Half Changed World

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.

This week’s book is The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, And Keeping Friends When You’re Not A Kid Anymore, by Marla Paul.  Someone recommended it on one of my email lists a while back and the title hit a nerve for me.  I often find myself thinking longingly of my circle of friends from college.  When I used to watch Sex and the City, I was never jealous of the characters’ shoes or their dates, but I did drool over the idea of having a group of friends who met every week for long brunches.

Paul’s book isn’t profound, but it’s an easy-to-read discussion of the reasons that women (and the book is really directed to women, in spite of the gender-neutral title) find themselves short on friends, and how to overcome them.  She talks about the concerns of women who have moved, new mothers, divorced or widowed women, and women who have left their jobs, whether to be SAHMs or for retirement.  Her recommendations for how to meet new people are basically common sense — try new activities, go to support groups, introduce yourself to neighbors — but she’s open about how scary this can be.  I think most people have a notion that making friends is easy for everyone else in the world, so it’s reassuring to be told that it’s often hard work.

I hit my "friendship crisis" several years back, when I got hit with the double or triple whammy of four of my closest friends moving out of the DC area within a couple of years (one to Pennsylvania, one to Massachusetts, one to Israel and one to Senegal), having a baby (which severely limited the time I had available to socialize), and dropping several of the activities that I had been doing before (due to the same lack of time).  I was pretty depressed about it for a while.  Things are better now, but not what I’d like them to be.  That’s one of the reasons that we’re starting the Drop In Dinners.

In the last chapter, Paul talks a little about online friendships, and gives some examples, but I don’t think she really gets what makes them special, not just a second-rate substitute for "real life" friends. Ronni at Time Goes By wrote a terrific post about this last week.  She writes:

"In my early years of reading blogs, before I started TGB, I was often astonished at how personally revealing many bloggers are. Much more so, I think, to unknown readers than most of us would be in the first few meetings with a new in-person friend.

This might be an advantage to getting to know another better; sometimes it is easier to be honest at a remove from one another."

Exactly. I think in some ways my online friends (from email lists, conferencing systems, and blogs) have spoiled me for in-person friendships, at least in the early, awkward, getting to know you stage.  I don’t have the patience for the meaningless small talk.  I want people to talk about the things they’re passionate about, what rocked and what sucked about their day.  And people don’t generally talk about those things with people they’ve just met.  I guess I could just start doing it.

I’m too distracted watching election results to write a book review, so I’m going to skip it for tonight.  Maybe tomorrow.

So far (it’s 9:11 as I write this), things are looking pretty good for Tim Kaine.  With 74.4% of the precincts reporting, he’s ahead by 2.5% of the vote, or about 50,000 votes.   The data I’m looking at (from Virginia Interactive, which is having some trouble loading, but seems to have significantly more recent results than the Post) suggest that the Republicans are leading on the other two races.  We shall see.

I’m also interested in seeing how the set of Ohio initiatives proposed by Reform Ohio Now does.  The Ohio state website has live results, but doesn’t seem to say anywhere what percentage of precincts are reporting, so I don’t know how significant the returns so far are.  It looks like they’re all going down by large margins.  That’s a shame — I think the partisan gerrymandering of districts is the single factor that has been most destructive of American democracy in recent years.

The Texas anti-same-sex marriage proposal passed easily.  I’m shocked.

I’m not planning on staying up late enough to watch the California results come in. 

This Tuesday is the Virginia general election.  I haven’t been writing much about it, because, as I’ve mentioned before, I find it hard to summon a lot of enthusiasm for Tim Kaine except by comparison to the alternative.

This evening, I got a robodialed phone call that began something like "I’m Tim Kaine and I want you to know where I stand on the issues…"  It’s too bad I didn’t let the answering machine get it, because I really wish I could play it back and get it word for word.  It went on to say that Kaine is a social conservative, religious, served as a missionary, opposes gay marriage, and supports restrictions on partial-birth abortion.

I hung up the phone going "huh?"  Why would the Kaine campaign be calling me with this message?  I am on some Republican mailing lists because I voted in the Republican presidential primary in 2000.  (Virginia does not have party registration, and the only thing that you need to swear to is that you are not participating in the candidate selection process of another party.)  But two days before the election is not the time to be trying to identify possible crossover voters.

