(With apologies for the digressions in the initial version....)
About six years ago, I was walking down the streets of Provincetown, Mass, thinking, "I wonder if the Taliban is going to come down here and do a raid on a gay bar?" Maybe THAT's why that woman sitting next to us in the audience in which we were watching the comic Leah DeLaria had such a long skirt on?
When I wrote about the loss of Michael Gonzales (INNOCENT BYSTANDERS), I shielded myself from thinking about another kind of loss familiar to probably every New York City public school teacher: the loss of students who are in the armed forces. Just in the past year, one of my first students, by now a 41 year old father of three, signed up for his National Guard in Utah. I expect, like those men and women from Massachusets who were deployed today to Afghanistan, he will be sent off to "do construction projects and bolster our nation's security around the world," as the reporter said at the end of the feature story which popped up after the one about the "yellow lobster" which was actually what had brought me to the Yahoo News site.
It kind of reminded me of my last visit to Provincetown during which my friend Karen did have lobster and during which I did not once think about terrorists of any kind. It's funny. We were actually pushed out of New York airspace that night because then President Bush was leaving New York just after his speech to the Republican convention. If he, or anyone had really thought there were terrorists en route to or from Massachusets, we shouldn't have been able to hear Air Force One ask for permission for take off. Let's see, he wasn't leaving JFK...probably he was leaving from White Plains and anyone with a friend who had a plane and was in the air at that moment knew exactly when. But, I digress...kind of. It's a great party story. Losing my students has become too popular a blog story.
It's not just the possibility of their deaths which upsets me and my own feelings about the futility of this war, but the cycle which lead them to choose the armed forces as a career. NOT ONE had ever told me that he/she dreamed about being a soldier. Serving your country is an honor which I do not mean to denigrate. The fact is that our economy has driven some of my smartest students to do tours of Afghanistan and Iraq. They tell me they are okay and they are proud of their work. First and foremost, they wanted to be working in challenging professions. They wanted to be in positions of leadership. Trying to balance college and supporting their families wasn't the only deterrent which kept them from making alternative choices. The reality that they could turn around after all that hard academic work and find an economy poised on grinding down their bodies and spirits without even benefits was a risk they found to profoundly painful to accept. It's a fate worse than death. Literally.
For all the time we spend debating the morality of the works of literature they read, whether children can read about gay parents when they probably watch them on TV anyway, we don't spend enough time arguing about what vocational skills we are giving our students. The liberal education was intended to free the mind. When it was conceived, it presumed a life in scholarship, law or the priesthood. Of those three professions, only the last offers any security and ladder of promotion. I'm not being facetious; I mean to speak in the plainest terms possible. No matter how much reading, writing and arithmetic are essential to survival, they are not enough. No matter how beautifully conceived a research project is for an honors class, it is not enough. Getting a 5 on the AP of anything, is not enough. Very few doctors and lawyers today can break out into practices of their own. And if they do, who helps them when, in their first years, they can't afford to fix things or can't afford classes which will help them compete in the marketplace. But these are, by far, not the weakest members of our economy. Take the "A" student with an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature. Who knew that he/she would likely teach classes the way women and men in sweatshops sewed garments -- both groups would be paid for "piecework." Most scholars have to teach and get paid by the class -- 3000 a pop. So, if you could teach ten classes a term, you could earn, before taxes, about 30,000. There are some people who are lucky enough to find tenure track jobs which often start at salaries in the 20 and 30 thousand dollar range. I hear that outside of New York, you can possibly survive on that, but that's not equitable payment for someone who has spent 8 years after high school dedicated to any field.
I'm not worried JUST about those kids who fail their exams. What I'm worried about is that BOTH the kids who do well and those who don't will be joining the National Guard whether they like it or not because they won't have many options.
When my doctor asks me if the book I am reading, Simon Schama's AMERICA'S FUTURE tells if we are going to become "The United States of China," I'm a bit embarrassed. Schama is tracing our ideas of what an American is -- but is that question even in the "bottom line" anymore? Goldman Sachs isn't treasonous when it makes choices which destroy the power of our economy and our government. But, when we bargain for fair treatment as teachers --whether it be for money or respect--we are vilified in the press. We rarely get to argue whether we WANT to be the United States of China. Besides our loss of money and power, what else do we care about in that equation? How can we care, for example, about our potential job losses to new immigrants and to our growing bad credit, when we haven't even faced the fact that Americans lose these jobs because they no longer pay a fair wage and that we keep borrowing money to fix an economy which needs serious re-envisioning? What do we want our children to be? What choices are we creating now for them to consider in the future?
I'm sure some of my students clicked on the story about the Yellow lobster and then went on to the story about the National Guard. Do you think they wondered why so many young and not-so-young people had joined a part of our military which people don't usually hear about? Do you think they wondered why many of them were people of color?
But, it doesn't get so far in the minds of a ten year old and maybe not always in a that of a tenth grader, who may, instead be wondering how you fish for lobster, why are yellow lobsters rare and can we go to Red Lobster tomorrow? And the practical questions of the trade as well as the marine biology are things they should understand. When they fight us off so hard, they do so both because they sometimes find us too hard and too irrelevant. They believe we are supposed to be training them for the hard work and all the possibilities of adulthood? We are supposed to be helping them find life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Are we?
Showing posts with label Obama Foreign Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama Foreign Policy. Show all posts
25 July, 2010
An absolutely irrelevant note about foreign policy
Last night, a cab driver assaulted me.
No, it wasn't the usual, "You nice lady. You married, Miss?"
It was about healthcare. I spent about 15 minutes (the entire ride) trying to explain to a man to whom I just explained the word "breathing," why our country didn't have national healthcare already.
"Germany, England, France, you pay nothing. Obama say in 2014 we pay a little bit. This good plan, Miss?"
He was a leaden pipe full of hot water, and if his long beard weren't black, I'd've thought it was steam. Here we were, Jew and Muslim driving toward the neighborhood we both live in (Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights), and we weren't talking about "loneliness" or Israel.
In the past, drivers, and in fact, people in cafes, my left-wing psychiatrist -- a fair number of people have engaged me on foreign policy early in conversations. I learned about Israel's latest controversy while sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office --reading TIME magazine. Yet, we didn't get into it at all in session. We were both more concerned about our pets and about the obvious necessity to increase my anti-anxiety medication. The latter has become a staple of how I "deal with" the state of our economy and my job. In fact, economics has ruled most of my social and medical life since Bloomberg took office.
Yesterday afternoon, at a cafe, no one even bothered to put the closed captioning on when our Secretary of State Hlilary Clinton was on CNN. Perhaps she is aware of her own place as a kind of throwback to another time. I was shocked to find she has now grown her hair long and set it in the "Upsweet" popular in the 1960's. Will the Jackie-O make-up follow?
I still have no idea what announcement the former-First Lady/Presidential Candidate and powerfully staunch hawk was making. At a time when world economies continue to be in need of serious vision, hardly anyone cares about what we hope to be our foreign policy. Excepting of course those unfortunate people whom we might be bombing, boycotting or bungling attempts to provide humanitarian aid. Sadly, most of those people are really facing the results of our economic policy which has remained stagnant since we voted in resounding force for change back in 2008. Take those receiving the humanitarian aid known as unemployment. --I know they're not the same, but de facto, they are. In a WORLD which lives on credit and in which money is no longer measured by the gold standard, the question of what we pay and what we afford has to do with psychology and not finance. If that weren't true, everyone would've pulled their money out of the stock market years ago as very few sectors of any economy are truly flourishing. Unregulated capitalism leads to a lot of cheap goods, bankruptcies and reorganizations as well as monopolies. None of this provides much entry-way for the average citizen to benefit. No Milton Friedman fan can defend/explain or fix what happened in Russia if you want proof on a smaller scale than our worldwide dilemmas.--
What I did know this week was that President Obama said it was important for Congress to "do the right thing" and extend unemployment. That's about as strong and open-hearted a phrase he has used in some time on a liberal cause and it made me hopeful. Our President doesn't want to see people suffering. That's important.
It did not give me an answer for what to tell my driver. In the end, we haggled about his tip, which I had mistakenly not added using the new touchscreens mandated by our lovely Mayor. This is perhaps because I pushed the button to turn the screen OFF very hard possibly damaging it., so that I would not have to watch the especially bad and tourist-driven television it will proffer it I did not. In the end, I reviewed the receipt multiple times and handed the driver much less than the percentage I would've tapped in had the machine been working properly. I resented the argument, though I knew it was his right to make it. I wasn't about to NOT tip him, but there were more polite ways to raise the issue that the tip did not seem to be calculated. For someone who had been fervent, but open to my opinions in an overall discussion of economics, the push and shove on dollars was a little unsettling. If I hadn't been so tired and were generally a more confident person, I might've used it as what we is called a "teachable moment." The same tension with which he fought over three versus five dollars is what drives the argument against healthcare. It is also what some people call, "bad business" as it's not the kind of behavior that makes someone want to step into your cab again. Since it is truly random whether or not a driver sees a passenger again, I guess it doesn't matter. It is an industry, then, which can be used as a microcosm for examining our economy. Essentially, it is driven by an exchange between two people and the value of the service fluctuates depending on individual moods and the weather. Like a magnate, a cab company survives by having so many cabs that they can cover their losses. There is very little ability to control quality beyond a minimum. (I get out of cars that don't have air conditioning or heat and I suspect that's where most people draw a line if they have made the decision that they need to pay the fare.) It is a mobile marketplace complete with haggling salespeople.
If he was asked, I am sure the driver would prefer not to have to raise the issue of a tip. I'd certainly prefer that the agreed upon price somehow provided him with adequate sustenance. But, that would require a decision by producer and consumer on what the set value of the entire service IS. What does the driver deserve to make? What does a human being require for healthcare?
Of course, most of the time, I take the subway or bus, but I was trying to avoid the death-claw of the humidity on the platform last night. I was able to do so, in no small part, owing to the long history of labor bargaining for a fair wage and benefits. But, someone who isn't so lucky, who might take the train and find breathing suddenly difficult might then be rushed to the ER. There, he or she would receive services which, if he/she is uninsured, for which he/she won't be able to pay. Because we are not as cold-hearted a people in New York as people think, our hospitals don't push people toward their deaths and refuse them treatment. Yet, we don't just agree to provide all members of our city with insurance because we would rather engage in daily bargaining than commit our wallets. (What is a healthcare plan which will be implemented in 2014 but conjecture -- at most, a gauntlet on a bargaining table.) I wonder at how much this would really cost us if we sat down and considered:
1) What REALLY is a fair amount of profit? Yes, there is unfair profit. Maybe we should call it unreasonable profit -- a profit margin which will ultimately make it impossible for any consumer to afford the product. That requires a certain honesty on everyone's part. For example: No one needs a 150 dollars sneaker which is not orthopedic and no one should be making 140 times what it cost to make the sneaker, assuming that it took some Indonesian woman at Nike one whole day to make that pair for her wage of one dollar.
2) What is the REAL COST of our treatment? The price of the 15 minute glance-over and routine blood tests most people get, at best? Is that the treatment which our doctors really think is enough if they were being paid adequately? Not being as liquid as my mother was, I go see doctors who take my insurance. Even when they are good, they are still overworked and behind schedule.
3) Do you find it unpleasant to step over homeless and sick people on your way to work, or do you just consider this some reaffirmation of Calvinism, Fascism -- or do you just enjoy the feeling of being inside a painting by Francis Bacon?
If we thought about all of this, we might then turn up the volume on Mrs. Clinton, as, I am sure something she was talking about had to do with paying for bombs or humanitarian aid. For the value of the former, see question 3 again
No, it wasn't the usual, "You nice lady. You married, Miss?"
It was about healthcare. I spent about 15 minutes (the entire ride) trying to explain to a man to whom I just explained the word "breathing," why our country didn't have national healthcare already.
"Germany, England, France, you pay nothing. Obama say in 2014 we pay a little bit. This good plan, Miss?"
He was a leaden pipe full of hot water, and if his long beard weren't black, I'd've thought it was steam. Here we were, Jew and Muslim driving toward the neighborhood we both live in (Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights), and we weren't talking about "loneliness" or Israel.
In the past, drivers, and in fact, people in cafes, my left-wing psychiatrist -- a fair number of people have engaged me on foreign policy early in conversations. I learned about Israel's latest controversy while sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office --reading TIME magazine. Yet, we didn't get into it at all in session. We were both more concerned about our pets and about the obvious necessity to increase my anti-anxiety medication. The latter has become a staple of how I "deal with" the state of our economy and my job. In fact, economics has ruled most of my social and medical life since Bloomberg took office.
Yesterday afternoon, at a cafe, no one even bothered to put the closed captioning on when our Secretary of State Hlilary Clinton was on CNN. Perhaps she is aware of her own place as a kind of throwback to another time. I was shocked to find she has now grown her hair long and set it in the "Upsweet" popular in the 1960's. Will the Jackie-O make-up follow?
I still have no idea what announcement the former-First Lady/Presidential Candidate and powerfully staunch hawk was making. At a time when world economies continue to be in need of serious vision, hardly anyone cares about what we hope to be our foreign policy. Excepting of course those unfortunate people whom we might be bombing, boycotting or bungling attempts to provide humanitarian aid. Sadly, most of those people are really facing the results of our economic policy which has remained stagnant since we voted in resounding force for change back in 2008. Take those receiving the humanitarian aid known as unemployment. --I know they're not the same, but de facto, they are. In a WORLD which lives on credit and in which money is no longer measured by the gold standard, the question of what we pay and what we afford has to do with psychology and not finance. If that weren't true, everyone would've pulled their money out of the stock market years ago as very few sectors of any economy are truly flourishing. Unregulated capitalism leads to a lot of cheap goods, bankruptcies and reorganizations as well as monopolies. None of this provides much entry-way for the average citizen to benefit. No Milton Friedman fan can defend/explain or fix what happened in Russia if you want proof on a smaller scale than our worldwide dilemmas.--
What I did know this week was that President Obama said it was important for Congress to "do the right thing" and extend unemployment. That's about as strong and open-hearted a phrase he has used in some time on a liberal cause and it made me hopeful. Our President doesn't want to see people suffering. That's important.
It did not give me an answer for what to tell my driver. In the end, we haggled about his tip, which I had mistakenly not added using the new touchscreens mandated by our lovely Mayor. This is perhaps because I pushed the button to turn the screen OFF very hard possibly damaging it., so that I would not have to watch the especially bad and tourist-driven television it will proffer it I did not. In the end, I reviewed the receipt multiple times and handed the driver much less than the percentage I would've tapped in had the machine been working properly. I resented the argument, though I knew it was his right to make it. I wasn't about to NOT tip him, but there were more polite ways to raise the issue that the tip did not seem to be calculated. For someone who had been fervent, but open to my opinions in an overall discussion of economics, the push and shove on dollars was a little unsettling. If I hadn't been so tired and were generally a more confident person, I might've used it as what we is called a "teachable moment." The same tension with which he fought over three versus five dollars is what drives the argument against healthcare. It is also what some people call, "bad business" as it's not the kind of behavior that makes someone want to step into your cab again. Since it is truly random whether or not a driver sees a passenger again, I guess it doesn't matter. It is an industry, then, which can be used as a microcosm for examining our economy. Essentially, it is driven by an exchange between two people and the value of the service fluctuates depending on individual moods and the weather. Like a magnate, a cab company survives by having so many cabs that they can cover their losses. There is very little ability to control quality beyond a minimum. (I get out of cars that don't have air conditioning or heat and I suspect that's where most people draw a line if they have made the decision that they need to pay the fare.) It is a mobile marketplace complete with haggling salespeople.
If he was asked, I am sure the driver would prefer not to have to raise the issue of a tip. I'd certainly prefer that the agreed upon price somehow provided him with adequate sustenance. But, that would require a decision by producer and consumer on what the set value of the entire service IS. What does the driver deserve to make? What does a human being require for healthcare?
Of course, most of the time, I take the subway or bus, but I was trying to avoid the death-claw of the humidity on the platform last night. I was able to do so, in no small part, owing to the long history of labor bargaining for a fair wage and benefits. But, someone who isn't so lucky, who might take the train and find breathing suddenly difficult might then be rushed to the ER. There, he or she would receive services which, if he/she is uninsured, for which he/she won't be able to pay. Because we are not as cold-hearted a people in New York as people think, our hospitals don't push people toward their deaths and refuse them treatment. Yet, we don't just agree to provide all members of our city with insurance because we would rather engage in daily bargaining than commit our wallets. (What is a healthcare plan which will be implemented in 2014 but conjecture -- at most, a gauntlet on a bargaining table.) I wonder at how much this would really cost us if we sat down and considered:
1) What REALLY is a fair amount of profit? Yes, there is unfair profit. Maybe we should call it unreasonable profit -- a profit margin which will ultimately make it impossible for any consumer to afford the product. That requires a certain honesty on everyone's part. For example: No one needs a 150 dollars sneaker which is not orthopedic and no one should be making 140 times what it cost to make the sneaker, assuming that it took some Indonesian woman at Nike one whole day to make that pair for her wage of one dollar.
2) What is the REAL COST of our treatment? The price of the 15 minute glance-over and routine blood tests most people get, at best? Is that the treatment which our doctors really think is enough if they were being paid adequately? Not being as liquid as my mother was, I go see doctors who take my insurance. Even when they are good, they are still overworked and behind schedule.
3) Do you find it unpleasant to step over homeless and sick people on your way to work, or do you just consider this some reaffirmation of Calvinism, Fascism -- or do you just enjoy the feeling of being inside a painting by Francis Bacon?
If we thought about all of this, we might then turn up the volume on Mrs. Clinton, as, I am sure something she was talking about had to do with paying for bombs or humanitarian aid. For the value of the former, see question 3 again
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