Causes, the Lottery, and What's Important

Allow me to tell two stories, and then string them together.

Just before Spring Break let out, my English class did an interesting activity. We were given a list of 20 events or causes that were more or less positive depending on personal opinion, and told we had $100,000 to spend on each cause based on how much we valued them. This was assigned as homework, and then we discussed our methodologies in class.

The causes were–

1. An end to hunger worldwide
2. Happy marriage
3. A long life of physical health
4. World peace between the US and all other countries
5. Reverse the effects of global warming
6. Fame 
7. An end to capital punishment
8. A good education
9. The ability choose the President of the United States for the rest of your life
10. An end to racism
11. Enough money that you don't have to work for the rest of your life
12. Outstanding musical/artistic talent
13. A end to abortion
14. Women's rights globally
15. Legalization of gay marriage
16. Outstanding athletic talent
17. Spiritual enlightenment
18. Worldwide democracy
19. Global nuclear disarmament
20. Worldwide access to effective contraception

Personally, I first put zeros for all the causes that I didn't actually want (a worldwide end to abortion, fame, outstanding athletic talent, etc.). I then put zeros for things that would benefit only me (a good education, a happy marriage, outstanding musical/athletic talent, etc.). I then had ten causes left. I picked the two goals that I considered the most difficult to achieve– an end to hunger worldwide, and world peace between the US and all other countries –and gave them $30,000 each. The other causes I gave $5,000 each.

In class we discussed what we picked. Some people chose to focus more personal causes. Some gave more money to the legalize women's rights globally option, thinking that it would solve other problems like an end to abortion, world hunger, and worldwide access to more effective contraception. We also discussed discrepancies between what we picked on this hypothetical list and what we work on in real life. I, obviously, care about my personal problems, which my choices for the assignment did not reflect. I also devote most of my time to the legalization of gay marriage, one of the options to which I gave $5,000.

New story time.

One of my two sisters, my Mom, and my Dad and I were sitting in our hotel room in Orlando over spring break. At the time, the lottery pot which eventually grew to $656 million dollars was a big news story. My family casually discussed how we would use the money– how much of it would go to charity, how much we would invest, what we would buy, what we would save. I personally didn't come up with any exact figures.

My Consumer Education teacher has said that the two rarest commodities are time and money; of those two, time is probably more rare.  I don't have $656 million (and neither does the winner; there were three, and the IRS takes 25%). Nor do I have $100,000 readily available to me. But I do probably have a good 60 years ahead of me. What causes are most important to me? What do I want to spend my life doing?

I've heard back from all ten colleges to which I've applied, both acceptances and denials. I applied to all 10 as a music education major. Now the rather grueling decision process begins. In terms of my major choice, it gives me a rather specific career (though my top choices have five year BA/BM programs where I would double major in an arts and sciences field, the second major would probably be for personal fulfillment and not for a career).

I'm not going to become a doctor and make my career out of helping people get more effective access to contraception. I'm not going to become a lawyer or politician and make my career out of ending capital punishment. My career solves exactly zero problems on this list, but that doesn't mean that these problems aren't important to me. I run a political blog that arguably calls out people who wish promote sexism and racism. I find great enjoyment out of the rare days in Gay-Straight Alliance where I get to educate the club on a topic. I also share a lot of media on Facebook and Tumblr to the end of promoting LGBT rights.  Although I chose hunger and peace as the largest, most difficult, and most important items on the list, they are not the ones I focus on in my daily life.

Why?

On the hunger issue, it's difficult for me to know which charities to throw money at. And in terms of world peace, I don't know how I could improve that without working for the State Department (if my readers think differently, I'd love to hear)...or perhaps a little bit of cause #9! If $30,000 each could fix that problem instantly, as I believe the premise of the activity suggests, of course I would put money towards that. But in real life, it wouldn't.

Plus, in terms of legalization of gay marriage in the United States, our successes are visible. They are legislative, political issues. They make sense. There's no problems with national sovereignty or white savior complexes or corrupt governments of developing countries. Sometimes it doesn't even require money, more of a vote or a signature. And so it's a good field to work in for me because I have visible results achieved through the appropriate political channels. (Of course, it's also an issue of personal importance to me.) But I know many people would say that lives are not at stake in the legalization of gay marriage debate, and so it should be considered less important.

I look at my blog, and I've talked about so many social issues in, particularly, the United States. But I can't work on all of them all the time, or even most of the time. And nobody can. In my opinion, we have to choose a fewer things that we're the most passionate about, because it is when we throw our hearts into our causes that we make the most impact.

What do my readers think? If you're in my class, what causes did you put down? If not, what would you have put? What do you work on in "real life?" Do you agree or disagree with my methodology?

