as magic. My son is only a lower level of the priesthood, but knows enough to know that all computer problems have some technological solution and your job is just to find it. With his command line voodoo, his poking around on the internet,  and his “failure is not an option” relentlessness we finally got that “upgrade” installed. I had to buy a new hard drive (by the way the price of storage has fallen dramatically) so that we could do what is know as a clean install. We put my old Windows 7 (for which I still had the installation disks from 2009) on it, then installed gigabytes of upgrades (much changes in 6 years), found a hacker’s way of installing Windows 10, and finally installed the sucker with only minor bumps along the way.
The new Windows 10 is beautiful however and although the web has concerns about its privacy issues it has published ways of getting around them as much as possible. I continue to explore its functionalities but I am happy so far. I will keep you posted if the honeymoon ends.
The two surprises in this early presidential election season have been the strength of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. It is much to early to tell if these showings will end up in the forgotten footnotes of presidential politics like the candidacies of Howard Dean and Herman Cain to name just a couple of surprisingly strong early campaign figures in recent history. Or, will one or both end up as an insurgent candidate like Barack Obama upsetting all the pundits and prognosticators? They could not be more different from each other and disagree on most any issue you could name: foreign policy, women’s issues, race, taxation etc. To make my prejudices clear at the outset I find Trump to be an annoying, narcissistic, overbearing, politically inexperienced, jackass with a soul so ugly that it hurts my feelings (to paraphrase the philosopher Moms Mabley.) On the other hand Sanders’ progressive policies and understanding of the current situation are much closer to my own and the man could not be more dissimilar to Trump. For the moment though I want to put my own feelings aside to try to take an objective look at the situation.
The two candidates are in structurally analogous positions within their respective presidential contests. Both are long-shot candidates but the similarities go deeper than that. Each is the personification of what the other’s base would see as the anti-Christ. Trump’s base sees Sanders as a radical socialist who would take away their guns and freedom.  Sanders’ base sees Trump as the epitome of billionaire capitalism taking over the political system and trying to buy the government for their own interests. Within their own bases however they are seen as the anti-candidates who are not afraid to speak the truth (as they see it) to the do-nothing leeches in the political system who have frozen real action into a political quagmire that gets nothing done. Each is therefore trying to appeal as a populist candidate as opposed to the establishment candidates others like Hilary and Jeb!. Their appeal is therefore similar and the support they are receiving is in part a rejection of status quo politics;  above all they advocate change in the political agenda. The growth of their support is the electorate saying “none of the above” to the usual list of candidates. Some other “insurgent candidates” e.g. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are therefore also doing well.
The insurgent candidates have been able to appeal to a section of the electorate base with plain talk, braggadocio, and chutzpah which tells us little about how they would govern. The problem with these insurgent candidates is that even if they win they have to negotiate through a political system in which they have minimal support.  Unless the Congress changes radically too we will be stuck with the same quagmire that we have now: a political system in which the executive and the legislature are constantly at odds with each other. Unless the legislative majority moves to the left in case Sanders wins or to the right in case Trump wins (God forbid) the odds are that neither would be an effective president. I am not advocating that one should or shouldn’t vote for one candidate or another at this point.  Let’s see how it plays out. I am arguing that if you support one of these candidates you should also realize that you have to bring the same zeal to turn the Congress around.
The effect of these candidacies has been to push the other candidates to take stands, issue sound bites, and make stump speeches about the insurgent candidates’ agendas. In the competition for media attention the insurgent candidates have drawn the spotlight from the mainstream candidates. The mainstream candidates have responded by saying “me too,” attacking the insurgents, or working behind the scenes to blunt their insurgencies. In doing so they reveal their respective party’s real colors or at least what they hope will sway their respective bases.
