Half Changed World

Blogging may be slow here for a while.  Something’s gotta give, and this is one of the few things in my life that can be cut back.

1)  First week of every-day preschool for D.  We’re all adjusting to the new routine, especially the need to take bedtimes seriously.

2)  We’re having the carpet in the two second floor rooms replaced with hardwood (bamboo actually).  The carpet is about 16 years old, and totally scuzzy, but we’d been saying that we needed to wait until the boys were both potty-trained to replace it.  But after D’s asthma attack last winter, we had him tested for allergies, and found out that dust mites were the only thing he was allergic to.  So, we started thinking that it probably didn’t make sense to put in more carpeting — and once we decided to go with wood, there wasn’t any reason to put up with the skanky carpet for another couple of years.  They’re coming tomorrow, so we had to get all the furniture and everything out of those rooms.  At least the bookshelves are built-in, so we didn’t have to empty them.

3)  I’ve started training to be a CASA volunteer.  It’s a great program, and I’m excited to be doing it (if more than a little nervous as well), but the training is 2 nights a week from now until the end of October.  I’m glad that they’re not going to send us out without preparation, but it eats up a big chunk of my time for the next couple of months.

On Monday, Philip Klinkner at PolySigh posted a graph of labor force participation rates by race and gender for the past 50 years.

I was generally aware of the overall trends, but was surprised at how low the labor force participation rates were for black women in the 1950s.  Yes, they were a lot higher than for white women, but I’ve often heard comments to the effect of "black women have always worked; they didn’t have the privilege of being stay-at-home mothers even in the 1950s.

That’s certainly the impression that I got from reading The Street.  We returned the book to the library yesterday, so I can’t post a direct quote, but Lutie Johnson (and presumably Ann Petry) lays the blame for most of the ills of black people on the fact that whites wouldn’t give black men jobs, but would hire the women as domestic servants.  So the men felt emasculated and sought to prove themselves by fighting and sleeping around.  And the children were left unsupervised in dangerous neighborhoods, and got sucked in by the attractive menace of the Street.

Petry also suggests that at least some of the huge increase in single-mother households over the past 50 years is illusory.  Almost all of the women in The Street are technically still married, but living on their own or with men other than their husbands.  They’re only married because they can’t afford to jump through all the hoops required to get a legal divorce at the time.

Over the summer, Wayne at Rag & Bone Shop posted a list of 10 books he recommended.  One of them was The Street, by Ann Petry, a book I had never heard of.  Wayne wrote:

"If you want to encounter the volatile, turbulent issue of race in America, Petry’s novel offers a more relevant and authentic and comprehensive account of it, from the perspective of Lutie Johnson—intelligent, talented, brave, and doomed Lutie Johnson with her eight-year-old son. It’s coarse and claustrophobic and nearly hopeless—and very, very good."

Right away I requested it from my library, and eventually got it, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my library books.  And when it was due, I renewed it.  And when it was due again, I renewed it again, still without having picked it up.  They only allow two renewals, so I finally put it in my bag to read on the metro.  And then I started reading it, and I was hooked.

I don’t think it’s giving away anything of the plot to say that from very early in the book, it is quite clear that Lutie is doomed.  In many ways, The Street is a horror story, in which evil lurks around every corner but the heroine keeps escaping, until the end, when she doesn’t.  And even so, I didn’t see the final twist coming.

The edition that I got from the library has a cover blurb by Gloria Naylor, in which she says "Forty-five years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry in this painfully honest and wrenching novel.  Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic."  Nice of her to say this, since having read The Street, The Women of Brewster Place seems like a pale imitation.  (No pun intended — although I will note that this is one of the few English idioms where lightness is undesirable.)  While the story mostly follows Lutie Johnson and her dreams of a better life, some of the strongest parts of the story are where Petry changes perspective for a chapter, and dips into the point of view of one of the other people whose lives intersect with Lutie’s.  Suddenly someone who has seemed part of the scenery flickers into life as a full person, with dreams and fears of his or her own.

Lutie is a little too perfect to be fully believable as a character, and Petry gives her long interior monologues that are clearly speaking with the author’s voice.  But the anger and the frustration and the shattered hopes ring through as strongly today as they did almost 60 years ago:

"No matter what it cost them, people had to come to places like the Junto, she thought.  They had to replace the haunting silences of rented rooms and little apartments with the murmor of voices, the sound of laughter; they had to empty two or three small glasses of liquid gold so they could believe in themselves again.

"She frowned.  Two beers and the movie for Bub and the budget she had planned so carefully was ruined.  If she did this very often, there wouldn’t be much point in having a budget — for she couldn’t budget what she didn’t have.

