Half Changed World

My brother is getting married on Sunday, so I’m going to be off-line for a few days.  Have a good weekend, everyone.

For most of today, I wasn’t focused on November 11th being Veterans’ Day.  It was my birthday, and a day off from work.  I went for a run, ran some errands, had lunch with a friend, went to see the Incredibles with my family.

And then, washing dishes, I heard this NPR story talking with the producer of HBO’s Last Letters Home.  And hearing people reading out loud from their loved ones’ final letters, I started to cry.  We don’t get HBO, so I probably won’t get to see the documentary, but that little sample was enough to remind me to be grateful for every night that I get to put my sons to bed, even if they sometimes make me crazy in the process.

Veterans’ Day is November 11 because it was Armistice Day after WWI.  A friend told me that in Canada some people still wear poppies — I’ve never seen anyone marking the day that way.   I was inspired to look up the "Flanders Field" poem, which I had never read in its entirety before:

In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
      In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      In Flanders fields."

I was struck by how martial a memorial it is, especially that line "take up our quarrel with the foe."  Not for McCrae is the ambiguity of Archibald MacLeish’s offering: "Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them."

My thanks to all those who serve and served in our name, and to their families who share the burden.

During the campaign, you may have heard a candidate or two saying that all Americans should have access to the same health insurance program that members of Congress have, who can pick from a range of different plans.  Well, as a fed, I do have access to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.  Our "open season," when we get to pick our plan for the next year, has started and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by it.

This year, the Office of Personnel Management is heavily pushing the new "consumer-driven" options, which combine fairly high levels of cost-sharing and deductibles with health savings accounts that allow you to set-aside money for health expenses pre-tax.  They differ from the more well-known Flexible Spending Accounts in that extra money isn’t lost at the end of the year, but can be carried over indefinitely.  The logic is that if patients share in more of the costs of health services, they’ll shop more wisely and help keep total costs down. 

Most reports that I’ve read about these plans suggest that they’re a good deal for young and generally healthy people; in fact, the main criticism I’ve heard of them is that they’ll result in adverse selection against traditional plans, by drawing healthier consumers out of the shared risk pool.  But every time I try to read through the benefits description for one of these plans, my head starts to ache and my eyes refuse to focus.  And I consider myself a pretty well-informed savvy consumer; if I’m having this much trouble figuring it out, I suspect that a lot of other people are too.

I therefore think I’m going to stay with the same HMO I’ve had for the past 8 years, even if I could save a little money with one of these new plans.  Fundamentally, the reason is that I have enough on my plate between my job and my family and volunteering and trying to carve out a little time for personal things I enjoy like writing this blog and taking photos.  I don’t need to be the "driver" of my health insurance — I’m happy to be a passenger.

Today’s book review (back in its regular Tuesday slot) is Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, by Sandra Steingraber.

At its heart, this book is a passionate plea for environmental action, focused on the effects of persistent pollutants on developing fetuses and nursing infants.  Steingraber is an ecologist, but one who can discuss scientific studies in layperson’s terms. She describes example after example of chemicals that are polluting our environment — lead, methyl mercury, dioxins, PCBs, pesticides — and how they affect children’s developing bodies and brains.  Fetuses are particularly vulnerable to these chemicals in part because of the wonderous precision of fetal development (Steingrabber describes how the toxic drug thalidomide caused different deformations depending on exactly which days of development the mother took it) and in part because the human body is unable to discard many of these poisons once consumed.  This means that the developing fetus is exposed to the cumulative burden of all the toxins the mother has breathed or eaten in her lifetime, not just those experienced during pregnancy.

Steingraber acknowledges that the evidence of damage is strongest for very high levels of pollutants — which are, fortunately, rarely experienced — and that less is known about the effects of the more common lower levels; however, she argues for the precautionary principle, which holds that when potential damage is irreversible, you shouldn’t wait for conclusive scientific evidence.  She points to the inconsistency between how we treat exposure to alcohol — telling expectant mothers that no level of alcohol consumption is acceptable — and how we treat exposure to toxins such as lead and mercury.  She is passionate that we should not put all the burden on pregnant women — telling them not to eat many species of fish, for example — but should instead clean up the world.

