Half Changed World

My almost-four-year-old saw the TurboTax boxes and asked "what’s that?"

"It’s a program for the computer to help us figure out our taxes." 

"What are taxes?"

Hmmm.  Most people would probably just have said something to the effect of whatever money you make, the government takes a piece of, and that’s taxes.  But being a person who believes that government is, by and large, a useful thing to have around, I didn’t want to leave my answer at that.  So I plunged ahead:

"Well, there are some things that everyone wants, but that are too expensive for anyone to buy by themselves.  Like roads.  Wouldn’t it be silly if you had your own road and I had my own road and daddy had his road, and they went the same place, and we didn’t share?  So instead, we all put our money together to build a road that we can all use, and that’s what taxes are."

Jen (who often comments here) asked me if I knew how the Boxing Day tsunami compares to other historical natural disasters in terms of the number of deaths.  Here’s the most comprehensive single list I was able to find, going as far back as an earthquake in 1201 AD.  Limiting it to the past 40 years or so, it looks like it falls third, behind only the 1970 cyclone that hit Bangladesh and the 1976 earthquake that hit China.  Wikipedia also has an entry on this, broken out by types of event.

For a different perspective, Nicholas Kristof points out in the New York Times that more people die every month of AIDS (240,000) and malaria (165,000) than died in the tsunami, and almost as many die of diarrhea (140,000).  But it’s hard to stay focused on unglamorous, persistent problems, and so kids die for lack of a few cents worth of oral rehydration salts, or bleach to purify their water.

I’d encourage everyone who is giving so generously to the victims of the tsunami to also consider giving unrestricted funds to an organization like CARE or Doctors without Borders to fight chronic disease and poverty. 

Moreover, a recent report from the UN Development Programme points out that most of the victims of "natural disasters" are also victims of poverty.  Poverty means that people live in places prone to flooding, earthquakes and mudslides, live in flimsier buildings, and so forth.  I’m not sure there’s any building code on earth that could have made much difference against the tsunami, but there’s a reason that similar size earthquakes kill tens of thousands of people in Iran, but only a few in California.

In looking around the blogosphere, I noticed several people wondering why the devastation of the tsunami didn’t get more coverage in the US media (specifically compared to 9/11, when all other stories disappeared from the news for days) and/or complaining that the news focused on the experience of Americans or Europeans, rather than the vast majority of the victims, who were Thai, Indian, Sri Lankan or Indonesian.  (Sorry, didn’t note the URLs and I can’t seem to find the posts again.)

I actually think it’s gotten a lot of media coverage compared to the "typical" third world natural disaster.  The sheer number of people killed and displaced is just mindboggling, but I don’t think that’s the primary reason it’s captured so many people’s imagination.  There’s something about the nature of a tsunami — both the way it comes without warning, and the way that its horror is unevenly distributed — so that there are survivors who witnessed its full fury, even as the people they were sitting with were killed.

Plus, the wide geographic distribution of its effects — and the many nationalities of the victims — means that a very large share of the world feels identified with some or all of the victims.  Someone I know online from Norway wrote recently that in a country of 4.5 million residents, there are about 500 Norwegians missing or known dead from the tsunami (Thailand is apparently a popular vacation destination), so everyone is no more than two degrees of separation away from someone affected.  That’s how New Yorkers felt after 9/11.

I’m horrified by the effects of the tsunami.  But I don’t think it makes me a terrible person to admit that I suspect I’d be more deeply affected if 130,000 people had been killed off the coast of New Jersey.  There’s a natural human tendency to be more affected by that which is closer.  When I visited India as a tourist several years ago, I was deeply disturbed by the huge contrasts of wealth and poverty.  And I found myself angry at well-off Indians for accepting it, because on some level I consider them more responsible for the well-being of their countrymen and women than I do well-off Americans.

I find myself circling back to Rabbi Hillel’s famous questions:

Im ayn ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

U’chseani latzmi, ma ani? If I am only for myself, what am I?

V’im lo achshav, eymatai? If not now, when?

Jen at Buddha Mama has a thoughtful new post about The Consequences of Choice.  In it, she writes:

"In general, I’m not trying to make the world do it my way. But if there is no validity to making choices and having opinions (and in occasionally stating such), then why make choices? If I thought your choices were just as good as mine, why would I make any of the choices that I am making (from stay-at-home parenting to co-sleeping to homeschooling, etc.)? If any of my opinions disagree with your own, then how can I not think that I am doing what I feel to be right?"

