Star Trek: Into Darkness has been out for a couple weeks now. My wife and I had a chance to see it, and we enjoyed it.
Of course, there was a lot of speculation as to the way this second movie in the rebooted "Abramsverse" franchise would align to original Wrath of Khan; I have to say that the previews and photos released of the movie were a total red herring as to what to expect. In a way it was true to form from the original second movie; I remember reading that it was leaked to the public that Spock was to die in that film, and fans were whipped into a frenzy. Remember how Wrath of Khan opened? A simulated battle in which Spock, then captain of the Enterprise, "died."
Supposedly this was added to show fans, "Ha ha! You thought Spock was going to die and we totally tricked you! This was the scene that was referred to in the leak!" This also explained the reference to a line from Kirk after the simulation asking Spock, "Aren't you dead?"
Total misdirection. Into Darkness played that hand very well.
We enjoyed the movie, but I started musing aloud to my wife some things that didn't quite make sense to me. She sort of nods and ignores me, since I'm thinking about sane elements in a fictional universe, but these are the sort of things that kind of irk me in a universe that has established rules.
(Warning, some things that follow would be spoilers. If you cared, though, you've already seen the movie by now...so...warning, otherwise, don't complain.)
Yes, this is fiction. Science fiction. Where some plot holes are waved off with techno-jargon the way Harry Potter films can be explained through adequate explanation of magic if necessary.
But in an established universe, there are rules to follow. Rules that if broken, for a fan, this means the suspension of disbelief necessary to follow the story can break. Science fiction fans are notorious sticklers for rules, and this in turn leads to the roadblocks that turn into online bickering over details in the movies that risk alienating a loyal fanbase.
Let's draw a parallel. Man of Steel, yet another reboot of the Superman franchise, will no doubt create a new spin on Superman's origin. It will probably have the basic elements that have been rehashed with every movie and comic...planet Krypton, explosion, baby in space, raised in the middle of ideal America, the Kents.
The thing is that Superman has been around for a long time. A really long time. He premiered in 1938, back when comics tended to have some really absurd things incorporated into the storylines. Basically whenever the writers need a new ability, they sort of just gave it to him. Things that "worked" became permanent. Things that didn't, they conveniently forgot about.
For instance, in the early days superman didn't fly. He could jump really far (ever give thought to the whole, "leap tall buildings in a single bound" thing describing Superman?) He had other abilities, like Super Ventriloquism and Super Telepathy. He even had Super Muscle Control that he used to pretend he was dead by stilling his heart and reshape his face and body so he could imitate an alien.
Most of these abilities faded away, lost to comic history. Sometimes they reappeared in other forms (like the Super Kiss that gave Lois Lane amnesia in the movies, or his ability to throw his Super Saran Wrap "S" at his enemies when fighting other Kryptonians in the second movie.)
Adding these abilities detracted from the character; they were convenient ways to wrap up a story without having to actually deal with the conflict (Super Deus ex Machina, I suppose.) The DC comics universe has a roster of characters that are, relatively speaking, gods, with Superman being the pinnacle example. He is invulnerable. He lifts mountains. He has an aura that helps protect things near his skin (the example given is his suit's resistance to damage). He flies. He can fly into space, and since his cells are charged by our yellow sun, he can fly into the sun. Some comics have depicted him as hardly aging, or even being in the center of our sun. He's as fast as the Flash. He shoots heat beams from his eyes, and freezes things with his breath.
Stories require that the hero must overcome adversity. There must be a challenge; a possibility that he (or she) will lose. How can you make an audience worry about the protagonist's life when your protagonist can withstand a nuclear bomb?
Oh, we'll throw in an Achilles heel...Kryptonite. Exposure to this radiation from his homeworld is a poison to this otherwise invulnerable race of god-aliens. But even this was eventually used as a plot point, where depending on what color of the rainbow the Kryptonite it would affect Superman in a different way.
Over time it got really ridiculous, the variations of rule bending that was applied to Superman just so they could have some kind of conflict that would challenge him. That's part of the reason DC decided to reboot their universe, resetting Superman (and many other storylines) with the Crisis. Superman now had more sane, consistent rules applied to his powers and abilities, with everything more absurd being wiped away from the timeline (they essentially pulled a reboot before the term "reboot" became popular in Hollywood.)
So even in a comic universe, establishing rules is important. As a fictional universe grows, new rules...and sometimes stupid ones...are established, and sometimes something has to be done to wipe them out with an in-universe explanation. A reboot, if you will.
Fictional universes are usually based on our own "real" universe, with some elements altered or twisted for dramatic purposes. In superhero universes, we accept that most people are like ourselves; average people going about their business each day, but there's an exceptional person that lives by a slightly different set of rules. Once we know those rules, we settle in to enjoy the story presented.
Star Trek doesn't have the long-running history of Superman, but it does have a longer-than-average history, given that it premiered in 1966. As the storylines progressed, elements that were introduced for practical reasons were given in-universe explanations (for example, shuttles and transporters were invented because they were cheaper than the effects needed to land a starship on a planet in the early episodes, but in-universe they became part of how the future had evolved, and a starship was just too physically large to land.)
Later some rules were altered. The Intrepid class starship (Voyager) is able to land on a planet; it's energy intensive, it's rarely done, but that ship does have landing struts and a procedure that allows it to do so, thanks to the "structural integrity field" that keeps the ship from buckling and flying apart from the stresses of flying through an atmosphere.
The structural integrity field, much like the inertial dampeners, was invented for practical reasons; there's a popular story that when the Enterprise-D was being designed, someone in the art department superimposed the design over the parking lot and realized that something that size would never be able to withstand the forces placed on something that big when moving through space. Inertial dampeners were created because when you have something moving fast in space, even "tiny" changes in velocity would result in large changes in the forces placed on the inhabitants of the ship...in other words, people would be turned into pudding on the walls whenever they tried to turn the ship at a rate that wasn't glacial.
Why were people thrown around when in a battle or during sudden maneuvers? Because there was a slight delay between the change in motion and the computer compensating with the inertial dampeners, of course. Dramatic tension melding with technobabble!
And these rules were established and refined over time. The fact the story producers would address these kinds of technicalities drew geeks with a passion for technology and some way to embrace pedantism. These people will question the effects of relativity on people traveling at warp speed, and how warp speed actually translates to factors of the speed of light. They can, and do, call out producers for getting technical aspects wrong on the ship; remember, these fictional vehicles have had their designs refined to the point where there are cutaway models and posters available of the various Enterprise incarnations showing where things are located on each deck. There have been people who wrote in to ask why rooms had certain markings, knowing that the particular facility was located on <insert correct deck>, and all the producers could do was admit they screwed up.
Yes, the fans in some cases know more about the layout of the fictional ship than the people making the series.
Then came Abrams. Abrams created a new universe, one where he's said that this Star Trek could be the kind of Star Trek he would have enjoyed as a kid (he couldn't "get into" the original Star Trek series and consequently hadn't followed much of the original storylines.) He made it more accessible. He also had the benefit of more advanced technology, so their aliens didn't have to consist of painted paper plates stapled to the actors' faces and spaceships that looked like dangling hubcaps and hot-glued refuse attached to fishing line.
Abrams has created a universe wherein he focuses on the characters rather well. Dramatic tension. He's rewriting and exploring the relationships of these established characters, and doing so rather well. But I think he's also forging new rules within the Star Trek universe, and that creates an odd sense of confusion, or unease. Unless these things are addressed at some point, there will continue to be a sense that something isn't quite right in the Abramsverse.
Does warp speed work differently there? As depicted, it's almost like warp is a corridor through which a ship travels. In the movie, the Enterprise was attacked, and it was suddenly jerked to the size as if it were a skidding car, and "broke" through the corridor to "real space."
In the old series, something like that would have, at a minimum, turned everyone in the ship into biological wall decorations.
For that matter, how is it possible they were fired upon while at warp? Phasers are a light-based weapon, essentially a modified laser. The only thing that could blow up while at warp would be a torpedo, as it could have a small warp-capable casing for short traveling short distances. Are these ships also equipped with some kind of mini-railgun cannon? Or is warp speed using some kind of bubble of non-warp space that would allow for non-relativistic speed weapons use? (The movie would hint not, since they thought they were safe at warp speed right up until they weren't.)
The use of shields are also slightly different. Originally shields were like a second skin, providing an invisible armor that enveloped the ship, and once they had taken an adequate pounding their failure meant the hull was exposed to damage. Over time they seem to go through a few modifications, such as overlapping generators that could be selectively powered (rear shields fail while forward sections were protected) and the use of particular frequencies as a plot point to allow properly tuned weapons to easily breach shields (rotate frequencies to stop the Borg weapon!) The Abramsverse seems to make it abundantly clear that shields don't stop damage so much as they help reduce damage, since the hull was taking a beating throughout the fights and no one seemed a bit surprised as the shields just gradually reduced in power.
Even the size of the ship is called into question; this was a huge sticking point on the Internet when the first rebooted Enterprise was unveiled. People analyzed the ship from graphics, comparing deck sizes to the original ships and using windows and shuttle bay doors as anchor points when figuring out how large it really is and what this would mean for the series. I think it's telling something when at this point, a few years after release, there still aren't "official" technical drawings for this ship.
(If you think I'm just being strange in speculating on this, Google "Enterprise size comparison" to see what work other people have done when sleuthing the stated ship size versus the visual comparisons in the movies. The "original" ship size was over 300 meters, less than 400 meters, and the size of the Abramsverse Enterprise is over 700 meters...which is kind of freaking huge, given that it has an ability to casually land on planets. Someone out there will no doubt eventually do the math to figure out what kind of stresses this would place on a vessel of that kind of mass, even with structural integrity fields and other technobabble to compensate.)
And there still has to be some explanation given as to how the new transwarp transporters, pioneered in the first film and utilized again in this one, work. Or are limited. Because really...if these can be used to beam from one planet to another, why are you using starships? Just send out drones to other places in the galaxy, use beacons to signal back that you can beam there, and beam to that planet. Even Stargate SG-1 had to compensate when gates moved through space over time; somehow this transporter is able to beam to other solar systems and reconstitute living matter on a planet moving relative to your place of origin without worrying about little things like beaming inside the ground (or more likely, into the middle of space.) The implications of this type of technology are really kind of big (much as when people started questioning replicator technology...why not replicate a ship? To which people came up with an answer...more rules of how a universe works, so the universe stays consistent, and can balance dramatic tension with limitations of a magic hand-waving technology.)
I'm hoping that there will be more explanations given as the series continues, especially in relation to how the ship works. In the original series, the Enterprise was more than just a vessel for traveling around the galaxy; it became a character, an extension of the crew. That was part of the reason it was so shocking when the Enterprise was blown up in Star Trek III, paving the way for new ships to continue the name, but it was a shock for the audience when it happened.
Given time, I can get used to many of the changes. Sure, the bridge looks like a futuristic Apple Store. And for some reason engineering looks like it should be brewing batches of beer rather than propelling a ship through space. But I'm really hoping these new rules better defined. I'm kind of worried that in focusing on characters, the technology in the Abramsverse will become simply an extended form of deus ex machina, wherein everything non-character driven is sacrificed in the name of being a convenient plot device that can be thrown away later or explained as if the technology were driven by magic. Star Trek doesn't meld well with that kind of logic. We're talking about fans that debated whether food eaten on the holodeck disappears from your stomach when you leave the simulation (answer: no, since the holodeck uses force fields and replicator technologies, the food you eat is created as any other replicated food while using force fields to create objects you aren't ingesting.)
Magic can be waved away with spells and incantations. Trek fans will want a plausible explanation for how things work...and expect them to keep working within those limitations later.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Are People, At Heart, Horrible?
Science fiction has long been used as a cloak to wrap social commentary so the producers of content can claim that the comments are just...well, part of science fiction. Classic science fiction shows and movies are a snapshot of the times in which they were created.
I was home recently, in part, for my son's birthday. When I'm home I try to set aside time to focus on doing things with my boy, since I'm away in the city so often. I got up one morning and asked him if he'd like to play a video game, and instead he suggested watching a movie. He proudly proclaimed that he found a movie that "you might like, Daddy!," so of course I agreed to see what he unearthed in the Netflix queue.
The movie? Godzilla. Not one of the campy Japanese Godzilla, but the 1998 American Matthew Broderick film. One of the few movies I've seen where Matthew Broderick's performance managed to make me cringe when he delivered lines.
My son is young, so action and effects can carry a bad film well in his opinion. I tried to use it as a teachable moment and brought up the idea that Godzilla was originally a way to express concern about nuclear weapons and experimentation.
"We used nuclear bombs on Japan during World War II," I said. "The radiation causes mutation to people's cells. Cancer. Godzilla was a monster created by nuclear radiation, because that's what people were worried about."
I went on to tell him that if he looked at Spider-Man, originally he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Today's reboots of Spider-Man's origin have him bitten by a genetically altered spider, reflecting our society's concern with experimenting on genes.
This got me thinking about some trends in what comprises popular themes in horror and sci-fi in the past few years. I know it's not a comprehensive study, and it's purely anecdotal, but this still gives me something to pause and think about.
Example; zombies. My wife and I were discussing Walking Dead and she said that if there were some kind of zombie apocalypse, she'd want to die right away.
"You'd only have to survive a certain period in the beginning...zombies would rot, and in winter they'd freeze, depending on where you were," I said.
"Have you seen what happens to people who survive?," she said. "They aren't running away from zombies."
She had a point. Worse, I read the comic series, so I know what happened there. Walking Dead isn't about zombies. It's about people. And people become very, very horrible in the Walking Dead universe. The acts committed in that series are not so much about survival, but in many cases are an expression of what people will do when they have the opportunity to do the things civilization reins in.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I watched a movie this weekend called Hell. It was a German film about a near-future where solar flares damaged our atmosphere, raising temperatures and exposing the planet to more damaging sunlight. Water becomes scarce and people begin fighting for resources. The movie focuses on the efforts of 4 survivors to head to the mountains where water and vegetation are rumored to exist.
Along the way they encounter a group of people who were farmers; I suppose in a way they still are, even after the livestock have died, if you catch my drift. I found the scene where they are seating Marie, whom they plan to marry off to their son, at the dinner table for their...meat stew....cringe-worthy, as they say a prayer thanking God for their bounty, much as some families today. In a future where food becomes scarce I'm not sure this scene is outside the realm of possibility; desperate people have done things like this in the past. This was at a point where there was no regret or hesitation in what they did; it was all justified and had become normal to them, making it all the more horrifying.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
Star Trek was originally a vision of an optimistic future, where humanity was at peace and people pursued interests to better themselves. Money was no longer a driving force in our lives, as replicators apparently did away with the need for acquiring material wealth. Medicines prolonged lives. Races lived in harmony. The original series had many blatant commentaries on society, from races that were painted black on one sie and white on the other to Kirk kissing Uhura on screen, something sure to upset the more "traditional" minds of the period with strong opinions on mixed-race relationships.
But even in this series set in a backdrop of peace, there were elements of hidden agendas. Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, focused on the hidden agendas of certain elements in Starfleet, the Romulan and Klingon Empires and the Federation to perpetuate war. It was meant to be a reflection of fear of change, set against a commentary of the cold war between the Russians and the US ending. High-ranking officials in positions of power were maneuvering to continue the war between the two groups rather than move towards peace.
That movie was released in 1991. Today, the US is still at war (though not with our Cold War counterparts) and Congress is lobbied by companies with military interests to continue spending more money on our armed forces than the next 10 major military powers combined.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I recognize this is anecdotal. People have a wonderfully developed sense of confirmation bias, and we see patterns in otherwise chaotic systems. Something in these non-patterned anecdotes makes me wonder if we, as a society, don't see a person's potential to always be looking for ways to take advantage of others and justify it through whatever cognitive dissonance necessary to gain the moral high ground. Many of our stories have the "bad guy" able to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate others for their own ends, sometimes with horrifyingly sensible reasoning.
I see it in advertising; we are barraged by messages for beauty products, clothes, weight loss pills and vitamins, herbal remedies, snack foods, fast food promotions and home business ideas. Children are hit with twice as many ads for toys and cartoons (although you might be able to argue that the cartoons are just extended-length advertisements for toys.) Our society is largely consumer based; we judge each other by what toys we possess and what brands we wear.
But what happens when you actually buy these things that you're told to buy?
If you aren't of a wealthier class in society, there is an instant backlash of judgement that you are living beyond your means. It's your fault you're poor.
What stimulates the economy?
The government, along with the businesses that blame you for your economic status, wants you to go out and spend. That message was louder than ever in the post-9/11 economy, ironically around the time people were told they were getting into crap mortgages (that banks knew full well these same people were huge risks to give loans to, but profited from them in the short term) because they should have known better than to get a mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place.
(Keeping in mind that the businesses that controlled the purse strings...taking the risk to make a profit...later blamed them for taking the money they were willing to loan.)
These are groups that work on making a profit to the detriment of society in the long run.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I previously posted that there's a long tail of poverty, and the wealth gap is growing. The middle class is slowly disappearing into the tail under the poverty line, while the top 1% continues to gain more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetimes. There won't be enough people to keep spending enough money to keep the economy sustainable.