"For a brief moment she tried to look into the future.  She still couldn’t see anything — couldn’t see anything at all but 116th Street and a job that paid barely enough for food and rent and a handful of clothes.  Year after year like that.  She tried to recapture the feeling of self-confidence she had had earlier in the evening, but it refused to return, for she rebelled at the thought of day after day of work and night after night caged in that apartment that no amount of scrubbing would ever really get clean."

Over at The Rabbit Lived, there’s been some interesting posts about pet owners and their attitudes towards their animals.  The blogger, who is a vet, wrote:

"I said that she was precisely the kind of pet owner that vets hate (sorry to speak for all vets there, but I was angry): the kind of person that takes care of the physical needs of an animal and expects applause for doing so.  Oh look, I do this and that and the other and I’m so good to this cat, he’s lucky to have me.  I said that the best kinds of owners are the ones that can list of ten reasons why their dog/cat/whatever is the most special dog/cat/whatever in the world."

This made me feel bad, because I’m definitely not that kind of owner, at least not about Aloysious.  I used to joke that she was my step-cat — since T got her when we were living on opposite coasts — and I was obviously a horrible step-mother who showed blatant favoritism to my cat.  (I could easily come up with a list of 10 things I loved about Becca-cat, who came to me when I was a teenager.  She died 5 years ago and I still have a photo of her in my office.)

Aloysious just isn’t a terribly lovable cat.  She will jump on your lap and want attention, but if you pet her, she’s likely to suddenly claw you without warning.  I don’t blame cats for scratching furniture, but I do object to her crapping on the couch, which she does often enough that we keep it covered with a plastic sheet when we’re not using it.  When we had to board her a couple of years ago (we were having the floors redone while we were away, so she couldn’t stay in the house), the staff nicknamed her "Aloy-vicious."

And yet we spent a significant amount of money last year to have her treated when she had a serious, but not life-threatening, medical issue.  Not really out of love, but because we could afford it, and because we take seriously the responsibility of being pet-owners.

This sounds awfully negative, so I will end with three things I love about Aloysious:

1. She’s got the loudest purr I’ve ever heard.
2. She’s the only cat I’ve ever known that fetches.  She loves it when you throw shoelaces or the plastic things from milk jugs for her.  (But she’ll also claw your hand open when you try to pick it up.)
3. In spite of being a not-very-gentle cat overall, she’s incredibly tolerant of the boys.  I’ve seen her respond to pokes by batting the offender with her paw — with the claws retracted.

Today I got an email with the header "Reminder ** Commemoration of Patriot Day SUNDAY, September 11th."   Not to be confused with Patriots Day, which commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, "Patriot Day" is apparently the officially designated name for September 11th.

The email went on to say:

"Our citizens have been looking for a meaningful way to commemorate September
11, 2001, its victims, and our heroes in uniform who continue to serve.

This September 11th, we are answering our citizens’ call-to-action by
hosting the inaugural America Supports You Freedom Walk, organized by the
Department of Defense and supported by Stars and Stripes newspaper."

I believe that commemorating the September 11th attacks and honoring those who serve America in the military are both highly worthy goals.  But I’m intensely uncomfortable about combining both causes into a single event.  I see this as part of the Administration’s attempt to blur the lines between the war in Iraq and the ongoing struggle against terrorism and to imply that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So, I wasn’t planning on participating in the "Freedom Walk" in any case, but my jaw dropped when I read in the Washington Post about the security measures being imposed:

"The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and "sterile," said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense.

The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford."

The Post reports that the park police offered to screen people entering the Mall, as they do for the big Fourth of July concert and fireworks, but DoD said "We didn’t want a bottleneck at the concert."  Somehow it works ok on the 4th, when hundreds of thousands of people come.  What the heck are they so afraid of?  Terrorists or anti-war protestors?

Instead, I’ll be participating in the DC Unity Walk, an interfaith walk from Washington Hebrew Congregation, to the Islamic Center, and the Gandhi memorial.  The mission statement is:

"We walk together as neighbors from many faiths and cultures. We gather in
peace to demonstrate our unity, recalling the spirit of togetherness that
grew out of 9/11 and rejecting the paths of despair and revenge. We
commemorate this day because concern for each other’s welfare is the shared
hope of us all."

If anyone reading this is planning on going and wants to meet up, drop me an email.  I’ll probably have N with me in the stroller.  (D has a birthday party to attend.)

Today was D’s first day of preschool for the year.  He’s going to the same school as for the past two years, with mostly the same group of kids, so it was pretty much a non-event for him.  I went in late so I could help take him to school, but 5 minutes after we got there, the teachers were lining them up to head out to the playground and he was off without a backward glance.  I was misty-eyed anyway, looking at the little kids in the two-year-old class, and being boggled at how big D is compared to them, and trying to wrap my head around the idea that he’ll be in kindergarden next year.