This struck me as a deeply important question, because it’s at the heart of what is sometimes called the "mommy wars."  Almost all parents believe that they are making the right choices, doing the best they can for their children.  Does that inherently mean that other parents, who make different choices, are doing the wrong thing?  If so, can we ever find common ground?

For many parenting choices — including such significant choices as at-home parenting v. child care, whether and how long to breastfeed, co-sleeping v. crying it out, how much television to permit — I truly believe that there isn’t a single right choice for all parents and all children.  Parental and child personality, family expectations, health conditions, economic circumstances, all come together in different ways to result in different outcomes.

At the same time, I’m not going to say that I think all parenting choices are equally valid.  Whether reading my email lists and various blogs, or watching people with their kids on the subway, I often see people treating their children in ways that I think are short-sighted, selfish, lazy, or downright wicked. 

But I keep my opinions to myself, unless someone explicitly asks for them.  (I’ve never been in the position where I felt that a child’s safety was threatened by my inaction.)  I am constantly amazed by the number of people who feel compelled to share their opinions on everything from what babies are eating to how warmly they’re dressed.  In Carolyn Hax’s online chat last Friday, she responded to a woman who stated that she has become a "pariah" in her town for choosing to keep the baby she is carrying as a result of having been raped.  That’s not a choice I can imagine making.  But I also can’t imagine what would compel someone to make that woman’s life one bit harder than it already is. 

I honestly don’t understand what their motivation is.  Do they really think that someone’s choice regarding such an intimate decision is going to be changed by the unsolicited advice of a stranger on the street?  Or are they just making themselves feel virtuous and competent by finding someone who is struggling to compare themselves to?

The opposite of judgment is empathy.  I can glare at the mom with the screaming baby on the metro or I can play peekaboo and try to distract the child.  I can judge the young parents of Random Family for having too many kids, too young, and for not being willing to put their kids first.  Or I can try to imagine the gaping holes in their lives, and how desperate they are to be loved. 

Like Jen, I don’t always succeed at being non-judgmental, but I do think it’s worth trying.  Because when I step outside of my judgment long enough to view the world from someone else’s perspective, I always learn something, even if I don’t change my mind.

Today the Washington Post has the first in a three-part series about pregnant or newly post-partum mothers who are murdered.  It builds off of the interest in the Laci Peterson murders, and refers to the findings from a study a year or so back that found that homicide was the leading cause of death for pregnant women in Maryland, accounting for more than 20 percent of the deaths of pregnant or recently postpartum women over a six year period.  That’s a mindboggling statistic.

While some of these homicides are apparently unrelated to the pregnancy, the majority of them are committed by the soon-to-be-fathers.  The article quote Pat Brown, a criminal profiler, as saying:

"If the woman doesn’t want the baby, she can get an abortion. If the guy doesn’t want it, he can’t do a damn thing about it. He is stuck with a child for the rest of his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and he’s stuck with that woman for the rest of his life. If she goes away, the problem goes away."

That quote comes across as perhaps more sympathetic to the murderers than Brown intended, but I think the general point is right.  I have no suggestions for solutions.  Giving the fathers the right to force an abortion seems deeply wrong to me.  Allowing them to opt out of paternal rights and child support just screws over the kids.

***

I’m embarassingly addicted to The Amazing Race, but am increasingly disturbed by the abusive relationship being displayed by Jonathan and Victoria.  It’s painful to watch.  Maybe I’m giving CBS too much credit, but I assume that the producers didn’t see the signs of this when selecting them to participate.  If that’s true, I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do.  Does showing this behavior on a "reality" show make it seem normal?  Would editing the coverage to de-emphasize it be abetting after the fact?  Should CBS be including links to support groups on the show’s website?

This is a bit of a rambling post — I’ve got a bunch of ideas chasing each other around in my head, but can’t seem to make them line up into a nice argument today.

