current events

The Weekly Vent: American Fascism

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The more I see of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Fox News and the rest, the more I am reminded of the rise of fascism in the last century. Xenophobia is on display, with know-nothing values, corporatism, authoritarianism, etc. This is nothing new, we’ve seen it before, but it has been repackaged with modern communications and given a smoother surface. And it is scary how many of today’s leading lights of the GOP have fathers who are alleged to have been quasi-fascists: the Koch brothers, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz. For an instructive look back, here’s what Salon.com has to say: It Can Still Happen Here, which recounts the 1944 article written by then U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, on the danger of fascists in America.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism, the vice-president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Sound familiar? Scared yet? I am.

 

The Weekly Vent: Heckling, Hate and Halloween

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The viral news of this week — leaving aside the serious issues of war and peace in the Middle East, ongoing genocide in Africa, incursions into international waters by China, etc. — was the reaction of undergraduates at Yale College to two emails sent to them by various faculty and administrators. The first, send by a group concerned with Intercultural Affairs, reminded students to avoid racially and ethnically offensive Halloween costumes.  The second, sent to students in one of the residential colleges by its Associate Master, criticized the first message and questioned whether it was appropriate for Yale to manage expression by its students or if it would be preferable for Yale students to monitor each other and — gasp! — have thoughtful, respectful conversations about their disagreements.

So far, just another tempest in an academic teapot. But when an advocacy group called FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) got hold of the story, and its president recorded and aired a video showing a confrontation between some students and the Master of Silliman College (who is married to the Associate Master), the story went viral. Lines were drawn in the sand and loud voices at both extremes of the political spectrum have been raised. Score one for FIRE! Free publicity!

Here is my take on it, in part. Continue reading →

The Weekly Vent: Death Among the Middle-Aged

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For those of you who may not read The New York Times, here’s a sobering piece of news: Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans. Basically, so many white Americans with less than a college education are dying prematurely from things like suicide and substance abuse that they are causing a statistical anomaly. This came to researchers’ attention when they realized that “unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” So they started digging into the details of that data. ” [P]oorly educated American whites … are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.” Dr. Angus Deaton, by the way, is a 2015 Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

Furthermore, the impact of this sudden increase in death rates in a specific age group is so dramatic, “Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. ‘Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,’ he said.” Continue reading →

The Weekly Vent: Is Honesty for Suckers?

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I have a love-hate relationship with The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” feature. I know the whole point is to present, in brief, conflicting points of view. It just riles me up. And this past week’s topic REALLY riled me up. “Is Honesty for Suckers?” . I think in our culture, at this time, it probably is. But that doesn’t mean I plan to become dishonest or I envy those who are. It just means I have resigned myself to foregoing some of the rewards that I have seen dishonest people reap for years. And I’m okay with that, as I am very fortunate in many ways, and I’d rather be myself (and live with myself) than go through life the way they do: rushing to grab every advantage, making and dropping “friends” along the way, unable to sustain loving, real relationships (funny how many of these folks seem to have dysfunctional personal lives). If that makes me a sucker, so be it. Honestly.

The Weekly Vent: More On Toxic Workplaces

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Surprise! Stressful work environments have a measurable negative impact on employees’ health and mortality, as set forth by The New York Times: How Stressful Work Environments Hurt Workers’ Health.

Among the findings:

• Work-family conflict more than doubled the odds of an employee reporting poor mental health and increased the odds of self-reported poor physical health by about 90 percent.
• Job insecurity raised the odds of self-reported poor physical health by about 50 percent.
• Low organizational justice increased the odds of having a physician-diagnosed condition by about 50 percent.
• High job demands raised the odds of a physician-diagnosed illness by 35 percent.
• Long work hours increased mortality by nearly 20 percent.

In addition, unemployment and low job control significantly upped the odds of all of the outcomes, while adverse psycho-social situations at work – lack of fairness, low social support and low job control – were as strongly associated with poor health as concrete factors like long hours and shift work.

Continue reading →

The Narrative of Privilege

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This is an extraordinary piece by a young doctor: The Narrative of Privilege. From the perspective of middle age, and raising teenagers myself, she is so accurate about the ways in which adolescents are shaped not only by the choices they make, but by the choices they are offered, throughout childhood and adolescence.

Just so you don’t think I’ve lost my snarky edge — this is why it enrages me when public officials nickel and dime services for children, like public education, so they can slash taxes for the overly fortunate. We are a fabulously rich nation. Surely we can afford to make sure all American children are offered excellent choices as they grow.

