NaBloPoMo 2011

I saw an interesting thing coming into work this morning: a small Chinese woman taking a picture of a parking sign with her cell phone.

What made this interesting wasn’t that she was cursing in Chinese (at least I assume she was cursing), nor was it that difference between her high and the height of the sign made for a visually comic juxtaposition, nor was it the fact that after she was done taking her photograph she got into the parked vehicle, a white Cadillac Escalade, one of the largest SUVs on the market. No, what made this amusing was she took the photograph to prove she’d parked legally yet the image provided no context of her vehicle parked by the sign.

The national dialogue about controversial issues often frustrates me largely because it lacks context. No framing is given, no background, just the facts of a single, specific instance which is then used by whatever commentator is presenting the story to frame a position on an issue that likely affects many people in different ways. But thinking about context makes me wonder about moral relativism.

A new(ish) study by the Pew Research Center gives a detailed age breakdown of the American electorate on a number of issues including whether or not our nation’s values have changed.

Pew concluded, “Among Millennials, only 54% say the change in moral values has been for the worse. This compares with 70% of Gen Xers, 77% Boomers and 78% of Silents. Millennials are twice as likely as Xers to say the change in moral values has been for the better (19% vs. 9%), and they are more than three times as likely as Boomers and Silents to view this change positively.”

Conservatives look at this, and at Lost in Transition
The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, a recent book detailing the results of a survey of young adults (18-23), and claim this means that younger people have no fixed idea of morality.

And I can see where conservatives might look at the Pew survey’s results on moral issues and conclude that anything goes for the Millenial generation. On specific social issue questions Pew writes,

“As discussed in Sections 1 and 4, different generations of Americans have starkly different views on some of the social changes occurring in the country today. That’s particularly the case when it comes to trends related to diversity, homosexuality, and secularism.”

While Millennials tend to take a more liberal position on most social issues, this is not universally true. Most notably, there is no significant generational difference on one of the most divisive issues in the nation: abortion rights.”

 

 

 

 

No survey can speak for everyone in a given age group. The generational voting history outlined in the Pew study certainly doesn’t reflect me for my age cohort. And yes, there are certain things that are always wrong; child p0rn springs immediately to mind as a prima facie example.

But maybe what those who don’t want to dig into the details see as “moral relativism” is just the manifestation of the idea that what is subject to fixed morality is a lot narrower than it was even 20 years ago and that many issues dubbed “immoral” really only need context to be seen in a different light.

They say the first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have a problem. I have a problem: I’ve got a raging case of “I’ll read that eventually”-itis.

By no means am I a hoarder. I just get behind in my reading. Life takes over, something moderately decent shows up on TV, I stupidly take a very badly constructed design class which takes twice as long as it should each week, and I get behind. Yeah, I’ll generally read something when it shows up but the fact is that if I set something aside I’m probably not going to read it anytime within the natural lifespan of the material. So, I’ll put it aside.

And it stays aside until the pile of aside gets to big, or is too inconveniently placed and I move it somewhere out of sight…and then I forget about it. Sometimes years pass before I get back to said stack of reading material. If you look at the 30lbs of assorted periodicals I put in the recycling bin this afternoon 2005 was my lost year for The Utne Reader and 2010 was my lost year for Wired.

I have to say in my own defense that I don’t save things randomly or just by chronology. The copies of The Utne Reader that went into the bin all had articles about happiness, focus, or serenity on their covers. In order to keep from becoming a hoarder there’s no question six year-old magazines need to go.

The thing of it is, I hesitated when I dropped into the recycle bin those magazines purporting to detail the secret to happiness or the way to find more focus and purpose in your life. What if they do have the secret to happiness? What if they can help me find more focus, more time, more energy, more creativity?

As they dropped from my hand my rational mind kicked in: if those secrets had been found and published, wouldn’t they be all over the Internet by now?

The only good thing about this is that by clearing up and cleaning out I have a chance to start over. I have a chance to reduce every time a magazine comes up for renewal. How often to you get a new chance on a regular basis?

TGF is a bit of a data geek and she’s turning me into a bit of a data geek. This is not a bad thing necessarily.

So, that job I hate? Yeah…according to figures from the Census Bureau for 2010, and according to this handy calculator based on those figures, it puts me in the top 6% of earners in the United States.

How is that even possible? Given the imbalance in weath distribution in this country and given the fact that my skills are of no real, practical value (seriously, in a survival economy knowing how plumbing works rates a lot higher than understanding website Information Architecture), what does that say in my little microcosm about how things are for most people in the U.S. ?

These figures stun and scare me and I don’t know what do to about them. Impoverishing myself won’t help the masses, and it’s become abudantly clear after nearly 7 months in the Fed that change from the inside is not possible.

Something’s got to give, though. I just don’t know what.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did a random act of kindness for a stranger this evening.   I found someone’s Federal ID badge, her contracting company ID badge, and authorization card to move equipment around her agency, and an RSA key, the kind that auto generates a really long random number so you can securely login to a protected network.

After going around a couple of times with the guy on the other end of the “Please call if found” number about how I didn’t think the Post Office would be willing to deliver all of this stuff, he finally agreed to meet me on the corner outside the building the ID granted access to.  It was a nice fall day and I needed the walk.  Plus, with the time change this weekend it’s probably the last time I’ll walk out of my office in the daylight for a while.

All this is by way of saying, I realize this is a crappy entry but sometimes life intervenes.