Pitting Old and Young Against Each Other: Manufacturing Age Divides to Prevent Solidarity

One of the more brilliant victories in the ongoing effort to set people against each other in a scrabble for crumbs to distract them from the real issues has been the successful creation of an age barrier where young and old are set up adversarially, rather than being treated as groups which may have some things in common and grounds for working in solidarity. Age divides and ageism have always been an issue, but it seems especially stark right now as economic tensions create the ardent desire for new scapegoats, and new targets of anger. Legitimate anger over issues like joblessness is subverted into rage at other people, rather than the system that creates these problems.

One consequence of pushes to raise the retirement age and limit benefits has been a larger number of older adults in the workforce. Many of these people may not be actively excited about this, may not be choosing to remain in the workforce, but they don’t have any options. Entering retirement would expose them to financial hardship because they cannot support themselves. This is an especially big problem for people who were counting on pensions that evaporated, or who made investments they were assured were sound, only to find that those investments are no longer supported, and will not be providing any payouts.

Older adults in the workforce face a considerable amount of discrimination. It is extremely hard to apply for work as you grow older, which means that people tend to cling to the jobs they have, because they cannot afford to take the risk of seeking out a new position. Leaving work at 60 and trying to return at 61, for example, is very difficult. Employers may believe any number of things about older applicants, and these beliefs contribute to decisions not to hire older adults, because clearly they will pose a problem on the job, and we can’t be having that. While age-based discrimination is not legal, there are many reasons to refuse a job applicant, and these can be trotted out if a challenge arises.

So older adults stick with the jobs they have and are reluctant to leave them, even if they really want to retire. Some may actively want to make room for younger up and comers with reform on the mind, but cannot step aside because to do so would be to create hardship and poverty. They have to remain employed, even if they do not want to. The systems around them may keep them working long past their planned retirement age and possibly up until the point where they die, because they cannot survive independently. Because they see what is happening to their retired friends and they can read the writing on the wall when it comes to changes to their benefits, and know it would be too dangerous to retire.

Consequently, fewer jobs become available. Turnover drops, because people aren’t leaving established positions. Advancement up the promotion ladder slows and in some cases halts because more senior positions are not opening up. Middle-aged people can’t rise to more prominent positions and their younger colleagues are forced to the bottom of the ladder, if they can grab a rung at all. Companies are also, of course, shrinking hiring budgets, firing personnel, and making less positions in general available, which creates a significant job squeeze. People with training may not be able to get jobs in their chosen career areas, and joblessness among young people is at an extremely high rate right now.

This is often positioned as the fault of older adults. If all those old fogeys would just retire already, plenty of jobs would open up. Promotions would begin again. People could start to build careers and develop experience. The unemployment rate for younger adults would drop and more opportunities would become available. Which means, of course, that younger people should resent older adults for ‘taking jobs’ and ‘keeping them out of the workplace.’ Instead of a situation where workers could work in solidarity with each other to build connections and address inequalities, workers are pitted against each other; some younger people take out their rage on older adults, and some older adults naturally assume that younger employees are out to get them and are unfairly blaming them for a tense economic situation. A neat divide has been created and it is extremely difficult to bridge. Mission accomplished; rather than working with each other, people work against each other, tearing each other apart.

Job creation and the job market are complex topics, and simplifying the issue to ‘well there are just too many old people still working’ is not only wildly inaccurate, but actively harmful. Unfortunately, it’s a widespread belief, and there seems to be an attitude that older people should be compelled into retirement to provide more opportunities to young employees. It is assumed that younger people are more innovative, have more energy, work harder, are more adaptable. The end result is further marginalisation of old people in the workplace, including a reluctance to take advantage of their knowledge and skills. After all, they are the enemy, what could they have to offer?

The issue here is that too few jobs are available, and that opportunities can be especially limited for people with specialised training. That highly qualified people are competing for shrinking numbers of positions and facing the possibility that they may not be able to work in their chosen fields. This is far from the responsibility of older adults in the workplace, but blaming them for it sure is convenient because it obfuscates the larger issues very neatly.

31 August, 2011 – 10:56 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice |

Environmentalists Are Only Out To Ruin Your Fun

Stereotypes about environmentalists and members of the environmental movement abound; stodgy, uptight, preachy. But perhaps one of the most enduring is the myth that we are fun ruiners. We are out to destroy everything enjoyable in your life, and we will grin maliciously in the process, because we hate fun. Environmentalists have little club meetings where they discuss the fact that fun is what is wrong with the world, and develop their next fun-ruining campaign with careful planning to target it most effectively. The question we ask ourselves is not how we can help the environment, but how we can inflict misery on the maximum number of people.

Take what happened when my landlord ordered some fill sand for a project. The driver duly came out with a hopperload of something that was not, strictly speaking, or really even by any stretch of the imagination, sand. My landlord asked what it was, thinking that perhaps there was an error with the order, and that the poor driver would need to go back for a load of the right thing. But, oh not, this was what was being sold as fill sand, you see, because ‘environmentalists.’

This was about the point where I started to tune into the conversation, because my ears tend to prick at the word ‘environmentalist’ said in a very specific and spiteful tone that leads me by reflex to check for a spit puddle on the ground. Do tell, I said, leaning out my window, and the driver obligingly told, blissfully unaware of the increasingly frozen expressions on our faces as he informed us that those awful environmentalist fun ruiners made it illegal to remove sand from the beaches, even in state parks! A common resource for us all! He went to the state park once to take some sand and a ranger told him he couldn’t do that! Where, he asked us, is a body to get sand with environmentalists around, snooping around every corner and taking all that makes the world enjoyable away.

