Thought That Came Unbidden

Political discourse in America is at a frightening crossroads, and as a people we’ve been standing in the intersection turning the map this way and that trying to figure out which way to go for quite some time now. This is not news. I am not the first person to point this out. Liberal pundits and actual journalists point this out on a regular basis multiple times a day.

And even though I’m not involved in the townhall fracases that the media have been orgasming over all summer, I still find myself affected by this creeping paralysis of thought. It’s hard not to be. I work for a progressive environmental organization, “my” party is in power in both the executive and legislative branches of the Federal government, and DC is flooded, much as it was in the mid-90s, with the young and the enthusiastic who want to change the world for the betterment of all not just for the betterment of the white, middle-class, and heterosexual. It should be a great time. Yet that closed mindedness that has lead to fist fights, shouting matches, and, at one recent meeting, the loss of body parts isn’t just happening on the right. There is a pervasive undercurrent, at least among the progressives I know, that people who disagree with them aren’t to be trusted. The problem, rightly unpacked into the three Ls (labels, lifestyle, and listening), boils down to one of time. All of the labels, all of the technology, allow us to short-cut the opinion forming process. They, plus party affiliation, are the moral equivalent of TV dinners in a world that requires slow-cooked, gourmet meals. Since identifying the problem is but the first step toward a solution I’ve been wondering:

What is the best way to maintain an open mind?

In his article on CNN.com Rudy Ruiz recommends the following:

For starters, we should eschew the notion that changing our minds is a character flaw. To the contrary, experts believe it’s a manifestation of higher intelligence. Renowned psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote in “Irrationality,” his seminal 1992 book: “The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.”

To further free our minds, we should aggressively treat the three Ls:

Let’s lose the labels: from “flip-flopper” to “commie,” from “fear-monger” to “right-wing nut job.” Trash the diatribe; mull the ideas.

Let’s engage in some constructive lifestyle management, slowing down to ponder — and make independent decisions — as enlightened people. We cannot allow the technological evolution to rob us of the intellectual strides of the American Revolution.

We must value the art of listening, reflection, comparative analysis, and civil discourse if we’re to make the most of our democracy. In the process, we should signal to leaders that we’re willing to expand our horizons beyond party lines. Maybe they’ll get in front of our parade, collaborating for a change.

Let’s request a second opinion and listen to each other. Switch channels. Visit different Web sites. Read a newspaper, while we can still find one. How about stepping into a town hall with an open mind, prepared to converse with people hailing from diverse circumstances? A range of perspectives enriches our viewpoint, empowering us to craft nuanced responses to complex situations.

Ultimately, we must stop thinking that the only thing to think is what we’ve thought all along. As we learn more about multifaceted matters, our positions should evolve accordingly. Let’s accept that it’s OK to change your minds.

Most of this is good advice. I’d argue that the polarization of debate has so infected the media that it is impossible to find anything of value from media outlets that you aren’t already inclined to browse (honestly: if you normally get your news from Rachel Maddow watching Glenn Beck isn’t going to inform, it’s just going to raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels).

But Ruiz hits on something when he writes that we should slow down, that we should take time to listen and reflect. What he misses is the examination of existing opinions and beliefs and our commitment to them even without new facts. Take for example this meme that has been going around the progressive circles in which I run:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. (RT if you agree)

This is something that I both retweeted and posted to my Facebook status yesterday. It’s a concept that I happen to agree with and it’s one that I believe is based on compassion. Yet there arises the question: At what point do your poor lifestyle choices – alcohol abuse, drug use, poor nutrition, lack of exercise to name a few – that adversely affect your health cease to be the object of compassion and become solely your problem?

A more pointed example is this poster pressuring President Obama to take action on AIDS. The group behind these posters, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation states that their mission is to “rid the world of HIV/AIDS.” Not knowing that, though, let’s unpack this poster and how it works.

It’s easy to see that it plays on a particular progressive – because yes, there are people out there “on the right” who believe that New Orleans, and its people, got what it deserved – mindset that sees the massive government corruption and institutional racism that was manifest in how Dubya’s administration handled the disaster that was Katrina. And it’s easy to let that knee-jerk feeling of agreement wash over you. Yet, the two situations, when you slow down and examine them aren’t the same at all.

