Half Changed World

I was struck by Christine’s comment that soccer is cheap to play, requiring only sneakers, a ball and a field.  Certainly, it’s a lot cheaper than hockey.   But that field can be hard to come by in urban areas, which is part of the conventional wisdom for why city kids play basketball instead of baseball these days.  There’s a reason why "soccer mom" entered the lexicon as synonymous with suburban.

And yet, as Foer points out, in most of the world, soccer is not an upper-class pursuit.  Working class children play this game, without benefit of organized leagues, and generally without lovely green fields.  In Spain, we saw kids and young adults playing informal games on stone plazas, on the beach, pretty much anywhere there was an open space.  You just don’t see that in the US.  Is there such a thing as a pick-up game of soccer in America?

One of my friends also pointed out to me that the local kids soccer league is far more expensive than the local basketball league.  I thought that the $80 registration fee (for Fall and Spring seasons combined) was pretty reasonable, a lot better than the gymboree type stuff in the area.  But she told me that the basketball league only charges $5 a season.  Is basketball really that much cheaper to run, or is it that they expect poor kids to play basketball, middle-class kids soccer, and charge what the market can bear?

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PS.  The rest of my trip photos are now up at Flickr.

Back from a very short trip to New York to celebrate the bris of my new nephew.  If we hadn’t just come back from a week away, I probably would have taken tomorrow off as well and made a long weekend of it, but since I had, I went up after work yesterday and came back this evening.  Even so, I was a bit nervous about walking into my boss’ office on Monday and saying, yes, I know I just started this job a month ago, and I know I just took six days off (with pay) to go to Spain, but I also need to take this Thursday off.  But she didn’t blink or suggest in any way that I shouldn’t go, which makes feel good about having taken the job.  One of my coworkers even rescheduled a doctor’s appointment so we could have the meeting scheduled for this morning tomorrow instead.

An economist will tell you that adding an option to the market always improves utility.  Either it’s better than the existing options, so you take it, and you’re happier than you would have been, or it’s worse, so you ignore it, and it doesn’t affect your utility at all.  I’m not convinced that’s true.

Today’s case in point is the ultra-cheap buses from Washington DC to New York (often generically referred to as the Chinatown buses, although there are now ones that run to different neighborhoods).  They typically charge $20 each way, $35 round trip, versus $84 for Amtrak.  (It’s a lot more for the high speed Acela, slightly cheaper if you can travel off-peak).   They’re slower than the trains — and can be much slower if you get stuck in traffic — and the seats give you a lot less room to spread out.  But if money is your top priority, they’re a great deal.

My problem, is that before these buses existed, I’d just take the train and accept the cost as non-negotiable.  (Yes, I could have taken Greyhound, but that offered all the inconveniences of the low-cost buses, but much smaller savings v. Amtrak — a clearly inferior option.)  Now, if I take the train, I feel like I’m being spendthrift, since I could suck it up and take the bus.  So, I’m less happy paying the same price for the train than I was several years ago.  And if I take the bus, I’m much less comfortable than I was taking the train.

This is a nice example of one of the points that Barry Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.  He argues that you compare your real options to an imagined alternative that combines the best features of both — a ride as fast and comfortable as the train, but as cheap as the bus — and they always fall short.  And that reduces your pleasure in the real options.

So what did I do?  I took the bus up last night (which was a drag — an accident closed a section of the NJ turnpike) but the train back today.

Today’s book is How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, by Franklin Foer.  I picked it up at the store as it seemed like an appropriate book to read while travelling in Europe during the World Cup.  It turned out to be a perfect book for travelling — a quick read, divided into self-contained chapters, interesting without being particularly challenging.

Unlike Stephen Jay Gould’s erudite essays about baseball, Foer’s essays aren’t really about the game of soccer.  You don’t really need to know anything about the game to enjoy them.  Foer writes about soccer fans, players, and owners, often focusing on the dark side of the sport — ethnic hatreds, corruption, violence.  He’s particularly fascinated by the persistence of local and national identitites in the face of globalization, and whether that’s inherently a bad thing.