I happen to have a keen interest in beach conservation and the political issues associated with taking beach sand, both for sale and for transfer to other beaches deemed more worthy of ‘nourishment.’ Oddly enough, sand tends to be taken primarily from low-income areas and brought to high-income areas, and residents of these areas do not receive compensation for the sand that is taken. Their beaches dwindle away into nothing and it’s made clear that they are not welcome at other beaches because they are loud, or dirty, or violent, or whatever stereotype people choose to use when explaining why it is simply not possible to allow ‘those people’ onto their pristine white beaches—after all, they are a resource for everyone, but we don’t mean everyone, now do we?

And of course stripped beaches are an environmental issue. Beach habitat is complex, fragile, and interconnected. The organisms that rely on beaches need each other, and stripping beaches strips them of a home. Animals in turn that may rely on them as transient food sources are put in a fix. Those nice buffer zones created by beaches suddenly disappear, exposing communities to an increased risk of flooding, storm surge, and severe climate conditions. There are very real dangers in mining beaches for sand, in using beach sand as fill in construction projects and other things.

But obviously, it’s not these issues that environmentalists care about, it’s the possibility to ruin some fun that we’re most interested in. Beaches as a public resource aren’t the primary focus, and the idea that maybe some people would like to enjoy beach sand in situ is just silly. No, we spotted people doing something fun (something very profitable as well) and simply had to put a stop to it. Because that is what environmentalists do.

The idea of members of social justice movements as fun ruiners is certainly nothing new, but the tensions are especially stark with environmentalists. There’s a fundamentally adversarial framing that appears to be actively encouraged, where people concerned about the environment become the enemy, and everyone else just wants to have fun and is stopped by foolish and naive tree huggers who have no respect for fun, or for nice occupations like logging and fishing (obviously we must hate loggers and fishermen if we do things like encouraging the preservation of timber and fisheries in the interest of having resources available for future generations).

The tensions have always been strong here, in a community where resource exploitation was the primary income for many people and uppity hippies started whining about it without providing any meaningful alternative for the people they put out of work; now the greed of resource exploitation has effectively choked the timber and fishing industries here, forcing almost everyone into dead-end tourist jobs in a community with a spiking cost of living created by reckless promotion from tourist agencies. This is not the fault of the environmentalists, but it is sometimes framed as such. If only we hadn’t stepped in to ruin the fun, things could have kept on as they were and it might have been possible for most people to have a nice, solid, middle-class income they could use to buy a modest house and support their families. Clearly, it’s our fault that the region is primarily dependent on tourism and the marijuana industry, all because we don’t approve of fun.

30 August, 2011 – 10:39 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , |

Charitable Appeals and the Deserving Poor

During the holiday season in the US, almost every newspaper runs some sort of charitable appeal or highlights community charities in a series of stories. It may keep track of donations from readers in a little box on the front page so people feel good about themselves. It discusses the good works of charities and interviews beneficiaries and generally paints a picture of perseverance in times of hardship, people struggling against overwhelming odds. These stories are meant to be uplifting even as they are a chiding reminder to holiday celebrants that not everyone has access to the same things that they do, so they ought to give a little to help out. And people contribute and feel better about the world and express faith in the society around them.

There is a significant problem with these holiday charity appeals and requests for donations and other assistance in general, with some obvious and notable exceptions. It has to do with the way the recipients of charity tend to be framed in appeals, with the narratives about poverty and hardship promoted by charities and the organisations that support them. The same newspapers that highlight charities every holiday season reinforce these narratives in their year-round reporting, to make readers feel good about them when November and December come around and the demands for money start to appear on the front page.

Charity, you see, is for the deserving poor. The selected recipients chosen for profiles are carefully cultivated by charities and the organisations that do the profiles; a journalist who approaches a charity for a story will get a list of carefully vetted clients to interview, and the charity will exercise extreme caution when it selects people. Thus, a journalist talking about the food bank might interview a surgical nurse who was laid off and forced into economic hard times with a single dependent child who happens to be precocious and full of potential, but the mother with six children relying on welfare is not brought forward as an interview subject. One is ‘deserving’ and the other is not.

Narratives about poverty in the United States tend to focus on a specific framework that differentiates deserving from not very neatly, with a bright, shiny, stark line. Deserving poor people are cheerful, work through their hardship, don’t waste money on frivolities. They believe in the American Dream and they work very hard and they just want to have a chance at success, they fully buy that opportunities are available if they just reach out a little longer, stretch themselves a little more. They deserve charity because they are models of how to do poverty right.

People who are unhappy, people who are angry, people who ‘waste’ money, they are not deserving poor. They are a drag on the system, they shouldn’t receive any assistance. They are clearly reckless, and are in distressed circumstances because of their own selfish and ridiculous behaviour. After all, unemployed people shouldn’t have children, because they won’t be able to take care of them and will expect society to bail them out. Poor people shouldn’t waste time whining when they could be looking for work or engaging in robust and healthful self improvement activities. Homeless people shouldn’t have dogs if they can’t take care of them.