The end of the message caught my attention, as it stated that this message was paid for by "Honest Leadership for Virginia PAC," not Kaine for Governor.  A quick google search revealed that this PAC "supports the election of conservative Republican candidates in the state of Virginia, including 2005 gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore."  Moreover, it is fully funded by the Republican Governors Association.  And other Democrats have been receiving these calls as well.  So, this isn’t from the Kaine campaign at all — it’s a deliberate attempt by Kilgore’s allies to discourage liberal Democrats like me from showing up to vote on Tuesday.

I’m not an elections lawyer.  I don’t know if it’s illegal to run ads like this.  But it’s sure as heck sleezy.  And I’m a lot more motivated to vote for Tim Kaine on Tuesday than I was an hour ago.  So, for those of you in Virginia, or who have friends in Virginia, pass the word.  Don’t be duped by Kilgore’s dirty tricks.  Read the Post editorial endorsing Kaine.  And please come out and vote, even if it requires a clothespin.

Updated: 

The Post blog has the text of the call.  I poked around the Kaine website, and I’m pretty sure that this radio ad from June is what the RGA outfit spliced to make the recording.

I got another robo-call tonight from the same outfit, this one claiming to be from a pro-choice advocacy group and pointing out that NARAL VA has declined to endorse Kaine, and suggesting independent candidate Russ Potts as an alternative.   The man outside the metro station tonight handing out literature for the local Republican candidate for delegate also seemed to be talking up Potts from what I overheard as I went by.  Nice try.

Just wanted to thank two bloggers for very generous mentions of this blog:

• Personal / Political for including me in the Second Carnival of Feminists.  It was very fun to read the mixture of posts from bloggers who I read all the time and from ones that were new to me.
• The Mom Salon for featuring this blog as one of their first spotlight blogs.  This is a brand new site that aims to help people find interesting mom blogs.

I’ve been finding myself staying up later and later.  We usually don’t get D to bed until almost 9, and there’s just too much that I want to get done in the evenings.  I often find myself at 11, or later, trying to squeeze in one more item from my to do list.  But it’s not good for me to be walking around like a zombie.

So, the latest addition to my to-do list is "Go to bed by 11 pm."  It sounds silly, but it’s  helping, by making going to bed at a reasonable time one of the things that I’m trying to do, rather than a failure to get things done.   

I’ve been reading the article on Bill Gates and his efforts to fight disease in Africa from the October 24 New Yorker.  (Not available online, although they do offer a slideshow on the effects of malaria in Tanzania.)  Michael Specter writes about how shocked Gates was to learn that there were public health investments that weren’t being made where the cost per life saved was in the hundreds of dollars.

Specter quotes Kent Campbell, a former chief of the malaria branch at the US Centers for Disease Control as saying:

"I would love to believe that in the United States this effort is being driven by a decent desire to help, but I don’t think most Americans give a rat’s ass about the death of millions of African kids each year.  I don’t think they ever have."

The argument in favor of this is based on what economists call "revealed preference," the idea that you can tell what option people prefer by the choices that they actually make.  If we let millions of African kids die each year, we must prefer the world in which millions of African kids die to the one in which we pay higher taxes and provide more public health aid, or else we’d do something different.  QED.

But, there’s some evidence that people behave in ways that aren’t explained by revealed preference.  The best example I know of comes from studies of how much people choose to save in 401k and similar retirement plans.  One of the things that researchers have found is that people are much more likely to participate if the default option is that a small percentage of their salary, 3 or 5 percent, is invested than if the default is non-participation.  This isn’t terribly surprising when you think about it; many people find the whole concept so hard to think about that they just go with the default.

As a country, we tend to go with the default too.  In fact, I’d be willing to argue that much of the structure of Congress (especially the budgeting process) is designed to make it hard to move away from the status quo.  And it’s designed to make it a lot harder to accomplish things that a lot of people want, but aren’t passionate about, than it is to do things that a smaller group desperately cares about.

Some useful links:

• Roll Back Malaria
• Bread for the World
• Campaign to End Fistula

Last week, in response to my post about income and SAHPs, Amy commented:

"If you’re a person who can live reasonably happily spending all day, every day with small children for 5-10 years — if you don’t require an intellectual life and work, sustained adult conversation, trips to the doctor or dentist where your priority is your health rather than keeping your child safe and amused, exercise, regular sleep, the security of a well-funded retirement account, an active resume, and a few other things — then sure, have at it."