I enjoyed the book, but am not sure how seriously to take Foer’s analysis.  One chapter is about soccer in the United States, in particular why some people are so vehemently oppposed to it.  Foer argues that they are, in their own way, anti-globalization activitists, objecting to the idea that Americans should like soccer just because the rest of the world does.  That seemed reasonable to me, but then he suggests that they’re defensive because baseball, the quintessentially American game, has failed in the global marketplace.  That argument doesn’t ring true — baseball is certainly struggling, but the games that it’s losing to (in the US) are US football (which is even more of an international flop) and basketball (which is increasingly an international game itself).  The gaps in the one chapter where I actually know something make me wonder whether there are similar holes in the rest of the book.

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Via BitchPhD, some World Cup blogging.

So, Linda Hirshman has a book out, and the Washington Post gave her op-ed space over the weekend.  I’ll take a look at the book if either of my local libraries gets a copy, but so far, I haven’t heard her saying anything that wasn’t covered in her original American Prospect essay or responding to any of the substantive criticisms that I and others made at the time.  (I do feel compelled to point out that Julia’s post in which she says that she’s not a capital F Feminist is a precise illustration of the point that I made about the dangers of litmus test feminism.)

I’m somewhat amused by Hirshman’s defensive reaction to the criticism the article got in the blogosphere — and her implicit assumption that "mommybloggers" are all stay-at-home moms.  And I really don’t understand why she’s so hung up on Miriam Peskowitz’s roof.  (And yes, it’s a sign that I spend way too much time on blogs that I knew exactly who Hirshman was referring to, even though she didn’t mention her by name.)

Via RebelDad, I read this post by Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic in which he criticizes Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of Mommy Wars, and author of a blog on the Washington Post website.  He begins:

"To my way of thinking, the Washington Post’s Leslie Morgan Steiner represents everything that’s wrong with the way the mainstream corporate media cover children and parenting: she’s shallow, blind to anything that falls outside her cultural and economic comfort zone…"

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a chance to have dinner two weeks ago with Steiner, Devra Renner and a group of working moms as part of a Women’s Information Network event.  While I share many of Jeremy’s frustrations with Steiner’s blog, and the "mom v. mom" framing of her book, she charmed me.  She was gracious, listened as well as talked, and was quite funny about the way her personal life gets dissected by the posters on her blog on a regular basis.  Moreover, she seemed to get the fact that professional-class parents enjoy a huge amount more flexibility and freedom than lower-income families, and argued that those of us with time and influence should be working to benefit all families, not just our own. 

So why doesn’t she push this harder in her writing?  Steiner claimed that the "Mommy Wars" framing was pushed on her by the publisher.  And she also pointed out that that day’s post, in which she talked about the huge settlement that Verizon had made in its class-action pregnancy bias lawsuit, got fewer comments than almost any post she’s made.

Sorry for the long gap in posts, and thanks to those who posted or emailed to make sure I was ok.  Actually, I was better than ok — my parents took the boys for a week, and T and I headed off to Spain for a slightly early 10th anniversary trip.  I didn’t mean to worry anyone, but didn’t want to advertise to the whole internet that we were away from home.

We spent two nights in Madrid, one in Toledo, and three in Barcelona, and had an absolutely wonderful time.  We walked all over the place, ate ourselves silly, explored the sites, and had conversations that lasted more than two minutes without interruption.  I took a lot of photos, and have put a few up on Flickr with more to follow as I get the chance to edit them.

It’s the first time we’ve been away from the boys for more than a weekend since D was born, so we were a little nervous.  When my parents headed out with them, I expected to feel liberated, but actually felt a bit bereft.  But by the time we got on our airplane, we were relaxing and having a good time.  We called twice to check in on them, and the boys had to be pried away from their activities to say hi to us.  My parents said that they were a lot of fun and didn’t give them too much trouble at bedtime, etc.  Their only complaint was the constant level of noise.

