Half Changed World

We’re getting closer to the primary to choose a Democratic candidate for Delegate in the 45th district, so I thought I’d provide an update on the race.

When I last wrote about the candidates, Doug suggested looking at the money.  Some contribution and spending reports are now available.  A few thoughts based on looking at them:

• Dick Hobson has raised significantly less money than any of the candidates.  That, combined with the fact that he still doesn’t have a campaign website, makes me wonder how seriously he’s really taking this race.  Or maybe he thinks that only ADC members are going to bother to show up for the primary.
• Laura Mandala has raised the most money, but nearly 2/3 of it is from a single donor (Edward Spoden).  It doesn’t demonstrate widespread support.
• Englin, Garvey and Mosqueda have raised more of their money in small amounts. 

The local Democracy for America group sent all of the candidates a questionnaire, and has posted the answers they all provided.  They’ve also set up forums where anyone can discuss the race.

I don’t have a new book to review this week, and Jody just tagged me with the book meme that’s been floating around for several weeks, so I’m going to play along.

1.  You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I was initially confused by this question, but I now understand it to be what book do you want to memorize to keep alive.  Assuming that I could actually memorize a full-length book, I think I’d pick Don Quixote.  It’s an Important Book, but it’s also funny and tender.  It’s also well-suited to be read out loud, which many recent books are not.  (I’m terrible at memorization, so in reality, I’d have to pick something like Where The Wild Things Are.  Also a fine book that I’d want to keep part of the human legacy.)

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Of course.  Everyone from Adam from A Ring of Endless Light to Strider from Lord of the Rings. (Heck, I still have a crush on Strider.)  And I really wanted to be Arkady from Second Foundation and Lessa from Dragonflight.

3.  What was the last book you purchased?

As Jody and Brian have noticed lately, I read an awful lot.  Both for money reasons and space limitations (we’ve seriously reached the stage that for any book that permanently enters the house, one needs to leave), I’ve gotten very good about getting books from the library instead of buying them.  Both my local library system and the adjacent much bigger one have online catalogs, and you can place a hold on any book and have it waiting for you when you show up.  Very civilized.  So, the books I buy these days are mostly either for the boys, reference, or really obscure stuff that the library doesn’t have.

That said, I’ve got an order on the way with Zinn’s Cycling Primer, Conditioning for Outdoor Fitness, and (thanks to Jody), Voyage to the Bunny Planet.  The last new hardcover book I bought for myself was The Plot Against America.  (Excellent book.  Given those space limitations, however, I’ll send it on to the first reader who emails me with a snail mail address.)

4.  What are you currently reading?

As usually, I’m reading more than one book at a time.  With D, I’m reading James and the Giant Peach.  I’m reading Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau, which I should finish in time to review next week.  And I’ve just started Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse.  The main problem is that it’s huge, and too much of a pain to haul back and forth to work, so I don’t read it on the metro.  I’m usually reading something lighter as well, but not just now.

5. Which five books would you take to a desert island?

As a teenager, I re-read books all the time, but I rarely re-read books these days.  Too many things I haven’t read yet on my list.  Hmmm. 

Assuming I’m not supposed to pick things like the Boy Scout Handbook or Peterson’s Guide to Desert Island Flora and Fauna, I’ll go with:

• Jody said to assume that we already have the Bible.  I’ll make mine a dual language, Hebrew-English, with a line by line translation, and bring along a dictionary.  I’ve always wanted to learn Hebrew well enough to read the Torah.
• Moby Dick, because my dad says it really is brilliant.  I read it as a teenager, when I got sick at camp, and didn’t appreciate it.  And I know I’m not going to make the time to read it anytime in the next decade or so unless I do wind up stranded on a desert island.
• Pride and Prejudice.  Challenging enough to be interesting, but fun enough not to feel like work. 
• The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman  A recent classic.  Sold as a fantasy for teenagers, but appropriate for thoughtful adults as well.
• Tales of Neveryon, by Samuel R. Delany.  A set of interlocking stories in a fantasy setting, playing on issues of sexuality, language, power, roles, and much more. 