I called this a "low blow" and she responded "in all honesty I have trouble understanding how someone with a serious intellectual life sustains the multiyear desert you get when you do fulltime childcare.  I sure as hell couldn’t."

I disagree with Amy’s suggestion that full-time parenting is incompatible with an intellectual life, but agree with her that I’d have trouble doing it.  (At some point, I realized that all my fantasies about being a stay-at-home parent involved school-age chidren.)  But I don’t think it’s because my brain would rot.  The two main reasons that I think T is better suited for being the at-home parent than I am are:

1)  He doesn’t mind the lack of adult conversation.  At the playground, he’s usually the one on the climbing structure with the kids, not on the bench trying to talk to the other adults, so he isn’t frustrated by the constant interruptions.  He has some online forums where he hangs out in the evenings, but doesn’t miss the water-cooler conversations.

2)  He’s not a multi-tasker.  I know, this is counter-intuitive; aren’t SAHPs supposed to be the masters of multi-tasking?  But it means that when he’s on the floor playing dinosaurs with the boys, he’s generally not stressing over whether the laundry’s getting done.  Whatever he’s doing, he’s giving his attention to.  I think I might get more done if I were the at-home parent, but I’d make myself crazy in the process.

Some interesting related links:

• Dadventure’s list of tips for potential stay at home dads (which generally apply to moms as well).  Via RebelDad.
• Mommy Chronicles argues "in defense of the bake sale" and the skills involved in parenting (although I would suggest that parents who work for pay also do many of the things that she describes).  Via Playground Revolution and MotherShock. 

Today’s book is The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, by Dan Savage, of Savage Love [decidedly not work-safe] fame.  It’s the story of his and his boyfriend’s discussions about whether to get matching tattoos, wrapped in various digressions about the marital choices of the rest of his family and the weirdness of the institution of marriage in general. 

It’s a quick read, funny in places, but without the emotional intensity of The Kid, in which Savage wrote about their decision to adopt a child, and the adoption process.  The heart of the book is the personal stories, which put a face on the gay marriage debate.  But fundamentally, I don’t see this book changing many people’s minds; the only ones who are likely to read it are already on Savage’s side.

Savage makes some interesting points about how people hold gays who want to get married to a higher standard than they do to heterosexual couples.  (That is, if they want to get married to their same-sex partners — Savage points out that if he wants to enter into a sham marriage with a woman he has no plans to live with, the state will happily bestow its authority on it.)   He argues in favor of commitment, especially when children are involved, but against enforced monogamy as an essential part of such commitments.  And, in a passage that is both funny and biting, he argues against the perverse logic that says that "only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney’s [funeral home] is a success."

I got up early this morning and went to the Capitol to pay my respects to Mrs. Parks.  "Pay my respects" is the right term; I didn’t know Rosa Parks personally, and she lived a long and full life, so I can’t really say I was mourning her death.  I was acknowledging her as both a person and as a symbol of what one individual can do.

I don’t have any photos — only the press were allowed to take pictures.  Bitch has a link up to a slideshow of images.  It was a beautiful Washington morning, with the sun just coming up and lighting the monuments.  All the official flags are at half-mast.  From the trampled grass and miles of barriers, it’s clear there were long lines last night (the Post says there were waits of up to 5 hours), but just before 7 am this morning there was hardly any wait.   The police officers guiding people through looked tired.

The people I saw at the viewing were racially mixed, teenagers on up.  (We thought about bringing the boys in this morning, but decided that they wouldn’t understand and it wasn’t worth the hassle in order to be able to tell them that they had done it.)  Everyone looked somber and mostly talked in hushed voices, if at all.  One woman called out "thank you, Rosa" as she walked by.  The coffin was on a box draped in black, and there were three huge wreaths, one each from the President, the House and the Senate.  A Capitol Police officer in dress uniform stood at attention at either end.

The list of those who have lain in state at the Capitol is a strange mix.  Being assassinated while President pretty much guarantees you the honor (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) but just dying in office doesn’t (Roosevelt).  Some pretty mediocre presidents have been honored (Taft?!) as well as a truly obscure Senator (John Alexander Logan).  Two Capitol Police officers who were killed in the line of duty were honored, as were unknown soldiers of World Wars I and II, Korea, and "the Vietnam era."  Congress considered so honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., but did not.  The list is enriched by the addition of Rosa Parks.