Suzanne at Mother in Chief wrote an post last week about the pressure she’s feeling to send her daughter to preschool, as most of her playgroup friends are going.  I’m sure her daughter will be fine either way.  We freely admit that preschool is as much about giving T a bit of a break from D’s constant desire to be entertained as it is because we think it’s useful for D.

Preschool has also helped T break into the social world of SAHMs and their children, which really wasn’t happening before.  They were happy to have their kids play with D at the playground, but no one was inviting them to playdates.  I think women are just very reluctant to invite a "strange" man into their house, or to accept an invitation from one.  And T was more focused on playing with D than with schmoozing up the moms, which made the social connections even harder.  Since D started preschool, he’s invited to many more parties and playdates.

Via Making Light, I ran across this vaguely attributed quote:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

As Roz Kaveny explains:

"I love it simply because it nails both the folly and the irrelevance of conspiracy theory. It is not necessary to claim that the President of e.g. the USA is setting out to kill a maximum number of African Americans out of deliberate spite. It is sufficient to point out that if you take a job involving life and death, and go on doing it when you are clearly incompetent, then you are morally responsible anyway. There is a duty not to be crap at what you do."

This fits in very nicely with Barack Obama’s take on the federal response (via MsMusings):

"I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and Poland Spring water."

"We as a society and this administration in particular have not been willing to make sacrifices or shape an agenda to help low-income people."

In the last couple of days, my office has been very peripherally involved with responding to Katrina, and all I have to say is that it doesn’t give me a whole lot of reason for hope.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Susan Wood, and her resignation from the FDA over the emergency contraception decision, saying that it "is contrary to my core commitment to improving and advancing women’s health." 

Shortly after I started working at HHS (over 9 years ago!), my new boss, Wendell Primus, resigned his position in protest of Clinton’s decision to sign the welfare reform bill.  Several months later, he was followed by his boss, Peter Edelman, and the ACF Assistant Secretary, Mary Jo Bane.  But all three of them were political appointees, obligated to represent the President’s position. 

At what point, if any, is a career civil servant morally responsible for being part of an organization that is crap at what it is supposed to be doing?

This is the post I started last Tuesday, and then didn’t have the heart for.  Since it was the day that the Census Bureau releases the latest poverty statistics, I’m discussing two books about growing up poor.

First up is The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, by Terry Ryan.  It’s her memoir of how her mother, Evelyn Ryan, kept her family fed and housed by entering dozens of entries in every possible contest, winning everything from televisions and washer dryers to shopping sprees, trips and a new car (which they sold to pay the bills).  Mrs. Ryan had a determinedly optimistic outlook, which Terry emulates in this book, so she focuses on her mother’s determination, creativity, and humor, rather than dwelling on her father’s alcoholism and violence, or on the indignities, major and minor, of their persistent poverty.  The closest she comes to complaining is when discussing how the nuns who taught at the parochial school she attended registered her for all remedial classes when it was time to enroll in high school, in spite of her excellent grades.

Evelyn Ryan is an amazing character, and her story would have been a terrific magazine article, but the material runs a little thin by the end of the book.  The book has a great premise, but no plot or character development.  At the beginning, Evelyn Ryan is a plucky heroine who wins contests, and at the end she’s still a plucky heroine who wins contests.  There’s a movie of this book coming out at the end of the month; based on the trailer, it looks like they’ve reframed the story as about Evelyn’s defiance of her bullying husband. 

The second book is the provocatively titled Welfare Brat: a memoir, by Mary Childers.  Childers writes about the endless contradictions of her childhood, of loving her mother and not wanting to be anything like her, of fitting in neither among the kids in the gifted class (where she stuck out for being poor) nor among the kids in her neighborhood (where she stuck out for caring about school), of living in decaying neighborhoods where all the other white families were fleeing, but also of taking advantage of her white privilege to get department store jobs.  She writes of hiding the money she had earned so that her mother couldn’t take it, but also of giving up a birthday celebration so that there would be cake for her little sister.

Perhaps the most heartfelt passages in Welfare Brat are where Childers talks about her dreams of going to college, but also of her depths of ignorance about it.   Desperate to get away from her mothers’ overcrowded apartment, she’s horrified at the prospect of sharing a dorm room.  She doesn’t understand that "full scholarship" still usually means loans, and has no money to pay for the incidentals that colleges assume are too minor to mention.  Her family doesn’t understand why she’d want to go to college, and even her friends think she should just get a job.  After her guidance counselor pulls strings, she winds up at a "mediocre community college":

"Even in college, most people aren’t excited about ideas.  Outside of class I’m teased for obsessing about my difficulties finishing a paper comparing Martin Buber’s notion of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship to Picasso’s representations of how we are three- and four-faced, and thus slated for prismatic complexity interacting with others.  Several teachers drop hints that I would have no trouble transfering to a better school.  When I explain my scholarship and aversion to debt, they reply that practically everyone borrows to attend college, as if no one should refuse a common fate."

(For maximum effect, these passages should be read alongside this essay about class and college admissions.)

Childers finishes her book with a statement about welfare reform. She writes "It’s clear to me that I could develop from welfare brat to chip-on-the-shoulder chick to contributing dissident citizen because I had the good luck to come of age when many people in the United States approved of a war on poverty rather than what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘the war against the poor.’"  This statement may well be true, but it isn’t supported by anything that’s come before in the book. While Childers is sympathetic to her mother’s struggles, she seems to have suceeded in spite of the parenting she received, not because of it. 

Dawn suggested that we talk about what we’re doing to help Katrina’s victims, because doing something is the best antidote to despair that we’ve got.

I gave some money to the Red Cross.  I deliberately requested that it go to the general disaster relief fund, not just to Katrina’s victims, because you never know what’s going to hit next week.  I want them to have the flexibility to use the money where it’s needed most.

I gathered up a big bag of summer clothes to donate — a bunch of stuff that won’t fit N by next summer, the shoes that he wore for about 3 weeks before outgrowing, some of my rejects from the great shorts hunt.  When I went to Target for dishwashing soap and milk, I also picked up a stack of underwear.  Because lots of people are donating used clothes, but who wants to wear used undies?  I’ll bring it all in to work, where one of my coworkers said she’d bring it to a friend whose company is sending a shipment to Texas.

(I know, I know.  All the experts say that money is the most useful thing to send.  But I’m hearing reports out of Houston and Baton Rouge that the shelves in the stores are bare.  And I think it’s a mistake to discount the human connection that grows when you make an in-kind donation and imagine the people who will be wearing those specific clothes or eating that food.  It sounds like the people coordinating services for the evacuees here in DC have all the donations they can handle.)

I volunteered at work to come in over the weekend to help answer the hotline for medical professionals who want to volunteer, but wasn’t called in.  I suspect they had many more volunteers than they could use.  (Grim note:  the list of professionals they use has been expanded as of today to include coroners, medical examiners, morticians…)

I gave blood a few weeks ago, so can’t give again right now.  But I’ll give when I can.  The Red Cross comes to our office building on a regular cycle, which makes it easy.

On re-reading, this doesn’t feel like very much, not in the scale of the disaster.  But the idea is that it’s a big country, and a bigger world, and if we all do the little that we feel able to do, it will add up to a lot.

Moxie wrote an interesting post contrasting the leadership shown on 9/11 with the lack of it this week:

"What do they need?" we asked.

They had an answer for that, Rudy & Company. They told us what was needed and where to bring it. When there wasn’t anything civilians could do, they told us. And we knew it was true. We knew we had to just sit tight until the rescuers needed something we could give."

I’m not sure that’s quite a fair comparison. 9/11 was logistically simple compared to the mess caused by Katrina.  There were very few wounded, and remarkably little damage outside the few blocks of the twin towers.  It was a mess getting everyone home that first day, but the weather was good, and except for emotional trauma, most people got away with nothing worse than blisters from walking a long distance.

Moreover, at least some of the answers that Rudy and co. gave that first week turned out to be wrong.  They said there was no reason to worry about the lingering cloud of dust.  (I was in the city six weeks later, and you could still taste it in the air.)  At best, this was an attempt to put a positive spin on an uncertain situation, to try to avoid panic and a mass exodus that would have damaged NYC for years.  At worst, it was an outright lie.

But yes, reading the coverage this week has made me appreciate what Giuliani did.  He managed to set an emotional tone of projecting confidence without seeming to take things less seriously than they deserved, of acknowledging the huge task ahead without seeming overwhelmed.  Bush still seems to be smirking and joking about Trent Lott’s house.  Nagin seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  FEMA officials seem to have forgotten that no one cares about how hard they’re working, only the results.  And the results — or lack thereof — speak for themselves.

And if this report is true — if the food distribution center where Bush’s press conference was held was a fake, taken down as soon as he left — then heaven help us all.  I’m pretty cynical these days, but that’s beyond what I can wrap my head around.  I’m literally nauseous at the thought.  (Via Scrivenings and Phantom Scribbler)

Important Update: Respectful of Otters and Idealistic Pragmatist tracked down the German video that was cited as the source, and found that it did not say that the food distribution center was a fake.  It did report that the street cleaning crews in Biloxi only showed up when the President was there.  As Rivka wrote:

"But we need to be careful not to undercut the points we’re trying to make with even unintentional amplification. The news coming out of the U.S. Gulf Coast, including the biting commentary by ZDF news, is damning enough as it stands."

If you’ve reported on this story as fact, please update it.