6. Which three people will you tag to answer this next, and why?

Oh, Jody’s right that this feels awfully Junior High.  And I agree with Anne Lamott that it’s a horrible thing to look at this tiny baby that you’ve borne and realize that someday he’s going to have to go through eighth grade.

So, I’ll tag Tiny Coconut and Anne, and save the third slot for anyone who wants to play but hasn’t been tagged yet.  Post a comment if you’re doing it.

Home from New York.  We had a good time — ate some wonderful matzoh ball soup, caught up with some old friends, ran along the great new riverfront path on the West Side, visited the dinosaurs, and attended the Blog Sheroes meetup.

Nichelle liveblogged the event, including links to all of the attendees’ blogs.  I see that Lindsay (Majikthise), Elayne (Pen-Elayne), and Carolyn (Instructions to the Double) have already posted about it as well.  I was a little intimidated walking into the place, but soon felt very welcome.  (And the place wasn’t as terminally hip as I had feared.)  Topics of conversation included how we got into blogging, shoes, how many of us were high school or college debaters, animation, mutilated Barbies, our freaking cute kids, academia, and birth stories. 

…at the Blog Sheroes meetup in New York.  It’s about 2 blocks from my parents’ apartment, where I’ll be celebrating Passover, so I really don’t have any excuse not to attend.  And I’ll get to meet Bitch, PhD. 

My Senator, John Warner, is on everyone’s list of the swing votes in the Senate on the "nuclear option" to prevent use of the filibuster. 

I disagree with Warner’s positions on the vast majority of issues, but I will always respect him for standing up against his party and saying that Oliver North was unfit to be a member of the U.S. Senate.  As Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he’s been active in investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib.  Most recently, he was one of the few Senators to oppose intervening in the Terri Schiavo case.

He’s one of the few Republicans who I’ve voted for.  I supported him over Mark Warner in 1996, who seemed to have nothing going for him but a lot of money (made flipping telecom licenses, no less), as well as in 2002, when the Dems didn’t nominate anyone.  He may well get my vote again in 2008.  But tomorrow, he’s getting a phone call.

I was reading an economics paper today on "consumption commitments" and risk.  Postlewaite, Samuelson, and Silverman argue that long-term financial commitments have risks, making people more vulnerable to negative effects of sudden drops in income, but that they are often worthwhile, because they provide access to goods at less expense, or to a higher quality of goods.  And then — mostly as a form of economist humor, I think — they write "Having a child is similar to committing to a long-term mortgage, but without the default option" and note that "the rental market for children is thin, if it exists at all, with a long-term commitment being the norm."

Actually, Greg at DaddyTypes just posted about a company that is supposedly offering kids for rent, aimed at men who think they’ll be more attractive to women if they pretend to be divorced fathers, along the lines of About A Boy. 

But, if you can look past the issue about treating kids as consumption commodities, I think there’s an important point here.  There’s way too few options* in middle class society** between becoming a parent — and making a 24/7/lifetime commitment — and not having any significant contact with kids.

Take me as an example.  I literally can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I held a baby under the age of one before I gave birth to my own.  That’s nuts, isn’t it?  But I was both a youngest child, and the youngest of my cousins, so there were no babies in my family when I was little.  I babysat when I was in high school, but almost never for infants.  And I was among the first of my friends to become a parent (at 29 — which counts as young in the circles I hang out in).  I was a camp counselor for a summer, and volunteered as a tutor, so I had some contact with older kids.  But pretty much the only infants and toddlers I ever spent time with were those at the shul I attended.  And I don’t think I’m some bizarre anomaly.  (Am I?)

I wish there were more accepted ways in our society for people who don’t have kids, or whose kids are grown, but who like kids and enjoy their company to have ongoing nurturing relationships with other people’s children.  I think it would be good for the children, good for the parents, good for the honorary aunties and uncles (or whatever you want to call them).  But I have no idea how to encourage such relationships.  Maybe they’re easier when kids are older, more verbal, and able to do things without their parents around.  I don’t know.

*I recognize that there are some options short of parenting that I didn’t pursue — short-term foster care, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, even babysitting.