In other news, I met Leslie Morgan Steiner, D graduated from preschool, and I became an aunt.  More details to follow…

Today’s book is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.  I requested it from the library after reading the interview with Singer that I discussed last month.  It’s an exploration of the ethics of food, focusing mostly on reducing unnecessary animal suffering and environmental impacts.  Singer and Mason organize their discussion around the diets of three American families: one that shops at Walmart and eats whatever is cheap, convenient and tastes good, one that shops at places like Trader Joes and Whole Foods and tries to make generally ethical choices around food even if it means paying more, and one that follows a vegan diet.

The basic argument behind The Way We Eat is that mass-produced food, especially meat, milk and eggs, is incredibly cheap because the price doesn’t reflect the real costs, both in animal welfare, and in environmental damage.  Singer and Mason don’t think it’s inherently wrong to kill an animal for food, but say that if we have to pay 10 cents an egg more in order to allow the chickens to have the room to turn around and access to grass, we ought to be willing to pay that price.  (More formally, they argue that it is "speciesist" to refuse to take animal quality of life and suffering seriously.)

Overall, I found the book interesting and readable.  (I was a little nervous, since I’ve tried reading one of Singer’s other books and found it inpenetrable.)  Singer’s much less of a moral absolutist in this book than I was expecting. He makes a strong case for avoiding the products of factory farms, but recognizes that it may be more important in a specific case to eat your grandmother’s cooking than to maintain a purist stance.  He doesn’t think that the benefits of genetically modified foods are worth the risks in developed countries, but notes that the calculus may be different in places where starvation is a real threat.  (Although he fails to acknowledge the political problems in trying to explain why GM food is good enough for Africans if it’s not good enough for Europeans.) 

Singer and Mason are also willing to zing some of their allies.  They suggest that it would be a good thing if we could grow cloned meat in vats, since it presumably wouldn’t have any ability to suffer, a suggestion that I think would give most environmentalists the queasies.  As noted in the Salon interview, Singer’s not a big fan of the Eat Local movement, arguing that it may be more sustainable to buy food from far away that is transported by ship and rail than local food that is trucked to market.  And they note that improved taste may be a good thing, but it is not an ethical requirement.

So, has reading this book changed my eating habits?  The sections that made the most impact on me were the discussion of mass poultry production. (I was already more or less aware of the issues in beef slaughterhouses, from Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, and I don’t eat pork for other reasons.)  Right after reading that section, I walked through the meat aisle at Shopper’s Food Warehouse and found it hard to pick up my usual pack of boneless chicken breasts.  So I left with mushrooms and bok choy, but no meat for the moo shu chicken I was thinking of making.

Later in the week, I made it over to Whole Foods (for the first time in the several months since it opened near me) and started looking at the prices.  I couldn’t bring myself to pay over $4 a pound for chicken that we wouldn’t be able to taste very much of over the sauce, so instead I bought a small package of beef.  I think the beef was slightly more per pound than the chicken, but it wasn’t as proportionately more expensive than I’m used to paying for beef, if that makes sense.  If I were to commit to buying only non-factory farmed meat, I definitely think the costs would help push me toward using less of it.  Which Singer and Mason would approve of, of course.

In honor of Blogging for GLBT Families Day, Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station wrote a provocative post in which she argues against marriage, for anyone:

"The government should not be in the business of deciding whether or not we or anyone else can have what should be universal human rights based on whether or how or if they have made similar vows to someone else.

"Gay marriage would get Cole and I on equal footing with her heterosexual colleagues. How nice for us. How nice that we too could have an upper-middle-class income, a stay-at-home parent, a child for whom we may choose a high quality private school, a well located, well funded public school or homeschooling by a PhD with teacher’s certification without paying an extra few thousand dollars a year penalty for being lesbians.

"Gay marriage would do nothing for the majority of people we know who either aren’t partnered with someone with good employment benefits or aren’t partnered at all—gay, straight or otherwise."