Katrina was a natural disaster. Its path and course measurable and vaguely predictable. A lot of the ramifications of Katrina – the flooding, the wind damage – were foreseeable (New Orleans is, after all, below sea level), and a lot of the problems that afflicted the people of New Orleans during and directly after the storm hit are a direct result of living in poverty. But the reality is that we could have done absolutely nothing to stop the storm, or the flooding, or any of the other physical damage that happened as a result of Katrina. The only thing better handling of the situation could have done was mitigate the effects on the people. The same is not true of AIDS.

Standing on a street on August 29, 2005 you could not have died of AIDS in New Orleans. The same can not be said of exposure to Katrina. Even though poverty does have a detrimental affect on education about AIDS, outreach in DC is pervasive and has been for the past 20 years. Free HIV screening is readily available as are the best identified means to prevent infection. The people flattened by Katrina didn’t have a lot of choice; it’s not as if they could have said “No, I choose not to participate in this hurricane. Let’s go outside and play some frisbee in our nice, sunny bubble while the storm rages around us.” Nearly all of whether or not you get AIDS is under your control.

These situations aren’t even marginally comparable. So why as a person who subscribes to the progressive view point that Katrina was badly handled am I expected to automatically believe and support the idea that “AIDS is DC’s Katrina?” The answer is I shouldn’t be, but that’s what the labeled viewpoint would have me do.

As a total sidebar I’d like to propose a corollary in progressive circles to Godwin’s Law: When you have to resort to invoking Katrina, you’re essentially saying that you have not thought out your argument.

The only real way to know what I think is to actually think it myself. Not to let any pundit or reporter, no matter how cute, or politician, no matter how charismatic, think it for me. Key to that is sitting down and figuring out what exactly it is I actually believe on a variety of issues. Until I know that, how can I know if I agree or disagree with what someone else is saying?

I love watching Rachel Maddow. Not just because she’s not hard on the eyes and not just because she’s, well, butch enough. I love watching Rachel Maddow because she thinks and that makes me think and while I generally agree with her political position, sometimes the things I think are contrary to what I get the feeling I should be thinking as a “good liberal.”

Since I stopped getting the daily paper I’m cut off from a lot of news so I find that I need a good, heavy dose of what’s going on “out there” to stay informed. Maddow’s show gives me that. Yet, I was shocked to learn last week that the “birthers” – you know, those people who don’t believe that Obama is eligible to be President because he wasn’t born in the U.S. – are still alive and kicking. Not only are they alive and kicking, they seem to be gaining some traction.

Part and parcel of how conservative pundits are talking about the real issue – which is not Obama’s birth place or eligibility for the presidency but his race – is to latch on to the Gates arrest in Massachusetts and to Justice Sotomayor’s comments about how race plays a factor in a judge’s ability to make decisions. And it’s getting ugly. Really ugly. So ugly, in fact, that Rush Limbaugh flat out called Barack Obama an oreo – a black person who “acts white;” oreo is a charge frequently leveled by poor, supposedly more authentic, blacks at middle class blacks who do things like maintain stable family relationships and encourage their children to get good grades and go to college – on the air.

And the liberal position still is stupidly, blindly, that racism is entirely the fault of “whites.” Why do I say this? Well, mostly because I’ve been thinking about this segment from Maddow’s July 29, 2009 show where she talked to Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who is an Associate Professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, about what is fueling the race debate in America and how conservative politicos might try to tap “white outrage” over loss of racial privilege. Watch the whole segment or just watch the excerpt where Prof. Harris-Lacewell proffers her theory on the differences between the perceptions of blacks and whites in America. [Read more…] about Justify my outrage

Memory is a funny thing. Some memories stick with us for the longest time taking us right back to the moment they were formed complete with joy, desire, rage, shame or humiliation, or whatever emotion characterized the event. Memories like that you actually feel rather than just recall. Some memories age with time getting soft and fuzzy, and often more palatable as we get farther and farther from the actual event. Our subsequent life experience shaves the sharp edges off these memories, curling them like photographs printed on cheap paper. And then there are the memories that don’t really have to do with experiences but with people and how we recall them, memories that are formed either by repeated or singular exposure that fix your perception of someone.

