Half Changed World

I’m not the only one for whom "For we were strangers in the land of Egypt" is resonating particularly loudly this year.

• Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
• Passover in Spanish — in the Streets of America

Jews in America are not as solidly left as they once were, but most are pro-immigration, both because many of us are not that many generations removed from the immigrant experience (both my grandmothers came to this country as children), and because we know that thousands — maybe tens of thousands, maybe more — of the six million might have survived if America and other countries had been willing to let them in.

Or as Marge Piercy writes in a poem that was read at many seders tonight:

"We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes
under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours
raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed
tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,

who walked into the strange and became strangers
and gave birth to children who could look down
on them standing on their shoulders for having
been slaves. We honor those who let go of everything
but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought,
who became other by saving themselves."

My favorite quote in this morning’s Washington Post article on the politics of immigration is the one from Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza:  "I’m not sure anybody totally understands this phenomenon. . . . But we are happily stunned."  NCLR is the biggest Latino advocacy organization in the country, and I’m sure they’d love to claim credit for the mass demonstrations against the House’s harsh anti-immigrant bill, but they can’t.  It seems to be a combination of Spanish-language radio, churches (and the Church), charitable organizations, and genuine grassroots activism.

Meanwhile one of my friends is wondering whether her Irish-Jewish son is going to fail 8th grade because he’s been joining in the mass student protests.  (Arlington schools have been taking a hard line, saying that absences will be treated as unexcused even with parental permission.)   She’s simultaneously worried about him and proud as can be that he’s standing up for what he believes in.  And, by all accounts, these protests were totally student-organized, by IM, mySpace, and cell phones, with no adult involvement.

I’ll be looking closely at the deal that Senate leaders cut today to see what I think of it.  I think there are a lot of valid competing desires — wanting to be a land of opportunity, but not wanting to depress low-skilled workers wages’, wanting to minimize disruption in people’s lives, but not wanting to penalize those who played by the rules.

And I’m thinking about trying to juggle my schedule for Monday afternoon so I can join the march on the mall.

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

I’ve been reading JT Waldman’s graphic novel of the Megillat Esther, the book of the bible that we read at Purim (discovered via the Velveteen Rabbi).  It’s reminded me of what a very strange story it is.  There’s an old joke that all Jewish holidays can be summed up as "They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat."  That’s certainly the heart of the Purim story, with the added vengeful twist that Haman falls into his own trap, and is killed on the gallows he had prepared for Mordechai and that the Jews fall upon their oppressors, killing tens of thousands.

The Purim story has been racing around my head the past few days, bouncing up against the news of Slobodan Milosevic’s death, and the possibility of the judge calling off the Moussaoui trial.   While we like to think of "law’ and "justice" as synonyms, they’re really not.  And sometimes following the rule of law means that evil people will get off.   It stinks, but it’s better than the alternatives.

God is never mentioned in the Megillat Esther. There’s no promise here of infaliable judgment in a world to come.  All we’ve got is this world, full of drunken kings, conniving queens, and scheming counselors.

When I took the intro to women’s studies class in college, Betty Friedan was hardly mentioned.  To the extent that she was discussed, she was mostly dismissed for focusing exclusively on the needs of straight, white, middle-class women.  To some degree, the problem was that she had succeeded so well — to my generation of younhg women, the idea that anyone would take satisfaction in gleaming floors was pretty much incomprehensible, so her insights seemed obvious.

And yet, here I am, in 2006, writing on a semi-regular basis about who vacuums the floor and picks up the dirty socks.  In some ways the world has been radically transformed since in 1963; in other ways, not so much.

Last month, Sandy at the imponderabilia of actual life wondered whether yesterday’s "housewives" are the same as today’s "SAH-moms."  I do think, for better or worse, the feminist revolution made it harder for women to take pride in a well-kept house.  But, in a world where children’s success can’t be taken for granted, regardless of their parents’ situation, investing time and effort in childrearing makes more sense.