Moxie made a similar point, writing "And, FWIW, I’m in favor of civil marriage for none; civil rights, benefits, and protections for all; and religious marriage for anyone who wants it."  She later clarified that she meant that anyone should be able to have a private ceremony of whatever sort they choose, but that it should not have legal significance.

I have a lot of sympathy for this point of view.  I agree that everyone should have access to health care, regardless of whether they choose to make a lifetime commitment to another adult.  I also think that it would make a lot of sense to have everyone explicitly designate the people who you want to be able to visit you in the hospital and decisions on your behalf.

I also think that there’s a logical elegance to the argument.  It neatly sidesteps the discussion about whether it’s possible to draw a line that supports same-sex marriage but opposes polygamy.  (I know this has been debated on Alas, a blog, but can’t find the links right now.)  Instead, it says, the government shouldn’t be in the business of deciding whose relationships "count" and whose don’t.

But (you knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?), I do think there are some privileges that are both appropriately within the governmental sphere, and should take relationships into consideration.  The prime example that comes to mind is immigration.  Unless we’re going to have a full open door policy, which I think would be disastrous, the government is going to be in the business of deciding who gets to immigrate (legally) and who doesn’t.  And I think it would be deeply wrong to say that only blood relations of citizens should get priority in immigrating, that no families of choice rather than birth should be taken into consideration.  There has to be some legally binding way of saying "this is my partner."

I also think that there’s a benefit to building on what’s already (more or less) working, rather than trying to "invent a language of new grunts."  I’ve been reading The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly.  It’s about the failures of Western aid to less developed countries.  Easterly argues that aid has largely been a failure because planners have tried to impose top-down reform schemes that don’t pay enough attention to the cultural realities on the ground.  He quotes Popper (Karl?) as saying "It is not reasonable to assume that a complete reconstruction of our social system would lead at once to a workable system."

That’s a roundabout way of saying that I’m somewhat skeptical of grand plans that require knocking down everything that’s already place in order to rebuild.  In practice, I think that if civil marriage were eliminated, children would be the ones hurt the most, followed by anyone who is economically dependent on their spouse.  Yes, in theory we could build a system that provided protections for children and caregivers whether or not they had a relationship with another adult.  So far, the closest thing to that we have is welfare, and it hasn’t worked so well.

I learned via Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station that today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day.

I don’t have anything terribly profound to say on the subject, so I think I’ll just share a kid story:

Last week at dinner, D asked "Do you know who I’m going to marry when I grow up?"

"No honey, who are you going to marry?"

"I’m going to marry Joe."  [One of his good friends.]

"Uh, ok."

"Boys can marry boys, you know."  [Said in a truculent sort of voice, as if he were daring me to disagree.]

"Uh, yes, that’s true, at least in some states.  Ummm.  Virginia’s not one of them.  But, sweetie, I will do everything I can so that if when you grow up, you still want to marry Joe, you can.  Ok."

"I’m not going to marry N.  Because he’s my brother."

"That’s right, he’s already part of your family."

This post started bouncing around in my head in response to Andrea’s comments on my post about Eating local and the environment.  And then she posted a long piece today in which she amplified her frustration at with the idea that we’re going to change the world through consumer activism.  So you might want to stop over there first.  But the key paragraph (I think) in her essay is this:

Being a good consumer is a minuscule part of the overall puzzle. Helping to make the world a better place, if that’s something you want to do, is not something you can buy. (I find it so depressing that even activism these days has become a shopping spree, something you do so you can get the t-shirt or the mug or the plastic bracelet, another opportunity to aquire more meaningless stuff we don’t need, as if the whole idea of doing something that won’t add to our collections is simply incomprehensible. Do we really need to be bought off with another cotton shopping bag?) You have to be a citizen.