And charitable appeals firmly reinforce this dichotomy of poverty. These ‘neediest cases’ profiles focus on the heart-wrenching stories that fit beautifully and cleanly into this narrative, the people who just fell upon hard times through no fault of their own. But they don’t want handouts, oh no. They might need a little help but they want to work hard and pay it forward. They are clean and scrubbed and bright, they have hopes for the future even though they are living in bleak times, and you, gentle newspaper reader, can help them realise their dreams. You can help these deserving poor, you can lift them up out of poverty and hardship.

You can ignore the ‘hard cases,’ the people entrenched in poverty who moan and whine about it and line up for government handouts and then waste them on soda pop and video games. They do not deserve your assistance, no reputable charity would work with them. They haven’t fallen on hard times, they’ve made their own hard times, you see. Society has no obligation to them. If it did, they’d be the topic of newspaper profiles in a positive light, instead of showing up only when the paper wants to raise the spectre of ‘welfare fraud’ and reinforce popular myths about people living high on food stamps or SSDI.

Many charities fall into this trap when it comes to talking about their clients because, in no small part, they don’t want to alienate donors. If they provide assistance to ‘undesirables,’ suddenly they are less sexy targets for newspaper profiles and public appeals. Needle exchange organisations, for example, rarely show up in seasonal charity appeals in the paper, because the population they serve is not one that fits into the deserving, ‘good’ poor model. For organisations that want to build donations and create a positive image in the community, it is necessary to stick within the confines of this narrative, even if it is actively harmful, even if it excludes some of their own clients.

A shift in attitudes about poverty and who ‘deserves’ assistance and what kind of assistance should be made available cannot happen overnight, and charities really cannot lead that charge, because they need to focus on serving their populations now. Unfortunately, that often means actively harming their own causes, because they are positioned in a place with minimal choice. It is too dangerous to advocate for all needy people when money is on the line; the responsibility here lies with the powerful and wealthy donors who could be promoting charity for all. With the newspapers who report on social issues year round, not just in the seasonal charity appeal, and shape perceptions of these appeals with the narratives they put forward on the front page every day.

29 August, 2011 – 10:21 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice | Tagged , , , , , |

Knowledge is Power and Power Consolidates Power

Wealthy people are very fond of hanging on to their wealth, as a general rule. There is a belief that they deserve it, that they won that money fairly, even in cases where people inherit money; after all, their ancestors worked for it, so they shouldn’t throw it all away because that would be a disgrace to the family legacy. And they must have won it fairly because they are wealthy in the land of opportunity, where no social inequality exists, where some groups are not advantaged over others. A nice cushion of mythology protects wealth, to make wealthy people feel more comfortable about the fact that they have money, and to encourage them to consolidate it. To acquire more money. To increase monetary inequality, because, well, they deserve it. If those poor people have a problem with it, they ought to get wealthy, and then they’d solve that little problem, now wouldn’t they?

One of the things about acquiring and maintaining wealth is that it requires knowledge and a very high degree of financial literacy. People are not born with this information. They acquire it through lived experience. If you grow up in a wealthy family, you absorb it throughout your childhood, and as you grow up, you are encouraged to seek out education, to go to college, to develop skills. You also have an army of advisers to rely upon; personal wealth management isn’t conducted personally by the wealthy, but by the people they hire to handle their money. People with extensive experience, training, and knowledge to draw upon.

Knowledge is power and wealthy people have access to considerable financial power in the form of their personal knowledge and the knowledge for hire they can readily access because of their wealth. Power also tends to consolidate power, which means there is an active incentive to accumulate more, to grow wealth, to increase power and control. To limit access to information that might be beneficial for people outside the power structure. To use that power to lobby for more tax loopholes and other benefits to limit the outflow of wealth. Information about these loopholes is available to the people who made them, and they are the ones who use them, to increase their power.

For most average citizens, financial literacy is limited. People may have a general idea on some vague topics, but they do not understand the financial system. This is highlighted in the way people engage in financial planning, in the way that the mortgage crisis was built, by preying upon people who did not fully understand what they were getting into and lacked the tools to do their research. These victims of a system where knowledge is tightly controlled were framed as reckless or greedy or just plain stupid, when in fact they were caught in a trap devised by people who had power and knew how to use it. The recklessness and greed came from the banks encouraging loan officers to stretch the truth when discussing loans, from people who originated no documentation loans to people who clearly didn’t understand them.

And financial literacy education for people in the lower classes is often framed as a ‘you should save money and work really hard,’ with some attention paid to topics like how compound interest works, and financial planning for retirement and big purchases like homes. Fundamentally, though, this information is often geared at limiting knowledge. Those tax loopholes used by the wealthy? They aren’t discussed in financial planning classes at the community center, and in fact many of them aren’t even available to the people attending those classes because they don’t make enough money, they don’t have enough wealth to hide the money they do have, so those benefits are useless.

Discussions about filing taxes may in fact cover some tricks people can use to reduce tax liability, but they fall far short of the tactics used by wealthy taxpayers and corporations to avoid the lion’s share of their taxes. Knowledge, the ability to control finances effectively and build wealth, is controlled and limited. People are blamed for their lack of knowledge in a system that deliberately hides this information from them. And they may not understand the extent of the inequalities around them because, often, they are around people with the same level of knowledge and power. When everyone struggles in the same way you do, it may start to feel normal, and you may start to feel like there is no way out, no information that you could use to empower yourself. After all, if there was, someone would have found it, taken advantage, and showed the rest of you.

