Look, another week done! Next week, I’ve got a Christian Masculinities post on Driscoll and on the Boy scouts coming up.  I’m also sure that after my Tuesday night radio show, Civil Discourse, I’ll have some more material. Anyway, here’s your week:

How to Write About Haiti by Ansel at the Haiti Rewired Blog

Haiti has captured my imagination this year.  I remember when the earthquake hit and I was working writing music news briefs, I made them about bands helping Haiti or throwing relief concerts as long as I could find it. I wrote about Hands & Feet Project or other artist led-initiatives at least once a week until I was asked to write less. I was still writing about Haiti when I left my job.

Before this year, I had only read one book on the history of Haiti. Actually, it was the first book I read in my World Religions class at Baylor.  A Baptist missionary in residence had us read “An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President” by Randall Robinson. That is a radical book to give to a class of mostly white upper class “oh I love the orphans!” republican/libertarian college students at the school rated Most Nostalgic for Reagan.  It was challenging for those of us who, upon reading this, could only sit back and say “Well now what the fuck do I do? How can I do anything but listen?  And how can listening bring whatever it is they need?”

This is why I love this article. It talks about Haiti, and it’s a pretty snarky review of what is generally going on in terms of “journalistic endeavors” there.  There are far too many perfect quotes, but for the sake of letting you actually read the article, I’ll pick one:

“You care so much about these hard-working people. You are here to help them. You are their voice. They cannot speak for themselves.”

What were they thinking? By Bil Browning at the Bilerico Project

Bil Browning highlights this excellent commercial from Argentina concerning Gay Marriage, recently legalized there.  Maybe it’s because I got engaged this year, or because I’m a total sap, but I totally teared up. If you don’t speak Spanish, you can watch it captioned on youtube.

Conservatives Promote Feasting on a Dairy Cow by Jon Walker at Firedoglake

It’s the best explanation of “short term gain, long term loss” I’ve heard yet.  The Texan in me loves the imagery. Also, due to my own mental scarring after trying to milk a cow via the vacuum bucket method (Screw Space Camp. This is what my parents thought was important to learn at summer camp.), it makes sense to me. You don’t want to eat a dairy cow as your best option. They’re not bred for meat.  And yes, while we do eat dairy cows who are substandard dairy producers in this country, we don’t eat dairy cows at the expense of having milk. Which is exactly the point of Walker’s piece here: What happens after the feast, when you wake up with no job, no money, and no future capital to invest?  You do what this upstate dairy farmer did earlier this year: Shoot all your cows for meat, then shoot yourself.

I realize it’s been a week and a half since I wrote, I apologize. It’s been busy, as usual. Saying that, here’s a 4th of July themed Week-in-Review!

Thoughts on a Declaration, New York Times

I thought it was nice to get a closer look at the document whose writing we celebrate Today.  It seems a tea-party favorite, especially, to quote (and misquote) our reasons for revolution against the British. “The Pursuit of Happiness, Then and Now” is the first and my favourite of the essays because it points out to the triune underpinning of the United States: the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to happiness.  We don’t really know what ‘happiness’ means these days. Does it mean the right for prisoners to watch Cable TV? Why on earth would the founders use such a confusing term? Arthur Danto explains:

” It would sound in today’s terms ridiculous to say that the Americans were fighting for happiness. But they were fighting for philosophical recognition of what it meant to be treated as human. They were fighting for human dignity.”

As for the Tea-Party use of Declaration in declaring “freedom from government”, J.M. Bernstein in “Song of Freedom” rightly reminds us that the Declaration does not end with it’s preamble. I hope all of us can remember the last lines:

However much the ideal of unencumbered freedom has become associated with the Declaration of Independence, freedom from binding attachments is no part of its philosophical underpinnings. In protesting against British tyranny, the American colonists were not proclaiming an ideal of individual freedom from government. On the contrary, they were pleading the cause for a vital conception of political community.”

RYviewpoint has a great response to “Song of Freedom” titled “Freedom From and Freedom For”.