The Weekly Vent: Up The Creek In A Toxic Workplace

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I thought my own workplace was pretty dysfunctional and toxic — and some days it really is. Then I read today about what it’s like to work at Amazon: Inside Amazon.  Here’s one passage:

“Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue.”

This is the Lord of the Flies, but at work, in real life, with people’s careers and livelihoods at stake. How many guesses as to who mostly gets sabotaged by colleagues who gang up on them through anonymous feedback? I’m betting they are mostly non-white, non-straight, non-males. The longer I work in organizations, the more I realize how many men are truly socialized to form gangs that then exclude or drive off others. You’re part of the in-crowd — or you’re completely out. It has nothing to do with the good of the organization, or the quality of your work, it’s all about the in-gang grabbing power and wealth for itself. Ugh. And why do the managers believe the comments that are made? Do they even look into them, or hold accountable workers who lie?

The rest of the article describes workers who never take a day off; answer emails all night; are pushed out when they have health or family issues; feel they cannot spend time with their families. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men on the planet, with a stay-at-home author wife and four children. I used to think he was brilliant. Now I think he’s a sociopath. And he’s trying to export his way of doing business to other workplaces, claiming that his way is the model of the future. I was glad to read several comments by recruiters for other companies who say they won’t hire anyone who has been at Amazon long enough to have been brainwashed into thinking this is the right way to interact at work.

I am shaking my head. This seems like the ultimate example of treating human beings like cogs in a machine. I will never willingly or knowingly work for such a cruel organization. I am seriously considering where I can cut back my purchases from Amazon. Bezos’ way seems to work well to enrich him beyond even the wildest plutocratic dreams. What is it doing for anyone else? Why do the rest of us put up with these Gilded Age antics? Why do we send our children to fight these plutocrats’ wars and protect their wealth? Why do we allow the schools, transportation systems, public services, lands and facilities we all need and use to fall into disrepair, while these greedy lunatics manipulate our financial systems and hog more and more of our productivity? Why?

Men, Women and Guns

current events

I just read this thought-provoking article by Nico Lang at Salon.com: America’s White Masculinity Complex and the Myth of the “Senseless” Mass Shooting.  He says that many of the recent mass shootings inflicted so tragically on communities around the U.S. have been carried out by straight white men attempting to re-assert what they view as the rightful dominance of straight white men over everyone else. Continue reading →

Seesaw

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This week, the New York Times reported that in a sharp reversal, school districts are now scrambling to fill teacher positions after several years of issuing pink slips to teachers: Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble. In fact, they are so desperate to hire teachers that they are hiring some before they have even graduated. This is nuts! I have relatives who are teachers. They are skilled professionals, with years of expensive education including master’s degrees in specialties like information technology in education, as well as experience. One works for a private school, one worked for a public school.

The one who works for a private school has been able to have a long, well-developed career with steady advancement and reasonable job security. The one who worked for a public school system did have tenure, but her job was constantly under threat from incompetent principals and superintendents, the threat of reorganizations that would have eliminated her position, the constant cost-cutting. She finally couldn’t take it any more; she and many other seasoned teacher colleagues have retired in the last two years. She herself was snapped up to do contract work by a mentor at the state department of education, who knows her talent and skill set. Her work with teachers and students in that role has restored her love of teaching and education, now that she is away from the relentless politics of the local public school district.

This makes me crazy. When will this country stop whipsawing schools, teachers and schoolchildren back and forth? It’s impossible for professionals to plan for a skilled career when their job prospects look like a rollercoaster. It’s impossible for the best professionals to do good work in an environment of shifting alliances, inadequate resources and permanent job insecurity.  Public schools deserve better, and so do the huge majority of American children who depend on them for their education. Periodic “nationwide hiring scrambles” are not the answer.

The Weekly Vent

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Where to begin? This past week’s GOP debate presents a target-rich environment, but so do the wafflings among the Democrats seeking the Presidency. Can’t we get some sensible, mature thoughts on the most pressing policy needs ahead, including long-term goals for our country? Hellooooo? I’m starting to feel like John Adams in the musical “1776.” Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?

Well, some people do. Here’s a selection of the past week’s Editorial Cartoons of the Week. They kind of sum it all up, don’t they? Except right now, I’m not laughing. I’m starting to get mad. Because this is serious, folks. I have kids who have to live in the world we’re creating.