Although the Senate has rebuffed the first attempt to fast track defunding Planned Parenthood, there will be more attempts. Â The Republican controlled New Hampshire state government has already done so. There is more sound than light in the recent opposition of anti-abortion advocates to the edited secret tapes of Planned Parenthood officials. I would no more accept those tapes as proof that PP was responsible for wrongdoing than I would accept Jurassic World as proof that dinosaurs exist. Let’s try to clear up the issues.
- Defunding PP will not stop abortions. The information that PP provides about abortion is freely available on the internet. Â If anything their counseling on contraception and that abortion is only one of the options available to women and couples, cuts down on abortions.
- Planned Parenthood cannot use federal money to fund abortions. Â There is a federal law against that. Â If PP did then someone could bring a court case against them.
- Planned Parenthood does not sell fetus parts for money. As a non profit with limited funds it only gets reimbursed for its handling fees when their clients legally donate their fetus parts for scientific research. Scientific research I might add that has saved lives and led to better treatment of all
- The federal funds that PP does receive are used to provide its clients among whom the poor are overrepresented. A denial of federal funds would disproportionately affect the poor and the health services available to them.
- According to NPR 97% of PP funding goes into things other than “abortion services.”
- Defunding Planned Parenthood is not an issue about abortion but about federal funding of women’s health care. It is an attempt to use abortion as a wedge issue to curtail federal spending. One Republican candidate (Jeb!) has already said publicly that we are spending too much on women’s issues.
- The Republican senators who are leading this charge know or should know all of the above, but are playing the anti-abortion advocates like a fiddle for their own political advantage. It is using them to stir up the Republican base. It is a calculated, hypocritical, and cynical move that turns sincere anti abortion advocates into political pawns.
No matter what your stand on abortion you need to see this attack on Planned Parenthood for what it is: a callous political move rather than an attack on abortion.
I know I have posted about voting before, but recently I read the statistic that only 42% of eligible voters voted in the 2014 elections.  This is the lowest rate of any of the developed countries. Today I read posts on two Facebook friends’ (one white, one black) pages explaining why they are not going to vote because all of the candidates are assholes. Look, I understand that this may be true.  There are no angels here, but it is cynicism like this that is going to let one of these assholes be elected. There may not be angels, but there are better and worse candidates. To not vote is a sign of privilege.  The people who sit out for what they see as “principled” reasons are those who feel they won’t be affected by whoever is elected. For some people having one or the other of these candidates elected is going to be literally a matter of life and death: deportation of a beloved family member, food stamp benefits being cut, social security cuts, sending someone off to war, more wage inequality, or curtailment of women’s health rights. Those in power are counting on and have even engineered the non-voting of significant segments of our population. For some it is the basis of their power.
I admit that government shenanigans are enough to cause despair. The whole corrupt system seems impregnable, rigged for those with money, and comprised of people who do not see the realities around us. The revolution that changes this system will not only not be televised, it will not come. Â We are going to be left with the system we have and if we don’t make that system work for us, for the common people, life is going to be much worse. Â Saying that you are not going to vote is like the petulant kid who says he will go home if he can’t get what he wants. The game will go on and there still will be winners and losers.
Maybe it’s growing up when people marched, fought and died for the right to vote. Â Maybe it’s just knowing that some people don’t want me to vote that arouses the contrarian in me. They are however going to have to pry that ballot from my cold dead hand to stop me. I will keep holding my nose and voting for the asshole who seems the best to me rather than allowing one of the other assholes to win. One has to fight with whatever one can. Please, everyone vote or stop complaining about getting the government you deserve but don’t want.
In an interview with a New Hampshire newspaper Jeb Bush, Republican candidate for president, criticized Obama’s foreign policy for taking a “nuanced approach – where it’s all kind of so sophisticated it makes no sense, you know what I’m saying? Big-syllable words and lots of fancy conferences and meetings – but we’re not leading, that creates chaos, it creates a more dangerous world.†This anti-intellectualism is of course a pose.  Bush went to that most fancy and intellectual prep school Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and is a college graduate. Yet he feels that he must dumb himself down (and that is saying something for a member of the Bush family) in order to appeal to those he wants to vote for him. If that is not an insult to the American people I don’t know what is. It is moreover a statement that says that the rest of the world is as dumb as he assumes the American electorate to be. It is an appeal to get away from Obama’s “nuanced” approach to foreign policy and back to the old American foreign policy of being a bull in a china shop wielding American lives and money as a club.