Enduring memory hangs on to details that were present – like needing to lose a few pounds or having long hair – when you were regularly interacting with someone. Even if you see someone after a key detail has changed, on your subsequent meetings the fact of that change will still come as a shock, for a while anyway, because that change conflicts with your enduring memory and you no longer have that regular exposure to reenforce that this person weighs less or now has short hair. I’ve had three encounters with enduring memory recently, and only two of them were about getting older.

Wait, she’s doing what?

My aunt has a best friend. This best friend has a husband. The husband has a company that buys season tickets to the Washington Nationals. Not all of these tickets go to clients. The best friend asked my aunt if I would be interested in tickets to any games. While picking up these tickets from my aunt I inquired about the best friend and her family and how everyone was doing. Turns out everyone is fine and that C., the best friend’s youngest, is now living in a trendy part of town and working as a bartender at an even trendier restaurant while she waits to hear about graduate school.

My enduring memory of this now at least 21 year-old is as a fussy about 8 year-old kid who didn’t like brown mustard and really wasn’t keen on eating the roll and could we just please give her the hot dog and some ketchup thank you very much. A benign encounter with enduring memory, the kind that comes with age and is perfectly natural.

Yes, we are all about to hit 40

No way to hide it: my high school graduating class, those of us that survived this long, is turning 40 this year in one massive wave.

We are the last gasp of the 1960s, post-“summer of love”, post-Prague Spring and assassinations and the Democratic National Convention, post-riots, post-White Album and Elvis’ first “comeback” special, and, really, post the naive idea that the world can be changed just by refusing to participate in the existing paradigm. We were born with the Stonewall riots, the moon landing, Woodstock, and Altamont. And we are getting middle-aged spread.

I’m on Facebook and I’ve reconnected with some of my 743 classmates there. If you’re not familiar with Facebook you might not know that you get to post a profile picture. Most people are pretty good about posting something (moderately) recent but to maximize recognition in these 50px x 50px photos, most people have chosen a close-up, face filling the frame and showing as much detail as possible. One of my friends who did this posted some photos from her recent vacation and it was something of a shock. See, her cheeks have always been a little chubby which is why the profile picture was no big deal; hell, we all carried a little baby fat in our faces even at 18, but the shock for me was to learn that at 40 she seems to have picked up all the weight I’ve lost since high school. Again, a moderately benign encounter with enduring memory that comes with age and is, in many ways, just as natural as the one that made me realize that yes, I’m getting older. Only with this one, it turns out I’m not getting older as fast as I thought.

And why didn’t the divorce challenge my enduring memory of you?

People’s identities shift over time. This is a fact. But lately the shifts have started to seem less like natural growth and more like “do you want to buy a some ocean front property in Phoenix Arizona” tectonics. See, a friend of mine after 16 years of marriage and a moderately easy divorce has decided in her 40s that “now was the time to really investigate this and explore being a lesbian.”

Hold the phone…what?

Yes, coming out of the closet in your 40s will have a tendency to mess with my enduring memory of you, particularly when you have a five year-old kid and have been either married or getting divorced the entire 15 years I’ve known you.

After I got over the spit take, and got over the flash of anger at the phrasing and my own prejudices – investigate and explore all you like but some of us have to live here -  and over a slight bit of envy – my friend is what is euphemistically referred to in personal ads here as a “professional lesbian” and I am, well, not, which means she’ll have a significantly easier time socially than I did – and after I got over wanting to point out to her that the state in which she lives is probably, outside the true Southern Bible Belt, the least likely to overlook a same sex relationship when it comes to child custody, and got over the impulse to say to her “Look, I get that busting down the closet door is all exciting and scary and transgressive and everything and while you are in for a very interesting time, after a couple of years if this is truly who you are it is going to cease to be a big deal so just chill already, OK?” I started to wonder why this fundamental change in her identity was such a shock, such a blow to my enduring memory of her when her divorce was so easy to accept when her marriage was just as long-standing a part of her as her previous heterosexuality.

Perhaps it’s because divorce is common, or maybe it’s because I didn’t actually like her husband; he was one of those men who acted as if he was the most virile, attractive man on the planet and of course he was going to refuse your advances but thank you for asking sweetie. Or maybe it’s because marriage is a choice not a fundamental part of who you are. Or maybe it’s because while I can appreciate that Hugh Jackman isn’t hard on the eyes, my sexuality isn’t so fluid as to want to get up close and personal with him and I have difficulty understanding how if that wasn’t  what you really wanted you could go through the motions for so long. All I know for sure is that my enduring memory of her just melted like the Wicked Witch of the West.

And maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s time to try and make those enduring memories disappear and be more in the now. Either way, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

I’m not a big fan of Starbucks – the coffee is both overpriced and bad – but every now and then I find myself adjacent to one and in need of a snack. Rather than get a 400 or 500 calorie “creme” Frappucino^® (no coffee in those), I tend to indulge myself with a slice of iced lemon pound cake (which, oddly, isn’t listed on the web site’s nutritional information but I doubt that it has fewer than the 330 calories (110 from fat) that a slice of marble pound cake has). This week I noticed something interesting.

The made from 100% unbleached paper with 20% post-consumer recycled content bag that my slice of pound cake was delivered in also included verbiage about how Starbucks had “removed the artificial trans fats, artificial flavors, artificial dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup” from their food products. My first thought was: does that mean all that crap has been in their food all along? My second thought was: what’s the profit motive?

See, Starbucks is a company that doesn’t do anything unless it’s going to turn them a bigger profit. So how has Howard Schultz figured out a way to make taking artificial crap out of his company’s cakes and cookies a financial win because he’s sure not doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

High-fructose corn syrup gets a lot of the blame for America’s obesity epidemic. Sometime in the late 1970s soft drink and other processed food producers figured out they could save a few pennies per unit if they switched from actual sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. And they were right. The other thing that the switch, which they have not made in Europe where Coke and Pepsi are both still made with sugar, allowed particularly soft drink producers to do was move more product.

See, high-fructose corn syrup does this sneaky thing in your body: it doesn’t digest chemically like the sugar your mouth tastes it as. Your body when it processes this additive treats it like undigestible vegetable matter. So while high-fructose corn syrup has the same number of calories as sugar, your brain doesn’t get the message that you’ve consumed those calories and the chemical trigger that says “full now, stop eating” doesn’t fire. This allows you to drink more soda, and consume way more calories than your body needs, while still not feeling satisfied, hence the term “empty calories.”

Having just spent two weeks in Europe eating every single meal out at a restaurant I can tell you that while this additive – which is in everything from soda to bread (as a preservative) – does play a big role in our every widening ass problem, mostly it’s the size of the portions we get, and make for ourselves, that are the biggest problem.

Italy is the land of meals in courses: antipasto, primo piatto, secondo piatto, contorni, dolce and café. That’s potentially five courses at one dinner sitting, and not as uncommon as you would think but it’s the size that really matters. Antipasto is maybe 3/4 of an ounce of prosciutto crudo with a slice of cantaloupe, or a medium sized tomato with the same amount of fresh mozzarella. Your first plate is pasta or risotto, probably no more than 1/3 of a cup, lightly sauced. Your second plate is meat or fish, generally not more than two to three ounces. Contorni is some kind of vegetable, green beans or verdura alla griglia (grilled eggplant, zucchini, carrots, and some times arugula, all sliced as thin as paper and no more than a two to three ounces total). And your dolce is small as is your café.

In an American restaurant, you couldn’t eat like this for less than 5,000 or 6,000 calories. Hell, Livestrong.com says there are 2,310 calories in the Bloomin Onion at Outback Steakhouse. That’s your daily calorie allowance and then some just for your appetizer (aka: antipasto) course. Even some of the items on Ruby Tuesday’s “smart choices” menu have upwards of 450 calories per serving (pdf). So, does it really matter what’s in our food if we’re eating double or even triple our recommended daily allowance of calories in one meal? I’m thinking not.

And that leads me back to my original question about Starbucks and ingredients: real ingredients, sugar, fresh tomatoes, real berries, all of these things cost more money to procure and use. The spoilage rate is higher which means you’re not only spending more on the ingredients you are, in the long run, getting less out of them. The only way I can see that Starbucks is going to make money off this move is to make the portion sizes smaller. And really, that’s a good thing.