I’d like to start by picking up on something that Elise wrote in her comment on my post The Day Care Debate:

"Our day care providers are not at all strangers to us or to our daughter. She sees them every day and has grown to love them dearly. She smiles and jumps with joy when she sees them in the morning…"

I agree that it is offensive to describe sending a child to paid day care as "leaving them with a stranger."  Obviously, there’s not a built-in relationship from the start, but given time and a modicum of luck, a caring relationship will develop.  My husband is still in touch with the woman who was his nanny as a child, and we have taken our children to visit her.  In many ways, he uses her as a role model as he figures out how to care for them.

The whole question of the relationship between paid caregivers and their charges is a complicated one.  Society tends to sentimentalize unpaid caregiving, suggesting that it is superior precisely because it is unsoiled by a commercial transaction.  I think this is a mistake.  Parents frequently use unpaid (or poorly paid) relative and neighborhood caregivers not because they are especially loving or dedicated to the children, but because they’re affordable.

At the same time, parents using paid care have an incentive to overestimate the affectionate relationship between their caregiver and their child.  Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy provides a poignant description of the tensions of a caregiving relationship from an au pair’s point of view, and how she resents her employers’ attempts to cast her as a sort of younger sister, rather than an employee. 

When a transaction is purely economic, the rights and obligations of each side are clearly defined.  On the local parenting email list that I subscribe to, there is often discussion about expectations for a nanny: how much television viewing is allowed and what shows? how much housework is it reasonable to expect while the child is napping?  I always am somewhat bemused by these discussions, because I certainly don’t have this kind of control over the care provided by my husband.  I can and do share my opinions, but ultimately, he’s the one at home with the kids and I can’t micromanage him.

But even spelling all this detail out in a contract doesn’t protect against the uncertainty that creeps in when emotions get involved:  if your child loves her caregiver, are you really going to fire her because she was late for work all week because her car broke down? or because she turned on the Teletubbies all afternoon when she was having a bad day?  If so, what are you going to tell your kid?  The Nanny Diaries is a silly book, but makes a valid point that the same parents who insist that their nannies are part of the family can turn around and fire them at any time.

A while back Hugo Schwyzer wrote a post about dependency, in which he wrote:

"When I grow old and feeble, I hope to be cared for by those I love — up to a point. I would want them to visit me, but I don’t want some future child of mine helping me on and off the toilet."

I think a lot of people would agree with this.  But why is it embarassing for an adult child to help an elderly parent to use the toilet, but not for a parent to change a baby’s diaper?  Dependency is the natural state for infants, but is seen as a humilation for an adult.  So why is it less embarassing to be cared for by a paid caregiver than by a loved one?  The very fact that the caregiving is paid for gives the dependent adult a form of power that balances out some of the embarassment of needing help with a basic function.

If you hadn’t heard, Bernard Kerik has withdrawn his nomination to be Homeland Security Secretary, having recently discovered that he may have hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny and/or failed to pay her social security taxes.  I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for him — it’s been over 10 years since this issue blew up in Zoe Baird’s face and at least in the greater Washington DC area, anyone who claims not to know the rules is either lying or undertook a deliberate strategy of plausible deniability.  If anything, I’m feeling a certain grim satisfaction that men as well as women can get caught in this mess.

***

On a related note, those of us at HHS are starting to wonder why a new Secretary-nominee hasn’t been named.  The conventional wisdom around the Department (as well as in most newspapers) was that the nominee was likely to be Mark McClellen, currently head of CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — don’t ask what happened to the second M).   But if he was going to be the nominee, it seems likely that it would have happened by now — he’s already been Senate-confirmed once, so is unlikely to have any issues like Kerik’s lurking in his past.  So, we’ve got our fingers crossed that we’re not getting a wingnut.

Last week, Michelle Singletary, who writes a personal finance column for the Washington Post, had an article about the heavy burden of college loans.  She notes that the average student graduating from law or medical school owes a total of over $90,000, and argues that this debt load makes it hard for new lawyers to choose careers in public service (average starting salary $36,000) rather than private practice (average starting salary $90,000 — and the top students can get offers in the six digits).  She writes supportively of a proposal from Robert Reich to make student loans payable as a percentage of salary rather than as a fixed amount.

I have two issues with this argument.  First, some student loans can be repayed under an income-contingent payback plan.  But, more significantly, I think it’s terribly misleading to suggest that the main problem is the burden of student loans rather than the huge disparity between the pay in the public v. private sector. 