I also noticed a new trend emerging as policy makers talk of "job makers;" usually these job makers speak up in fighting labor reforms or proposals to increase minimum wage. I also heard the term thrown around quite a bit with healthcare reform, in that new "Obamacare" regulations were too expensive for businesses to afford for their employees.
It struck me as I read articles about minimum wage workers...people working in fast food, or Wal-Mart, or other service industries that serve to skew jobless figures...that these people are often living under the poverty line. The usual image portrayed of the poor are people that sit around reaping free money from the government while watching TV and taking free rides in ambulances because...really, who wouldn't want to spend hours in the hospital in their copious free time?
What happens to the working poor when they have health issues? Taxpayers have to make up the difference.
What happens when the working poor can't afford to feed their kids? Taxpayers make up the difference.
There's a stunning number of working poor, and I fear that number will continue to climb as the economy pushes the middle class farther down in the wealth gap. But it becomes a bit darker when you see that the classic "job creator" lobbying Congress relies on our socialist assistance nets to subsidize their workforce while maximizing profits. They actively lobby to keep regulations and reforms from giving their workers a better standard of living that could help get them off taxpayer funded assistance.
For a certain class of people, Gordon Gekko said it best..."Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." The problem is that this only seems to work for a narrow class of people.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I was home recently, in part, for my son's birthday. When I'm home I try to set aside time to focus on doing things with my boy, since I'm away in the city so often. I got up one morning and asked him if he'd like to play a video game, and instead he suggested watching a movie. He proudly proclaimed that he found a movie that "you might like, Daddy!," so of course I agreed to see what he unearthed in the Netflix queue.
The movie? Godzilla. Not one of the campy Japanese Godzilla, but the 1998 American Matthew Broderick film. One of the few movies I've seen where Matthew Broderick's performance managed to make me cringe when he delivered lines.
My son is young, so action and effects can carry a bad film well in his opinion. I tried to use it as a teachable moment and brought up the idea that Godzilla was originally a way to express concern about nuclear weapons and experimentation.
"We used nuclear bombs on Japan during World War II," I said. "The radiation causes mutation to people's cells. Cancer. Godzilla was a monster created by nuclear radiation, because that's what people were worried about."
I went on to tell him that if he looked at Spider-Man, originally he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Today's reboots of Spider-Man's origin have him bitten by a genetically altered spider, reflecting our society's concern with experimenting on genes.
This got me thinking about some trends in what comprises popular themes in horror and sci-fi in the past few years. I know it's not a comprehensive study, and it's purely anecdotal, but this still gives me something to pause and think about.
Example; zombies. My wife and I were discussing Walking Dead and she said that if there were some kind of zombie apocalypse, she'd want to die right away.
"You'd only have to survive a certain period in the beginning...zombies would rot, and in winter they'd freeze, depending on where you were," I said.
"Have you seen what happens to people who survive?," she said. "They aren't running away from zombies."
She had a point. Worse, I read the comic series, so I know what happened there. Walking Dead isn't about zombies. It's about people. And people become very, very horrible in the Walking Dead universe. The acts committed in that series are not so much about survival, but in many cases are an expression of what people will do when they have the opportunity to do the things civilization reins in.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I watched a movie this weekend called Hell. It was a German film about a near-future where solar flares damaged our atmosphere, raising temperatures and exposing the planet to more damaging sunlight. Water becomes scarce and people begin fighting for resources. The movie focuses on the efforts of 4 survivors to head to the mountains where water and vegetation are rumored to exist.
Along the way they encounter a group of people who were farmers; I suppose in a way they still are, even after the livestock have died, if you catch my drift. I found the scene where they are seating Marie, whom they plan to marry off to their son, at the dinner table for their...meat stew....cringe-worthy, as they say a prayer thanking God for their bounty, much as some families today. In a future where food becomes scarce I'm not sure this scene is outside the realm of possibility; desperate people have done things like this in the past. This was at a point where there was no regret or hesitation in what they did; it was all justified and had become normal to them, making it all the more horrifying.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
Star Trek was originally a vision of an optimistic future, where humanity was at peace and people pursued interests to better themselves. Money was no longer a driving force in our lives, as replicators apparently did away with the need for acquiring material wealth. Medicines prolonged lives. Races lived in harmony. The original series had many blatant commentaries on society, from races that were painted black on one sie and white on the other to Kirk kissing Uhura on screen, something sure to upset the more "traditional" minds of the period with strong opinions on mixed-race relationships.
But even in this series set in a backdrop of peace, there were elements of hidden agendas. Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, focused on the hidden agendas of certain elements in Starfleet, the Romulan and Klingon Empires and the Federation to perpetuate war. It was meant to be a reflection of fear of change, set against a commentary of the cold war between the Russians and the US ending. High-ranking officials in positions of power were maneuvering to continue the war between the two groups rather than move towards peace.
That movie was released in 1991. Today, the US is still at war (though not with our Cold War counterparts) and Congress is lobbied by companies with military interests to continue spending more money on our armed forces than the next 10 major military powers combined.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I recognize this is anecdotal. People have a wonderfully developed sense of confirmation bias, and we see patterns in otherwise chaotic systems. Something in these non-patterned anecdotes makes me wonder if we, as a society, don't see a person's potential to always be looking for ways to take advantage of others and justify it through whatever cognitive dissonance necessary to gain the moral high ground. Many of our stories have the "bad guy" able to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate others for their own ends, sometimes with horrifyingly sensible reasoning.
I see it in advertising; we are barraged by messages for beauty products, clothes, weight loss pills and vitamins, herbal remedies, snack foods, fast food promotions and home business ideas. Children are hit with twice as many ads for toys and cartoons (although you might be able to argue that the cartoons are just extended-length advertisements for toys.) Our society is largely consumer based; we judge each other by what toys we possess and what brands we wear.
But what happens when you actually buy these things that you're told to buy?
If you aren't of a wealthier class in society, there is an instant backlash of judgement that you are living beyond your means. It's your fault you're poor.
What stimulates the economy?
The government, along with the businesses that blame you for your economic status, wants you to go out and spend. That message was louder than ever in the post-9/11 economy, ironically around the time people were told they were getting into crap mortgages (that banks knew full well these same people were huge risks to give loans to, but profited from them in the short term) because they should have known better than to get a mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place.
(Keeping in mind that the businesses that controlled the purse strings...taking the risk to make a profit...later blamed them for taking the money they were willing to loan.)
These are groups that work on making a profit to the detriment of society in the long run.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
I previously posted that there's a long tail of poverty, and the wealth gap is growing. The middle class is slowly disappearing into the tail under the poverty line, while the top 1% continues to gain more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetimes. There won't be enough people to keep spending enough money to keep the economy sustainable.
I also noticed a new trend emerging as policy makers talk of "job makers;" usually these job makers speak up in fighting labor reforms or proposals to increase minimum wage. I also heard the term thrown around quite a bit with healthcare reform, in that new "Obamacare" regulations were too expensive for businesses to afford for their employees.
It struck me as I read articles about minimum wage workers...people working in fast food, or Wal-Mart, or other service industries that serve to skew jobless figures...that these people are often living under the poverty line. The usual image portrayed of the poor are people that sit around reaping free money from the government while watching TV and taking free rides in ambulances because...really, who wouldn't want to spend hours in the hospital in their copious free time?
What happens to the working poor when they have health issues? Taxpayers have to make up the difference.
What happens when the working poor can't afford to feed their kids? Taxpayers make up the difference.
There's a stunning number of working poor, and I fear that number will continue to climb as the economy pushes the middle class farther down in the wealth gap. But it becomes a bit darker when you see that the classic "job creator" lobbying Congress relies on our socialist assistance nets to subsidize their workforce while maximizing profits. They actively lobby to keep regulations and reforms from giving their workers a better standard of living that could help get them off taxpayer funded assistance.
For a certain class of people, Gordon Gekko said it best..."Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." The problem is that this only seems to work for a narrow class of people.
People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Moments of Clarity Relating to Skill
I am rapidly approaching my first year with Stack Exchange. I know this because the management company that collects my rent sent me notice that my lease can be renewed for another year, and I signed when I first came to the city to start my new job.
I have been trying to look back and get a feel for what progress, if any, I've made. There are always things that could use improvement, and I think that the knowledge of just how much I don't know is part of what feeds my feeling of inadequacy. I try to keep perspective by reminding myself of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Unfortunately that's not always effective.
It's especially hard when I work with a number of young, intelligent, highly competent people. They are a reminder that had I taken a different path, instead of deciding to go into the IT department in a public school system, I may have more marketable skills and experience.
I do have a tendency, surrounded with a pool of talented younger people, to focus on the skills I am lacking in and they excel in. And that is why, upon reflection of the past nearly-year, I have at least two moments of clarity that struck me square in the melon.
First, one of the more routine tasks I've been performing involves ownership of the tape backup rotation. We have logs of every hit our balancers get, and these logs get pretty large pretty fast. Despite having an 8-tape LTO-4 jukebox, we're hitting low-tape alarms in the course of about a week or so. Usually I'm the person that heads to the data center, about 25 minutes from the office, to perform a tape swap.
We recently hosted a summit wherein remote community, system administrators, and developers came to our office. Several of the technical people spent their first days playing in the datacenter, and one day coincided with the need to swap tapes. "Hey, while you guys are there, could you...?"
They needed a cable brought out to them from the office, and the sysadmin who mentored me on the backup system volunteered to take it out to them. When he came back, he said that they were having...issues...with swapping out the tapes.
These are people I hold in high regard. Very high regard. They're very good at what they do, and tape backups are not what they normally handle as an everyday task. So having issues with figuring out how to work the tape system is not something to hold against them. But he had no idea how much pride that gave me to know that there is something I'm able to do as a routine task that people I look up to with envy could not.
I have a skill that is useful and fills a niche to them. He had no idea how much this made my day.
Then there was a more recent example of skill development.
We have several hires coming in. I'm working on getting equipment and accounts set up. I was setting up a phone (Polycom VOIP phone) for one of the new hires.
I brought it into the build room and thought I'd get the configuration done in Asterisk (The sysadmin that owns the phone management has it mostly simplified through macros in the config files) and test the phone.
I ran through the checklists. Updated phone numbers and extensions in documentation. Started the phone...no configuration.
I double checked the phone's MAC setting on the server. Matched.
I checked that the FTP server was running on the server. Running.
Asterisk was running after the service reload for changed configurations.
I then went into the phone and reset it to factory defaults, thinking something was "stuck." It reset to defaults...and wouldn't pull the new settings.
Next I went on the switch. It saw the phone's MAC in the address table.
I looked at the port it was plugged into; that port, for some reason, was missing the phone VLAN. A couple of lines added and running config saved, the phone pulled its configuration without a hitch.
I was finally able to close the loop on a troubleshooting issue that before coming here I wouldn't have been able to do; I would have been stymied at the Cisco switch. I simply haven't been buried in the Cisco infrastructure enough to know the necessary configuration and diagnostic steps to take without the fear of screwing something up or knocking the office's Internet access offline.
That ability to close that loop...troubleshoot from start to finish something that a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do...that's progress. And it was a moment of clarity for me.
I am improving.
I now can tell if a remote office has a computer or phone plugged into the network by looking for the MAC in the address tables of a switch across the country or on the other side of the ocean. I was mapping out what ports are active in a remote office, as well as checking what ports aren't configured for any devices. I'm confident doing this now, something I wouldn't have done before.
I'm always afraid that I'm not improving enough, or not showing skill enough to be worthy of working at a startup with so many great people. My goal now is to keep improving, while accepting that improvements don't come in sudden waves so much as a series of smaller steps that build up over time.
My first year is coming up. With it I believe there will be a review of my progress; I am hoping my peers have noticed improvements over time, and I look forward to guidance of what really needs tuning. But if they ask if there's something I feel I am proud of, I can say that I can swap tapes at the datacenter and I configured a phone without resorting to bothering other people for help.
Look for moments of clarity in your work life. Reflect on what you have done, and how you've improved. Perhaps you're like me and you get caught up in the frustration of things you can't do right or things you screw up, and forget the things that you are doing right and the skills you are learning. If you really reach a point where you go weeks at a time without any such moments of positive clarity it may be time to reach for a change.
I have been trying to look back and get a feel for what progress, if any, I've made. There are always things that could use improvement, and I think that the knowledge of just how much I don't know is part of what feeds my feeling of inadequacy. I try to keep perspective by reminding myself of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Unfortunately that's not always effective.
It's especially hard when I work with a number of young, intelligent, highly competent people. They are a reminder that had I taken a different path, instead of deciding to go into the IT department in a public school system, I may have more marketable skills and experience.
I do have a tendency, surrounded with a pool of talented younger people, to focus on the skills I am lacking in and they excel in. And that is why, upon reflection of the past nearly-year, I have at least two moments of clarity that struck me square in the melon.
First, one of the more routine tasks I've been performing involves ownership of the tape backup rotation. We have logs of every hit our balancers get, and these logs get pretty large pretty fast. Despite having an 8-tape LTO-4 jukebox, we're hitting low-tape alarms in the course of about a week or so. Usually I'm the person that heads to the data center, about 25 minutes from the office, to perform a tape swap.
We recently hosted a summit wherein remote community, system administrators, and developers came to our office. Several of the technical people spent their first days playing in the datacenter, and one day coincided with the need to swap tapes. "Hey, while you guys are there, could you...?"
They needed a cable brought out to them from the office, and the sysadmin who mentored me on the backup system volunteered to take it out to them. When he came back, he said that they were having...issues...with swapping out the tapes.
These are people I hold in high regard. Very high regard. They're very good at what they do, and tape backups are not what they normally handle as an everyday task. So having issues with figuring out how to work the tape system is not something to hold against them. But he had no idea how much pride that gave me to know that there is something I'm able to do as a routine task that people I look up to with envy could not.
I have a skill that is useful and fills a niche to them. He had no idea how much this made my day.
Then there was a more recent example of skill development.
We have several hires coming in. I'm working on getting equipment and accounts set up. I was setting up a phone (Polycom VOIP phone) for one of the new hires.
I brought it into the build room and thought I'd get the configuration done in Asterisk (The sysadmin that owns the phone management has it mostly simplified through macros in the config files) and test the phone.
I ran through the checklists. Updated phone numbers and extensions in documentation. Started the phone...no configuration.
I double checked the phone's MAC setting on the server. Matched.
I checked that the FTP server was running on the server. Running.
Asterisk was running after the service reload for changed configurations.
I then went into the phone and reset it to factory defaults, thinking something was "stuck." It reset to defaults...and wouldn't pull the new settings.
Next I went on the switch. It saw the phone's MAC in the address table.
I looked at the port it was plugged into; that port, for some reason, was missing the phone VLAN. A couple of lines added and running config saved, the phone pulled its configuration without a hitch.
I was finally able to close the loop on a troubleshooting issue that before coming here I wouldn't have been able to do; I would have been stymied at the Cisco switch. I simply haven't been buried in the Cisco infrastructure enough to know the necessary configuration and diagnostic steps to take without the fear of screwing something up or knocking the office's Internet access offline.
That ability to close that loop...troubleshoot from start to finish something that a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do...that's progress. And it was a moment of clarity for me.
I am improving.
I now can tell if a remote office has a computer or phone plugged into the network by looking for the MAC in the address tables of a switch across the country or on the other side of the ocean. I was mapping out what ports are active in a remote office, as well as checking what ports aren't configured for any devices. I'm confident doing this now, something I wouldn't have done before.
I'm always afraid that I'm not improving enough, or not showing skill enough to be worthy of working at a startup with so many great people. My goal now is to keep improving, while accepting that improvements don't come in sudden waves so much as a series of smaller steps that build up over time.
My first year is coming up. With it I believe there will be a review of my progress; I am hoping my peers have noticed improvements over time, and I look forward to guidance of what really needs tuning. But if they ask if there's something I feel I am proud of, I can say that I can swap tapes at the datacenter and I configured a phone without resorting to bothering other people for help.
Look for moments of clarity in your work life. Reflect on what you have done, and how you've improved. Perhaps you're like me and you get caught up in the frustration of things you can't do right or things you screw up, and forget the things that you are doing right and the skills you are learning. If you really reach a point where you go weeks at a time without any such moments of positive clarity it may be time to reach for a change.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Slut Shaming
Slut shaming. This is a strange term for me. It's one of those things that when I hear it, my brain tingles, like a veil of cognitive dissonance is resonating between places I don't want to be yet am comfortable being labeled. If that didn't make sense, imagine what it's like to be a supporter of science in a classroom deeply entrenched in an area of the US that believes creationism should be a classroom topic; you feel you should own the label, but know you're in deep trouble if you're outed for having it.
That just describes the feeling I get with this term, because, I think, there is some part of the term that I am guilty of yet I don't know if I should feel guilty for it.
It doesn't help that socially hot topics aren't something that encourages conversation. Most people with strong opinions in this area tend to judge by emotion and have trouble relating to people with my type of brain wiring; to not simply understand or empathize with them means I'm stupid or ignorant, or worse.