Interwoven into this environmental discussion is Steingraber’s discussion of her own pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing experience with her daughter, the Faith of the title.  She talks about the environment around her — from the woods of the midwestern college where she is a visiting professor, to her Somerville, MA, apartment, to the isolated Alaskan villages she visits — and how her body is her daughter’s environment.  The months of her pregnancy are the organizing structure for the book, providing a forward thrust to the narrative and leavening the otherwise deeply depressing material.  This is a really difficult trick to pull off — in writing this blog I’ve discovered just how hard it is to move smoothly from global trends and statistics to individual experiences — but for most of the book Steingraber makes it seem natural.

While this book was recommended to me by a pregnant friend, I think it might well have given me a panic attack if I had read it while pregnant myself.  But, overall, I’d definitely recommend it.  I learned a lot about both fetal development and the environment, but I also enjoyed the time spent in Steingraber’s company.

I got sent a link to one more set of maps today, showing the land mass distorted in order to reflect the population.  I find them harder to interpret than some of the others, but fascinating — a rorschach test of sorts.

***

I’ve been hearing a lot from people claiming election fraud.  One of my basic principles for dealing with the world is not to assume sophisticated conspiracies when human error and incompetence work equally well as explanations.  But even if it didn’t affect the final results (and I don’t think it did), it’s still worth investigating and figuring out exactly what did or didn’t happen — in order to prevent the same errors next time and in order to restore confidence in the system.  And Republicans ought to be demanding these investigations as loudly as — if not more loudly than — Democrats.

The organization that seems to be the focus of these efforts is http://www.blackboxvoting.org/  (NOT .com) As of 9.30 tonight, this site isn’t responding — maybe it’s just a random outage, or maybe it’s been the subject of some sort of denial of service attack.  Given that www.electoral-vote.com was continually under attack during the campaign, it doesn’t seem implausible.

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We’re fighting hard in Fallujah.  I’m praying for the safety of our soldiers, and also for the innocent bystanders who will inevitably suffer.  I wish it weren’t so obvious that the Administration was just waiting until after the election to go in.

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

We included this poem in the program at our wedding, and it’s been on my mind a lot these days.  I don’t have the energy for original writing tonight, so I thought I’d share it.

Taking a break from the heavy-duty election-related posts, I have to ask: what’s up with ER?  In particular, what’s their issue with reverse traditional (working mom/SAHD) families?

First, in the season premier, they have a baby suffering from botulism, having been fed honey by his clueless SAH father.  When the bitchy working mom learns this, she screams at him for not having read the book.  He responds something like "which book, you gave me 10."

Two weeks later, Susan is asking for the promotion to chief of emergency medicine (which she had previously turned down), because she needs the raise in order to make up for the lost income from her husband, who is going to be a stay-at-home dad.  Within five minutes, she’s asking whether some of her troubles are "punishment for being a bad mother."  What-the-*&^(?  Not loving being home full-time and returning to work makes her a "bad mother"?  Good grief.  Plus, as the fine folks at Television Without Pity point out, we’ve previously seen Susan being a darn fine mother — not to her baby, but to her niece, little Suzie, the one she parented when sis was a druggie, and moved to Arizona to be closer to.

I don’t know why I care — this show has clearly jumped the shark — if not years ago, certainly at the start of the season when they actually had a shark in the show.  The main problem with it is what my husband refers to as "Chris Claremont Syndrome" — when you run out of plot ideas, inflict something horrible on one of your characters.  But I’m still not quite willing to give up on it.

(In case anyone’s wondering why I’m just posting this now, I’m just getting around to catching up on everything that’s piled up on my TiVo.  As far as I’m concerned, TiVo is up there on my list of the top 10 best things ever invented for busy parents.  You never have to watch anything that’s inappropriate for kids when they’re up; you can watch Blue’s Clues and Max and Ruby at any time of day; you can fast-forward through all the commercials; you don’t miss any of your show when you’re interrupted; and you never watch dreck just because there’s nothing else on.)

I found some more maps of the Presidential vote at the Big Picture.   I particularly like the population density map, which adjusts the coloring for the density of people in different areas.  It’s a nice response to the people out there who seem to think that because the county by county map of the US is overwhelmingly red, that means the overwhelming majority of people voted for Bush.

I’m also getting tired of hearing journalists and bloggers say that the people who voted based on their values voted for Bush.  Some of us have values that include tolerance and social justice and peace and voted based on these values.