Having it Both Ways: Illinois Stops Paying Its Bills, but Can’t Stop Digging Hole by Michael Powell

Putting it lightly, Illinois is having a little bit of budget trouble.  To the point that, well, they just stopped paying their bills. All of them. Even to the schools, universities and non-profits. This is worrisome, because without a social safety net (or budget) of any sort, the state doesn’t really exist except in name. It’s anarchy, survival of the corporate fittest (who will do their best to get the hell out) and well, lets hope everyone else, who can’t find a job (because the state can’t pay, and everyone else left) can survive, literally. But one paragraph really stood out as a warning:

More broadly, Illinois is caught between blue state convictions about social safety nets and a red state aversion to taxes. For years, the Democratic-controlled legislature has passed budgets that are, in effect, in deficit. Lawmakers routinely skip around the state’s balanced-budget law, with few consequences. (Republicans are near monolithic in voting against any tax increases and borrowings. When one broke ranks to try to keep the pension solvent, he was stripped of a committee position, reducing his pay and pension.)

This is interesting, because this is what Legislative Republicans are trying to do: Simply say “No” to all tax increases, and to all job increases.  At this point in the recovery, we’ve seemingly forgot how high the unemployment and the underemployment rates and realities really are, and that adding those jobs is necessary. Republicans say “We’ve already spent too much!” But unfortunately, even with effective use of that money, we haven’t spent anywhere near enough. Apparently the hole brought on by G.W. Bush administration’s politics &policy of extreme deregulation is still deeper.  Slacktivist has two recent great posts about this, “Rendering unto Krugman” and “Ask the Economist”. He recreates a recognizable parable it seems Illinois forgot and the U.S. will hopefully remember soon:

But knowing their hypocrisy, he said unto them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a dime and let me see it.”

And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this — FDR’s or Herbert Hoover’s?”

They answered, “Roosevelt’s.”

And he said unto them, “Right. So shut up. Have you morons already forgotten the 20th Century? When the choice is between imitating what worked and what really, really didn’t work, why are you pretending it’s terribly complicated?”

And after that, no one dared to ask him any question.

“Officials Worry about Consumers Lost Over Recalls” by Lyndsey Layton at The Washington Post

First of all, I wish the article were “Officials Worried about amount of Recalls” instead, because this fear of “consumer exhaustion” is only a symptom of the fact that there is a lot of unenforced regulations over currently-mandated safety standards. Maybe another title should be “Officals worry about lack of manpower to enforce regulations”.

For example: I’m currently working in the service industry, and while my manager is absolutely neurotic about keeping everything 100% clean (and we do, as I’m a clean freak as well), we haven’t been inspected in over a year (Dallas mandates regulates surprise inspections every 6 months).  But I don’t trust other businesses, because I don’t know them. And I can’t afford to have my own inspector (nor can I force other businesses to allow me to inspect) come with me to every business. This is why I pay taxes to outsource these tasks to my local government, an entity whose purpose is serve the public good, to inspect every business. Of course, I could just eat at the grocery store, but with the amount of recalls there, apparently that’s out as well. Maybe I just need to grow all my own food.  Honestly, I don’t have the money, time, nor skills to do that. Nor do I think that’s the best use of my resources.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this lack of choices, as the article explains.

“There is so much information out there, if you paid attention to every recall notice that came out every day, you’d go nuts,” said Hallman, who has studied consumer attitudes toward food recalls with a grant partially funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He conducted a national survey last year in which 12 percent of respondents said they knowingly had eaten a recalled food.

Honestly, I’m sick of paying other people to put me at risk.  And I want my life to be modern.  I’d like to trust that I am paying people for the product they say they are selling me, and I’d like to be able to live my life at the same time.  Which is why I support a pretty thorough regulation process for my food and my products.  Even with all the tests and regulations in the world, I realize that sometimes there will be recalls. I’m not asking for perfection, just for clean food and cars with working brakes (for me and other people, whose illness and lack of brakes could still directly screw mine up).