Unlike others among the Republican presidential candidates Bush is not a lawyer. Â His diplomatic experience is limited to teaching classes in Mexico as a high school student, speaking Spanish and marrying a Mexican woman. He feels and wants to convince us that his experience as a wealthy real estate developer and former governor of Florida is exactly what this country needs in its leadership. There are other Republican candidates with gubernatorial experience and others with much more public service experience than Bush. Â If real estate development experience is a prerequisite then Trump has even more than Bush and we can see where that leads. Why then should people vote for Bush? Yes his family name recognition makes him a front runner and he has managed to raise money from the Republican fat cats, but why does he say we should vote for him? We should vote for him because he is less nuanced, doesn’t use as many three syllable words and doesn’t have as many meetings on foreign policy.
This is horrifying. We should all want our leaders to have a nuanced foreign policy, use whatever words necessary, and have as many meetings as it takes to avoid sending our troops off to war or to keep from sending our money abroad. The idea that the people who are working on our behalf should be “dumber” or less skilled is certainly an odd one. I for one want them to be better than that and as good as they can be. We should want our diplomats to be as much better than us at “diplomatting” as our soldiers are better than us at fighting.
I have hope that our electorate is better than this and there are enough voters to see the hypocrisy of Bush’s attempts to portray himself as one of the people. I hope we have learned our lesson about the last Bush we elected and will not fall for this again. Â Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.
Recently a friend who was a couple of classes behind me in college and who is a reasonable but die-hard conservative mentioned “government sponsored systematic racial inequality.” By this I take it that he was implying that current social welfare programs like TANF and food stamps trap African Americans in cycles of dependency that reify racial inequity, that is, turn it into a reality. That is a variation of the usual conservative argument against social welfare programs: they sap individuals’ motivation to go out and get a job, encourage laziness, and in general hold back the poor. This is of course based upon the tenets of personal responsibility and individualism that form the core of conservative thought. I have recently been researching the New Deal where many of today’s social welfare programs were born. There is much evidence of “government sponsored systematic racial inequity” in those programs.  The Social Security Act for example excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers which were common occupations for blacks and women. Whether this was intentionally racially or gender biased is a point of contention among New Deal historians and also irrelevant.  The effect if not the intent of the law  was to exclude many African American workers. Many of the programs to put people back to work were skewed towards whites rather than blacks. Blacks not only received fewer subsidized work opportunities than their presence among local populations of workers and in unemployment lines warranted, these programs were usually administered by local officials who imposed restrictions, limited opportunities, segregation and lower wages paid to black workers. Most importantly the liberals of the New Deal conceived of the programs that helped whites as “work’ programs and the programs that helped most blacks as “relief” programs. This set up a dichotomy between positively perceived and unacknowledged government supports to workers and business, versus negatively perceived “charity” to poor and especially black poor people. Although many more people who now receive the social government payments called “welfare” are white, “welfare” has been stigmatized in common perception as going mostly to black people and poor black people have been stigmatized as “welfare queens’ or as recipients of charity.