Much as people are set against each other in fights for crumbs, knowledge is hidden and shuffled around to keep people in the dark while they are simultaneously criticised for their lack of knowledge. People make assumptions about the availability of tax benefits, financial assistance, and related things on the basis of what the people around them do, and know, on the basis of their own experiences. Someone who grows up in a poor household receives a very different education than someone who grows up in a wealthy one, and this sets up for entrenched intergenerational inequality. You do what you know, and you cannot know more if you don’t even have access to the tools you need to understand that there is more to know, let alone the tools necessary to get the information you might benefit from. And we wonder why wealth and power become increasingly concentrated over time.

28 August, 2011 – 10:06 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy, social justice | Tagged |

Debunking Mythologies About Mental Illness and Domestic Violence

That there is a clear link between mental illness and domestic violence is indisuputable. Most members of society agree that such a link exists and needs to be addressed, some with graphic tales to accompany their position. The nature of that link, though, runs contrary to popular claims. As with other generally accepted beliefs about mental health and violence, the focus on the connection between mental illness and domestic violence tends to be on the alleged tendency of mentally ill people to commit acts of violence. People are informed that mentally ill partners are dangerous, that schizophrenic or bipolar people are not safe to be in relationships with because they will be abusive. Borderline personality disorder in particular is blamed for abusive relationships and family dynamics.

The fact of the matter is that while there is a connection between mental illness and domestic violence, it runs in the opposite direction. Mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence; this .pdf handout on the subject points out that women in particular are at especially high risk. In surveys of mentally ill women, very large percentages reported experiences of domestic violence and abuse, in numbers of 50% and higher in many cases. This is not an epidemic of abuse caused by expressions of mental illness, but a serious social problem and threat for people with mental illness, because the statistics in the other direction, on reports of violence committed by people with mental illness, are miniscule by comparison.

Mentally ill women are viewed as legitimate targets, which is why they are more likely to experience domestic violence, sexual assault, and other abuses. This is particularly stark for women with severe mental illnesses, and women who are vulnerable because of homelessness and other issues, like physical disabilities to accompany their mental health conditions. People viewed as targets tend to become targets, and when they are targeted, the people who should theoretically be protecting and advocating for them may fall short on the job. Police officers, for instance, don’t take claims of domestic violence and assault as seriously when they come from mentally ill women, particularly if their partners occupy positions of power; are members of the police force, for example.

This creates a feedback effect, as women experience violence because they are targeted for it and do not get support, thus informing their abusers that they were absolutely correct when they chose their targets. It is safe to keep abusing their partners without fear of the consequences, because society doesn’t care. In fact, society may even create excuses. Partners of mentally ill people receive constant reinforcement in reminders about how hard it must be, how brave and courageous they are to stick with their partners, the great services they are offering as caregivers. These messages can contribute to a feeling of ownership and entitlement, as well as anger. Why aren’t their partners more grateful for all the kind things that they do?

Popular perceptions of mental illness include the idea that mentally ill people are ‘difficult.’ Hard to get along with, impossible to engage in a meaningful way, too hard to be around. Work. Relationships with mentally ill people are framed as grinding work without end and this can create a situation where abuse is excused. We all know it’s not right to hit a partner, for instance, but if that partner is ‘acting crazy,’ you can see how it might happen. You could see how many people need to be restrained for their own good or calmed down with a brisk slap. It’s not nice, but you do what you have to do and surely you feel awful, but. This kind of logic is so far off the slippery slope it might as well be all the way at the bottom of the abyss, but it’s parroted and promoted, which means that abusive partners can turn to it when they want to justify their behaviour.

For mentally ill people, there is a constant reminder that you are not good enough for relationships, you don’t deserve them, and thus you need to cling to what you’ve got. You should stay with an abusive partner because it’s better than nothing and you may not be able to find another relationship. And often, such relationships cultivate dependency, as well. People may be reliant on their partners to assist them with tasks of daily living, which means they cannot leave, and their framing as a burden may lead them to think they deserve the abuse because they’re such a drag on the relationship. Economic abuse is also not uncommon, as partners of mentally ill people may take their paycheques or benefits from them, arguing that they can take care of the money more responsibly, or need some compensation for all the work that they do. When someone does try to leave a relationship, no money is available, and attempts to leave can subject you to the risk of more abuse as punishment, and thus, you stay where you are. Even though it is dangerous.

The persistent social attitude that the danger in relationships with mentally ill people comes from the person with mental illness makes it very difficult to deconstruct and combat this particular link between violence and mental illness. This framing makes it easy to dismiss violence against mentally ill people as an isolated outlier, rather than evidence of a systemic social problem, because everyone knows that mentally ill people are violent and dangerous and frightening. We need to take measures to protect the rest of society from them, not the other way around, goes the popular logic, and thus a group of people identified and targeted as victims will continue to experience abuse at shocking rates.

27 August, 2011 – 10:50 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , |

Privatising Water, Creating Suffering

Globally, there is a severe water crisis. Billions of people lack access to safe supplies of drinking water and water-borne illnesses continue to be a problem in many regions of the world as people drink from contaminated water, cannot adequately control hazardous waste materials, and receive inadequate health care to meet their needs. Water is a critical resource and in many regions there are increasing tensions over who has access to it, who does not, and who gets to control it.

