confessions of a former optimist

I have always been an optimist. Or perhaps I should say I was always an optimist until the last few years. This has little or nothing to do with my personal life experiences. I maintained an optimistic outlook during unemployment, poverty, cancer, divorce, and many other personal trials, and recent years have been kind to my husband and I in many ways. 

Moreover, my optimism  was not based on ignorance of the worlds problems and issues. My parents brought me up to be highly aware of the dire circumstance of poverty, war, brutality, pain and suffering that others in the world suffered. I was brought up to care about and fight for equality, freedom, and opportunity for others. I was a realist optimist. 

I can remember reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs in high school and she had this very apt description of Aquarius that fit me to a "T": 

"Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code." 
Goodman, Linda (2011-02-23). Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: Aquarius (Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Set) (Kindle Locations 175-178). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition. 

Later few years later in college I read Yevegeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography  and identified strongly with this passage: 

"My optimism which had been all pink, now had all the colours of the spectrum in it, including black, this is what made it valid and genuine." 

I made my career in sociology a discipline focused on understanding the realities of social life; and I focused on topics of inequality (wealth and poverty), economic and political power (its uses and misuses), and environmental problems. I became more and more versed in what was wrong with human societies, and still I retained optimism that if people properly understood the sources of those problems they could struggle together to make a better world. 

But some where in the past decade, perhaps just the past five years I lost my way. I have come to believe that many of the problems the world is facing can not be fixed, at least not in a way that allows human societies to move forward from where we are now. The inequalities have become so huge, the gaps in power so large, and the many of the environmental problems irreversible without immediate, dramatic reversals in energy, transportation, and food policies that I know will not happen because of those overwhelming inequalities and power differences. 

It feels to me on a daily basis as if those in control of the multinational corporations and the worlds' wealth are deliberately driving humanity towards the edge of destruction, because they believe that there is more profit and more power in creating impoverished and powerless masses, and that the accumulation of vast wealth will some how exempt them from the disasters to come....and who knows, enormous wealth provides a lot of cushion against catastrophe so perhaps they are right. Whether they are right or wrong they are acting as if they, and their children and grandchildren will be immune. 

I do not believe humans are headed to extinction - even as we drive many other species to extinction - but I do believe that we are headed to a lot of hunger, disease and death, and the break down of much of modern industrial society.  

I also believe that within that disaster lies the possibility for vibrant, localized, lower tech, sustainable communities to come out from the other side of the disaster - perhaps many decades on the other side. I also believe that there are people around the world who are doing enormously good things to build social capital, make connections, create local food webs, advance new forms of spirituality  and environmental awareness, and to create support networks that may be the tenuous bridges that we will need to reach that sustainable future on the other side of disaster. 

I know some of those people doing good work and dreaming good dreams. Most of them are far away from me and I only have contact with them through Facebook. It is this lack of direct connection that I think has given birth to my despair.  I want to be part of the bridge building, but no longer know how to make the connections.  I no longer feel it in my soul the way I once did. I feel weighted down by the presence of so many whose response to the uncertainty and fear that they feel in their bones is to cling to a mythical past that never existed and demand that nothing change or that changes should be to a more restrictive, narrower, meaner, less inclusive future. 

Why the Rich Hate Obama

This morning I ran across an article "The Best Worst President Ever" by Mark Morford in SF Gate.  Morford observes a wealthy beneficiary of the economy under Obama proclaim Obama the "worst president ever." Morford then proceeds to give a litany of economic facts that provide ample evidence that this wealthy individual is almost certainly benefiting greatly from the economy during Obama's presidency. In the end Morford just laughs, and shakes his head at the "bizarre lament" of these crazy rich bastards. His only explanation is simple racism - rich white guys can't stand it that a black guy could actually run the country, so they'll simply deny that he has done so. 

I think that Morford and almost all the other defenders of the Obama presidency are missing something truly important, something that the wealthy feel in their bones, even though few of them can allow themselves to recognize it consciously. There has been a seismic shift in this country during the Obama presidency, one that has nothing at all to do with Obama's actions as president, but everything to do with what a black man in office means to American people. It is not what Obama has done, but what Obama has inspired (including fear) that makes him "the worst president ever." 