Conservatives have used these perceptions to press their political agenda which calls for a cutting back of social welfare or so called “entitlement” programs. My own experiences among the poor and my social worker wife’s experiences among the poor as well, indicate that most poor people would rather work than receive “welfare.” National surveys concur. Given the limited support both in duration and amount that “welfare” programs provide, the restrictions which such programs demand, and the social stigma attached to them, this is not surprising. Most of the people on “welfare” are children and the elderly thus unable to contribute much to the workforce. Limited job skills may explain why some do not find jobs and get off “welfare” and so programs galore to improve those skills have sprung up with government funding. The lack of quality education plays a role here but don’t get me started on that. The major reason why they do not get off welfare is a shortage of jobs for which the poor are eligible. There are many reasons for this shortage: the export of unskilled or semiskilled jobs abroad, cheaper wages abroad, the corporate depression of American wages, the structural transformation of the American economy into more of a service economy than a productive one, and on and on. It is not a lack of personal responsibility but low wages, a shortage of jobs, and limited economic options that push people onto the “welfare” rolls. Putting further restrictions on welfare, for example restricting what one can use food stamps to purchase, and cutting “welfare” benefits in the economic reality of fewer jobs that provide a living wage, is not just cruel and shortsighted, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Once again conservatives have let theory blind them to reality, ignored the facts because of ideology, condescended to their constituents, and let their privilege prevent them from seeing, hearing about, knowing and understanding how the people they are supposed to serve really live. At their inception government sponsored programs reproduced racial inequality. I would only need to cite the New Deal programs but later Federal Housing Authority lending programs have done so as well. Over the years many have worked to eliminate these racial inequalities so that the programs work better today. The government sponsored programs do not produce racial inequality but rather racial inequality makes government programs look the way they do.
I spanked my child only one time.  It took me about a week to get over it.  He was 2 or 3 at the time and he started to run out into the middle of the street. I rationalized that this was a life or death situation and he was too young to have a rational discussion about this.  He had to learn not to do this if he were to survive and he had to learn the simple equation that running into the street was a no-no, that it was associated with pain. I was reminded of this with the media coverage and the viral video of the Baltimore mother who was seen hitting her teenage son for throwing rocks at the police during the Baltimore protests. Many praised the mother’s actions in hitting her teenage son.  It showed a parent taking charge and disciplining here son when he took actions that were in their eyes “bad.” Some may have seen it as proof that for black boys harsh discipline and violence was necessary to keep them in line. Further interviews revealed that her concern was not so much about protecting property, respecting police authority, or not participating in illegal and frowned upon acts.  Her major concern was as mine had been: keeping her child safe and out of danger.  In this case the danger was police violence against black youth.
This may have fueled those who feel that the problem is black youth behavior and not police over-reaction. Â If black youth simply submitted to police authority even when police actions stepped over the line, they wouldn’t be beaten or killed. Those of us old enough to remember recall that this was also a criticism of the civil rights protesters of the 50’s and 60’s. If they had passively submitted to Jim Crow they wouldn’t have brought down the wrath of Bull Connor and countless other law enforcement officials. One may argue that the rock throwing and all was not done by the peaceful protesters, but by youths just caught up in the mob violence of the occasion. However this ignores the acts of police violence that set off this situation in the first place and the countless acts of the police before, during and after the protests.
Let’s get back to the so-called “Mother of the Year.” Her actions were not a support of the status quo or of ensuring the proper attitude toward society and the police. Â They were an indictment and recognition of the reality of police violence. Â She was doing what she thought was the only thing she could do. Â She couldn’t change the police so she was getting her child away from them.
She saw it as a life or death situation, an emergency when she did not have time to argue with her son. Â She did the most expedient thing; she resorted to violence to protect her child as I had done many years before.
Our society has a a major divide on whether it is acceptable to use violence to discipline your child.  Adrian Peterson, the NFL running back, was suspended for corporeally punishing his four year old child.  This mother was cheered for corporeally punishing her teenage child. There are people on either side of the argument who believe passionately in their view. Let us not allow this dispute to make us lose sight of the central issue here: Freddy Gray. The issue in the foreground here here should not be parenting and it should not be not child abuse. There is a time and place for talking about both of those things.  The real issues here are so contentious and so frightening we welcome the opportunity to pursue a sideshow. Unless we deal with the core issues the situations will keep on repeating themselves.