Sleeping In Public, Immigrants, Separating Kids From Parents, Can Getting Stoned Cure All This? Sunday Reading

NPR's Ted Talk show this week* , Attention Please, was about how the world is vying for your attention.  They noted the average person sees (does that include hears) 4000 - 10,000 ads a day, all competing for your attention.  I've been writing here about how people's attention is diverted from critical issues, from learning deeply enough to understand critical issues.
*Link gets you to this week's show which will thus be out of date soon  This link gets you to one of the talks on this subject.

And I'd remind you that this blog DOES NOT TAKE ANY ADS.  The more time you spend here, the fewer adds you're subject too. :)

Here are some recent  articles that cover well issues that we either don't hear or think about enough, or at all.


1.   Sleeping In Public - Starts with a story about a Yale student calling the police because black Yale student dozed off in a dorm common room, but goes on to explore our norms against sleeping in public.  It gives some examples of where it's ok, but doesn't mention the beach, where it's ok if you're in swim wear, but not if your in street clothes.  Think about your reaction to people you see sleeping in public - when is it ok, where is it ok, does it matter how they're dressed or what color they are?

2.  Crackdown on immigrants takes a toll on federal judge: 'I have presided over a process that destroys families' - a judge talks about how soul destroying his job is.  Here's a brief snippet:

Brack also sees migrants charged with drug offenses or long criminal records and is unsparing in their punishment. But they are a minority, he said.
“I get asked the question, ‘How do you continue to do this all day every day?’ I recognize the possibility that you could get hard-edged, you could get calloused, doing what I do,” he said. “I don’t. Every day it’s fresh. I can’t look a father and a husband in the eye and not feel empathy.”
Brack, 65, is the son of a railroad-worker father and homemaker mother and earned a law degree at the University of New Mexico. He served as a state judge before being named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush.

3.  Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror - Masha Gessen is bi-cultural having grown up in both the US and the Soviet Union/Russia (maybe they makes her trip-cultural.)  She was a journalist in Russia and has written a searing biography about Putin.  She's someone I think understands the world better than most.  Here's a paragraph from that piece that is a relevant follow-up to #3 above.

"Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry."
  

4.  Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs  - Andrew Sullivan argues that psychedelic drugs help expand people's minds,  help people  experience universal love  and  see the unity of humankind. From Jesus to Lennon we've heard "All You Need Is Love."   And that's why authoritarian leaders over the same time period have wanted them banned.  (The last sentence is my thought. But the idea is connected with George Carlin's piece  )

Expanding Humpty Dumpty For 2015 And Beyond

We're in Seattle with our daughter and granddaughter.  The other night I read one of her books which included Humpty Dumpty.  So far so good.  When I was done, she said, "I want to watch the Humpty Dumpty video on your computer."  I'd forgotten about that.  We'd found some Humpty Dumpty videos on a previous visit.  You'd be surprised how many there are.  The top ranking one on Youtube is this Indian version:





And then there's this version where doctors come and get him patched up and he decides that no one should sit on the wall.  Oh dear, is this a really good lesson?  For some things maybe, maybe not.  I'm just giving you a link, because this is a long, long video with lots of different nursery rhymes - old and new.  But it starts with Humpty Dumpty.  It's from Chu Chu TV - another Indian production.

This one also has an ad that I couldn't figure out how to skip.  Had to turn off sound till it was over.

If you go to Youtube on the link to the Chu Chu TC version, you'll fjnd lots more  versions of Humpty Dumpty.

I can see how totally addictive this can be for little kids.  I asked my granddaughter if she could watch it all day and she just looked away with a little smile on her face.   I'm limiting it to 15 minutes a day when I'm with her.

Historical Context Of Tanaina, Equality For Women, And Title IX

I arrived at UAA as a new faculty member in 1977 with a wife, a three year old and a six week old baby.  My wife quickly got a part time job in her technical specialty and we needed child care.  At first our daughter was in a private home where a very nice lady took care of about five babies.  But when I picked my daughter up on the third day, I told the caregiver that we would have to take our daughter out.  The place smelled of cigarets in the afternoon.  To the caregiver's credit, she told me she'd been thinking that was a problem and said there would be no more smoking. 