** I qualify this statement with the "middle-class" statement after reading Promises to Keep, where Edin comments on how much more hands-on child care experience her young subjects had than she did when she became a mother.

Today’s book is Michelle Kennedy’s memoir, Without A Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story.  It tells the story of how, at 24, Kennedy found herself living with her 3 small children out of her car in the small town of Stone Harbor, Maine.

Kennedy tells her story in easy, direct prose.  She moved to Stone Harbor after leaving her husband and the unheated cabin where they had been living,  She was quickly able to find a job as a waitress, but didn’t have enough cash to pay the deposit on an apartment.  It was summer, and so they slept in the car at the beach, with occasional stays at a campground for the showers.

She couldn’t afford a babysitter, so for a while she’d leave the kids in the restaurant parking lot while she worked, racing out at breaks to check on them.  (To her great fortune, she never got in trouble with child protective services; later she found someone who would take a reduced rate and keep the kids overnight.)  Without a kitchen, they had to buy small (and expensive) packages of food that wouldn’t go bad without refrigeration, pushing up expenses.  And even when she saved up some money, most landlords didn’t want to rent a 1- or 2-bedroom apartment to a woman with three kids.

To the extent that Kennedy’s book has a message, it’s that homelessness is closer than you think.  She emphasizes her middle-class background, her year of college at a good school, the way she and her family blended in with the tourists.  If this could happen to her, she suggests, it could happen to almost anyone.

Kennedy applied for public assistance (food stamps and housing vouchers) twice, and was turned down both times because she earned too much.  She asked her parents for help, and they said no — but she didn’t admit to them that she and the kids were homeless.  She comments at the end that she didn’t realize that she could have walked into almost any church and gotten some help.  (Charities love cases like hers, where a single infusion of cash can make a big difference.)

I found myself thinking that Kennedy’s middle-class background was as much a hindrance as a help to her.  It certainly helped her find a job, a babysitter, and eventually an apartment.  But a young mother from a poor background almost certainly would have known more about the potential sources of assistance, and how best to approach them.  And — more significantly — a young mother from a poor background probably wouldn’t have had the sense of failure and shame that burdened Kennedy and prevented her from asking for help.  She wouldn’t tell her parents that she was homeless because they felt that she had already screwed up — by marrying young and dropping out of school, by having three kids so young, by following her husband to that isolated cabin.  She didn’t want to confirm their low opinion of her by admitting that she didn’t have a place to live.

Interestingly, Kennedy never turned to the most common "safety net" of the downwardly mobile — credit cards.  Late in the story, she gets a job working for a credit card company, encouraging people to re-open closed accounts, and admits that she doesn’t have a credit card of her own.  It’s unclear whether this is a deliberate choice.

Ultimately, the story has a happy ending.  Kennedy gets an apartment, a better job, and remarries.  She’s able to look back on her time homeless with bemusement, but without deep pain. 

**************************

If anyone reading this blog has suggestions of other personal memoirs of raising children in poverty, I’d welcome them — it’s for something I’m working on.

I’ve been enjoying all the poems that people have been sharing as part of National Poetry Month.  I’ve run across some old favorites, as well as some ones that are new to me.

A friend shared with me this poem from Alfred E. Knopf’s poem a day email:

A Brief for the Defense, by Jack Gilbert, from his new collection, REFUSING HEAVEN.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

This poem reminded me of a poem by Yehuda Amechai that I tacked onto my wall after September 11.

A man doesn’t have time in his life

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

From The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translations by Chana
Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.

Back, tired and happy, from a terrific overnight camping trip with D, courtesy of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club.  D is totally obsessed with tents, loves nothing more than to climb in and out of the display models at REI, and has been begging to sleep overnight in one since last year.  We did it, and he even slept reasonably well — much better than his mother.

But the highlight of the weekend, however, turned out to be just hanging out with the other kids, especially the older ones.  For the first four years of his life, his father and I — or the other adults to whom we entrusted his care — mediated all of his interactions with the world.  I’m just loving watching him learn to make his own way.

In her comments on Friday’s post, Jody points out some of the dangers of the peer culture for children.  I’m sure there will be days when I miss my malleable preschooler.  Even in less than 24 hours of hanging out with the big kids, D learned that such a thing as a "gameboy" exists and started calling me "mom" as well as "mommy."  But I’m still feeling a bit like the mommy bird watching my fledgling start to catch the current.

Via 11d, I found this interesting debate between Amy Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias about whether it’s appropriate for politicians — especially liberal politicians — to speak out about the ways that pop culture coarsens our society and presents constant challenges to those of us trying to raise children.

The posts are worth reading in full, but the key statement of Yglesias’ position is "liberals are characterized by the belief that the state shouldn’t have substantive views about these things."  Given that, he believes that it is pure pandering for politicians who oppose censorship to use their position to criticize movies and television.  He writes:

"If Dan Gerstein wants to write op-eds decrying Friends then let’s have at it. Friends is not above criticism. But Joe Lieberman shouldn’t be doing this. If he wants to be a movie critic, or a rabbi, or whatever he should leave the Senate and let someone else write the laws."

As several of the commenters on his post point out, however, citizens look for politicians to do much more than pass laws.  We vote for candidates who seem to understand us and our problems, who invoke the aspects of America that we care about.  As much as Clinton’s "I feel your pain" has become a cliche, it worked.  And he was the master of proposing microprograms that didn’t cost a whole lot of money, didn’t do very much good, but sent the message that the government cared.

As Sullivan responds:

"I think that acknowledging the concerns of many Americans–even if you can’t fix them with a policy–is sometimes just the obvious and right thing to do, and shouldn’t always be given the perjorative label of pandering….sometimes it’s not about policies. It’s about proving that you’re not hopelessly out of touch with the real anxieties and concerns of many Americans."

I’d also like to see more people — politicians, sure, but also clergy, athletes, bloggers — helping people come together to develop ways to resist the onslaught.  Because there really is an onslaught.  I’ve written about the impact of advertising on my kids, and it’s only going to get much much worse as they get older.

NewDonkey writes:

"It’s not just about sex and violence; it’s also about consumerism, fashion-and brand-consciousness, and a generally superficial approach to life…. Matt is simply wrong to assume this is all about some "New Prudishness." As a parent of a teenager, I am not that worried that the ever-present marketers will turn him into a sex-addict or a sociopath; I’m more worried that he will turn into a total greedhead whose idea of the good life is stuff, and whose idea of citizenship is to demand a better personal cost-benefit ratio on his tax dollars."

It’s not enough to just say "turn off the TV."  It’s everywhere.  My son watches very little television at home, and we TiVo out the commercials.  But when we go to the doctor’s office, there are TVs in the waiting room, and when we go to the bookstore, the Dora books have ads for video games in the back.  And then there’s the matter of the other kids at school, as well as in the neighborhood.

As Jen commented on 11d, we’re seeing more and more parents — secular liberals as well as religous conservatives — feeling like the media is contrary to their values, and pulling the plug.   We’re also seeing more homeschooling for much the same reasons.  But the culture is pervasive and — unless we decide to become Amish — our children will eventually be exposed to it.  We can’t raise them in a bubble, even if we wanted to.

When I posted this week about D’s case of the "I wants,"  Parke commented:

"We also spend a lot of time in a church community with lots of other parents who are raising children in a similar way, so our children have many friends who also don’t get all the toys they want."

I don’t feel like I have such a community — and I think many people don’t believe that such a community is possible.  I think that there’s a power to talking about these issues in a way that makes people feel like they do have some control, rather than making them feel helpless and cynical.  The only people talking about this are the religious conservatives, and I don’t want to live in their community either.

I like what Anne wrote about this topic, although I’m not sure I entirely understand what she means:

"I became enamored with [the idea] a couple years ago, that to raise a family effectively today you must act counterculturally. That never fit quite right because I am too much a creature of our culture to turn my back on it entirely…. Instead, I can put myself and my family not against the culture, as ‘counterculture’ demands, but orthogonal (perpendicular in every dimension) to culture."