At the head of this are corporations with a vested interest in privatsing water supplies. Water is big business, and companies that control water stand to make substantial profits. Globally, the increasing privatisation of water resources is on the rise. Communities receive pennies on the dollar for the water they sell to privatising companies, and may receive minimal support or assistance when they start to experience water shortages and other issues. Companies have their contracts for a set amount of water, and they don’t really care how they get it, or who they harm to access it. Their goal is simply to extract more water. Attempts to push back, as seen with protests against Fiji Water, often receive scant media coverage and support; many reporters, after all, probably have branded water bottles on their desks.

Organizations like the United Nations appear to be promoting policies that lead to privatisation and the exploitation of water resources. These groups should be working on improving access to water supplies in communities where clean drinking water is not available, not helping corporations take water and sell it at vast personal gain. When UN projects are funded and supported by organisations with interests that may run contrary to its stated mission, it is safe to say that we have a significant problem, and one that needs to be addressed by the member nations. Water, like other resources, is ripe for exploitation from communities that may lack the authority and clout to resist it, and may in fact need that resource for themselves.

Issues of privatisation are often framed around the developing world, as something ‘they’ have to struggle with, something ‘we’ should rescue ‘them’ from, but in fact the industrialised world has some problems of its own. Northern California faces chronic water shortages not just because of siphoning from Southern California, but also because of private water packaging and sales. In Britain, vulnerable waterways are being drained dry by private water companies. Public resources that should be common to all are falling under the control of a limited number of people, and society as a whole suffers.

It’s not just that human communities need their water supplies for drinking, bathing, and irrigation, but also that water is an important environmental feature. Animal habitats rely on water, native plants need consistent and appropriate supplies of water. Rivers and lakes are there for a reason, and allowing companies to drain them to sell their contents is potentially extremely dangerous, for the humans who need that water, for the environment, for the continued stability of potentially delicate and complex ecosystems.

Fighting water privatisation is a critical environmental and social issue, but despite increased consciousness on this subject, the bottled water industry is booming. Bottled water is a ubiquitous sight and the same outlandish labeling claims that have been singled out for criticism persist because there has been no real push for change. Misleading statements about the origins of water and the communities it is taken from, what is in the bottle, the ‘benefits’ of bottled water. In the industrialised world, where most people have access to potable, safe water directly out of the tap, some of the safest water in the world, people buy bottled water in droves and flock particularly to exoticised products from the wilds of the jungle or glaciers or whatever natural source is in at any given time, with scant attention to the costs that may be embedded in that water bottle.

Information on the costs of privatisation and the way it harms communities is readily available, with fairly minimal research, but resistance to bottled water is framed as ridiculous. Look at San Francisco’s decision to turn away from spending city monies on providing bottled water to city personnel. This is an example of a concrete action taken to protest privatisation and reduce the market for bottled water, and to set an example to the rest of the city, to show people that it is possible to live without bottled water and to promote the use of tap sources. Yet, media reports often recounted this tale as an ‘oddly enough’ news item, not important political and environmental news but another example of those silly people in San Francisco.

My socially conscious grocery store has racks and racks of bottled water, including products with exotic labeling and claims intended to seduce buyers. I occasionally drop them notes asking why they continue to sell a product associated with documented harms, and have yet to receive a response. I suspect my notes are written off, rather than taken seriously for what they are, or that the store argues that it is simply accommodating the needs of a market, that people will buy water somewhere so it might as well sell it. Imagine what would happen if chains like Whole Foods decided to stop selling bottled water and posted signage talking about why, if they put their claims of environmental friendliness where their mouths are. I suspect we’d see a shift in attitudes about bottled water, and more resistance from privatisation from people in positions of power to actually do something about it.

26 August, 2011 – 10:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , |

Guest Post From Andrea: Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Invisible Misery and the Failure of Compassion

Andrea lives in Nowheresville, Virginia, on the edge of the piedmont. She has four dogs, five cats, and an incredibly patient husband. We will not discuss the number of chickens. She is a knitter, a spinner, a dyer, a soapmaker, a socialist, and an angry cripple. You can find her blogging her idyllic life over at The Manor of Mixed Blessings. Posts there have no redeeming social value.

As I’m sure everyone is aware, a 5.8 earthquake hit the east coast on Tuesday afternoon, just a little before 1400. The epicenter was near little Mineral, Virginia, a town most people had never heard of before the quake struck. Indeed, most people continued to be ignorant of the town’s existence in the hours immediately following the quake; because the shaking was felt in Washington, DC, and New York City, where the major media outlets already had correspondents, reporting focused solely on those two major metropolitan areas.

Damage was light in DC and New York, those media outlets reported. There were cosmetic injuries to the National Cathedral and the Washington Monument, and a few buildings in NYC took some dings as well, but nothing major, making the panic and fear of the inhabitants the major story for the networks. Disappointingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, many west coast inhabitants responded to these reports by mocking residents of the east coast who were frightened by the quake, offering sarcastic “tips” on Twitter, passing around this link to a picture of a fallen chair as if it were typical of the damage done, and otherwise displaying a profound lack of compassion for people whose homes and businesses were destroyed and damaged.