I think Andrea’s over-emphasizing the contrast between being a citizen and a consumer, and under-emphasizing the contrast between acting on your own and trying to engage others, regardless of whether you’re acting as a citizen or a consumer.  Going by yourself into the voting booth on election day and voting for the candidate of your choice is as symbolic — and practically ineffective — as choosing to buy a locally grown heirloom tomato instead of one that’s been genetically engineered for pest resistance and durability and shipped across the country.  Except that the locally grown tomato probably tastes good.  Both activities are only likely to change the world if you convince a bunch of other people to do them too.

Without dismissing the importance of political action, I actually think collective consumer action is more likely to have an impact, at least in the short-run, and at least in the U.S.  Because having 20 percent of the public support the environment in the voting booth gets you a lot of speeches in the Congressional Record, and that’s about it.  The system is so winner-take-all that even a substantial minority has very little opportunity to move public policy.  But if you changed the consumption patterns of 20 percent of the public, that’s a pretty big niche market.

And I believe that shifts in demand do change what’s available, even in the housing market.  At least in the Washington DC area, they’re literally pulling down small older houses to put up bigger ones — McMansions, as they’re not so fondly referred to.  And, from everything I’ve read, the consumer pressure on McDonalds to improve the way the cows/beef it buys was treated had a dramatic impact on the entire slaughterhouse industry in the US. 

A while back, landismom had a post in which she explained that the essence of political organizing is giving people Anger, Hope, and a Plan.  Andrea’s worried that people aren’t angry enough.  I think there’s a real risk of pushing people right past anger and into despair, which is as much the enemy of action as indifference.

How do I put this?  If Andrea is right, and a sustainable environment really requires North Americans to voluntarily (either as individuals, or by voting in governments that would mandate it) reduce our consumption by more than 50 percent before we have no choice about it, then I hope the cockroaches learn to write poetry.  I recognize that pretty much everything that we can do as consumers is an exercise in slowing down our race to the brink, rather than in changing the overall trajectory.  But if it buys us just a few more decades between when we (as a society) recognize that our current path is unsustainable and when it’s too late to do anything about it, that could make all the difference.

Today’s book is It’s A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, edited by Andrea Buchanan.  I’m one of the last stops on this month’s blog book tour.

At the MotherTalk event I attended, Andi read her essay from this book, "Learning to Write," which is about how her daughter used writing to express her anger with — and her separation from — Andi.  I asked her why she included it, since it’s not obviously about gender, and she said that it was because she found the issue of enmeshment and separation was a running theme in the essays about mothering daughters, while it was not in the ones about mothering sons.  As she explains in her response to Meredith at Boston Mommy, Andi found that mothers couldn’t help identifying with their daughters, and revisiting "the ghosts of their girlhoods."  (Do fathers of sons go through the same struggles?)

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I am the mother of two sons.   I adore them to pieces, but I do sometimes feel a pang for the daughter that I’m never going to have.   These books  (I wrote about It’s A Boy back in November) made me think about what it is that I think would be different with a daughter.  It’s not the traditionally girly stuff that I’m sad about missing (although I’ll admit to coveting the little girls’ dresses in the stores).

I think maybe I’m wistful about not getting to teach a girl that she can do anything she dreams of.  Oh, I’ll certainly teach my boys that they can do anything they dream of, but it’s not the same.  I guess, like many of the writers in the collection, I had thoughts of raising a daughter without the hangups and insecurities I have.  (Also, I think society today is by far harsher on boys who aren’t conventionally masculine than it is on girls who aren’t conventionally feminine, so I’ll worry about my sons even as I encourage them to follow their hearts.)

This sounds silly, but I’m also getting a sinking feeling that my boys may not be willing to sit still for all the books that I’ve dreamed of reading to them.  I know, they’re young yet, but… D is pretty much uninterested in any chapter books that don’t involve pirates or rocketships.  I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed if I don’t get to read Charlotte’s Web, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Little House books to my kids.  Do boys read Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret? Based on what I’m hearing in the blogosphere, my odds would be better if I had girls.