Minority Celebrations

Happy Women's History Month!

International Women's Day was last week, but all of March is intended as a celebration of women around the world. I, personally, took a 90 minute mini-class on American Women in Rock and Roll, as a part of a special day where my school held different workshops on different topics.

Anyhow, this is sort of a response to the annual dialogue that comes up around Black History Month (which was February), and generally any period of time set aside for minority celebrations. For example, see this 55 second clip of Morgan Freeman being interviewed by Mike Wallace.

I have seen the transcript of this interview all over tumblr; it is the first post on the blog Stuff White People Reblog. The post has 120,000+ notes.

As I did with my "United States on LGBT People Around the World" post, I'd like to add something to the conversation and go against the flow a little. With this commentary, take a grain of salt– I'm white, Morgen Freeman is black. However, it should also be noted that he is incredibly rich and famous, and so both of us speak from points of privilege.

First off, I can't think of (m)any problems that were ever solved by not talking about them. Women and black people didn't get their rights by patiently waiting for them.

Second of all, as alluded in my disclaimer, racism probably looks really good and solved from a Morgan Freeman standpoint. I found his salary for only one movie, and it was $5 million– in 1997 dollars. But the point being that the average Black American is definitely behind whites. A 2004 U.S. Census Bureau study called "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States" said that in 2004, African-Americans earned about $16,000 less in annual income than White Americans (11) and 14% more of the black population was below poverty than the white population (17). In addition,  the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in February 2012 for Black Americans was nearly double what it was for White Americans.

Clearly, economic inequality exists, whether or not Morgan Freeman wants to talk about it. Instead of pretending like it doesn't exist, we should try to figure out how to best lift African-Americans out of poverty and get jobs. Just because we have a mixed race president in the White House doesn't mean that we are a post-racial country.

One final point that I should make was a comparison that my English teacher brought up in our AP Literature class. American culture has been traditionally viewed as a "melting pot," with immigrants assimilating into the dominant culture. However, a more recent view has been that of a salad bowl. Different ingredients can maintain their individual tastes and still come together to make a dish with variety. Of course, the lettuce is still a part of the salad. But it's still lettuce.

African-American history (and women's history, this month) is a vital part of American history. But considering that blacks are still an oppressed minority group, I see no harm in taking a little less than 1/12th of the year to more closely examine Black History– and what we can do to elevate the status of African-Americans today.

Social Class and Mental Illness

(This blog post is somewhat a study in intersectionality, which is essentially the principle that different forms of oppression are all connected, and takes special interest in people who identify with more than one minority group: black women, disabled trans people, etc.)

A member of my family was very fortunate last summer to get a well-paying job in software consultation. With the knowledge that they were on a significant number of medications to control Type I Bipolar Disorder, I asked my mother if she thought the company's healthcare plan would cover our family member's medical needs. My mother informed me that there would probably never be a job that would cover all of their healthcare needs, and some of it would always have to be covered by personal cost and insurance.

Surprise! Having a mental illness— incidentally, most of all bipolar disorder —is really, really expensive. The lifetime cost per case of bipolar disorder for chronic or non-responsive bipolar can be up to $624,785. That's about fourteen years of an Ivy League-caliber college. Few people have that money simply lying around.

The other issue with poverty and mental illness is its cyclical nature. At first, it can seem like a chicken-and-egg question— are people poor because they're mentally ill and therefore have a harder time holding a job and paying for treatment, or are people mentally ill because they're poor and feel that they have few prospects for the future? Of course, each person's case is unique. But in the end, the cause itself is not as important as the fact that when a mentally ill person falls on hard times, its extremely difficult to escape.

How many times have we, walking down the street, written off a homeless person as a "crazy bum," when perhaps in a different situation they could be any other middle-class wage-earner? After all, 20-25% of the American homeless population is severely mentally ill (compared to 6% of the country as a whole). Homelessness can also complicate the consistency and availability of treatment of mentally ill people.


Though the cycle can be a downwards spiral, it can also be a positive pattern. For example, better mental health services can also combat homelessness. It also can see overall jail times decrease. Perhaps by better funding mental health services, we can actually save money as a society by lowering the number of people who rely on the state through food services or even incarceration. As a sort of preventative medicine, providing job resources for the mentally ill and mental health resources for the poor can make sure that no one gets caught in a vicious cycle.

Ron Paul and "Honest Rape"

I should preface this with my honest, completely biased opinion– I dislike and have always disliked Ron Paul.

I think some people who are Ron Paul supporters are very attracted by his anti-war stance, one of his many libertarian views for which he is famous. Others like his soft on marijuana position, though he doesn't think that full-out legalization is possible right now. Some people are repelled by the fact that he's signed off on racist newsletters, or just find his economic opinions. Depending on what's important to you, all of those are pretty valid opinions to like or dislike the man, as long as you recognize the whole picture.