The response has utterly repulsed me. It’s fed by the media’s lack of curiosity in discovering exactly what did happen to people in rural Virginia when the quake hit. Mineral is around a hundred miles from Washington, DC, which I guess is too far for CNN to send a reporter to look into what was going on. WAMU, the NPR station for DC, did send a reporter as far south as Culpeper, VA, a few miles west of me, where a local state of emergency was declared. They reported eight buildings condemned (and also totally failed to spell the town’s name correctly in the first run of the article, the misspelling “Culpepper” is preserved in the URL — lemon in the papercut there, WAMU1). Culpeper hasn’t seen that level of destruction since the Civil War at least, and probably for longer since the town was not the scene of heavy fighting during the war, unlike nearby Fredericksburg.

Speaking of Fredericksburg, the local community college took significant damage in the quake. This map of earthquake damage to the town shows that it was clustered in the downtown historic district; the mayor of Fredericksburg estimates that total damage is in the millions. Some buildings that managed to survive the town’s bombardment during the Civil War may need to be destroyed now due to earthquake damage.

That no one was killed in the earthquake was a matter of grace, not good engineering. As Scientific American pointed out, east coast infrastructure is not prepared for earthquakes. And as Virginiaplaces.org notes (on a very informative web page I strongly urge you to read), geology in Virginia means that earthquakes cause damage further from their epicenter than they do in the west. Looking at that page, you will also discover that the last earthquake of this magnitude in Virginia was in 1897. Californians may be accustomed to getting a quake that rates over 5.0 on an annual basis, but down here it was our once-in-a-century event.

No help is forthcoming at the federal level for residents displaced by the quake. The Red Cross has opened no shelters in Louisa County for people whose homes are unsafe. Governor McDonnell has failed to declare a state-level state of emergency, so no state help will be forthcoming, either. The earthquake largely did its damage in rural areas that don’t even register on the radar for politicians on anything but a local level, and at the local level there’s just not funds to help all the people who need it.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Irene is headed up the East Coast, meaning that people whose homes were damaged by the quake are scrambling to repair foundations, siding, and roofs before the severe weather hits to heap insult on injury. Or more accurately, injury on injury. At least hipsters of all regions who were previously competing to see who could be the most offensively jaded and blase about the quake seem to have gotten tired of making fun of people who are worried and afraid and moved on to whatever shinier target has caught their attention. Unfortunately the media seems to have forgotten us too, in their rush to make dire predictions about the incoming hurricane. I’m lucky — the damage to my house is cosmetic, not structural, and all I really need to fix it is a tube of caulk and some mortar. My friends and neighbors weren’t all as lucky, particularly those closer to Mineral.

Never mind. Down here in Nowheresville, Virginia, and environs, we’ll keep getting by like we always have — neighbors banding together to repair houses and support each other. That is to say, we’ll get by without your help, America. You had no compassion to offer us when our homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed by the quake — only mockery, sarcasm, and admonitions to get over it. We’re pretty well used to that, but for the love of God don’t act all shocked when it turns out we’re clinging to guns and Jesus again, all right? Y’all have left us with nothing else to cling to.

  1. They could have checked the town’s Wikipedia page which notes, “It is often misspelled Culpepper.” ↩
25 August, 2011 – 1:27 pm | By Distinguished Guest | Posted in guest poster, politics | Tagged , , , , |

Where Does the Line Between Vital Services and Charity Lie?

Starting in the Bush Administration, there was an increasing push in the United States to privatise the provision of welfare programmes from education to food assistance. The administration popularised the idea of ‘faith-based charities’ that could provide services so the government wouldn’t have to, and promoted a sort of ‘every person for themselves’ approach to welfare and survival in the United States. This push has increased with the economic crisis, as the government slashes funding to social programmes and anticipates that charities will pick up the slack, even though they, too, have funding problems, and many are struggling with smaller budgets than before, and a larger clientele of people who desperately need their assistance.

Approaches to social wellbeing have seesawed back and forth over the course of human history, and vary considerably between nations. Some countries promote a basic standard of living for all citizens, believe in welfare programmes, and provide a wide range of services to make sure that everyone can look forward to at least some quality of life. Others are more of a free for all, and rely more heavily on charity-based models to provide services to citizens. Here in North America, there was a time when charity provided almost everything, before a transition to government funding for things like education, in recognition of the fact that charity was not working. Now, we appear to be returning to that, which means that perhaps in another 40 years we’ll see a return to more government provision of services.

My question is where the difference, the line, between charities and vital government services lies. I view things like health care, education, and environmental protection as vital government services. I believe they should be funded by the government, that there should be agencies to supervise them and to make sure that they are provided equally and fairly to everyone in the United States, citizens and noncitizens alike, that the government has an obligation to provide these things. Not just because I am a bleeding heart who believes we have a social obligation to limit suffering and protect the environment, but also because there are clear social benefits to providing these things. Education, for instance, assures me that when I need medical care, doctors will be available. That if I need an attorney, someone with adequate training and experience will be accessible. These are benefits to society as a whole that also promote national security, as a healthy, stable society is one less vulnerable to external threats.

I also think that things like roads are an important government services, that regulatory agencies to supervise air traffic and drug regulation and many other things are clearly critically needed. Many people seem to agree on these grounds because these are resources that many people use; even conservatives who don’t believe in ‘government interference’ need to be able to drive and tend to be fans of well paved and properly maintained roads. Likewise, many people seem to believe that the United States needs a military, and requires law enforcement agencies, to protect itself at home and abroad, that these services are critical and should not be eliminated or cut.