There’s a lot of discussion out there (see the New York Times and Salon for examples) about whether the gay marriage issue — and Gavin Newsom’s decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in particular — cost Kerry the election.  It may well have — and if it didn’t, it wasn’t because the Christian Right didn’t try.  I think Barney Frank is deluding himself in thinking that if Newsom hadn’t thrown open the doors of San Francisco’s city hall, the Christian Right would have quietly accepted the Massachusetts ruling.  The dramatic photos would have been in Boston and Provincetown and they would have been a few months later, but they still would have been front-page news, for better or worse.

And here’s a bit of encouraging electoral news that I had missed:  Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post that  "72 percent of the voters in the Bush state of Florida and 68 percent in the Bush state of Nevada voted on Tuesday for initiatives that raised the minimum wage."

I just want to share some interesting maps of the election results I ran across today.

This one has red and blue colored by county, rather than by state. It dramatically shows how much the red/blue divide is a rural/urban one — the map is overwhelmingly red even though the gap in the popular vote was just a few million. Ole Eichhorn also compares it to a similar display of the 2000 results.

This one shades each state somewhere on the Red-Blue continuum, depending on the percentage of the popular vote. It’s a visible reminder that there are people who supported both candidates in every state of the union.

***

I’m officially looking for a new job. While I still think there’s a need for dedicated career civil servants to provide a continuity of knowledge across administrations, I don’t think I have the temperament to do it for another 4 years. If any of my readers have suggestions for places to look, I’d love to hear them.

***

Jimbo commented that fillibustering isn’t an effective legislative strategy. I disagree — I think we’d be a lot worse off now than we are if the Dems hadn’t held the line in the Senate against the excesses of the Republicans in the House. And I don’t think the public ever really holds the minority accountable for lack of action. But it’s certainly not enough to stand against things — we need to say what we’re for as well.

And we need to pay more attention to local and state politics. The Hot Flash Report provides a nice summary of how the Christian Right started in the 1980s by getting their people to turn out for school board races, and built a base that has carried them forward to today. The closest Democratic equivalent is unions, which are getting weaker and weaker by the year.

I’m afraid this isn’t going to be one of my most eloquent posts. I’m tired and I’m depressed.

After refusing for months to get my hopes up, I got caught up in the excitement yesterday and I really thought Kerry was going to win. Alexandria is a very blue area in an overall red state, so it felt like Kerry supporters were everywhere. It was awfully exciting to go to the school at 8 am and see a line of voters wrapping halfway around the block. And when we heard the Zogby poll saying that Virginia was too close to call, we were on the moon. But that’s not how it turned out in the only poll that matters…

I’m in awe of the people who waited on lines for 4 or 5 or 9 hours in order to vote. They’re my heroes today. I don’t understand why there were so few voting machines — was this an attempt to surpress the vote, or were they just being cheap? I think that the attempts to squelch the minority vote backfired, by reminding people not to take their rights for granted. If the level of engagement that we saw yesterday can be sustained — if people don’t get bitter and give up — this election may be regarded as a turning point in history.

I think Kerry made the right choice to concede this afternoon. It’s wishful thinking that the provisional ballots were going to change anything, and this way he looks classy instead of like a sore loser.

It’s looking like the Republicans will have 55 seats in the Senate. That should be enough that they take a two-seat advantage in all the committees, up from one in the current Senate. That’s significant, because in the current Senate, moderate Republicans like Snowe and Chafee as well as mavericks like McCain were able to essentially veto legislation in the Senate. (For example, Snowe wouldn’t let the welfare bill pass the Senate Finance Committee until she got a promise from the leadership to let her bring up her amendment to add $6 billion of child care spending on the floor.) That won’t be the case this year.

On the other hand, 55 seats isn’t enough to invoke cloture, so the Senate Democrats will still be able to put the brakes on a lot of Republican proposals. The talking heads on CNN this afternoon were predicting that there would be a brief "honeymoon," when the Democrats would be more inclined to compromise, but I find that highly unlikely. The atmosphere in the Senate has been totally poisonous the past couple of years, and I don’t see anything in the election results that will change that.

It’s worth noting that essentially all of the Republican gains in the House are due to the Texas’ legislature’s highly partisan off-year redistricting, masterminded by DeLay. If a genie granted me a wish of a single electoral reform to implement, I’d let the electoral college stand and go for non-partisan redistricting. The way it’s currently done, the vast majority of House seats are totally noncompetitive, making voting for them a pro-forma exercise.

Yikes. I just almost deleted everything I’ve written tonight by hitting the wrong button. I’m going to call it a night and get some rest.