What I really would like to do is solve what it is about the term "slut shaming" that rings that cognitive dissonance bell in my brain; what am I not understanding? Or do I have an opinion formed, but am missing a key aspect of the topic to have an informed opinion?
I've had this topic in my Trello list of Things To Possibly Blog About for awhile; I'd glance at it, and think about it, turn it over in my head a bit and end up thinking, "Let's save this for later" once more to let the topic ferment in my brain a little longer. I'd re-watch Laci Green videos, like her Jenna Marbles video response to Jenna's Slut Edition video.
The Dr. Phil show no doubt was considered, for the general audience that watches his show each weekday, an educational source. But what do you learn from it? Let's break it down.
The episode is called "Girls Who Bash Girls Who Dress Sexy." I'd link to an episode, but a few have already been pulled by television networks claiming copyright infringement, so nothing guarantees my links won't go stale within days so you may have to look it up yourself.
The episode opens with Phil bringing up the latest news headlines regarding the Steubenville rape of a 16 year old girl, where he then ties "blaming the victim" to the term "slut shaming." Both of the terms are already emotionally charged, so I suppose this is an early warning of what the show will be aiming for in terms of what the viewer should conclude lest they are obviously deviant of Dr. Phil's viewership.
He introduces his first guest, a teenager who posted a meme that ended up going viral. She thought her peer age group were often dressing "inappropriate" and decided to post a picture expressing her opinion.
Dr. Phil touches on spoofs of her post as well as people who have given her death threats and insults as a result of her opinion.
This, he said, was kind of the genesis of slut shaming, judging others for their choice of dress. I'll file that away as an aspect of slut shaming:
Telling someone to not show so much cleavage is slut shaming. You're seeing someone's choice of dress, you carry the opinion they should not do this, and make them feel bad for it. The show also labeled this as judging them which is both true and emotionally charged so if you don't necessarily agree, you're made to feel like the bad person in the narrative (can you tell I'm more sensitive to emotional bias when it seems to be more for manipulation purposes instead of education?)
Next up was someone he obviously threw in as the villain in the show. Jason carries the opinion that slut shaming is not only okay, it's a noble pursuit. He doesn't think you should respect people who have no respect for themselves, and slut shaming is about taking responsible for your actions and the consequences of spreading your legs for all sorts of people.
Jason maintains that he judges people by their behavior, which Dr. Phil counters with he's judging people without knowing that is what they're doing. When pressed, he tacitly admits it's based on their dress or rumor. He tries to make his point that if Lady Gaga wears a meat dress in the savannah and a lion eats her; maybe the meat suit isn't the best choice of apparel. "We judge people a lot by what we wear," he said. Dr. Phil counters by showing a picture of he and his wife at a social event (I assume, since he's wearing a suit jacket and open-collar button up shirt and his wife was) wearing a low-cut dress, to which Jason says she's dressed "very tastefully." This was another manipulative moment to define him as the bad guy; what else could he say?
He was going to introduce his next guest, so what did this segment tell me about slut shaming?
Slut shaming is based on seeing people's choice of dress and drawing conclusions about them. There's obviously more I'm supposed to draw from this because it was so blatantly transparent that Jason was cast as the villain of the episode, but I'm trying to enlighten myself a bit about slut shaming, not get sucked into the dramatic aspects of the show. Jason was trying to say that people have conclusions drawn about them because, in part, of the way they dress; he then labels them as sluts given their "uniforms," and assumes more about their behaviors, which is the part he really is taking umbrage to. Their behavior, in turn, is what he disapproves of and sees as irresponsible.
The next guest was Laci Green. Dr. Phil defined slut shaming as women being made to feel inferior because they are dressing, acting, or engaging in inappropriate behavior that connotes sexuality. He then introduces Laci Green saying that slut shaming is about controlling women, not teaching self-respect.
She is quoted from her video talking about promiscuity being a "bad decision" for women, being called slut, losing respect, or asking to be raped. Meanwhile, "dudes" being promiscuous is a "good decision." She goes on to say that, from society's view, dudes are expected to make bad decisions so it's okay.
Dr. Phil and Laci then attack Jason, where Dr. Phil compares his view as bullying. ("Bullying" is a wonderful hot-button word to use.) Why he took this opportunity to attack Jason right after introducing Laci I'm not sure...what was the point of having Laci on? Her viewpoint was entirely summed up by the video, then her chance to talk (on the broadcast) was basically to echo that she disagreed with Jason, then another guest was introduced.
So what do I take away from Laci's segment?
Slut shaming is about controlling women and being sexist, because men aren't shamed for slutty behavior.
His next guest was Trisha, who is shamed by women for the way she dresses. She talked about people anonymously attacking her, then referencing Jason by saying people like him were cowardly when they couldn't hide behind a computer screen.
(It's really hard for me to even pretend you're trying to have a dialog or educate someone when you demonize the person you're trying to convince of the error of their ways. You're doing little more than stooping to a level of childishness and...what, trying to shame them into seeing your side of the argument?)
Trisha talks about sluts, when she was growing up, were the girls who had sex with a lot of people; they screwed half the town or many people in school. Now they were calling her a slut because of the way she dressed.
Jason was pressed for his opinion, and he said she was dressing for attention. She denied this, saying she's all about being "girly" and she's proud of being curvy. She said she's not even interested in men right now.
Laci adds that even if it were for attention, she doesn't see what's inherently wrong with dressing the way you want. It says something more about the person who's judging them rather than the person wearing the outfit. Jason tries to say that most men don't really care what women are wearing but other women seem to judge each other for this, which Laci interjects that many people do care, but then seems to agree that it is a problem because women judge each other for this and not men. She seems really angry that there is a perceived double standard...and the fact that they both seem to say that women are harsh on other women more then men is never pointed out; it's a rule that you don't concede a point to the villain.
Trisha added that she hadn't had sex in three years, yet Jason concluded she was loose and said as much on national television, so he shouldn't be judging her by what she was wearing.
This marked the end of Trisha's segment. What did I conclude I was supposed to learn from this?
Sluts are girls who sleep around, not dress in a provocative or revealing manner.
Phil's next segment was highlighting the "Slut Walk," protests against victim blaming in rapes. Scantily clad women march to reclaim the term "slut." He then introduced Kira, who is an "advocate of modesty" and said that slut shaming is a term used to silence people like her. People are engaging in a competition to sexualize themselves, and she thinks it's an issue of wanting attention. "Women need to put a little more thought into the image they are projecting."
Kira talks about promiscuity having consequences that can follow you for the rest of your life, and that concerns her. She also said that slut shaming is a term to shame people who feel others should be more modest.
Dr. Phil says that you cannot criticize, humiliate, censor, or hold them up to public ridicule and not consider yourself a bully.
He keeps finding reasons to bring that word into the conversation..."bully."
Kira just replies that she's not advocating Jason's position (another slam!) but is advocating modesty and she shouldn't feel ashamed for advocating this.
Phil says it's a leap to go from thinking this person is dressing in a way you wouldn't, to assuming this person is sleeping around and exposing themselves to STD's and such. He also talks about how he has two boys that dress very different, one a rocker, one a preppy Wall Street type, but talking to them they are alike.
This marked the end of another segment. What did I take away from this?
Slut shaming encourages you to draw conclusions about people from their choice of dress, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth about who they are. I say this because Kira made a point of advocating for modesty and feeling that slut shaming was a term made to label her as unreasonable, but the host of the program instead discussed how deceiving looks are, which doesn't seem relevant to the guest's point. He talked about his similar-personality yet differently imaged boys, and he discussed someone who had backlash after pointing out Miley Cyrus had been in a 3-year relationship but was labeled a bitch and slut, while Taylor Swift has been with 13 guys in 3 years but is labeled inspirational and sweet. He didn't seem to address Kira's point at all other than the comment regarding bullying...implying she was a bully.
Next up was a guest speaking on behalf of Felicia Garcia, a teen from Staten Island, jumped in the path of a train after she ran a train on four football players and a few girls and a couple of guys harassed her about it mercilessly. "Words don't hurt, but they kill," Alissa, her friend, said. The segment was little more than telling the story of how she was bullied until she killed herself. "She made a mistake" (referencing having sex with four guys.)
Dr. Phil talks about promiscuity being about pain, lack of self worth, need to be accepted, lack of self esteem, basically a number of things that aren't sex. So the label of slut ignores the actual issues and just adds to the issues that may have driven that behavior in the first place.
The next segment continued the Felicia story, but then he introduced Gabriella Van Rij, author of an anti-bullying book, and a small discussion on getting help for kids being bullied. The only thing I remember of her contributions were that 85% of the girls she talked to in schools claim to have been bullied (is that a real statistic, or anecdotal?) and that people don't need their mistakes pointed out to them repeatedly, they know they screwed up and are humiliated enough.
This segment, I suppose, is supposed to tell me that slut shaming is a form of bullying that can lead to suicide. Especially if you're a teenager where everything is a major, universe-changing incident, from being picked on to having a pimple break out before prom.
Here's the summary of what conclusions I drew from the show:
I had a few problems with this presentation of slut shaming that I think impedes my ability to properly understand the argument. At the very least, there are some issues that I don't think were addressed.
Several times, the point of the choice of dressing style carrying the connotation of behaving in a certain manner or believing in a certain lifestyle had come up but was not addressed beyond dismissing it as being misleading, or at most having the label of "judging others" slapped on the act so as to shut down the subject (since judging others carries a negative connotation, therefore you're performing a negative act and should be ashamed of yourself for judging someone.)
Yet we choose our image every time we get dressed and go into public. In the segment where Phil shows a picture of himself with his wife, I guessed he was at a social function; it was outdoors, there were other people around, but he's wearing a suit jacket with button up shirt, she was wearing a low-cut (but elegant!) dress. It's never brought up why he is hosting the show in a suit coat, trousers and tie. Why does he wear this outfit? Is it just what he is most comfortable wearing? Or is it because he won't be taken seriously wearing pajama pants and tee-shirt, something I've seen more than once in high schools and in Wal-Mart?
Come to think of it, the guests on the show were all wearing outfits that, on the average spectrum of clothing, would be considered less casual and more dressy. Even Trisha, the one criticized for her outfits, wore something that didn't show much cleavage.
Why? Why did they choose the clothes they wore?
How can you claim that outfits don't mean anything when there was obviously some shared theme to the choice of outfits worn for appearing on TV?
We do judge people at some level when we see them. Snap judgement act as a shortcut for our brains; it's a simple way to evaluate how we should react to people around us.
Is it realistic to pretend we don't acknowledge that we do certain things to project a certain image? Many people will say they don't care how people see them when they dress; it's their own style, or it's just an expression of themselves. SO DON'T JUDGE ME!
But...how are you expressing yourself without those styles having a certain meaning? Otherwise you're expressing nothing. It communicates nothing. Even the act of communicating nothing is a form of communication, much in the same way as the people in high school who go against the grain by actively trying not to fit in with the pre-labeled social cliques become, themselves, their own group.
Right or wrong, your clothes do draw certain judgements from others.
Think people might be a little more hesitant talk about their beliefs, if they're not Christian, and you're wearing a cross on your neck?
You think teens didn't get backlash if they wore a trenchcoat to school after Columbine?
Even Phil talking about his son wearing rock musician outfits said there were unusual looking kids at the concerts...implying they tend to wear a particular style of clothing to fit in with a certain crowd.
The rational part of my brain will say that the outfit doesn't necessarily reflect who that person is in other ways; looks can be deceiving. But on the other hand, the outfits are still a reflection of how they want you to see them. They are projecting an image that you're expected to understand. And it's a disingenuous joke to expect people to not draw conclusions based on your outfit, whether it's to tell others you're a 'Don't mess with me' biker in a leather jacket or a 'Respect me' business suit.
Is it realistic to expect people not to draw conclusions about the image you project?
You can choose to reject their judgements or conclusions. You can choose to put the onus of changing opinions on yourself, and change the image you project. But you really shouldn't whine about it; I fully expect strange stares if I wore a spiked red mohawk, or a garishly multicolored muumuu to work, because these are fully outside of society's norms to the point where it would be considered strange. There are already the occasional odd look from people when you're strolling into a building in the financial district, populated by bankers and traders and other expensive suits, while wearing a tee-shirt and jeans.
I also think that there was another point of possible irony that was glossed over. When Laci's video was being played, there was a bit blipped out; "Women, you don't give away your precious <blip> gift until you're under the ownership of a man!"
Watching her actual, unedited video, the word blipped out was "vagina."
When showing the montage of images for Trisha during her introduction, there were a number of shots where her cleavage was fuzzed out. Basically, censoring her body.
...if these things aren't inappropriate, if these are things that shouldn't matter, why were they censored?
Isn't that a non-verbal slut shaming, saying that whatever outfit she was wearing in those images cannot be shown on television?
And keep in mind that not only was Phil humiliating and criticizing Jason, which would fall into the purview of his repeated call of bullying, but his show censored Laci and Trisha.
There's some irony, if not cognitive dissonance, to that.
In the end I'm seeing hypocrisy in the show's message, and never having the point of how appearance draws judgements from others (and engaging in dressing in a certain manner for the show, implying that outfits do project a certain image and adds to the legitimacy of the idea that there are "appropriate" outfits) properly addressed or acknowledged.
I'm confused in this.
The idea of social shaming is also never addressed, and the relationship of social shaming to slut shaming. Social behaviors reinforced through collective social shaming has been a strong force since...well, societies existed. Why is social shaming allowed, and in many ways encouraged, yet slut shaming is somehow special and needs to be excluded?
Perhaps the big difference is whether you make your disapproval known. You can disapprove of a behavior or outfit without telling the person, although then I am lost as to where the difference is that this isn't the same as a chilling effect, discouraging you from expressing an opinion.
Perhaps my mistake is trying to understand this concept through the lens of a daytime TV show. It seemed pretty obvious that it was less about educating and more about forming a dramatic narrative; Dr. Phil's show had a definite "here's what you should believe" instead of a "here are the facts" approach.
Or maybe this is a topic governed largely by emotion and less by rationalization, so it's a little more nuanced and complex than I can easily empathize with. I'll probably continue to turn this topic over in my head, trying to understand it better...but if I've gone this long without understanding it, I'm not sure I ever will.
That just describes the feeling I get with this term, because, I think, there is some part of the term that I am guilty of yet I don't know if I should feel guilty for it.
It doesn't help that socially hot topics aren't something that encourages conversation. Most people with strong opinions in this area tend to judge by emotion and have trouble relating to people with my type of brain wiring; to not simply understand or empathize with them means I'm stupid or ignorant, or worse.
What I really would like to do is solve what it is about the term "slut shaming" that rings that cognitive dissonance bell in my brain; what am I not understanding? Or do I have an opinion formed, but am missing a key aspect of the topic to have an informed opinion?
I've had this topic in my Trello list of Things To Possibly Blog About for awhile; I'd glance at it, and think about it, turn it over in my head a bit and end up thinking, "Let's save this for later" once more to let the topic ferment in my brain a little longer. I'd re-watch Laci Green videos, like her Jenna Marbles video response to Jenna's Slut Edition video.
I also watched Laci's appearance on Dr. Phil in an attempt to understand the topic better. I've watched that episode several times, as a matter of fact. And yet...something about it left me feeling more lost than educated.
The Dr. Phil show no doubt was considered, for the general audience that watches his show each weekday, an educational source. But what do you learn from it? Let's break it down.
The episode is called "Girls Who Bash Girls Who Dress Sexy." I'd link to an episode, but a few have already been pulled by television networks claiming copyright infringement, so nothing guarantees my links won't go stale within days so you may have to look it up yourself.
The episode opens with Phil bringing up the latest news headlines regarding the Steubenville rape of a 16 year old girl, where he then ties "blaming the victim" to the term "slut shaming." Both of the terms are already emotionally charged, so I suppose this is an early warning of what the show will be aiming for in terms of what the viewer should conclude lest they are obviously deviant of Dr. Phil's viewership.
He introduces his first guest, a teenager who posted a meme that ended up going viral. She thought her peer age group were often dressing "inappropriate" and decided to post a picture expressing her opinion.
Dr. Phil touches on spoofs of her post as well as people who have given her death threats and insults as a result of her opinion.
This, he said, was kind of the genesis of slut shaming, judging others for their choice of dress. I'll file that away as an aspect of slut shaming:
Telling someone to not show so much cleavage is slut shaming. You're seeing someone's choice of dress, you carry the opinion they should not do this, and make them feel bad for it. The show also labeled this as judging them which is both true and emotionally charged so if you don't necessarily agree, you're made to feel like the bad person in the narrative (can you tell I'm more sensitive to emotional bias when it seems to be more for manipulation purposes instead of education?)
Next up was someone he obviously threw in as the villain in the show. Jason carries the opinion that slut shaming is not only okay, it's a noble pursuit. He doesn't think you should respect people who have no respect for themselves, and slut shaming is about taking responsible for your actions and the consequences of spreading your legs for all sorts of people.