Where is the line between charity and vital services? The provision of paved roads could just as easily be considered a charity. The benefits of paved roads, things like easier commerce and trade, increased access, are, surely, charitable things provided to citizens as a gift, not critical to the nation. If we believed that commerce and trade were important, we would agree that highly trained professionals who innovate and create new products and develop new services are important, and we would agree that education to make sure such individuals exist would, thus, be a critical government service. That equally accessible high quality public education should be a priority.

What is the difference between roads and schools? Both are services to citizens that make our lives personally more pleasant and enjoyable in addition to providing social benefits. Why is one viewed as absolutely critical, while the other is not? Why can we all agree that dangerous bridges should be replaced, while kindergarten teachers are far too numerous, and we really don’t need as many of them? Surely one can handle a class of fifty students, and we could use the money from that education cut to buy some nice office furniture for the Department of Defense.

Expectations that charity will provide are fundamentally based on a devaluation of some services, deemed not important enough for the government to prioritise. At the same time, the government cynically relies on people who passionately believe these services are vital, think that people should not starve to death or die of untreated medical conditions, to provide these things. Even if charity-based provision of services is not entirely efficient, may be filled with gaps, and doesn’t meet the needs of all citizens. Charities are assured they’re doing important work, receive minimal assistance, and are fundamentally doing the government’s job for it, intervening in a situation where it is clear that the government will remain passive.

The United States seems to have a conflicted view of its goals and what it wants, based on the way the government prioritises funding and approaches to social issues. It wants to be a dominant innovator and inventor, contributing new technology and other developments, but it doesn’t want to invest in the infrastructure to support that. It wants to be known as a happy, healthy, wealthy place, or at least so narratives about bootstrapping and the American Dream tell us, but, again, it doesn’t want to actually pay for that. It wants to be a land of opportunity, without actually making opportunity possible.

25 August, 2011 – 10:44 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice | Tagged , , , , |

How Dare the FDA Do Its Job!

The origins of the Food and Drug Administration lie in a sort of wild West of unregulated medical practice, a world where anything could be slapped in a bottle and called a tonic, even if it killed people, where no regulations existed to protect food products, where people could merrily push contaminated cheese and whatever else they wanted on the general public. Anything could be labeled and sold in any way, and the results were nothing short of horrifying as people died, developed severe medical complications, failed to receive adequate treatment for health conditions because they thought they were treating themselves appropriately. It took several tries at it, but eventually the US government created a fairly firm regulatory framework for controlling foods and drugs to protect the general public.

This seems to be forgotten in arguments about the function of the FDA and suggestions that it is being too stodgy. It is too aggressive, not functional, too hidebound in bureaucracy. Or people claim that it fails to protect the public, even as the FDA’s funding is slashed and programmes that protect people from harmful pathogens are targeted for elimination or severe cutbacks. It is difficult for a regulatory agency to perform its core functions without the financial and social support to do so; when pathogens do burst onto the open market, organisations like the FDA and the CDC will be blamed, even though they may have been powerless to stop it because of defunding initiatives.

Pharmaceutical companies are complaining about the FDA, arguing that the organization is too erratic and out of control. It takes too long to get regulatory approval for drugs, drug companies don’t know how to craft a successful application because approvals seem arbitrary, and the organisation yanks drugs from the shelves when it thinks they might be unsafe, or encourages drug companies to voluntarily withdraw products so the FDA doesn’t have to initiate proceedings to get them out of reach of the public.

These companies have wisely chosen an excellent hill to fight from, using cancer medications as the thrust of their arguments, as cancer is perhaps one of the most popular social causes in the world of health care. The FDA, they inform the public, is actively harming cancer patients by holding up the regulatory process. People are dying because the FDA cannot move things along and seems to demand more and more evidence of efficacy and safety. The FDA costs patients money by yanking regulatory approval for certain uses, meaning that insurance companies drop coverage for those applications and patients must pay out of pocket if they want to access these lifesaving drugs.

The underling message here is clear: The FDA hates cancer patients. Indeed, the organisation is clearly on an eliminationist quest to leave cancer patients high and dry with no access to treatment. Goon squads of paper pushers cackle in the halls of this regulatory agency, rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of all the cancer patients they can harm with a simple red stamp, a request for additional review, a hearing to discuss the merits of a drug.

Recent months have seen a slew of FDA hearings to discuss the safety and efficacy of a range of medications. Some of these hearings have resulted in a withdrawal of regulatory approval for these medications because they are apparently unsafe and ineffective, according to review by the FDA. The FDA practices evidence-based medicine. It looks at what is likely to benefit the largest number of people and it works on accomplishing that. Which means that, yes, some patients who respond well to a drug and do not experience harmful side effects may suffer from a decision to revoke approval; those patients are the outliers, and decisions like this are hard on them. The FDA acknowledges this, even as it focuses on the utilitarian practice of regulation.

This is not something the FDA takes pleasure in. You would be hard pressed to find a regulator who thinks it’s fantastic when regulatory decisions harm patients. On the other hand, failing to make those decisions might result in harm to many more patients, while the creation of exceptions like compassionate use grants allows at least some patients to benefit from medications that help them in spite of overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t. The FDA is doing its primary job, which is protection of the public as a whole, not saving the lives of individual patients.