Let’s think about a lawyer fresh out of law school. She’s 26 or 27 and idealistic.  And let’s take financial aid out of the picture — say she was lucky enough to get almost all grants for financial aid, and got a great summer job that paid enough to cover the rest.  She’s so idealistic that she doesn’t care that her classmates are making almost three times what she is — she’s got more than enough to pay her rent and she’s happy.  (Hey, I made about $21,000 my first year out of college, and thought I was rich.)  And then 3 years go by, maybe 5, and she’s starting to think about having kids.  And it’s a lot harder to think about supporting 2 or 3 or 4 people on that salary than it is to support 1 on it.

And women are much more likely to take public interest jobs than men.   A student study at Harvard Law found that from 1998 to 2003, 10% of women graduates and 5% of men graduates took public sector jobs (including government, nonprofit, and legal services).  This is consistent with broader studies of both law students and other professsions.

What’s going on here? At least some of the women are looking for more family-friendly jobs (although public service jobs are not always family-friendly), but I doubt that’s the main driving force for most.  (In fact, if you’re not planning on having kids for several years, one could argue that the most family-friendly thing to do is to take a high-stress high-paying job and sock away as much money as possible, so you can afford to hire help, stop working, or go part-time when the kids come.)

I think gender roles play out in a more subtle way — that most young women don’t expect to be supporting a family on just their income, and so don’t feel compelled to maximize their earning potential. I’m not saying young men are thinking explicitly about supporting a family — but I think men get less societal support for picking altruistic but low-paying careers.  And it seems that earning lots of money is an unalloyed plus for men in the dating scene, while it’s a mixed blessing for women.

Singletary writes:

"If young people come out of school saying "Show me the money," who will teach in public schools? Who will work as social workers? Who will take lower-paying physician jobs in urban and rural hospitals? Who will legally represent the downtrodden?"

If these are tasks we value as a society, maybe we should figure out a way that people can do them without giving up on a middle class life (or marrying someone who will subsidize them). 

Representative Henry Waxman issued a report today on the most popular curricula used by federally funded abstinence education programs.  He’s on the Government Reform committee, which gives him a nice bully pulpit for things like this. The findings were quite horrifying — 11 of the 13 curricula studied included blatantly false statements about things like the effectiveness of condoms at preventing STDs, the long-term health consequences of abortion, the means by which HIV can be transmitted.

One of my coworkers came into my office this morning holding the Washington Post article on the report and asking if I had seen it.  Her older son is in middle school, and she had just recently received the notice from the school informing her of her option to excuse her child from the abstinence component of the "family life" class they offer.  She’s now planning on asking the principal if she can see the curriculum that they’re using.

Rana commented on Pharyngula’s post about the report that maybe this is a subtle strategy to make liberals more open to homeschooling and vouchers.  I admit, my reaction to conservative moans about schools teaching "the wrong values" has always been to think that if you’re depending on schools to teach your child values, you’re already in trouble.  And it’s still true, while I’d be pissed off to learn that the local school was teaching this sort of bs, I’d hope that I’d have provided my children with enough real information that they wouldn’t be put at risk by this stupidity.  With the right sort of child (one who enjoys challenging authority and doesn’t mind sticking out a bit), I could imagine not exempting my kid from such a class, but arming him with real statistics, so he could keep raising his hand and being a pain in the butt.

I also want to point out that it was issues like this (on the other side) that lead to the creation of the Christian Coalition as an effective political force.  So, go find out if your local school district is using one of these awful curricula. If it is, write a letter of complaint to the principal and the school board.  And if they don’t do anything about it, find someone to run against them for the school board.  Or do it yourself.

Today is World AIDS Day.  I don’t really have anything to add to the raw horror of the simple estimates:  39.4 million people worldwide infected with HIV, of whom 25.4 million live in sub-Saharan Africa.  The vast majority of these do not have access to any treatment.

Two organizations that I give to address very different aspects of the AIDS epidemic.  amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Fesearch, supports research into both a vaccine and treatment, as well as into effective prevention efforts.  Food and Friends delivers groceries and prepared meals to people living with HIV/AIDS and other life-challenging illnesses in the Washington DC area. 

While I very much support efforts to bring treatment to Africa and Asia, I feel like any contribution that I could make is insignificant compared to the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  (This foundation almost makes me feel good about buying Microsoft products.)