On Friday, Ron Paul was interviewed (transcript here) on Piers Morgan about his life, his political views, and his election run, especially impressed with his popularity with young people.

(Video from YouTube.)

At one point, Morgan brought up Paul's stance on abortion. Morgan posed the dilemma that if one of Paul's five children or eighteen grandchildren were raped, would he force them to carry the baby to term? Paul simultaneously asserted that "life does begin at conception" and then went on a rambling tangent about the complexity of the issue (recognizing there are no clear lines, indirectly mentioning the morning-after pill) but ultimately did not come to a satisfying conclusion. He did acknowledge that "It's a tough one. I won't satisfy everybody there."

Regardless of the stumbles that he made on abortion, there was one moment of shockingly poor word choice.

MORGAN: But it's a dilemma that I am going to put to you. You have two daughters. You have many granddaughters. If one of them was raped -- and I accept it's a very unlikely thing to happen. But if they were, would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?

PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them --

MORGAN: You would allow them to abort the baby?

PAUL: It is absolutely in limbo, because an hour after intercourse or a day afterwards, there is no legal or medical problem. If you talk about somebody coming in and they say, well, I was raped and I'm seven months pregnant and I don't want to have anything to do with it, it's a little bit different story.

Morgan did not go on to ask Paul to clarify on what he believed was an "honest rape." This poses a lot of awkward questions: what is "honest rape?" Moreover, what is "dishonest rape?" 

I'm not going to get into the ins and outs on the different opinions on when life begins.  But I think in this quote and this interview, Ron Paul is showing a dangerous disdain for rape victims. An "honest rape" is not just one where the girl is single and a virgin and a Christian, and she was held at gunpoint in a dark alley, and she didn't know her rapist (probably a person of color, knowing Paul). Rape victims can be drunk. They can be married. They can be male. They can be of any age, race, gender, religion, or socioeconomic class.

There is no such thing as an "honest rape" or a "dishonest rape." There is only rape, and the fact that people should not have to deal with its horrible consequences after the attack.

Book Review: Enlightened Sexism

(Image from Bitch Magazine)

I chose to read this book after a classmate, Graicey (who has her own blog about feminism) couldn't  put it down while we were working on our English research papers last year. I asked for it for my birthday this past summer but got too bogged down to read it immediately, but when we were assigned over to read and review a book relevant to our blog, I knew exactly what I was doing.

Enlightened Sexism, by Susan J. Douglas, is based on the premise that women are shown as "having it all" in movies and TV shows, and therefore people think that feminism is outdated or unneeded. However, Douglas argues that the media overestimates how successful women are, and that people are ignoring the fact that sexism is still very much a real thing. "It's a powerful choke leash, letting women venture out, offering us fantasies of power, control, and love, and then pulling us back in" (17). The term "enlightened sexism" comes from the idea that people think they are somehow "above" or "past" sexism, so sexist jokes and stereotypes are being used as amusing or in a "wink wink, nudge nudge" way...when in fact, they're still sexist. It also examines the still-constant pressure that now along with powerful and accomplished, women still have to be beautiful. This is demonstrated through the exhaustive inspection of recent media, especially TV shows and occasionally magazines.

First off, you will find no argument from me about Douglas' ideas themselves; that should be obvious from the theme of this blog. She is also a very talented writer: able to be smart yet not condescending, not shying away from quoting or mocking vulgarities when the time calls for it, and switching effortlessly between colloquialisms and more academic writing. Overall, the style of her writing was an absolute pleasure to read.

However, it was how the ideas were presented that I had some issue with. Much of the book (the first half at least) was thus formatted– within each chapter, a TV show was introduced, summarized, and examined, and at the end the shows featured in the chapter were tied together and the "big ideas" were established. Many of the TV shows that Douglas talked about were from the 1990s. In the 90s, I was watching Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Whereas an older viewer who might have been more familiar with the shows may have skimmed the summaries, I had to slow down and  comprehend every single TV show and character mentioned. After awhile, having to try and read summary after summary, plotline after plotline got a bit dull. In fairness to Douglas, she was straddling a fine line– though the constant explanations clogged up the book a little, at the same time, leaving these out would leave readers in the dark when they weren't familiar with the material. The second portion of the book was a  more palatable examination of news media, but again focuses on the early 2000s when this is less relevant for my life. It became clear to me that this book was perhaps not intended for a seventeen-year-old, that the pop culture references were not over my head but before my time.

Having said that, Douglas's book is an awesome resource for anyone who wants a hard look at media and who is willing to reconsider just what is "feminism" as we know it– or as it has been presented to us.

United States on LGBT People Around the World

For the entirety of my blog, I have been playing a sort of game with myself– how long can I go without making a post about LGBT rights? I have finally lost, but perhaps my readers will find it a winning topic.

On December 6th, President Obama issued a memorandum with seven points on protecting LGBT rights abroad, saying that gay rights were an important part of human rights and stating that they were a major part of the human rights and foreign policies of the United States. A short time after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a speech in Switzerland to celebrate December 10th, which marks both Human Rights Day and the signing of the Geneva Convention. She expanded upon President Obama's memo and also announced that the U.S. is making a $3 million "global equality fund" to support organizations who advance these goals around the world.

(Fun fact, which I didn't know before looking at Sec. Clinton's speech: Before the 6-3 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, there were still "sodomy laws" in place in thirteen states. Oh yeah, that was in 2003. 2003!)

The response to this speech was overwhelmingly positive. Dan Savage, creator of the "It Gets Better" campaign (and admittedly under fire for some controversial remarks about trans*-people) echoed the sentiments of many LGBT activists when he said "The check I was planning to write to Obama's reelection campaign just acquired another zero." Joe Solomonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights organization, said that "Today's actions by President Obama make clear that the United States will not turn a blind eye when governments commit or allow abuses to the human rights of LGBT people." Clearly, some big names in LGBT rights are really happy about this new development in gay rights and foreign policy.

The favorable reaction shocked me. Sure, I'm glad that our administration is paying attention to human rights and gay people. But it seemed to me to be kind of a backhanded move concerning domestic politics. Remember, folks, President Obama supports civil unions, not same-sex marriage. This seemed like an almost hypocritical way for Obama to pander to the LGBT crowd without actually taking any decisive stance on the freedoms of his own citizens. The more that I think about it, of course this action is going to be popular– few people are going to say that they think defending human rights is a bad thing. But it really rubs me the wrong way to see an inconsistency between actions at home and abroad, especially when it is so obviously a tactic to get gays to the polls.

I hope that if President Obama is elected for a second term, he will take a more decisive stance on the rights of LGBT people in America.

"Happy Holidays!"

Recently, I turned on the radio in my car, and something compelled me to turn on 93.9 FM, which around my parts is Lite FM. This station is not on my regular presets, but it is one click away from 94.3, which I call Jesus Radio. In between songs, I heard a prerecorded message that said something along the lines of, "From all of us at Lite FM, have a Happy Holidays!"

I actually said out loud, "I am so sure."

I found it ironic that a station that makes a point to play nonstop Christmas music would still say "Happy Holidays." Perhaps I missed something on their website?

It's even on their Google result!

This perhaps-mildly-amusing anecdote hopefully provides a segue into the idea that Christmas in America has really become more of a commercial or secular holiday than a religious one, and this really freaks some people out. Securalization of the season has even been called the "War on Christmas." The timeline for the Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays debate is difficult, because there are Christians who say "Merry Christmas" as a first instinct, Christians who say "Happy Holidays" to try and be inclusive, and there are Christians who say "Merry Christmas" with secularization in mind who are purposefully trying to "Keep the 'Christ in Christmas'" or something of the sort.

As it turns out, around 60% of surveyed Americans prefer "Merry Christmas" to 23%'s "Happy Holidays, although when given an option, 45% said it didn't matter. The results followed along age, party, and religious lines, with older people, Republicans, and Evangelical Christians more likely to be supportive of "Merry Christmas" or public displays of religious symbols (although even President Bush wished people a "Happy Holidays" in office). One author quoted in The Huffington Post suggested saying "Merry Christmas" where the vast majority of people are Christian and "Happy Holidays" in more diverse areas.

Yes, the majority of Americans are Christian. But as one 2004 Reason Magazine blogger put it, instead of complaining about secularization, "the answer is in giving more time and attention to religious and charitable activities, not in demanding more Christian symbolism at the place where you shop. Macy's is not a temple." Indeed, the effort in "Happy Holidays"– in what some people perceive as a culture war –is not to belittle or take away Christmas from Christians. The effort is to try and recognize and account for the one-quarter of Americans who aren't Christian.

I identify as Christian and even I find this a little ridiculous. Christians are hardly an oppressed minority in America. We saw it recently with Rick Perry's infamous and homophobic advertisement, in which he proudly stated that "I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a Christian." Big deal! Although he said this before the Rick Perry spot came out (which may be a testament to the extent and ridiculousness of Christians' perceived oppression in America) I think Jon Stewart put this one best– "Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe — dare I dream it? — maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively."

And to all my readers, Happy Holidays.