Jason maintains that he judges people by their behavior, which Dr. Phil counters with he's judging people without knowing that is what they're doing. When pressed, he tacitly admits it's based on their dress or rumor. He tries to make his point that if Lady Gaga wears a meat dress in the savannah and a lion eats her; maybe the meat suit isn't the best choice of apparel. "We judge people a lot by what we wear," he said. Dr. Phil counters by showing a picture of he and his wife at a social event (I assume, since he's wearing a suit jacket and open-collar button up shirt and his wife was) wearing a low-cut dress, to which Jason says she's dressed "very tastefully." This was another manipulative moment to define him as the bad guy; what else could he say?
He was going to introduce his next guest, so what did this segment tell me about slut shaming?
Slut shaming is based on seeing people's choice of dress and drawing conclusions about them. There's obviously more I'm supposed to draw from this because it was so blatantly transparent that Jason was cast as the villain of the episode, but I'm trying to enlighten myself a bit about slut shaming, not get sucked into the dramatic aspects of the show. Jason was trying to say that people have conclusions drawn about them because, in part, of the way they dress; he then labels them as sluts given their "uniforms," and assumes more about their behaviors, which is the part he really is taking umbrage to. Their behavior, in turn, is what he disapproves of and sees as irresponsible.
The next guest was Laci Green. Dr. Phil defined slut shaming as women being made to feel inferior because they are dressing, acting, or engaging in inappropriate behavior that connotes sexuality. He then introduces Laci Green saying that slut shaming is about controlling women, not teaching self-respect.
She is quoted from her video talking about promiscuity being a "bad decision" for women, being called slut, losing respect, or asking to be raped. Meanwhile, "dudes" being promiscuous is a "good decision." She goes on to say that, from society's view, dudes are expected to make bad decisions so it's okay.
Dr. Phil and Laci then attack Jason, where Dr. Phil compares his view as bullying. ("Bullying" is a wonderful hot-button word to use.) Why he took this opportunity to attack Jason right after introducing Laci I'm not sure...what was the point of having Laci on? Her viewpoint was entirely summed up by the video, then her chance to talk (on the broadcast) was basically to echo that she disagreed with Jason, then another guest was introduced.
So what do I take away from Laci's segment?
Slut shaming is about controlling women and being sexist, because men aren't shamed for slutty behavior.
His next guest was Trisha, who is shamed by women for the way she dresses. She talked about people anonymously attacking her, then referencing Jason by saying people like him were cowardly when they couldn't hide behind a computer screen.
(It's really hard for me to even pretend you're trying to have a dialog or educate someone when you demonize the person you're trying to convince of the error of their ways. You're doing little more than stooping to a level of childishness and...what, trying to shame them into seeing your side of the argument?)
Trisha talks about sluts, when she was growing up, were the girls who had sex with a lot of people; they screwed half the town or many people in school. Now they were calling her a slut because of the way she dressed.
Jason was pressed for his opinion, and he said she was dressing for attention. She denied this, saying she's all about being "girly" and she's proud of being curvy. She said she's not even interested in men right now.
Laci adds that even if it were for attention, she doesn't see what's inherently wrong with dressing the way you want. It says something more about the person who's judging them rather than the person wearing the outfit. Jason tries to say that most men don't really care what women are wearing but other women seem to judge each other for this, which Laci interjects that many people do care, but then seems to agree that it is a problem because women judge each other for this and not men. She seems really angry that there is a perceived double standard...and the fact that they both seem to say that women are harsh on other women more then men is never pointed out; it's a rule that you don't concede a point to the villain.
Trisha added that she hadn't had sex in three years, yet Jason concluded she was loose and said as much on national television, so he shouldn't be judging her by what she was wearing.
This marked the end of Trisha's segment. What did I conclude I was supposed to learn from this?
Sluts are girls who sleep around, not dress in a provocative or revealing manner.
Phil's next segment was highlighting the "Slut Walk," protests against victim blaming in rapes. Scantily clad women march to reclaim the term "slut." He then introduced Kira, who is an "advocate of modesty" and said that slut shaming is a term used to silence people like her. People are engaging in a competition to sexualize themselves, and she thinks it's an issue of wanting attention. "Women need to put a little more thought into the image they are projecting."
Kira talks about promiscuity having consequences that can follow you for the rest of your life, and that concerns her. She also said that slut shaming is a term to shame people who feel others should be more modest.
Dr. Phil says that you cannot criticize, humiliate, censor, or hold them up to public ridicule and not consider yourself a bully.
He keeps finding reasons to bring that word into the conversation..."bully."
Kira just replies that she's not advocating Jason's position (another slam!) but is advocating modesty and she shouldn't feel ashamed for advocating this.
Phil says it's a leap to go from thinking this person is dressing in a way you wouldn't, to assuming this person is sleeping around and exposing themselves to STD's and such. He also talks about how he has two boys that dress very different, one a rocker, one a preppy Wall Street type, but talking to them they are alike.
This marked the end of another segment. What did I take away from this?
Slut shaming encourages you to draw conclusions about people from their choice of dress, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth about who they are. I say this because Kira made a point of advocating for modesty and feeling that slut shaming was a term made to label her as unreasonable, but the host of the program instead discussed how deceiving looks are, which doesn't seem relevant to the guest's point. He talked about his similar-personality yet differently imaged boys, and he discussed someone who had backlash after pointing out Miley Cyrus had been in a 3-year relationship but was labeled a bitch and slut, while Taylor Swift has been with 13 guys in 3 years but is labeled inspirational and sweet. He didn't seem to address Kira's point at all other than the comment regarding bullying...implying she was a bully.
Next up was a guest speaking on behalf of Felicia Garcia, a teen from Staten Island, jumped in the path of a train after she ran a train on four football players and a few girls and a couple of guys harassed her about it mercilessly. "Words don't hurt, but they kill," Alissa, her friend, said. The segment was little more than telling the story of how she was bullied until she killed herself. "She made a mistake" (referencing having sex with four guys.)
Dr. Phil talks about promiscuity being about pain, lack of self worth, need to be accepted, lack of self esteem, basically a number of things that aren't sex. So the label of slut ignores the actual issues and just adds to the issues that may have driven that behavior in the first place.
The next segment continued the Felicia story, but then he introduced Gabriella Van Rij, author of an anti-bullying book, and a small discussion on getting help for kids being bullied. The only thing I remember of her contributions were that 85% of the girls she talked to in schools claim to have been bullied (is that a real statistic, or anecdotal?) and that people don't need their mistakes pointed out to them repeatedly, they know they screwed up and are humiliated enough.
This segment, I suppose, is supposed to tell me that slut shaming is a form of bullying that can lead to suicide. Especially if you're a teenager where everything is a major, universe-changing incident, from being picked on to having a pimple break out before prom.
Here's the summary of what conclusions I drew from the show:
- Telling someone to not show so much cleavage is slut shaming.
- Slut shaming is based on seeing people's choice of dress and drawing conclusions about them.
- Dr. Phil defined slut shaming as women being made to feel inferior because they are dressing, acting, or engaging in inappropriate behavior that connotes sexuality.
- Slut shaming is about controlling women and being sexist, because men aren't shamed for slutty behavior.
- Sluts are girls who sleep around, not dress in a provocative or revealing manner.
- Slut shaming encourages you to draw conclusions about people from their choice of dress, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the truth about who they are.
- Slut shaming is a form of bullying that can lead to suicide.
I had a few problems with this presentation of slut shaming that I think impedes my ability to properly understand the argument. At the very least, there are some issues that I don't think were addressed.
Several times, the point of the choice of dressing style carrying the connotation of behaving in a certain manner or believing in a certain lifestyle had come up but was not addressed beyond dismissing it as being misleading, or at most having the label of "judging others" slapped on the act so as to shut down the subject (since judging others carries a negative connotation, therefore you're performing a negative act and should be ashamed of yourself for judging someone.)
Yet we choose our image every time we get dressed and go into public. In the segment where Phil shows a picture of himself with his wife, I guessed he was at a social function; it was outdoors, there were other people around, but he's wearing a suit jacket with button up shirt, she was wearing a low-cut (but elegant!) dress. It's never brought up why he is hosting the show in a suit coat, trousers and tie. Why does he wear this outfit? Is it just what he is most comfortable wearing? Or is it because he won't be taken seriously wearing pajama pants and tee-shirt, something I've seen more than once in high schools and in Wal-Mart?
Come to think of it, the guests on the show were all wearing outfits that, on the average spectrum of clothing, would be considered less casual and more dressy. Even Trisha, the one criticized for her outfits, wore something that didn't show much cleavage.
Why? Why did they choose the clothes they wore?
How can you claim that outfits don't mean anything when there was obviously some shared theme to the choice of outfits worn for appearing on TV?
We do judge people at some level when we see them. Snap judgement act as a shortcut for our brains; it's a simple way to evaluate how we should react to people around us.
Is it realistic to pretend we don't acknowledge that we do certain things to project a certain image? Many people will say they don't care how people see them when they dress; it's their own style, or it's just an expression of themselves. SO DON'T JUDGE ME!
But...how are you expressing yourself without those styles having a certain meaning? Otherwise you're expressing nothing. It communicates nothing. Even the act of communicating nothing is a form of communication, much in the same way as the people in high school who go against the grain by actively trying not to fit in with the pre-labeled social cliques become, themselves, their own group.
Right or wrong, your clothes do draw certain judgements from others.
Think people might be a little more hesitant talk about their beliefs, if they're not Christian, and you're wearing a cross on your neck?
You think teens didn't get backlash if they wore a trenchcoat to school after Columbine?
Even Phil talking about his son wearing rock musician outfits said there were unusual looking kids at the concerts...implying they tend to wear a particular style of clothing to fit in with a certain crowd.
The rational part of my brain will say that the outfit doesn't necessarily reflect who that person is in other ways; looks can be deceiving. But on the other hand, the outfits are still a reflection of how they want you to see them. They are projecting an image that you're expected to understand. And it's a disingenuous joke to expect people to not draw conclusions based on your outfit, whether it's to tell others you're a 'Don't mess with me' biker in a leather jacket or a 'Respect me' business suit.
Is it realistic to expect people not to draw conclusions about the image you project?
You can choose to reject their judgements or conclusions. You can choose to put the onus of changing opinions on yourself, and change the image you project. But you really shouldn't whine about it; I fully expect strange stares if I wore a spiked red mohawk, or a garishly multicolored muumuu to work, because these are fully outside of society's norms to the point where it would be considered strange. There are already the occasional odd look from people when you're strolling into a building in the financial district, populated by bankers and traders and other expensive suits, while wearing a tee-shirt and jeans.
I also think that there was another point of possible irony that was glossed over. When Laci's video was being played, there was a bit blipped out; "Women, you don't give away your precious <blip> gift until you're under the ownership of a man!"
Watching her actual, unedited video, the word blipped out was "vagina."
When showing the montage of images for Trisha during her introduction, there were a number of shots where her cleavage was fuzzed out. Basically, censoring her body.
...if these things aren't inappropriate, if these are things that shouldn't matter, why were they censored?
Isn't that a non-verbal slut shaming, saying that whatever outfit she was wearing in those images cannot be shown on television?
And keep in mind that not only was Phil humiliating and criticizing Jason, which would fall into the purview of his repeated call of bullying, but his show censored Laci and Trisha.
There's some irony, if not cognitive dissonance, to that.
In the end I'm seeing hypocrisy in the show's message, and never having the point of how appearance draws judgements from others (and engaging in dressing in a certain manner for the show, implying that outfits do project a certain image and adds to the legitimacy of the idea that there are "appropriate" outfits) properly addressed or acknowledged.
I'm confused in this.
The idea of social shaming is also never addressed, and the relationship of social shaming to slut shaming. Social behaviors reinforced through collective social shaming has been a strong force since...well, societies existed. Why is social shaming allowed, and in many ways encouraged, yet slut shaming is somehow special and needs to be excluded?
Perhaps the big difference is whether you make your disapproval known. You can disapprove of a behavior or outfit without telling the person, although then I am lost as to where the difference is that this isn't the same as a chilling effect, discouraging you from expressing an opinion.
Perhaps my mistake is trying to understand this concept through the lens of a daytime TV show. It seemed pretty obvious that it was less about educating and more about forming a dramatic narrative; Dr. Phil's show had a definite "here's what you should believe" instead of a "here are the facts" approach.
Or maybe this is a topic governed largely by emotion and less by rationalization, so it's a little more nuanced and complex than I can easily empathize with. I'll probably continue to turn this topic over in my head, trying to understand it better...but if I've gone this long without understanding it, I'm not sure I ever will.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
A Reason Wealth Inequality Matters
I intended to follow up on my previous post regarding wealth disparity much sooner than this, but sometimes life gets in the way.
I rent an apartment in Manhattan. If you know anything about the five boroughs of New York, Manhattan is the borough the Muppets, Jason, several superheros and Cloverfield have all either taken or destroyed, and is also known as one of the most expensive places to live despite the several times it has had to be rebuilt. Well, the non-Hollywood part is true, at least.
I work in a part of Manhattan called "The Financial District," a very small area of real estate where each weekday enough money flows through the virtual coffers of the banks and trade floors to fund small countries.
Last Friday I was sitting in the back seat at the coffee bar with some developers who, despite having Internet access cut off at the office, decided to stick around and socialize a little. A small part of the conversations involved a nearby apartment building whose rent, they said, ran around $40,000 a month.
That's $480,000 a year. Nearly half a million dollars.
I said I couldn't imagine what it's like to have so much money in the bank that I could afford to spend that as rent. I'd love not to have that kind of financial worry in my life...and then I wondered, what is it like for people who do make that kind of money?
Someone said that they knew someone who had lived near there a period of time and said it was a nice apartment, but the location sucked. My first reaction was, "How?" but someone else reminded us there aren't really any supermarkets nearby.
That's true...groceries would almost exclusively be delivered.
(I know there are some markets in the financial district; they tend to be small and pricey, though, even for Manhattan.)
This isn't to say that if you have groceries delivered in Manhattan that it means you are wealthy. It's quite common; there are several people I know that are getting various grocery-type items delivered who aren't what I would consider top income earners. But it is an added luxury that does add up over the course of a year, especially when you add in the cost of having laundry picked up and delivered (it usually costs a dollar or two a pound, although pricing for dry cleaning and specialty treatments can quickly increase costs. The convenience of having grocery and laundry items delivered as a service is, to me, like cable or satellite television...nice to have, but something I can do without, especially after actually sitting down and doing the monetary math.
Manhattan is a kind of illustration of the wealth disparity in America. There are pockets of affordability; it's safe to say that my apartment is nowhere near forty grand a month in rent. But it certainly is far north, for what I get in relation to what I pay, to what I could afford back home with the same amount of cash. Other people get by finding roommates on Craigslist to afford rent, or making do with tiny studio apartments that suits a more frugal lifestyle.
And by tiny, I mean 500 square feet or less.
And by pockets of affordability, I mean I can cross a street or two and there are apartments that will cost the upper side of four figures, or possibly five figures, per month. Even near our office I've heard rumor of apartments that are slightly below $3,000 a month in rent being a block away from apartments that are tens of thousands per month.
The cost of living isn't getting any cheaper, either. Rent costs, along with transportation, and service industries, are creeping higher. Couple that with the news that middle class income is essentially stagnant, and you end up with the most common option for people who work in New York and need to afford housing; they have a longer commute.
The truly affordable housing tends to lay in the concentric zones farther from Manhattan; on the far north side of the island is Harlem, or people move into Brooklyn or Jersey, across the river. The rent is lower, but the commute tends to jump from a 25 minute subway ride in train-dense Manhattan to 45 minutes or an hour once you factor in multiple train hops, or in some cases and hour and a half. That's the tradeoff for affordable living if you enjoy your job (or in this economy, just want to keep the job you have.)
In the course of the conversation I recounted an account I read in a book on New York "tunnel dwellers," people who lived in the subway tunnels. It was remarkable; it described how you could walk within three feet of someone, and not even know they were there. One fellow interviewed worked more or less full time at McDonalds, and said his coworkers had no idea he lives in the subway tunnels. It was sad and surprising given the amount of spin and vitriol, especially during our recent presidential campaign season, towards the laziness of the poor who are portrayed as lazy ne'er-do-wells sucking tax dollars in exchange for sitting on the couch watching daytime TV.
Here's the thing; much of the city thrives on the poor and middle class to do the jobs the upper (and upper middle class) rely upon, but wouldn't want to do.
I don't see too many bankers who would want to be out in crappy weather delivering Seamless and GrubHub orders to hungry folks. Or doing laundry or custodial services, or waiting tables. Even the artists performing on Broadway often share rooms with multiple roommates to make ends meet. These are people eking out a living, hoping they don't become ill or badly injured lest they end up going bankrupt with a visit to the hospital or ending up not being able to go into work from illness, meaning no income since many of them are hourly workers (which, by the way, is a terrible way to prevent the spread of disease, when you think about how many people come into contact with someone who had to go to work in order to make ends meet while still contagious...think about that when you are commuting on the subway or eating prepared food.)
If prices keep rising, more people move farther away, until the strain of the commute will basically price them out of the city. They move on. It's a process that is basically an extreme form of gentrification, only with the economy being what it is, it's not only pushing out the poorest people. The lower middle class and middle class feel the strain as well.
Of course there is a counterbalance to this that econ 101 teaches us; prices will level out at a point where people will pay what they can afford. The pendulum is supposed to swing to a point where once it is noticed people are moving away, the overall economy suffers, jobs aren't being filled, and the politicians and businesses start offering incentives for people to come in again, hopefully in the form of "this apartment is pretty crappy so we'll make the rent affordable."
Only I wonder if that's what is actually happening. My employer is actually paying a very decent salary, and I'm still wondering how long it will be before I will have to look at moving to Brooklyn. The city has raised transportation fees, which doesn't affect me personally (thank you again to my employer offering Metro cards as a job perk) but does cost money when my wife and son come to visit; most people on the island are beginning to notice the nickel and diming adding up for them to get to work.
So what happens?
I wonder if you'll see a push of poor and middle class out of the city. Jobs will become more difficult to fill as people move away; at least, the jobs that keep trash cans in offices emptied, clothes laundered and food delivered. Business will end up having to pay more in order to get workers, squeezing small businesses closer to going out of business.
Quality workers may become more scarce. I see this effect in education; as the job perks slip away and the negatives become a heavier burden, teachers who are good teachers, people who care about the work of being a teacher and not a cog in the education system, they leave. They see that the reality of teaching is far removed from the job description and certainly doesn't match what they thought was happening when they were sitting at the desks on the receiving end of an education.
Instead I saw, over time, more B-stringers getting their chance to become teachers. These are people who are less passionate about teaching and more fitting into the dysfunctional system that is in place; real teachers become disenfranchised and demoralized, and soon enough begin looking for work outside the education field. The B-stringers just stop caring or are comfortable working at a mediocre level within the broken system.
Ever notice how hard it is to find teachers who are passionate about their jobs? The people who would be passionate are driven away from the field.
So what happens if a city becomes largely dysfunctional, and the people who would be passionate about it leave? Does it end up become like Detroit?
I doubt that a place like New York City will ever be like Detroit, but then again, it wasn't long ago that you wouldn't have thought Detroit would become today's Detroit. I hear stories about what has become of the Vegas suburbs after the economy tanked, and California, as a state, is having larger scale issues that are creeping into the lives of its citizens. Florida is having interesting economic effects on its citizens largely in part from Tea-Party political ideas put into effect, and Florida already has an economy heavily funded by retirees and spring break tourists.
Only time will tell. But one thing I'm sure of is that as long as people look only for themselves, there will be looming problems. The myth of the job creator paints a picture of a wealthy citizen waking in the morning and feeling the burden of keeping his employees employed; the truth is we have more people who are willing to step on whoever is in his or her path to financial gain in order to have more financial gain. There is a disconnect wherein the wealthy can't relate to the middle class, let alone the poor. I read an article outlining tips to save money for bankers and their wives, and the disconnect couldn't be more stark; it made what was common sense for middle class families sound almost novel or shocking. If these ideas hadn't occurred to them before, no wonder they don't care about the financial situation of people around them. And worse, the advice felt like the equivalent of, "Instead of driving the Ferrari, take out the Benz!"
I read the tone of the article summed up in the lines,
“I still go to New York five or six times per year, but now I forego business class to travel in premium economy,” he said. “With the new flexibility to plan ahead – which was impossible when I worked for a bank – you can get good fares. And if you’re smart about it, the airlines still give you all the perks.”
and,
“The wife is doing the ironing,” another banker told us. “She’s not loving it, but she doesn’t want to get a job herself so is having to accept it.”
It's a novel idea to have to scale back and still have perks many people will never have.
We need to care about our neighbors. We need to understand that when people become miserable and stressed, there are repercussions. This doesn't mean handing out free checks to everyone (although this is done in Alaska...) to boost incomes but it does mean acknowledging that maybe a single minded pursuit of everything that's best just for ourselves will come back to bite society in the ass. Benefiting everyone still means everyone will benefit, not just the poor or middle class. And we need to stop stigmatizing the desire to help others.
Otherwise you end up in a system where only the most connected and financially powerful will call the shots, and gradually they get into positions where laws are created that will only benefit the most connected and financially powerful, snowballing their accumulation of wealth until there's nothing left for anyone else.
Sound familiar?
I rent an apartment in Manhattan. If you know anything about the five boroughs of New York, Manhattan is the borough the Muppets, Jason, several superheros and Cloverfield have all either taken or destroyed, and is also known as one of the most expensive places to live despite the several times it has had to be rebuilt. Well, the non-Hollywood part is true, at least.
I work in a part of Manhattan called "The Financial District," a very small area of real estate where each weekday enough money flows through the virtual coffers of the banks and trade floors to fund small countries.
Last Friday I was sitting in the back seat at the coffee bar with some developers who, despite having Internet access cut off at the office, decided to stick around and socialize a little. A small part of the conversations involved a nearby apartment building whose rent, they said, ran around $40,000 a month.
That's $480,000 a year. Nearly half a million dollars.
I said I couldn't imagine what it's like to have so much money in the bank that I could afford to spend that as rent. I'd love not to have that kind of financial worry in my life...and then I wondered, what is it like for people who do make that kind of money?
Someone said that they knew someone who had lived near there a period of time and said it was a nice apartment, but the location sucked. My first reaction was, "How?" but someone else reminded us there aren't really any supermarkets nearby.
That's true...groceries would almost exclusively be delivered.
(I know there are some markets in the financial district; they tend to be small and pricey, though, even for Manhattan.)
This isn't to say that if you have groceries delivered in Manhattan that it means you are wealthy. It's quite common; there are several people I know that are getting various grocery-type items delivered who aren't what I would consider top income earners. But it is an added luxury that does add up over the course of a year, especially when you add in the cost of having laundry picked up and delivered (it usually costs a dollar or two a pound, although pricing for dry cleaning and specialty treatments can quickly increase costs. The convenience of having grocery and laundry items delivered as a service is, to me, like cable or satellite television...nice to have, but something I can do without, especially after actually sitting down and doing the monetary math.
Manhattan is a kind of illustration of the wealth disparity in America. There are pockets of affordability; it's safe to say that my apartment is nowhere near forty grand a month in rent. But it certainly is far north, for what I get in relation to what I pay, to what I could afford back home with the same amount of cash. Other people get by finding roommates on Craigslist to afford rent, or making do with tiny studio apartments that suits a more frugal lifestyle.
And by tiny, I mean 500 square feet or less.
And by pockets of affordability, I mean I can cross a street or two and there are apartments that will cost the upper side of four figures, or possibly five figures, per month. Even near our office I've heard rumor of apartments that are slightly below $3,000 a month in rent being a block away from apartments that are tens of thousands per month.
The cost of living isn't getting any cheaper, either. Rent costs, along with transportation, and service industries, are creeping higher. Couple that with the news that middle class income is essentially stagnant, and you end up with the most common option for people who work in New York and need to afford housing; they have a longer commute.
The truly affordable housing tends to lay in the concentric zones farther from Manhattan; on the far north side of the island is Harlem, or people move into Brooklyn or Jersey, across the river. The rent is lower, but the commute tends to jump from a 25 minute subway ride in train-dense Manhattan to 45 minutes or an hour once you factor in multiple train hops, or in some cases and hour and a half. That's the tradeoff for affordable living if you enjoy your job (or in this economy, just want to keep the job you have.)
In the course of the conversation I recounted an account I read in a book on New York "tunnel dwellers," people who lived in the subway tunnels. It was remarkable; it described how you could walk within three feet of someone, and not even know they were there. One fellow interviewed worked more or less full time at McDonalds, and said his coworkers had no idea he lives in the subway tunnels. It was sad and surprising given the amount of spin and vitriol, especially during our recent presidential campaign season, towards the laziness of the poor who are portrayed as lazy ne'er-do-wells sucking tax dollars in exchange for sitting on the couch watching daytime TV.
Here's the thing; much of the city thrives on the poor and middle class to do the jobs the upper (and upper middle class) rely upon, but wouldn't want to do.
I don't see too many bankers who would want to be out in crappy weather delivering Seamless and GrubHub orders to hungry folks. Or doing laundry or custodial services, or waiting tables. Even the artists performing on Broadway often share rooms with multiple roommates to make ends meet. These are people eking out a living, hoping they don't become ill or badly injured lest they end up going bankrupt with a visit to the hospital or ending up not being able to go into work from illness, meaning no income since many of them are hourly workers (which, by the way, is a terrible way to prevent the spread of disease, when you think about how many people come into contact with someone who had to go to work in order to make ends meet while still contagious...think about that when you are commuting on the subway or eating prepared food.)
If prices keep rising, more people move farther away, until the strain of the commute will basically price them out of the city. They move on. It's a process that is basically an extreme form of gentrification, only with the economy being what it is, it's not only pushing out the poorest people. The lower middle class and middle class feel the strain as well.
Of course there is a counterbalance to this that econ 101 teaches us; prices will level out at a point where people will pay what they can afford. The pendulum is supposed to swing to a point where once it is noticed people are moving away, the overall economy suffers, jobs aren't being filled, and the politicians and businesses start offering incentives for people to come in again, hopefully in the form of "this apartment is pretty crappy so we'll make the rent affordable."
Only I wonder if that's what is actually happening. My employer is actually paying a very decent salary, and I'm still wondering how long it will be before I will have to look at moving to Brooklyn. The city has raised transportation fees, which doesn't affect me personally (thank you again to my employer offering Metro cards as a job perk) but does cost money when my wife and son come to visit; most people on the island are beginning to notice the nickel and diming adding up for them to get to work.
So what happens?
I wonder if you'll see a push of poor and middle class out of the city. Jobs will become more difficult to fill as people move away; at least, the jobs that keep trash cans in offices emptied, clothes laundered and food delivered. Business will end up having to pay more in order to get workers, squeezing small businesses closer to going out of business.
Quality workers may become more scarce. I see this effect in education; as the job perks slip away and the negatives become a heavier burden, teachers who are good teachers, people who care about the work of being a teacher and not a cog in the education system, they leave. They see that the reality of teaching is far removed from the job description and certainly doesn't match what they thought was happening when they were sitting at the desks on the receiving end of an education.
Instead I saw, over time, more B-stringers getting their chance to become teachers. These are people who are less passionate about teaching and more fitting into the dysfunctional system that is in place; real teachers become disenfranchised and demoralized, and soon enough begin looking for work outside the education field. The B-stringers just stop caring or are comfortable working at a mediocre level within the broken system.
Ever notice how hard it is to find teachers who are passionate about their jobs? The people who would be passionate are driven away from the field.
So what happens if a city becomes largely dysfunctional, and the people who would be passionate about it leave? Does it end up become like Detroit?
I doubt that a place like New York City will ever be like Detroit, but then again, it wasn't long ago that you wouldn't have thought Detroit would become today's Detroit. I hear stories about what has become of the Vegas suburbs after the economy tanked, and California, as a state, is having larger scale issues that are creeping into the lives of its citizens. Florida is having interesting economic effects on its citizens largely in part from Tea-Party political ideas put into effect, and Florida already has an economy heavily funded by retirees and spring break tourists.
Only time will tell. But one thing I'm sure of is that as long as people look only for themselves, there will be looming problems. The myth of the job creator paints a picture of a wealthy citizen waking in the morning and feeling the burden of keeping his employees employed; the truth is we have more people who are willing to step on whoever is in his or her path to financial gain in order to have more financial gain. There is a disconnect wherein the wealthy can't relate to the middle class, let alone the poor. I read an article outlining tips to save money for bankers and their wives, and the disconnect couldn't be more stark; it made what was common sense for middle class families sound almost novel or shocking. If these ideas hadn't occurred to them before, no wonder they don't care about the financial situation of people around them. And worse, the advice felt like the equivalent of, "Instead of driving the Ferrari, take out the Benz!"
I read the tone of the article summed up in the lines,
“I still go to New York five or six times per year, but now I forego business class to travel in premium economy,” he said. “With the new flexibility to plan ahead – which was impossible when I worked for a bank – you can get good fares. And if you’re smart about it, the airlines still give you all the perks.”
and,
“The wife is doing the ironing,” another banker told us. “She’s not loving it, but she doesn’t want to get a job herself so is having to accept it.”
It's a novel idea to have to scale back and still have perks many people will never have.
We need to care about our neighbors. We need to understand that when people become miserable and stressed, there are repercussions. This doesn't mean handing out free checks to everyone (although this is done in Alaska...) to boost incomes but it does mean acknowledging that maybe a single minded pursuit of everything that's best just for ourselves will come back to bite society in the ass. Benefiting everyone still means everyone will benefit, not just the poor or middle class. And we need to stop stigmatizing the desire to help others.
Otherwise you end up in a system where only the most connected and financially powerful will call the shots, and gradually they get into positions where laws are created that will only benefit the most connected and financially powerful, snowballing their accumulation of wealth until there's nothing left for anyone else.
Sound familiar?
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Look at the Numbers: Wealth Inequality
In continuing with the theme of my previous post, I'd like to present yet another "How can a sane and/or rational person look at these numbers and not think that something is a little wrong here?"
And today's topic is "Wealth Inequality".
Wealth inequality is the term used to describe why the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck while one percent of Americans own over a third of the country's wealth.
Articles like this give more numbers and try to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the people most affected by this social problem tend not to be good with numbers; partly because the human brain sucks at dealing with numbers and there's a point where all big numbers are just subconsciously translated as "wow that's big" instead of comprehending the comparisons, and partly, perhaps, because this is a topic that once politicians get into the mix becomes something that you either actually think about or reject outright because it's against your personal ideology.
Numbers and graphs sometimes just don't cut it for conveying a message of these proportions. Let's try a video instead. Every time I've seen this I can't help but wonder, "How can you not think something is a little wonky here?"
There's an important point to make here; there's a difference between wealth inequality and income inequality. Wealth inequality is what leads to the reaction, "We pay sports stars millions of dollars to throw a ball while teachers educating our future leaders make so little!" or some similar comparison.
Income is more of a flow of money...your paycheck. Wealth is the accumulated value of things you own. This would be why many people who are retired have very little income, but are not considered necessarily poor, because they have accumulated assets in their lifetimes. Also, money gained from trusts, dividends, and investments aren't considered income.
It's easier to remember the difference between wealth and income when you remember that Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple at the time of his passing, had a salary of one dollar in his position at Apple.
I see these numbers and look at these graphs and it absolutely gobsmacks me that people defend the idea that this is not only fair, but reasonable.
One YouTube comment read, "Nobody has time for your whiny, ignorant, socialist crap. If you want socialism, go to Russia. Those top people work very hard. And Obamaites like you don't realize that it is fair based on how much you work. Go complain somewhere else."
I normally attribute YouTube comments about as much credibility as 4chan comments, but this is actually something I've seen echoed by people in FaceBook, with actual people not necessarily hiding behind trollish anonymity. And these were not wealthy people saying this; from what I can tell the sentiment was being expressed by economically lower to middle class people, the very people falling under a category I labeled "being screwed."
Maybe I lack the ability to properly convey how I see the situation.
No one is working 380 times harder than the average person.
You can, perhaps, say that someone is working 380 times harder than someone else. There are people in comas and on the other end of the spectrum there are athletes training 12 hours in the gym in preparation for the next Olympics. I can see that fitting the scenario.
But that's not the average person.
See, the average would be, ideally, the middle class. You have a job. You put in your 40 hour workweek. You do your part, and you should, in theory (according to the version of the American Dream I was told) be able to provide comfortably for your family, be able to afford healthcare, and maybe take a vacation once or twice a year.
But as you can see in that video, that's not the reality.
And when you take that average, you shouldn't have it common...that is, routine, and expected...for a person to make 380 times your economic value if they have a particular title in a business. I can see it happening, but it should be the exception, not the rule. And I'm not saying that CEO's should have more wealth or money; they are the people that are leading the business, and they shoulder the responsibility of keeping that company running and keeping employees employed.
But 380 times more than the average employee? Isn't that...excessive?
It would seem that some economists agree. Something along the way has become seriously warped.
I see a progression of blame in society. A series of excuses, really.
"If you're poor, you deserve to be poor."
"It's America. If you work hard, you will make it."
"Nothing is stopping you from going out and making that money."
The reality is that it's not a level playing field. Most of the money going to the top of the wealth pie doesn't come from their paychecks, although that's a big help (remember, Steve Jobs, dollar salary, worth millions...) Thanks to Congress and Congressional lobbies over time, tax and economic policies favor people who get a chunk of cash to start off well in the game of accumulating wealth. Wealth creates more wealth. Investments create more wealth. It's a feedback loop. And it's the reason you see wealthy people being compensated with large, healthy salaries on top of stop options and bonuses and other forms of compensation.
Ever play the board game Risk? I used to like playing it. It's a game of war. As you conquer more countries, you get more armies each round so you can place them and roll dice to take over another country and expand, leading to more armies on your next turn if you're successful, and you get a bonus number of armies if you control a particular region. Also you get these cards each time you take over a country and after collecting a certain number of cards you turn them in for a bonus army set, which gets higher each time a set is turned in.