There was talk at the university about a place called Tanaina - a day care center on campus and also a place where the education department could do research and have student teaching experience in early childhood development.  I remember well that my dean at the time was strongly opposed to $10,000 of university funds that was proposed to go to Tanaina.  I asked him, "If a private donor offered to pay the $10,000 instead of the university, would you stop protesting?" At least he was an honest man, and he said no.  Young children belong at home with their mothers, not in day care centers.  "But," I repsonded, "you told me that I couldn't afford to live here on my salary alone, that my wife would have to work too.  So what are we supposed to do with the kids?"  "Steve, you and your wife are different, you take great care about your kids education and development." 

You can see where that discussion was going.  Round in circles.  So, the ones who take good care of their kids can use child care, but the ones who don't - the ones whose kids need it most - shouldn't?  My dean's religious background made him adamantly opposed to day care, even if it conflicted with real life practicalities, like the economic need for my wife to work. 

Our daughter did get into Tanaina shortly after it opened.  It meant I could take her with me to campus, drop her off, and I could look in on her when I had some free time during the day.  And it offered peace of mind to know that if anything happened, I was nearby.  Tanaina was good for her and she still has a best friend, 30 odd years later, that she met at Tanaina. 

I tell this story, in part to give some history.  In part to remind everyone that child care was then and is still today, loaded with political and religious controversy.

It was great to have child care on campus.  But the person who benefited most in my family - besides my daughter who got great socialization and early education - was my wife.  We came to Alaska because I got a full time job offer.  My wife took part time work in her specialty - they really wanted her full time, but she did want to more time with the kids - and she was able to do that because we had child care available. 

Child care is something that first and foremost benefits women.  Wives still tend to be the ones who drop out of work to take care of kids.  And women overwhelmingly have the kids when there is a one-parent household.  Without affordable child care, women slip backwards economically, along with their kids.

So I find it particularly ironic that as UAA is on a federal Title IX watch list, the administration decided to evict the campus child care/child development center.  The link between the campus climate for women and availability of child care apparently never crossed their minds.  They also had no sense of the deep loyalty people have toward a place like Tanaina, how important Tanaina is and was to the kids who went there, the faculty, student, and staff parents who were able to get their kids into Tanaina.   Good child care makes an enormous difference in a young couple's lives. 

Tanaina is also intended to be a laboratory for the early childhood education program in the College of Education.  Over the years this has worked better in some periods than others.  But it is an important role that campus based daycare usually serve. 

But the issue is bigger than UAA.  There just aren't that many good, affordable places available in Anchorage or anywhere in the US, certainly not enough for all the people who need them.  So evicting Tanaina not only hurts the university community, but the Anchorage community as a whole.  
The people who made this decision apparently had no sense of how important this issue is in people's lives, particularly women's lives.    They were taken completely by surprise by the strong community response and also by the response of - I'm told - four regents who told them at last Thursday's meeting that this was an important issue and they should go back and try harder.

The same day that people were telling the regents they were opposed to the eviction of Tanaina, the university was sending out emails to all faculty, students, and staff about a campus climate survey they were going to receive as part of the university's getting back in good graces over Title IX.  While the survey is specifically about sexual harassment, the eviction of Tanaina from the space they'd been in for over 35 years, doesn't send a good message to the feds about the administration's understanding of how all the components of a university, including child care,  work together, to create a campus climate that's welcoming to women. 

I also need to say that while I'm pretty disturbed about the administration's initial actions here, I also know that the Chancellor is a decent man.  Since the eviction notice has gone public, he has taken moves that offer the possibility of improving the campus day care situation.  Tanaina, like all good day care centers, especially those on campuses, has a long waiting list.  The space they are in is too small. There's a task force working to find alternatives for Tanaina.  The timing is tight and it's not clear that things will work out for the best, but there is a chance.   In the best possible world, this will lead to Tanaina getting a bigger space on campus.  In the worst possible world, Anchorage will lose a much needed day care option. 

I'd also mention that the university's contribution to Tanaina now, as I understand it, is the space.  That's estimated to be about $27,000.  I also understand that the board of Tanaina has said that they could absorb that cost through increased tuition.  So this isn't about 'entitlements' as the president suggested at the board of regents meeting on Friday.

I'd also say that there are lots of problems with many child care programs.  We need more and better affordable child care.  So many human problems could be alleviated through early intervention in children's lives that the cost of good child care should be more than made up for in the drop in other agencies that deal with the results of poor child rearing practices. 

I'll report on last Friday's task force meeting in a new post before too long. 

Patrick Gamble to Tanaina Supporters: Are You Saying Tanaina's Location Is an Entitlement?

That's a question that University of Alaska president (until June) Patrick Gamble asked at least two people who spoke to the board of regents last Friday about keeping Tanaina Child Development Center open and on campus after the University of Alaska Anchorage administration abruptly notified the Center that it would have to move, soon.  

I've been thinking about how to write about this pre-school closing by the university. (It's not exactly a done deal - there's a task force that's been set up to find some options.)  I understand the bigger contextual issues, but I needed to get my facts about the specifics at UAA better.  I went to the board of regents meeting Friday and task force meeting Friday afternoon and so I have more facts.  Too many for one post.  So I'm going to start here with the president's use of the word 'entitlement.'  

I try pay attention to words, and as most of you are probably aware, 'entitlement' is one, heavily loaded  term these days.  The New York Times pointed out how Mitt Romney's team was using the term back in 2011, so this isn't anything new:

"Romney and his aides have designed his rhetoric to define pretty much all spending on entitlements, including provisions for the injured, unemployed, sick, disabled or elderly as benefits to the poor who, Romney implies, are undeserving. And it doesn’t matter whether the money to pay for these programs comes from employer and employee contributions and not just tax revenue — they are all under suspicion. 

Will the United States be an Entitlement Society or an Opportunity Society? In an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy. [emphasis added]

Basically, we have the lazy welfare cheats who want government to supply them with everything versus the Horatio Alger go-getter who makes his fortune on his own.  This view of the world helps explain why people can be against Obamacare - they see it as lazy people getting something for nothing.  Which is how the Koch Brothers (I guess that's becoming the metaphor for those on the right who want to shape public opinion to reflect their political interests) want people to think.  In this model, people are poor because they choose to be and they prefer to live the great life provided by welfare.

An opposing model, one that is much more realistic for me, is that some people in this society either are born into privilege, get lots of lucky breaks, and/or genetically have been blessed with the right skill set that can be successful in today's United States.  The rest are blocked by big and little structural barriers - from parents who were ill-prepared to raise them, schools that teach to academically (or athletically) oriented kids, a society that assumes certain skin colors and other physical characteristics are less intelligent, more violent, and otherwise threatening or disgusting, to student loans that force them to get any job they can just to pay off the debt.  (This is just scratching the surface, of course.)

In any case, it was disturbing to hear Gamble question people about whether they thought the Tanaina location was an 'entitlement.'  It was like a trap question - what would have happened if they said yes?  They didn't, and he said, "That's good, because you're going to have to compromise."  The very fact that he used that word in the context was scary.  Was he, in fact, trying to trap them into admitting they thought it was an entitlement?  Was it just his own emotional reaction?  Is he just around people who use that term so much that he doesn't even realize others see it as a code for bad and undeserving?

It's also kind of strange, because by my calculations, Gamble is getting what some would call  'entitlements' in the guise of military and Alaska Railroad retirement checks that boost his annual income from the University to close to $500,000 a year.  And on top of that he wanted, and got the board to agree (before they changed their minds) a  $320,000 longevity bonus.   Of course, I don't think that pension money is an 'entitlement' but Republican governors in Illinois, New Jersey, and other states have used attacking pensions as part of their budget reducing strategy.   Are there abuses of some pensions?  Of course, just as there are abuses in all systems that are made up of people.  But, that is yet another post.

Let me say that the news isn't all bad.  Going to the meetings was a good idea because I've gained some factual data that changes my view of things to a certain extent and I hope to lay this out in future posts.