The framing of the FDA as a dangerous organisation out to kill patients with its overzealous regulations is a dangerous one because it sets the stage for more funding cuts. Lobbying on the part of pharmaceutical companies can and will change the perception of the FDA from a public safety organisation to a dangerous one that wants your aunt, cousin, partner, you yourself, to die. This in turn creates political pressure to defund the FDA, to limit the kinds of programmes it can use to track and prevent health problems, to eliminate entire sectors deemed ‘harmful.’ To dilute the agency’s power. Which, in turn, is going to result perhaps not in a return to the old days, but certainly in increased dangers, and the FDA will be blamed for missing them, and this will be used to argue for further funding cuts, because who wants to fund an agency that does not do its job?

Like all government agencies, the FDA is probably in need of some restructuring and reevaluation to organise its priorities and get it more functional. The agency itself would probably admit this. But that doesn’t mean that the organisation should be thrown out, not even at the behest of pharmaceutical companies eager to get their products into the hands of consumers; not to save their lives, but to increase profits for their manufacturers.

24 August, 2011 – 10:24 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , , |

Health Care and Cost Ineffectiveness

The health care system in the United States is obviously broken down to the core, and in so many ways that it is clear a complete overhaul is needed. Patches are not sufficient when an entire system is structured and predicated in fundamentally inequal ways, and ways that are also laden with gross cost inefficiencies. Conservatives are fond of harping on these but they don’t seem to recognise that it is their policy recommendations that contribute to these inefficiencies, that there are better ways of providing health care in this country that would be less expensive and would reach more people.

Under the current system, there is a focus on reactive health care and stabilisation of patients, rather than on more proactive prevention and actual curative care. If a person with no insurance is found lying in the street and brought to the hospital, that person will receive basic care, will be stabilised, and then released. It is likely that person will wind up back in the hospital, probably with more expensive health problems, because the hospital was unable to provide more in-depth treatment that could have made a significant difference in the patient’s life. And the patient may well lack other forms of support, like a warm and dry place to sleep that could prevent complications.

This is inhumane, and it’s odd to see the provision of nothing but very basic emergency care to all framed as some sort of progressive, compassionate step for humanity. Here in the United States, we do not allow people to die in ditches by the side of the road, for the most part. Go us. Instead, we haul them out, apply a few bandaids, and then dump them back into the ditch, until they skirt close to the edge of death again and we repeat the process. It is a series of endless patches that do not provide for any meaningful change; no one wants to know why the person ended up in the ditch, if there is perhaps an intervention that would prevent a repeat incident.

Health care approached in this way is ridiculously costly. Emergency stabilization of critically ill and injured people is very expensive. It can require a large team of care providers, expensive medication, the dedication of emergency facilities. When those people are not fully stable upon release and return in short order with even more health problems, they are even more expensive to treat. The costs of treatment mount with each incident and the patient is never really well, simply kept inches away from death. The hospital is the cat toying with the mouse, bound up in policy and the need to address paying patients and the creation of policies that seem to actively promote inefficiency.

Prevention of health problems is demonstrably less expensive than treating them. Community-based medicine and interventions do not need to be extensive or particularly costly before they start to have a real impact, creating a tipping point that tends to promote more health and wellness in the community. Some surprisingly simple measures can go a long way—say, providing youth with something to do in a community that lacks cultural enrichment, so they aren’t forced to turn to self-harm to entertain themselves. This, the prevention of health problems, doesn’t just benefit individuals, but also society as a whole. Less missed work, less unhappiness, a more focused and balanced workforce. For those concerned with money, less monies paid out in benefits and support to ill employees. This is good for everyone.

Actual treatment of health problems on the first visit is also less costly than the current system. Our hypothetical junkie in the ditch might want inpatient rehabilitation services, but could not afford them. The patient with persistent asthma might need to work extensively with a nurse practitioner, have reliable access to medications, to get the asthma under control and develop a long term management plan. This is less expensive than treating that patient at every crash, airways closing and inflammation raging. The patient with poorly controlled diabetes may not actively be dying, and thus isn’t deemed worthy of care, but will experience a decreased quality of life and is more likely to die earlier, and could receive actual concrete care at a relatively low cost when compared with the expenses of hospitalisation for complications.

The framing of emergency care only as progressive or humane is simply incorrect. It’s not just cruel, it’s also more expensive, and creates more of a drain on society; if people want to frame human beings as ‘drains,’ they should look at the kind of care they provide to these individuals. No one wants to lurch from health crisis to health crisis, to require extremely expensive intensive care. People don’t plan or look forward to severe illness and complications, but they cannot access meaningful preventative care or maintenance therapy that might help them avoid serious health problems. Society turns people into ‘drains’ by structuring care and social services in the way it does, creating an endlessly reactive culture of crisis, patch, release, crisis, patch, release.

It is curious to see people who claim to believe in ‘Christian values’ actively advocating for human suffering. I do not think Christ would have agreed that the meek, the humble, the sick deserve this kind of care. I do not think he considered them drains, but people of value who could contribute something and would, if they weren’t endlessly teetering on the brink, but instead were provided with some breathing room. We call it ‘welfare’ as though we are doing people a kindness, when really we’re just killing them slowly and patting ourselves on the back for our compassion.

23 August, 2011 – 10:06 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , |