The Cost of Entry and Diversity of Experience

I recently took a family trip to St. Louis.  While in St. Louis, we went to the zoo.  Aside from the ethical questions that all zoos raise, the St. Louis zoo was impressive in design, appearance, and scope.  Most noteworthy, though, was the fact that the zoo charges no entry fee.  As such, the patrons seemed considerably more diverse than what I experience when I attend the Milwaukee County zoo.  I cannot say for certain whether cost is the sole factor (and am not assuming that diversity is coterminous with poverty), but the city's promotion of the zoo and other cultural experiences as benefits of residency seems to make the experiences more communal.

In many ways, the St. Louis zoo reminded me of the Milwaukee lakefront during summer.  It is at the lakefront that the barriers of segregation are at their weakest because the public resource is limited in size, open to all, highly desirable, and accessible in cost.  I should add that there is no equivalent alternative available that could lead to populations self-sorting.  The St. Louis zoo or the Milwaukee lakefront are unique public resources and so have a truly public character.  The experience suggests to me that if we value diversity and prefer integrated social experiences to segregation or self-sorting, then we must place unique and desirable spaces and institutions wholly in the public domain.  By this I mean that the cost of entry and maintenance of the spaces and institutions must be spread progressively and fairly across the public through taxation rather than through usage fees, which are by nature regressive, even when partially subsidized.

Even small entry fees will have, like all regressive taxes, a discriminatory effect, favoring both those best placed economically and those whose sociocultural experience values the space or cultural institution.  In short, if institutions like zoos and museums charge entry fees, they largely become the domain of the middle and upper middle classes (and especially what might be called the traditional or 'white' middle and upper middle classes) because these groups, through received experience, place a sufficiently high value on cultural institutions like zoos and museums so that they will not only be able to pay entry fees but are also willing to do so.  There is nothing wrong with being middle or upper middle class; however, our communities are richer when valuable institutions that help us create shared histories and experiences are actually shared with all people. Progressively spreading the costs of cultural institutions is a sensible way to do this.

Another Take on Race

Jamelle Bouie has a response to the Chait piece at Slate.  It is worth reading because it offers an important corrective to Chait:  there is an actual lived experience of racism that Chait does not address.  The most poignant example is the feeling a 20-year-old black woman has when her younger brother rides his bike to the corner store and is tailed by a squad car.  Regardless of the rhetorical foibles to which our conflation of race and political persuasion have committed us, race still matters at a visceral, experiential, and real level because it in fact still exists.

Bouie effectively reminds us that while it makes sense to remember that racism and conservatism are not coterminous, we must also remember that many conservative policies (such as voter ID laws), whether overtly racist or not, have a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities, especially African Americans.  In instances when a policy, conservative or otherwise, has a disproportionately negative impact on minorities, we should still get rid of the policy, whether it's origin was intentionally racist or not, and we should not be afraid to discuss the policy's racial impact, regardless of how the policy's supporters react.  And this requires us to engage with, talk about, and act on the lived experience of black Americans.

Jonathan Chait Talks About Race without Hyperbole

Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece in the online edition of New York Magazine regarding the significance of race at this moment in U.S. politics, specifically as it relates to Barack Obama's presidency.  I found it to be one of the more thoughtful treatments of the question.  Chait's thesis is essentially that liberals are guilty of painting everything politically conservative as racist without examining whether the policy or the politician is in fact racist while conservatives are guilty of ignoring the white resentment that stokes conservatism generally and some particular conservative policies.

Chait summarizes his position in a brilliant extended statement:

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life.  On another level, it is a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense.  The spread of racial resentment in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality.  It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives.

While the article spends more time addressing the conservative side, Chait does a fair job of pointing out that liberals are perfectly comfortable in taking advantage of the association between conservatism and racism, justified or not, to their benefit.  A telling point is the surprise liberals often express when they make critical statements about Israel and are immediately portrayed as anti-Semites by conservatives.  The bottom line is that our political discourse is skewed because conservatives consider any mention of racism to be a smear against conservatism generally and liberals are willing to use specific instances of racism to smear all conservatives.  While racism is still troubling and alive in America, it would be nice if conservatives would stop assuming every mention of racism is a metonym for conservatism and if liberals would stop using it as one.

Lunch Walk

I like walkable cities and walkable neighborhoods.  I prefer walking or biking to getting into my car and driving.  I’ll be honest, part of me feels a bit smug about this and all the good I am doing the planet/city/neighborhood by leaving the car at home.  Still, aside from any moral or environmental benefits, walking is just nice for no other reason than it feels good to be outside doing what our bodies are engineered to do.  

I currently work near a mall in the suburbs and have lately taken to going for walks during my lunch hour despite the nightmarish traffic and frequently puzzling and seemingly arbitrary decision on which blocks get sidewalks and which blocks do not.  The other day I headed toward an open air “shopping center” across the street from where I work to start the walk.  Although the temperature was cold, the wind was not blowing and the sun was out.  I decided to take the sidewalk next to the businesses while I was out to see what was in the shopping center.  Needless to say, not many persons were walking about.  With the exception of one person, everyone I saw was either making the trip from car to store or vice-versa.  The thing is, though, this is kind of an interesting place if you go slow and pay attention.

I walked past a dance studio that caused me to smile, thinking of the gentle scam that convinces some lonely folks to come back again and again because of their undiscovered talent or the couples dutifully struggling through a foxtrot so they can learn to dance for their wedding (which will be deejayed by someone playing cheesy pop hits from the last three or four decades, few or none of which will be conducive to foxtrotting, waltzing, or cha-cha-ing).  

When I was in law school we studied a case involving a dance studio in which the plaintiff claimed to have been fraudulently induced to spend money based on the studio’s representation that she was talented.  The judge used the phrase, “Terpsechorean arts” at one point in the opinion and made a few of us laugh.  I still smile thinking of it.  

I admit to being slightly disappointed that no tall, slender, bleach blonde-haired woman with a slightly husky voice and an unidentifiable Slavic accent did not bump into me as I walked by to try and seduce me into believing I was, despite appearances to the contrary, the next Fred Astaire (or whomever the equivalent contemporary figure is, if indeed there is one, which I am inclined to doubt).  Of course this would presume a coeval cultural currency between us that would be as weird as this wistful vision of mine is.

As I approached the all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, a car pulled up. An old couple tottered out of the restaurant leaning on their respective canes and made their way to the car.  Another older couple walked slowly ahead of me for a moment or two before turning into the parking lot to get to their car.  The scene was melancholy.  Perhaps it is the fact that this restaurant has reduced food growth, preparation, and consumption to a mechanized event devoid of the unique, the real, and the spontaneous that did it for me.  A caloric Eden amid a nutritional desert sold at prices that cannot honestly reflect the actual costs involved, which must be borne on the backs of impoverished farmers and migrant workers and other cheap labor, that is borne on the backs of us all in the farm bills that subsidize the growers and processors and agri-chem companies and shippers and truckers and who knows who else.  While a part of me feels the guilt of snobbishness, I am still overwhelmingly convinced that the buffet restaurant is symptomatic of the depressed state in which the American middle class finds itself, part of the downward spiral of Wal-Martification, union busting, and wage suppression that has been going on for two decades or more.

For further proof I didn't have to walk far.  There is it was, that box of societal sorrow, defeat, and despair - a dollar store.  Advertising frozen chicken nuggets for a dollar.  A woman carrying three full plastic bags out of the automatic door.  Difficult.  Dolorous.  Determined.  As if she is not trying hard enough.  Obviously we should further erode her pride and force her to urinate into a cup to keep receiving the meager support the government gives her so she will not have to go hungry.  It only makes sense, right?  It isn't wrong to assume that if she's poor and needs some help that she's probably a drug user, right?

Next door is the high-end tea shop with clever lights and displays selling organic and specialty and fair trade teas that make you feel like a hero for purchasing them.  With appropriate implements necessary for the experience to be authentic and rare.  And commodified.  Like everyone else.  Aristocratic dreams.

The fabric store.  God-awful memories of my youth.  There can be few worse places in which to be a boy while accompanying one’s mother shopping than a fabric store.  Even the imagination has its limits and the fabric store tests them.  The rolls of fabric may entertain for a few minutes:  feeling the faux fir, checking out the sports themed racks.  But then what?  The soul-sucking begins.  The barely audible fluorescent light hum would be hypnotic if it weren't enervating.  The vinyl tile floor lacks the comfort of the carpeted department stores in the mall so you have to stand.  And that is basically all there is to do.  Stand and watch your mother look at fabric and patterns and thread while the light fixture hum bores a hole through your spirit.  Emptiness without nirvana. Boredom that lacks the panache of ennui.  Time slows unbearably.

Then there is the record store that miraculously survives without being a head shop, selling new vinyl and old vinyl and rare vinyl.  The record store beckons me.  Contrary to the horrors of the fabric store, the record store conjures up fond memories of my teenage years and my many sojourns to the record store in my home town where I would pore over Clash and Cure and REM albums amid the always changing but ever-present incense aroma.  Sometimes I would talk to the owner when he was working.  He was a scrawny dude with heavy metal hair and innumerable concert tees.  Once when I was fifteen he sold some weed to a friend and me, though it wasn't at the store.  We burned a bowl and went to the county fair glassy-eyed and ridiculous.  

The hearing aid store makes me think of my father who died nearly eight years ago.  He wore hearing aids, though he spent years denying that he needed them while we shouted our objections.  I miss him often and am grateful for things that bring him back to me if only for a short while.

Eventually I make my way past the last store and return to my usual route through the neighborhoods in the area, alone in the midday winter sun and happy I didn’t drive a block-and-a-half for a burger and fries.  

Failure Is an Option, at Least When Learning Something New

This is a post I published on the blog I write for Medical Systems, Inc.:

Medical News Today reports on an article in Pscyhological Science (subscription required) that found how we practice new tasks is more important than the frequency with which we practice new tasks to master them. Specifically, researchers found that persons who took risks or took more time between practices mastered a new video game faster than their peers who were more conservative and frequent in their approach to practice. The researchers concluded that, "individuals who were able to learn faster had spaced out their practices or registered fluctuating results during early game performances, indicating that these participants were analyzing how the game works, leading them to perform better." Tom Stafford, one of the authors, stated "inconsistency doesn't necessarily reflect flakiness, it reflects a willingness to explore the parameters of the game… [B]eing unafraid to fail early on, you gain the knowledge needed to support superior performance later on."

The findings may prove important in developing training and education strategies in multiple settings, including the workplace. According to Stafford:

If we can work out how to learn more efficiently we can learn more things, or the same things in less time. In an economy where we're all working for longer and longer, the ability to learn across the lifespan is increasingly important… This kind of data affords us to look in an unprecedented way at the shape of the learning curve, allowing us to explore how the way we practice helps or hinders learning.

This should give anyone who is an educator, whether in a school, the office, on the athletic field, etc., pause to consider how to foster creative risk-taking. Novel approaches to problems should be embraced rather than criticized when the approach is creative and well-thought out as it appears that the seeds of mastery are sown in the fields of creative failure.

The Charade Masquerading as Piety

Bill Moyers has an opinion piece that Alternet.org picked up.  I will leave most of the writing to Mr. Moyers, but will add that I continue to remain perplexed by the animosity those born into privilege and good fortune have toward those born into poverty and ill fortune (or who find themselves there despite working hard and trying to get out of poverty).  Here are a couple of memorable quotes:

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty...  It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C1

 [T]his is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C3

Welcome to the Third World

 Alternet has a good piece on how, despite jingoistic sloganeering to the contrary, America is not number one in most categories that matter.  As the author points out:

 Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.

 What is frightening is the degree to which we have essentially cannibalized ourselves into lowering wages and, hence, lowering our standard of living.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that... 

 IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. 

This has resulted in an America that does not have any cities among the top 10 cities in the world, that ranks behind 30 countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, and ranks first in such distinguished categories as incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes.  Despite the ascendancy of and the abject failure over the last three decades of Reagonomics and other supply-side economic fantasies, we have a Congress that thinks the answer is to shrink the government further, privatize public goods to unparalleled extents, and cut the few benefits those hit hardest by their policies rely on to put food on the table.  Perhaps most frightening is the fact that a near majority of persons in the United States thinks Congress is right.  

For anyone interested in the incarceration issue, WUWM is doing a series on the rate at which Wisconsin incarcerates black males.  We're number one in this category also.