The problem, however, is that childrearing is much less predictable than housecleaning.  Housecleaning is sometimes tiring, often boring, always repetitive.  But you can pretty much guarantee that if you put in the effort, you’ll get the results.  There’s something satisfying about knowing that. (I can’t be the only one who scrubs the stove or the tub when angry or frustrated.)  Childrearing is ultimately not predictable in the same way.

The story of the miners killed in the West Virginia mine accident this week would have been sad in any case, but it’s made macabre by the terrible miscommunication that led the families to believe for several hours that 12 of the 13 miners had been found alive, rather than just the lone surviver.  Every time I walked through the lobby of my office building today, the USA Today headline "Alive" jumped out at me.

As it happens, for several weeks I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Melissa Fay Greene’s Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster while I exercise.  I picked it up a while back at a library sale, knowing nothing of the disaster, but willing to give anything Greene wrote a try having read Praying for Sheetrock.  She describes the terrible collapse of an entire mine that happened in Nova Scotia in 1958 and the experiences of two small groups of miners that miraculously survived the "bump."  They were trapped underground without light, food, or water for a week before the miners on the surface were able to dig down to them.

Listening to a book on tape slows it down for me, and makes the images linger.  I know that mines have changed a great deal over the last half century (although maybe not enough), but I can’t help imagining the scene in Tallmansville as much like that described by Greene in Spring Hill.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families.

I’m sure everyone in New York is relieved that the transit strike has been settled.  The buses and trains should be running by tomorrow morning.

The blogs that I read have generally been supportive of the striking transit workers, strongly so in the case of landismom and Lindsay Beyerstein, moderately so for Laura at 11d.  By contrast, my family in NYC had very little sympathy for the strike, even though they’re generally liberal and pro-union.  They argued (and I agree) that it was the working class  — who don’t have the option of telecommuting, who don’t get paid if they can’t make it to work, and for whom the cost of a taxi is a significant portion of a day’s wages — who bore the brunt of the shutdown. 

In weighing whether the TWU demands are reasonable, a key issue is whether you’re comparing them to an abstract ideal of what workers should received or to the wages and benefits that other workers actually receive.  Because I don’t think anyone is disputing that their retirement and health package is more generous than most workers receive today, especially when compared to other jobs that don’t require college degrees.   And, just as low-income workers often get hostile when welfare recipients get benefits they don’t, lots of people are angry at the transit workers for asking to be able to retire at 50.

Retirement benefits are a particularly tricky issue, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that both the private and public sector vastly underestimated the real costs of the pension promises that they made during the last 30 or so years.  Negotiators saw pensions as a cheap concession to make, because they didn’t have immediate cost impacts.  Now that the law requires companies — and is about to require governments as well — to calculate the real costs of their future obligations, they’re in trouble.  A lot of companies are dealing with it by ducking out of their promises — either converting to defined payment plans instead of defined benefit plans, or just dumping the whole mess in the government’s lap. 

Governments — and quasi-governmental entities like the MTA — tend not to weasel out completely, but they’re in a fix too.  While I’m not a fan of two-tier benefit systems that treat workers differently depending on when they’re hired, I’m not sure what the alternative is if we don’t want to change the rules on current workers in midstream, but also don’t want to be tied forever to unwise decisions that we made 30 years ago.

I keep thinking that I’ve achieved a level of cynicism such that I won’t be shocked by anything our government can do, but then I discover that I’m wrong.   We’re just supposed to trust the President when he says that the illegal wiretaps were so time sensitive that they couldn’t be brought before the secret court that could have approved them.  I’m not all that surprised to learn that the President was sleeping through 10th grade American Government when they covered checks and balances, but I can’t believe that no one in the Administration seems to have noticed (or had the guts to point this out to him). 

Meanwhile I’ve been spending much of the weekend hitting refresh on my computer, checking CQ.com and the Congressional websites, trying to figure out what exactly is in the budget reconciliation bill that Congress is about to pass.  It appears that some version of welfare reauthorization is in there, but the details are extremely murky.  And, as the Center on Budget and Policy Prioirities points out, even the members of Congress themselves are likely to get the actual bill text — hundreds of pages of it — only shortly before they’re asked to vote on it.

So what do you think is in those pokes?

Today’s book is Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female In The US Army, by Kayla Williams.  This insta-memoir is Williams’ account of her year serving in Iraq as an Arabic-speaking military intelligence soldier. 

I first heard of the book through a fairly negative review from Debra Dickerson on Salon.  Their site pass system is broken tonight, so I can’t look it up to quote it, but Dickerson basically says that Williams is whiny and compares the book unfavorably with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead.  Yes, Jarhead is a better written book, brutal, elegant and hallucinatory by turns.  Swofford has serious literary ambitions — he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and has the advantage of writing 10 years after his military service.  Twenty years from now, I’ll guess that people will still be reading Jarhead, while they’ll have long forgotten Love My Rifle.

But that doesn’t mean that Love My Rifle More Than You isn’t worth reading.  Williams’ prose isn’t memorable, but it’s servicable, and she shares experiences that are worth hearing about.  She writes about the constant sexual harrassment and a near-rape by one of her fellow soldiers, about the ambiguity of the Army’s relationship with the Iraqi people, about her quest for vegetarian MREs, and about how some female soldiers use their gender to get out of unpleasant tasks.  She writes about her brief involvement with interrogation of prisoners.   There’s material in the book to discomfit both supporters and opponents of using women in combat roles, and both should read the book.

Yes, the book is whiny at times.  Williams sounds surprised that her armpits and groin chafe in the desert heat, that her commanding officers sometimes give her stupid orders that risk her life.  She doesn’t seem to have read Catch-22, let alone Jarhead.  (By contrast, Swofford never is surprised by any degree of official stupidity.)  But ultimately the book reads like Williams is sitting down and telling you what it was like.  And I was happy to spend a few hours in her company.

My husband once told me that he knew he needed to get out of his job when he could look at a Dilbert cartoon and wonder where the joke was.

Lily Tomlin once said "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."  When that doesn’t sound even vaguely like a joke, you know we’re all in trouble.

Today’s evidence:

• Mr. Orwell goes to Washington.
• Pat Robertson says Dover PA "voted God out of your city."
• Morning after pill decision "unusual."
• NYTimes says Administration is hoping Katrina victims will "simply give up and go away."

Tomlin’s right.  I can’t keep up.

I’ve signed up with several organizations, so I get multiple "action alerts" in my inbox every week, urging me to email or call elected officials about some issue or another.  After a while, in spite of my good intentions, I find myself tuning them out, tired of the constant alarmism and feeling like my input isn’t going to matter anyway.  I suspect many of you feel the same way.

But I just sent off an email to my Representative, and I’m going to urge anyone reading this to do so as well.  Congress is in the middle of considering a massive budget reconciliation bill that has all sorts of nasty surprises tucked away in it.  Some of these are purely designed to save money by cutting programs that mostly serve the poor (Food Stamps, Child Support Enforcement, Medicaid), while others are included because the reconciliation act is a "must-pass" bill and can’t be filibustered in the Senate, so it’s a good way to force through things that couldn’t pass as stand-alone proposals (like drilling in ANWR). 

The House was supposed to vote on it today, but the Republican leadership postponed the vote because they didn’t think they had enough votes to win.  They’re going to spend the weekend trying to cut deals and twist the arms of moderate Republicans to get them to go along.  (For once, the Dems are standing united.)  So it’s critically important that Representatives, especially those moderate Republicans, hear from their constituents about this bill.

So here’s a bunch of useful links:

• For the nitty-gritty about the budget proposal and how it would hurt the poor, the best source of information is the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
• For a progressively-slanted guide to the politics of the budget process, try Moving Ideas.
• Here’s a link for the "Emergency Campaign for America’s Priorities" which is a coalition of many of the major progressive advocacy organizations.
• And here’s an action alert from Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center.

Thanks.