Follow that?
The game is fun the first several rounds. Especially if you can get Australia. You'd understand if you played.
But inevitably the game loses its appeal at the end, because usually about a third to halfway through you know who's going to win. Someone by that point is getting an obnoxious number of army units each turn, and everyone else is going to be faced with fighting a juggernaut with so many armies that only a gambling addict would think the dice would overcome the odds. "I'm going to place my 55 armies here, 34 armies here, and 25 here...against your total of 15 armies in Brazil. Roll the dice!"
Our economic and tax policies have been crafted in such a way that if you have 6 or 7 figures in investments, that money will make more than enough money for you to live on. And it just snowballs. Meanwhile the poor and middle class have hardly enough to pay the taxes and insurance premiums to live on, let alone pass on in inheritance to their kids. The hard part is getting that initial investment amount so you can build up a snowball to roll down the mountain, metaphorically speaking.
I suppose it shouldn't be surprising; once you have people making a lot of money through means outside of income or salary, they have more power and influence to tell Congress how to create laws that are beneficial to their ways of making more money. And they have enough money to hire people who specialize in making money to spend their time taking advantage of loopholes in laws so they can make yet more money. The fox is guarding the henhouse; Congress isn't generally comprised of blue collar workers, but rather wealthy businessmen and lawyers. Your representatives are probably not able to relate to you economically. There's a disproportionate skewing in the background that comprises our Congress compared to the rest of the nation. Yet they are supposed represent your interests in matters of law? I suppose it should be no surprise to find laws passed that benefit more economically privileged positions in society once you see who is running our government.
When you hear people say that the poor don't work hard enough, that's really just a way of placing blame through word play. I understand there are CEO's that put in long hours at the office. Most have had times of extreme stress at various times of their lives. And CEO's of large businesses can look back and think about the difficulties they've had in their lives while sipping alcoholic beverages on a beach in Bermuda.
I think back to people like my dad who woke at 4:30 in the morning to drive to work by 5:30 and get home that evening after putting in a long day in his job at one of the three industrial plants funding my home town's economy. I think back to a man named Dave who worked long days at the garage he owned beside his 2 employees, grease and oil covered from mucking about in the undercarriage of cars and SUV's. I think about the numerous farmers living near my home who woke before the sun rose and continued spreading that "Dairy Air" scent until the sun went down, and rarely were able to take vacations (unless they were a corporate farm or had enough farmer family neighbors that would check in and keep their farm going for a day or two). My mother made a comfortable living as a teacher...not wealthy, by any definition, but not living on spam and bologna, thanks to efforts of the teacher's union ("When I first started teaching I made $7,000 a year. Your dad made more at the time. He worked at a garage mounting tires.") She would get to school by 7:30 and, much to my impatient chagrin as a child, stay in her classroom grading papers and preparing for the next day until roughly 5:00 every weekday.
These people worked hard.
So why aren't they wealthy?
And how do laws favoring wealth building wealth creating a fair playing field, a fair opportunity for the poor to become wealthy?
I see a question of, "How can you blame people for not being wealthy, if the opportunity is the exception, not the rule?"
How can it been reasonable that any person is worth 380 times the average worker? I have no problem with someone being wealthy. I'm not criticizing that. I'm simply pointing out the excessive nature of that number. That's a really big number when it's compared to an average...and wealth by its nature hoards wealth; the wealthy aren't using their wealth to create jobs.
And why is it considered fair to have laws favoring money making money, meaning that it's easy for the rich to get richer, while the poor and middle class struggle to have modest incomes? Shouldn't it be easy, if you have a job and work your fair share, to afford not to worry about your bills being paid and have a vacation once or twice a year, and once you reach a certain point of wealth it should be harder to continue having your finances snowball like the leading player in a game of Risk builds their armies?
And today's topic is "Wealth Inequality".
Wealth inequality is the term used to describe why the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck while one percent of Americans own over a third of the country's wealth.
Articles like this give more numbers and try to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the people most affected by this social problem tend not to be good with numbers; partly because the human brain sucks at dealing with numbers and there's a point where all big numbers are just subconsciously translated as "wow that's big" instead of comprehending the comparisons, and partly, perhaps, because this is a topic that once politicians get into the mix becomes something that you either actually think about or reject outright because it's against your personal ideology.
Numbers and graphs sometimes just don't cut it for conveying a message of these proportions. Let's try a video instead. Every time I've seen this I can't help but wonder, "How can you not think something is a little wonky here?"
There's an important point to make here; there's a difference between wealth inequality and income inequality. Wealth inequality is what leads to the reaction, "We pay sports stars millions of dollars to throw a ball while teachers educating our future leaders make so little!" or some similar comparison.
Income is more of a flow of money...your paycheck. Wealth is the accumulated value of things you own. This would be why many people who are retired have very little income, but are not considered necessarily poor, because they have accumulated assets in their lifetimes. Also, money gained from trusts, dividends, and investments aren't considered income.
It's easier to remember the difference between wealth and income when you remember that Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple at the time of his passing, had a salary of one dollar in his position at Apple.
I see these numbers and look at these graphs and it absolutely gobsmacks me that people defend the idea that this is not only fair, but reasonable.
One YouTube comment read, "Nobody has time for your whiny, ignorant, socialist crap. If you want socialism, go to Russia. Those top people work very hard. And Obamaites like you don't realize that it is fair based on how much you work. Go complain somewhere else."
I normally attribute YouTube comments about as much credibility as 4chan comments, but this is actually something I've seen echoed by people in FaceBook, with actual people not necessarily hiding behind trollish anonymity. And these were not wealthy people saying this; from what I can tell the sentiment was being expressed by economically lower to middle class people, the very people falling under a category I labeled "being screwed."
Maybe I lack the ability to properly convey how I see the situation.
No one is working 380 times harder than the average person.
You can, perhaps, say that someone is working 380 times harder than someone else. There are people in comas and on the other end of the spectrum there are athletes training 12 hours in the gym in preparation for the next Olympics. I can see that fitting the scenario.
But that's not the average person.
See, the average would be, ideally, the middle class. You have a job. You put in your 40 hour workweek. You do your part, and you should, in theory (according to the version of the American Dream I was told) be able to provide comfortably for your family, be able to afford healthcare, and maybe take a vacation once or twice a year.
But as you can see in that video, that's not the reality.
And when you take that average, you shouldn't have it common...that is, routine, and expected...for a person to make 380 times your economic value if they have a particular title in a business. I can see it happening, but it should be the exception, not the rule. And I'm not saying that CEO's should have more wealth or money; they are the people that are leading the business, and they shoulder the responsibility of keeping that company running and keeping employees employed.
But 380 times more than the average employee? Isn't that...excessive?
It would seem that some economists agree. Something along the way has become seriously warped.
I see a progression of blame in society. A series of excuses, really.
"If you're poor, you deserve to be poor."
"It's America. If you work hard, you will make it."
"Nothing is stopping you from going out and making that money."
The reality is that it's not a level playing field. Most of the money going to the top of the wealth pie doesn't come from their paychecks, although that's a big help (remember, Steve Jobs, dollar salary, worth millions...) Thanks to Congress and Congressional lobbies over time, tax and economic policies favor people who get a chunk of cash to start off well in the game of accumulating wealth. Wealth creates more wealth. Investments create more wealth. It's a feedback loop. And it's the reason you see wealthy people being compensated with large, healthy salaries on top of stop options and bonuses and other forms of compensation.
Ever play the board game Risk? I used to like playing it. It's a game of war. As you conquer more countries, you get more armies each round so you can place them and roll dice to take over another country and expand, leading to more armies on your next turn if you're successful, and you get a bonus number of armies if you control a particular region. Also you get these cards each time you take over a country and after collecting a certain number of cards you turn them in for a bonus army set, which gets higher each time a set is turned in.
Follow that?
The game is fun the first several rounds. Especially if you can get Australia. You'd understand if you played.
But inevitably the game loses its appeal at the end, because usually about a third to halfway through you know who's going to win. Someone by that point is getting an obnoxious number of army units each turn, and everyone else is going to be faced with fighting a juggernaut with so many armies that only a gambling addict would think the dice would overcome the odds. "I'm going to place my 55 armies here, 34 armies here, and 25 here...against your total of 15 armies in Brazil. Roll the dice!"
Our economic and tax policies have been crafted in such a way that if you have 6 or 7 figures in investments, that money will make more than enough money for you to live on. And it just snowballs. Meanwhile the poor and middle class have hardly enough to pay the taxes and insurance premiums to live on, let alone pass on in inheritance to their kids. The hard part is getting that initial investment amount so you can build up a snowball to roll down the mountain, metaphorically speaking.
I suppose it shouldn't be surprising; once you have people making a lot of money through means outside of income or salary, they have more power and influence to tell Congress how to create laws that are beneficial to their ways of making more money. And they have enough money to hire people who specialize in making money to spend their time taking advantage of loopholes in laws so they can make yet more money. The fox is guarding the henhouse; Congress isn't generally comprised of blue collar workers, but rather wealthy businessmen and lawyers. Your representatives are probably not able to relate to you economically. There's a disproportionate skewing in the background that comprises our Congress compared to the rest of the nation. Yet they are supposed represent your interests in matters of law? I suppose it should be no surprise to find laws passed that benefit more economically privileged positions in society once you see who is running our government.
When you hear people say that the poor don't work hard enough, that's really just a way of placing blame through word play. I understand there are CEO's that put in long hours at the office. Most have had times of extreme stress at various times of their lives. And CEO's of large businesses can look back and think about the difficulties they've had in their lives while sipping alcoholic beverages on a beach in Bermuda.
I think back to people like my dad who woke at 4:30 in the morning to drive to work by 5:30 and get home that evening after putting in a long day in his job at one of the three industrial plants funding my home town's economy. I think back to a man named Dave who worked long days at the garage he owned beside his 2 employees, grease and oil covered from mucking about in the undercarriage of cars and SUV's. I think about the numerous farmers living near my home who woke before the sun rose and continued spreading that "Dairy Air" scent until the sun went down, and rarely were able to take vacations (unless they were a corporate farm or had enough farmer family neighbors that would check in and keep their farm going for a day or two). My mother made a comfortable living as a teacher...not wealthy, by any definition, but not living on spam and bologna, thanks to efforts of the teacher's union ("When I first started teaching I made $7,000 a year. Your dad made more at the time. He worked at a garage mounting tires.") She would get to school by 7:30 and, much to my impatient chagrin as a child, stay in her classroom grading papers and preparing for the next day until roughly 5:00 every weekday.
These people worked hard.
So why aren't they wealthy?
And how do laws favoring wealth building wealth creating a fair playing field, a fair opportunity for the poor to become wealthy?
I see a question of, "How can you blame people for not being wealthy, if the opportunity is the exception, not the rule?"
How can it been reasonable that any person is worth 380 times the average worker? I have no problem with someone being wealthy. I'm not criticizing that. I'm simply pointing out the excessive nature of that number. That's a really big number when it's compared to an average...and wealth by its nature hoards wealth; the wealthy aren't using their wealth to create jobs.
And why is it considered fair to have laws favoring money making money, meaning that it's easy for the rich to get richer, while the poor and middle class struggle to have modest incomes? Shouldn't it be easy, if you have a job and work your fair share, to afford not to worry about your bills being paid and have a vacation once or twice a year, and once you reach a certain point of wealth it should be harder to continue having your finances snowball like the leading player in a game of Risk builds their armies?
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Why Aren't We Hearing About Healthcare Prices?
The topic of healthcare prices has long been something that infuriated me.
I think about it every time I have to go to the doctor. Every time I am inconvenienced by some bill or statement. I have so little faith in the co-mingled bureaucracies woven by insurance companies and hospitals that every envelope marked with the address of the insurer or hospital leaves me feeling a sense of overwhelming dread as to what I'm expected to pay or have to sort out yet again.
The sad part is that I'm one of the fortunate ones; I've spent most of my life with decent medical insurance. I read horror stories from other people, and what they have to go through, and on days where I'm in a more empathetic moods they leave me feeling bereft of hope for our country. Not only do I wonder how we as a society could have let things get this bad, but I wonder why we continue to put up with it.
Or worse, how people could be such monsters that they will defend our current system. Our government is crawling with such selfish monsters. People like Florida House speaker Will Weatherford who decried the decision to accept Medicaid expansion for the state. He told the story of his little brother passing from cancer, and his family being left destitute from the bills for treatment. Medicaid didn't help them! Charity from the hospital helped them! Which is what Florida needs! Not that nasty Medicaid stuff!
Only the story was complete bullshit. The bills were paid by a program funded by Medicaid. Whoopsie.
But this twit isn't alone. There are plenty of people throwing numbers out there showing how unsustainable our healthcare costs are, complete with predictions of bankruptcies and destitution. And yet, when I read stories of what suffering Americans are going through, I wonder: why is it so expensive in the first place?
I mean, really? Are people really not seeing the same things I am and thinking, Something just isnt right here?
Am I really the only one? Because I'm seeing some really outrageous things going on.
An article by Steven Brill was recently published in Time magazine about the cost of healthcare in America and it was truly infuriating.
I grabbed a notebook and began jotting down some facts from the article, and ended up filling quite a few pages with material that no sensible person would think would come from the "greatest country on Earth."
The story talked of Sean Recchi, 42, diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. They paid $469/month for an insurance plan, meaning they paid $5,628 a year, and it was 20% of their income, which by my math meant they made a modest $28,140 a year.
Even with insurance, the policy only covered $2,000 per day of hospital costs, and the hospital wouldn't take their insurance anyway. In order to create a treatment plan, they had to front $48,900. To actually begin treatment, they borrowed another $35,000 from family.
The hospital made them wait 90 minutes because they couldn't confirm the check cleared. They had to pay $7,500 with a credit card as a good faith payment that the check would clear.
What. The. Hell.
So...these insured Americans had to pay $83,900 up front just to have a first round of treatment for cancer.
What kind of things were they being billed for?
Tylenol on Amazon costs around $17 for a bottle of 100 (there was a cost of $1.49 here, but in checking, I don't see it and don't know if it was a typo...), the hospital charged $1.50 for a single pill.
A chest X-ray for $283, which Medicare pays $20.44.
Rituxan, a cancer drug, was charged to them to the tune of $13,702. A dose. The actual cost from the drug supplier to the hospital was around $4,000, which the hospital pays less for because they can get it in volume, so the actual price to the hospital would be an estimated $3,000 to $3,500. It cost the company about $300 to manufacture, test, package, and ship the drug.
There was the story of Janice, who experienced chest pains. She rode 4 miles by ambulance, and after 3 hours of testing, it was diagnosed as heartburn. Out of work for a year, she had no insurance. Her bill? $21,000.
The ambulance, for a four mile trip, was $995.
The doctors, whom she saw very little of in the ER, cost $3,000.
The hospital fees for room, tests, and equipment...$17,000.
Let's break some of the costs down some more. She had three troponin tests, which look for a protein that indicates a possible heart attack. Each test cost her $199.50.
Medicare would pay $13.94.
A CBC test was charged to her for $157.61. Medicare pays $11.02.
Diabetes test strips were charged $18 each. You can order them on Amazon for $0.55 each.
A stress test was performed with an injected dye and CT scan. $7,997.54. Medicare would pay $554.
How does Medicare get away with such low fees? Here's something I didn't know. Medicare, by law, is restricted to paying what is basically the actual cost of the procedure...including staffing costs, overhead, etc...plus about 6%, so there's some profit in there for the hospital. So when you see how much Medicare will pay for a procedure, that's more or less supposed to be pretty close to the actual cost of the procedure to the hospital.
The New York Times did an article on deficit cutting proposals that included cutting payments to hospitals, and Steven Safyer, the Chief Executive of the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, sai that any cut to hospitals would be a cut to beneficiaries. The hospital couldn't afford these cuts!
His salary was $4,065,000.
His Executive Vice-President's salary was $2,220,000.
The head of their dental department was making $1,798,000.
That hospital's operating profit for 2010 was $196.8 million, 99.4% of which came from patient billing and only 0.6% from fundraisers.
Where do these prices come from? A dirty little secret hospitals apparently don't like to talk about. The Chargemaster. That's a list of prices charged for each service. This is the list they go to insurance companies with and start talking pricing from, and these are the prices given to the patients after treatment if they don't have insurance.
How are the prices calculated?
They're arbitrary.
Yeah. They're made up. The reason they stink is because they're pulled from someone's ass.
The numbers on the Chargemaster are where many of the numbers come from when citing statistics. The American Hospital Association ran ads in some Washington rag remind Congress that they shouldn't cut payments to hospitals because think of the poor and all the good they do for them; the hospitals paid $39.3 BILLION to the poor in forgiven fees and procedures!
Only that was based on Chargemaster pricing. By the author's research, that $39.3 billion dollars was really closer to $3 billion. A lot of money, sure, but hardly the nearly forty billion they were boasting they spent on those icky poor people.
Honestly, to read some of these stories you'd think that the primary goal of insurers and hospitals was to make sure being dead was cheaper than living. I've heard plenty about the uninsured...but being insured is hardly a guarantee you're better off than the uninsured. Scott came down with pneumonia. After 4 or 5 days in the hospital his wife went down to check on the bill...it was already at $80,000.
Their insurance had an annual payout limit of $100,000.
By the time he checked out of the hospital, the 161 page bill came to $474,064. After insurance, that bill was lowered to $402,955.
Would it surprise you to learn that they were charged between $84 and $134 for bottles of saline solution? You can get them packaged in drip bags on Amazon for $5.16.
There are reform measures out there. It's just that the government works hard to prevent them from passing. For example, Congress made sure that if two drugs were shown to be equally effective in treating a disease, but one drug was $4,000 and the other was $400, Medicare cannot say they'll pay for the cheaper drug and not the overpriced treatment. They are forbidden from negotiating prices on equipment or drugs. So hospitals can still make a nicer profit from the drugs by reporting how much the average retail price of them is, and conveniently dropping the part about rebates they get for buying in bulk.
There are some that say that the high prices paid in America are what subsidize R&D for hospitals and drug companies. But do we?
According to the article, the securities filings for pharma companies state they are spending around 15% to 20% of gross revenue on R&D, which are hardly enough to cut into the net profits they're making (and are accounted for after R&D.) In other words, if you do the math you'll find that the companies are making so much profit that our outstanding prices and fees are not necessary to fund their R&D efforts.
The article stated that if we were to regulate hospital costs the way other developed countries do, we'd save $94 BILLION a year.
Honestly, how can someone look at these numbers and not understand that something is seriously wrong with our medical system? There's a brilliant amount of spin in media keeping people from seriously questioning why things are so expensive in the first place. It's a common-knowledge joke, much like the $5,000 hammers in the army and $10,000 toilet seats on subs. Charged an extra fifty bucks for an Aspirin? Well, it was administered by a skilled nurse! Gotta pay her salary somehow! Har har...
Only it's not so funny when you're hit with thousands of dollars in fees because your insurance doesn't cover a procedure, or only covers to a certain point then you're on your own.
And thanks to the fact that the Chargemaster prices are based on arbitrary numbers, it should come as no surprise when hospitals charge you $50,000 on a bill that gets magically cut down to $10,000 after the right person makes a phone call to push the right buttons. Hospital bills are actually the opening to negotiation, something they don't tell their average patients. They claim they're willing to work with you and make a deal. Which is great, since the bill you end up holding is largely based on fiction.
An even bigger joke is that the prices on Chargemaster are sent to people without insurance as the full price owed. Insurance companies deal with the negotiation process all the time; they have people dedicated to just haggling with hospitals. But the uninsured...they often find themselves in a position of shellshock. They just got treated for an illness or catastrophic life event; it probably doesn't occur to them that in addition to the recovery efforts they would be slapped with the challenge of a four to six digit bill. Most people don't do a lot of shopping around for medical work when they're dragged to the hospital in pain.
And can you imagine having to deal with the choice of treating cancer or letting yourself die if it meant not putting your family in debt that will outlast you?
The people who are least able to afford the Chargemaster prices are the ones that GET the Chargemaster prices. How stupid is that?
If you can look at those prices and think that something isn't fundamentally broken with our medical system, I question what kind of person you are. Profits aren't a bad thing, but outrageous profits...that's different. There's something sinister about an institution that codifies a system of substantial profit on the backs of the suffering.
This is a wonderful illustration of a system that is screaming for regulation. Yet the government does nothing. Well, that's not entirely true. Congress has actually gone out of its way to make sure prices stay high. They worked hard to keep people uninsured, or at least keep people with plans that are beneficial to the companies providing the insurances out there. They work hard to keep up the appearance of wanting a population that is insured, when in reality the insurance is worthless if you have a major health event and the insurance doesn't cover more than a pittance of the bill. But it does make you look better in the statistics to say you're insured!
Try reading that article in Time. It's shocking. It's infuriating. It illustrates how fundamentally broken the system is. And worse, none of our representatives are doing their jobs and stepping up to fix this. Short of having a major economic collapse, I don't know what, if anything, will fix the situation.
After all, we hardly even talk about this problem. Without that conversation it's hard to see the situation improving anytime soon, despite how glaringly obvious it is.
I think about it every time I have to go to the doctor. Every time I am inconvenienced by some bill or statement. I have so little faith in the co-mingled bureaucracies woven by insurance companies and hospitals that every envelope marked with the address of the insurer or hospital leaves me feeling a sense of overwhelming dread as to what I'm expected to pay or have to sort out yet again.
The sad part is that I'm one of the fortunate ones; I've spent most of my life with decent medical insurance. I read horror stories from other people, and what they have to go through, and on days where I'm in a more empathetic moods they leave me feeling bereft of hope for our country. Not only do I wonder how we as a society could have let things get this bad, but I wonder why we continue to put up with it.
Or worse, how people could be such monsters that they will defend our current system. Our government is crawling with such selfish monsters. People like Florida House speaker Will Weatherford who decried the decision to accept Medicaid expansion for the state. He told the story of his little brother passing from cancer, and his family being left destitute from the bills for treatment. Medicaid didn't help them! Charity from the hospital helped them! Which is what Florida needs! Not that nasty Medicaid stuff!
Only the story was complete bullshit. The bills were paid by a program funded by Medicaid. Whoopsie.
But this twit isn't alone. There are plenty of people throwing numbers out there showing how unsustainable our healthcare costs are, complete with predictions of bankruptcies and destitution. And yet, when I read stories of what suffering Americans are going through, I wonder: why is it so expensive in the first place?
I mean, really? Are people really not seeing the same things I am and thinking, Something just isnt right here?
Am I really the only one? Because I'm seeing some really outrageous things going on.
An article by Steven Brill was recently published in Time magazine about the cost of healthcare in America and it was truly infuriating.
I grabbed a notebook and began jotting down some facts from the article, and ended up filling quite a few pages with material that no sensible person would think would come from the "greatest country on Earth."
The story talked of Sean Recchi, 42, diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. They paid $469/month for an insurance plan, meaning they paid $5,628 a year, and it was 20% of their income, which by my math meant they made a modest $28,140 a year.
Even with insurance, the policy only covered $2,000 per day of hospital costs, and the hospital wouldn't take their insurance anyway. In order to create a treatment plan, they had to front $48,900. To actually begin treatment, they borrowed another $35,000 from family.
The hospital made them wait 90 minutes because they couldn't confirm the check cleared. They had to pay $7,500 with a credit card as a good faith payment that the check would clear.
What. The. Hell.
So...these insured Americans had to pay $83,900 up front just to have a first round of treatment for cancer.
What kind of things were they being billed for?
Tylenol on Amazon costs around $17 for a bottle of 100 (there was a cost of $1.49 here, but in checking, I don't see it and don't know if it was a typo...), the hospital charged $1.50 for a single pill.
A chest X-ray for $283, which Medicare pays $20.44.
Rituxan, a cancer drug, was charged to them to the tune of $13,702. A dose. The actual cost from the drug supplier to the hospital was around $4,000, which the hospital pays less for because they can get it in volume, so the actual price to the hospital would be an estimated $3,000 to $3,500. It cost the company about $300 to manufacture, test, package, and ship the drug.
There was the story of Janice, who experienced chest pains. She rode 4 miles by ambulance, and after 3 hours of testing, it was diagnosed as heartburn. Out of work for a year, she had no insurance. Her bill? $21,000.
The ambulance, for a four mile trip, was $995.
The doctors, whom she saw very little of in the ER, cost $3,000.
The hospital fees for room, tests, and equipment...$17,000.
Let's break some of the costs down some more. She had three troponin tests, which look for a protein that indicates a possible heart attack. Each test cost her $199.50.
Medicare would pay $13.94.
A CBC test was charged to her for $157.61. Medicare pays $11.02.
Diabetes test strips were charged $18 each. You can order them on Amazon for $0.55 each.
A stress test was performed with an injected dye and CT scan. $7,997.54. Medicare would pay $554.
How does Medicare get away with such low fees? Here's something I didn't know. Medicare, by law, is restricted to paying what is basically the actual cost of the procedure...including staffing costs, overhead, etc...plus about 6%, so there's some profit in there for the hospital. So when you see how much Medicare will pay for a procedure, that's more or less supposed to be pretty close to the actual cost of the procedure to the hospital.
The New York Times did an article on deficit cutting proposals that included cutting payments to hospitals, and Steven Safyer, the Chief Executive of the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, sai that any cut to hospitals would be a cut to beneficiaries. The hospital couldn't afford these cuts!
His salary was $4,065,000.
His Executive Vice-President's salary was $2,220,000.
The head of their dental department was making $1,798,000.
That hospital's operating profit for 2010 was $196.8 million, 99.4% of which came from patient billing and only 0.6% from fundraisers.
Where do these prices come from? A dirty little secret hospitals apparently don't like to talk about. The Chargemaster. That's a list of prices charged for each service. This is the list they go to insurance companies with and start talking pricing from, and these are the prices given to the patients after treatment if they don't have insurance.
How are the prices calculated?
They're arbitrary.
Yeah. They're made up. The reason they stink is because they're pulled from someone's ass.
The numbers on the Chargemaster are where many of the numbers come from when citing statistics. The American Hospital Association ran ads in some Washington rag remind Congress that they shouldn't cut payments to hospitals because think of the poor and all the good they do for them; the hospitals paid $39.3 BILLION to the poor in forgiven fees and procedures!
Only that was based on Chargemaster pricing. By the author's research, that $39.3 billion dollars was really closer to $3 billion. A lot of money, sure, but hardly the nearly forty billion they were boasting they spent on those icky poor people.
Honestly, to read some of these stories you'd think that the primary goal of insurers and hospitals was to make sure being dead was cheaper than living. I've heard plenty about the uninsured...but being insured is hardly a guarantee you're better off than the uninsured. Scott came down with pneumonia. After 4 or 5 days in the hospital his wife went down to check on the bill...it was already at $80,000.
Their insurance had an annual payout limit of $100,000.
By the time he checked out of the hospital, the 161 page bill came to $474,064. After insurance, that bill was lowered to $402,955.
Would it surprise you to learn that they were charged between $84 and $134 for bottles of saline solution? You can get them packaged in drip bags on Amazon for $5.16.
There are reform measures out there. It's just that the government works hard to prevent them from passing. For example, Congress made sure that if two drugs were shown to be equally effective in treating a disease, but one drug was $4,000 and the other was $400, Medicare cannot say they'll pay for the cheaper drug and not the overpriced treatment. They are forbidden from negotiating prices on equipment or drugs. So hospitals can still make a nicer profit from the drugs by reporting how much the average retail price of them is, and conveniently dropping the part about rebates they get for buying in bulk.
There are some that say that the high prices paid in America are what subsidize R&D for hospitals and drug companies. But do we?
According to the article, the securities filings for pharma companies state they are spending around 15% to 20% of gross revenue on R&D, which are hardly enough to cut into the net profits they're making (and are accounted for after R&D.) In other words, if you do the math you'll find that the companies are making so much profit that our outstanding prices and fees are not necessary to fund their R&D efforts.
The article stated that if we were to regulate hospital costs the way other developed countries do, we'd save $94 BILLION a year.
Honestly, how can someone look at these numbers and not understand that something is seriously wrong with our medical system? There's a brilliant amount of spin in media keeping people from seriously questioning why things are so expensive in the first place. It's a common-knowledge joke, much like the $5,000 hammers in the army and $10,000 toilet seats on subs. Charged an extra fifty bucks for an Aspirin? Well, it was administered by a skilled nurse! Gotta pay her salary somehow! Har har...
Only it's not so funny when you're hit with thousands of dollars in fees because your insurance doesn't cover a procedure, or only covers to a certain point then you're on your own.
And thanks to the fact that the Chargemaster prices are based on arbitrary numbers, it should come as no surprise when hospitals charge you $50,000 on a bill that gets magically cut down to $10,000 after the right person makes a phone call to push the right buttons. Hospital bills are actually the opening to negotiation, something they don't tell their average patients. They claim they're willing to work with you and make a deal. Which is great, since the bill you end up holding is largely based on fiction.
An even bigger joke is that the prices on Chargemaster are sent to people without insurance as the full price owed. Insurance companies deal with the negotiation process all the time; they have people dedicated to just haggling with hospitals. But the uninsured...they often find themselves in a position of shellshock. They just got treated for an illness or catastrophic life event; it probably doesn't occur to them that in addition to the recovery efforts they would be slapped with the challenge of a four to six digit bill. Most people don't do a lot of shopping around for medical work when they're dragged to the hospital in pain.
And can you imagine having to deal with the choice of treating cancer or letting yourself die if it meant not putting your family in debt that will outlast you?
The people who are least able to afford the Chargemaster prices are the ones that GET the Chargemaster prices. How stupid is that?
If you can look at those prices and think that something isn't fundamentally broken with our medical system, I question what kind of person you are. Profits aren't a bad thing, but outrageous profits...that's different. There's something sinister about an institution that codifies a system of substantial profit on the backs of the suffering.
This is a wonderful illustration of a system that is screaming for regulation. Yet the government does nothing. Well, that's not entirely true. Congress has actually gone out of its way to make sure prices stay high. They worked hard to keep people uninsured, or at least keep people with plans that are beneficial to the companies providing the insurances out there. They work hard to keep up the appearance of wanting a population that is insured, when in reality the insurance is worthless if you have a major health event and the insurance doesn't cover more than a pittance of the bill. But it does make you look better in the statistics to say you're insured!
Try reading that article in Time. It's shocking. It's infuriating. It illustrates how fundamentally broken the system is. And worse, none of our representatives are doing their jobs and stepping up to fix this. Short of having a major economic collapse, I don't know what, if anything, will fix the situation.
After all, we hardly even talk about this problem. Without that conversation it's hard to see the situation improving anytime soon, despite how glaringly obvious it is.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The City; It Changes You
My first day at the new job was July 9th, 2012. I moved to the city two days before that. Today is February 19th. That means it's been roughly 227 days since I arrived in New York City.
Handy tip, straight from the Unix Stack Exchange site. If you want to know the difference between two dates, ask a snake for help.
These 227 days have been filled with emotional ups and downs. I deal with the constant feeling of being an inadequate father, as I'm not physically with my wife and son back home. Usually at least once a month either I'm back home visiting them or they come to the city, and each time my boy seems to have grown another inch, despite not looking so different on our periodic Skype sessions.
That wears on you after awhile. I had several reasons for coming here, and there is the promise that things will improve. The time between moving and things getting better, though, that's the rocky part. It's a tough road to travel. I don't recommend it unless you're really dedicated to taking that path, and you have a strong relationship with your significant other, because without a very strong support system something will definitely give in your relationship.
Sometimes I think the only things that have kept me going are my extremely strong support system back home and my enjoyment of the new job.
But there are times when I look at my life and I see that some things have changed. Not just in circumstances, but in my general outlook on life. I suppose it comes from the horizon having been stretched a little wider, due to the fact that I lived my entire life in a small town with as many bars as there are churches, and we have a lot of churches back home. Here...it's New York City.
There was a story of someone living in the Chicago area who went home to a more country area to visit his family. The strange thing was he never came back to the city. Just quit his job...his coworkers apparently didn't have much idea of what happened.
Upon hearing this, one of my own coworkers said, "The city will make you or break you." That stuck with me. It was said as a nonchalant observation. But it rang true. You are either a city person or a country person, and some people just can't take the transition between.
I still have some of the fragments of country life in me. I know it's true; I have a stab of repulsion at my reaction to homeless people. Not repulsion at the homeless; my reaction to them. I ignore them. Like just about every other New Yorker, I ignore them. At least, I ignore them to the extent that I don't pull out my wallet, I don't donate to them, and I pretend I don't hear them if they're speaking.
I still try to glance at the cardboard signs they hold in front of them as they sit on the sidewalk. Not long ago I saw one man with a hand on a sign and the other on his dog, who lay quietly at his master's side. "Lost everything but my dog," it read.
Another time I was walking to the toy store to find something for my son who was planning to visit in a few days, and a passed a woman sitting against a light pole at a crossing not far from an Apple Store. Next to her was a large bag and a tattered sign. She was sobbing. I was in a bustling crowd that split apart as they approached her, as if grief were something that you could catch if you got too close. I didn't know what she was sobbing about. I moved with the crowd.
Why?
In part because I can't save the world. There are far far too many homeless and desperate out there, and handing out money for a short term assist will do little in the long run other than deprive me of resources that I can, admittedly in a selfish fashion, use on myself and my family.
In part because I'm afraid; afraid to engage people. Many are mentally ill. It is not difficult to find stories of people who end up being mugged because they engage with a homeless person, and once the wallet comes out...you're a target. Or they may suddenly flip out on you.
Cynicism also plays a part. How many of the people asking for money are telling sob stories that are disingenuous? Do they really have a family that's starving? Or will the money be used to feed some addiction?
And then there are the scammers. As there are stories of people being mugged for trying to help, there are stories of people who actually pretend to be homeless, or play on your emotions to get more money. Want more donations? Try sitting outside with your children, or your dog. You're a really heartless bastard for letting someone's kids suffer when you have a spare buck in your pocket.
The way I see it, the city has made me more of a heartless bastard.
I take solace in hating myself for it. It means that there's still a part of me that questions that behavior...it's just that that part is smaller than the part of me that pretends I can't hear them through my headphones.
Then there's the people. So many people! Back home a heavy crowd means having to pass within five feet of someone in the mall. I remember when that was irritating.
Here...two words. "Times. Square."
Ugh. One more word. "Tourists."
With all the flashy animated signs, you'd think someone could add a billboard that slides the words "MOVE IT" in that sardine can of a tourist trap. I don't know how many times I was bumped into, shouldered, and run over with rolling suitcases as I navigated my way around that general area.
But it wasn't limited to just Times Square; that was just where the effect was most pronounced. I would get shouldered as I crossed the street as I commuted to and from the subway station and my apartment. On the weekend I would make a trek to the ATM and from there to the comic shop; I'd have to dance around the sidewalk to keep from getting plowed by New Yorkers yacking on phones or jogging or just glowering at me.
Eventually I realized that this was like some kind of test. I was moving because they expected me to move. When you're 300 pounds...that's just ridiculous. I was being bullied by complete strangers.
See, there is this thing that happens when you're in an environment that is just filled with people in close proximity to you. Manhattan has over two million people living and working on a relatively small island. The five boroughs have, during the workday, more people total than my entire home state of Pennsylvania. This is crazy full of people.
So many people in such a small space...you begin to see other people as if they were two dimensional. You're forced into a small space, but you have an instinct to respect some semblance of personal space, while physically forced to break the personal boundaries...subways will crowd you to the point where you wonder if you've impregnated someone between two stations because you didn't have enough room to turn around, yet the whole time you and the strangers you're rubbing up against have this insane mutual understanding that you all don't actually exist. All of you refuse to acknowledge the other people are there.
Unless, of course, one of them is insane. But that's another story.
You end up with this situation where people act as if no one else exists, and you don't generally acknowledge their existence. And that kind of dehumanizes you; the infamous "don't look other New Yorkers in the eye" seems to stem in part from the unwritten rule of never acknowledging the existence of others. When you do this, you force them to acknowledge you, and it triggers something primal, like an animal being challenged for territory.
I was thinking about this one day when I realized that my moving around the streets to accommodate others was a way of signalling my submission to others. I was a target of bullying because I allowed myself to be bullied. I nearly laughed when I thought about the image of a 300 pound guy hopping out of the way of some 100 pound bastard sporting thick rimmed glasses and expensive brand name jacket; he was no better than I was, and I had every right to be where I was.
You move.
And as I crossed the street, they did.
Well, most did.
Whump!
Dude. I'm 300 pounds. Your skinny ass isn't going to stop me.
I don't think I've been a prick about it. I don't plow over old ladies or ram headlong into people just because they're there. But when I'm walking a straight line, and they clearly see I'm coming and they move into my way...I don't really move over so much to accommodate them. I've noticed that there are people who will actually move into your way, like a challenge.
Now I take that challenge.
Whump!
Times Square is worse. There are times when I've contemplated molding rubber to my shoulders to cushion the blows from passersby. Some of them almost seem shocked when I don't get out of their way.
Get used to it. You and me, when we die, we both become dirt. I've been a doormat long enough and I'm hardly invisible.
Then I get back to my apartment and I feel shock. I'm pushing people out of my way instead of dancing around, trying not to get pushed over. I'm ignoring people that sit on sidewalks painted in dried piss, begging for a buck. At times I hate myself for it. Other times I feel as if I'm seeing more of what people are really like; I see how it's possible to have little regard for other people and place yourself at the top of the priority list.
Care about yourself first; other people here don't give a damn about you.
The other night I sat on the floor of the Port Authority waiting for my wife and son to arrive on the bus. I clutched my bag, which basically held my clipboard of documents and a couple containers of lunch leftovers; my trenchcoat shielded me from whatever unpleasantness was skittering about on the floor, and my headphones played a podcast loud enough to drown out the low din of travelers trying to find their way around the terminal when it occurred to me that the best way to be ignored, even on an island with two million people crawling around it, was to put a cup in front of me and dump a couple dollars into it. That would virtually guarantee that I would become instantly invisible to people as they hustled by. Just sitting on the floor in my decade-old trenchcoat and out-of-fashion clothes seemed to be enough to keep me camouflaged from most of the travelers.
I was starting to understand how this worked. I was starting to understand how people are, when they feel anonymous in large crowds. When they are given the freedom to behave how they want without consequences. Without having to conform beyond the minimum of civility towards other people.
Basically, in some ways this was a real life version of the Internet. The city anonymizes you and gives you leave to care more about yourself, or you will be taken advantage of by others.
These emergent behaviors seem to make it hard to raise a child in the city environment. How can you teach your son to care about others when you also teach them that it's okay to ignore people sitting on the corner begging for money?
I'm not entirely sure.
I suppose the only thing I can do is look for teachable moments, where I can make some difference in his character. Not long ago we were in a Barnes and Noble, and he was looking at a large book. It's slightly above his reading level, but I still encourage him to read whatever he can, because $DEITY knows children today get more than enough flashy commercials to fill their brains with PURCHASE THIS OR YOUR PARENTS DON'T LOVE YOU messages. I hope that teaching my son to love books may foster his curiosity and help him become a bit of a critical thinker as he grows older.
As he flipped through the book I heard the sound of paper shredding. The heavy binding slipped from his grip and a page suddenly gained a four inch tear.
He was clearly embarrassed and his face reddened.
"Be more careful," I said. "Support the book with both hands."
"I will, Daddy," he said.
I sighed. "Well, it looks like you've gained a book." I closed the back cover. "Thirty bucks."
"That's a lot," he said. I could tell he was afraid I'd be docking his allowance to pay for it, which was horrible for a boy obsessed with trying to negotiate advances in his allowance to feed his BeyBlade addiction.
"Yeah, it is. Here's the deal...I'll pay for it, and you're going to read it to Mommy. You read it and if you do well we'll talk about a new Bey for Easter."
"Okay," he said.
On the surface it was a bribe. What I hoped it taught him, in some small way, was manifold lessons.
Then I find myself trying to teach my son to be better person, which in part is the opposite to how I see myself reacting to other people in the street.
I still haven't found a way to fully reconcile these observations and behaviors. Maybe in the next 200 days I will find a way to integrate them into a narrative that makes sense, so it will be okay to look out for your own good while still believing in the goodness of others and hoping that people aren't always, completely, selfish.
But in the meantime...don't stand in my way when I'm crossing the street. In New York City, I'm invisible. And you are too.
Handy tip, straight from the Unix Stack Exchange site. If you want to know the difference between two dates, ask a snake for help.
$ python
>>> from datetime import date as D
>>> print (D.today() - D(2012, 7, 7)).daysThese 227 days have been filled with emotional ups and downs. I deal with the constant feeling of being an inadequate father, as I'm not physically with my wife and son back home. Usually at least once a month either I'm back home visiting them or they come to the city, and each time my boy seems to have grown another inch, despite not looking so different on our periodic Skype sessions.
That wears on you after awhile. I had several reasons for coming here, and there is the promise that things will improve. The time between moving and things getting better, though, that's the rocky part. It's a tough road to travel. I don't recommend it unless you're really dedicated to taking that path, and you have a strong relationship with your significant other, because without a very strong support system something will definitely give in your relationship.
Sometimes I think the only things that have kept me going are my extremely strong support system back home and my enjoyment of the new job.
But there are times when I look at my life and I see that some things have changed. Not just in circumstances, but in my general outlook on life. I suppose it comes from the horizon having been stretched a little wider, due to the fact that I lived my entire life in a small town with as many bars as there are churches, and we have a lot of churches back home. Here...it's New York City.
There was a story of someone living in the Chicago area who went home to a more country area to visit his family. The strange thing was he never came back to the city. Just quit his job...his coworkers apparently didn't have much idea of what happened.
Upon hearing this, one of my own coworkers said, "The city will make you or break you." That stuck with me. It was said as a nonchalant observation. But it rang true. You are either a city person or a country person, and some people just can't take the transition between.
I still have some of the fragments of country life in me. I know it's true; I have a stab of repulsion at my reaction to homeless people. Not repulsion at the homeless; my reaction to them. I ignore them. Like just about every other New Yorker, I ignore them. At least, I ignore them to the extent that I don't pull out my wallet, I don't donate to them, and I pretend I don't hear them if they're speaking.
I still try to glance at the cardboard signs they hold in front of them as they sit on the sidewalk. Not long ago I saw one man with a hand on a sign and the other on his dog, who lay quietly at his master's side. "Lost everything but my dog," it read.
Another time I was walking to the toy store to find something for my son who was planning to visit in a few days, and a passed a woman sitting against a light pole at a crossing not far from an Apple Store. Next to her was a large bag and a tattered sign. She was sobbing. I was in a bustling crowd that split apart as they approached her, as if grief were something that you could catch if you got too close. I didn't know what she was sobbing about. I moved with the crowd.
Why?
In part because I can't save the world. There are far far too many homeless and desperate out there, and handing out money for a short term assist will do little in the long run other than deprive me of resources that I can, admittedly in a selfish fashion, use on myself and my family.
In part because I'm afraid; afraid to engage people. Many are mentally ill. It is not difficult to find stories of people who end up being mugged because they engage with a homeless person, and once the wallet comes out...you're a target. Or they may suddenly flip out on you.
Cynicism also plays a part. How many of the people asking for money are telling sob stories that are disingenuous? Do they really have a family that's starving? Or will the money be used to feed some addiction?
And then there are the scammers. As there are stories of people being mugged for trying to help, there are stories of people who actually pretend to be homeless, or play on your emotions to get more money. Want more donations? Try sitting outside with your children, or your dog. You're a really heartless bastard for letting someone's kids suffer when you have a spare buck in your pocket.
The way I see it, the city has made me more of a heartless bastard.
I take solace in hating myself for it. It means that there's still a part of me that questions that behavior...it's just that that part is smaller than the part of me that pretends I can't hear them through my headphones.
Then there's the people. So many people! Back home a heavy crowd means having to pass within five feet of someone in the mall. I remember when that was irritating.
Here...two words. "Times. Square."
Ugh. One more word. "Tourists."
With all the flashy animated signs, you'd think someone could add a billboard that slides the words "MOVE IT" in that sardine can of a tourist trap. I don't know how many times I was bumped into, shouldered, and run over with rolling suitcases as I navigated my way around that general area.
But it wasn't limited to just Times Square; that was just where the effect was most pronounced. I would get shouldered as I crossed the street as I commuted to and from the subway station and my apartment. On the weekend I would make a trek to the ATM and from there to the comic shop; I'd have to dance around the sidewalk to keep from getting plowed by New Yorkers yacking on phones or jogging or just glowering at me.
Eventually I realized that this was like some kind of test. I was moving because they expected me to move. When you're 300 pounds...that's just ridiculous. I was being bullied by complete strangers.
See, there is this thing that happens when you're in an environment that is just filled with people in close proximity to you. Manhattan has over two million people living and working on a relatively small island. The five boroughs have, during the workday, more people total than my entire home state of Pennsylvania. This is crazy full of people.
So many people in such a small space...you begin to see other people as if they were two dimensional. You're forced into a small space, but you have an instinct to respect some semblance of personal space, while physically forced to break the personal boundaries...subways will crowd you to the point where you wonder if you've impregnated someone between two stations because you didn't have enough room to turn around, yet the whole time you and the strangers you're rubbing up against have this insane mutual understanding that you all don't actually exist. All of you refuse to acknowledge the other people are there.
Unless, of course, one of them is insane. But that's another story.
You end up with this situation where people act as if no one else exists, and you don't generally acknowledge their existence. And that kind of dehumanizes you; the infamous "don't look other New Yorkers in the eye" seems to stem in part from the unwritten rule of never acknowledging the existence of others. When you do this, you force them to acknowledge you, and it triggers something primal, like an animal being challenged for territory.
I was thinking about this one day when I realized that my moving around the streets to accommodate others was a way of signalling my submission to others. I was a target of bullying because I allowed myself to be bullied. I nearly laughed when I thought about the image of a 300 pound guy hopping out of the way of some 100 pound bastard sporting thick rimmed glasses and expensive brand name jacket; he was no better than I was, and I had every right to be where I was.
You move.
And as I crossed the street, they did.
Well, most did.
Whump!
Dude. I'm 300 pounds. Your skinny ass isn't going to stop me.
I don't think I've been a prick about it. I don't plow over old ladies or ram headlong into people just because they're there. But when I'm walking a straight line, and they clearly see I'm coming and they move into my way...I don't really move over so much to accommodate them. I've noticed that there are people who will actually move into your way, like a challenge.
Now I take that challenge.
Whump!
Times Square is worse. There are times when I've contemplated molding rubber to my shoulders to cushion the blows from passersby. Some of them almost seem shocked when I don't get out of their way.
Get used to it. You and me, when we die, we both become dirt. I've been a doormat long enough and I'm hardly invisible.
Then I get back to my apartment and I feel shock. I'm pushing people out of my way instead of dancing around, trying not to get pushed over. I'm ignoring people that sit on sidewalks painted in dried piss, begging for a buck. At times I hate myself for it. Other times I feel as if I'm seeing more of what people are really like; I see how it's possible to have little regard for other people and place yourself at the top of the priority list.
Care about yourself first; other people here don't give a damn about you.
The other night I sat on the floor of the Port Authority waiting for my wife and son to arrive on the bus. I clutched my bag, which basically held my clipboard of documents and a couple containers of lunch leftovers; my trenchcoat shielded me from whatever unpleasantness was skittering about on the floor, and my headphones played a podcast loud enough to drown out the low din of travelers trying to find their way around the terminal when it occurred to me that the best way to be ignored, even on an island with two million people crawling around it, was to put a cup in front of me and dump a couple dollars into it. That would virtually guarantee that I would become instantly invisible to people as they hustled by. Just sitting on the floor in my decade-old trenchcoat and out-of-fashion clothes seemed to be enough to keep me camouflaged from most of the travelers.
I was starting to understand how this worked. I was starting to understand how people are, when they feel anonymous in large crowds. When they are given the freedom to behave how they want without consequences. Without having to conform beyond the minimum of civility towards other people.
Basically, in some ways this was a real life version of the Internet. The city anonymizes you and gives you leave to care more about yourself, or you will be taken advantage of by others.
These emergent behaviors seem to make it hard to raise a child in the city environment. How can you teach your son to care about others when you also teach them that it's okay to ignore people sitting on the corner begging for money?
I'm not entirely sure.
I suppose the only thing I can do is look for teachable moments, where I can make some difference in his character. Not long ago we were in a Barnes and Noble, and he was looking at a large book. It's slightly above his reading level, but I still encourage him to read whatever he can, because $DEITY knows children today get more than enough flashy commercials to fill their brains with PURCHASE THIS OR YOUR PARENTS DON'T LOVE YOU messages. I hope that teaching my son to love books may foster his curiosity and help him become a bit of a critical thinker as he grows older.
As he flipped through the book I heard the sound of paper shredding. The heavy binding slipped from his grip and a page suddenly gained a four inch tear.
He was clearly embarrassed and his face reddened.
"Be more careful," I said. "Support the book with both hands."
"I will, Daddy," he said.
I sighed. "Well, it looks like you've gained a book." I closed the back cover. "Thirty bucks."
"That's a lot," he said. I could tell he was afraid I'd be docking his allowance to pay for it, which was horrible for a boy obsessed with trying to negotiate advances in his allowance to feed his BeyBlade addiction.
"Yeah, it is. Here's the deal...I'll pay for it, and you're going to read it to Mommy. You read it and if you do well we'll talk about a new Bey for Easter."
"Okay," he said.
On the surface it was a bribe. What I hoped it taught him, in some small way, was manifold lessons.
- If you damage something like that, you don't hide it. You make it right. In this case, we bought the book. Because really...how would you feel if you bought a new book at the store and when you read it, found a page ripped?
- I might get upset at something, but if we're going to work on a solution, it's okay to get upset. I won't stay mad. Cover it up, and then I'd get mad. Lie to me, and then I'd get mad. Acknowledge the problem and work on a solution, I'll get over it.
- Honor is the one thing only you can give away and no one can take from you. I could have had him hide the book back on the shelf. Sometimes doing the right thing is more scary...or in this case, expensive...but it's still the right thing to do.
- Mistakes happen, but if you learn from them, it's okay to make mistakes.
Then I find myself trying to teach my son to be better person, which in part is the opposite to how I see myself reacting to other people in the street.
I still haven't found a way to fully reconcile these observations and behaviors. Maybe in the next 200 days I will find a way to integrate them into a narrative that makes sense, so it will be okay to look out for your own good while still believing in the goodness of others and hoping that people aren't always, completely, selfish.
But in the meantime...don't stand in my way when I'm crossing the street. In New York City, I'm invisible. And you are too.
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