The seismic shift to which I refer is the cosmic decline in the legitimacy of the existing American social system, in all its economic, political and social dimensions, in the minds of Americans. The fact of an Obama presidency, the presidency of a Harvard educated, progressive black man of mixed racial and cultural heritage is the catalyst that turned the already existing cultural divergence of America into a chasm of Grand Canyon proportions. It is not about what Obama has done or will do, it is all about who he is and what he represents to the various factions in America. 

Obama of course represents quite different things to those on the left and those on the right. For those on the left, Obama's presidency offers hope (yes that "hopey changy thing") that real change and reform can happen. If a black man can get elected in America, than perhaps real, progressive economic reforms are possible too. By raising expectations, Obama's presidency undermines the legitimacy of a Congress stalled in the morass of partisan bickering, and of a corrupt and massively unequal economy.  Decades ago historical research on revolutions suggested that the greatest danger for revolt occurred not when conditions were the worst in a society, but when small improvements gave people hope, but change did not come quickly enough to satisfy those hopes. 

Obama's presidency has done something that nothing before has been able to do: the fact of a black man in the highest office in the land has led masses of ordinary conservatives to question the legitimacy of government and law enforcement. Suddenly "law and order" conservatives are on the side of armed vigilantes protecting a law-breaking rancher (Bundy) in Nevada, who casually aim weapons at local, state and federal law enforcement officials. 

The most class conscious, educated members of the rich are fully aware of the disintegrating legitimacy of capitalism and the vastly unequal distribution of wealth and income in this country. A tiny handful of these economic elite think that it is possible to re-establish legitimacy as was done during the Great Depression by Roosevelt. Warren Buffet speaks openly and often about the need to reform the tax system to address rising inequality. Bill and Melinda Gates focus on pouring their wealth into reforming education with a goal of reducing inequality. Far more common however, is the headlong rush to accumulate more and more, claiming the moral superiority of capitalism (or getting toadying academic economists to do it for them), and blaming Obama for the rising numbers of Americans who seriously question the both  legitimacy of extreme inequality and capitalism. 

Their hatred of Obama is based not on anything that he as actually done to effect inequality, because in point of fact, Obama's actual policies and actions have fueled the growth of wealth and inequality.  Rather it is based on the fact that an Obama presidency has fueled more and more open disaffection with the existing order of things, and shaken the legitimacy of both government and economy. Their hatred is greater because they have more to lose. 

Zombie America - installment 1

(First in a series)

I was awake most of the night last night (New Years Eve/New Years Morning) thinking about things over which I have no control.  The downward spiral of obsessive thought began with something very personal - my mother's mental decline into dementia - but I was quickly distracted into much more far reaching national, international, even species (human species) issues over which I have no control.

America is in decline. The signs are all around us.  I started thinking about those signs in the wee hours last night (and will discuss some of them in a few moments). For decades I have been waiting for the "beginning of the end," the moment when it all begins to unravel, the day that the "shit-hits-the-fan."  [I'm currently reading a right-wing paranoid post-apocalyptic sci-fi mystery that does a good job of imagining the consequences but not the causes of the day "The Shit Hits the Fan."] Last night, it came to me that that day, that moment came and went a long time ago. We're on the downward slide, not waiting to go over the crest.

We probably never will be able to fix a firm date on the beginning of the end of United States as a developed first world country. The causes are far too complex and are inevitable results of the multiplicity of contradictions buried within industrial capitalism. If you're the kind of person that wants to understand the whys and look for the beginnings, there are plenty of good books you can read, such as:

• Grant McConnell's Private Power and American Democracy (Vintage Books 1966)
• James O'Connor's The Corporations and the State: Essays in Theory of Capitalism and Imperialism (Harper and Row 1974) and The Fiscal Crisis of the State (St. Martins Press 1973). [The latter book goes to show that social theorists on the left understood about the dangers of deficit spending decades before the first Tea Partier took up the chant].
• Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Avon Books 1977)
• Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison's The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (Basic Books 1982)
• Donella Randers, Jorgen Meadows, and Dennis Randers' Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing 2004) [original Limits to Growth was 1971]

Most of these books have more recent editions, but I refer you to the originals so that you can see that causes of Americas decline was thoroughly analyzed and well understood thirty or more years ago; some people did bother to listen, they just lacked the numbers, the money or the political power to do anything about it.

What are these signs of decline in to third world status that I'm talking about? This isn't an exhaustive catalog, just a few telling indicators.

The first sign is the abandonment, boarding up and eventual leveling of American towns and urban and suburban neighborhoods.

It began in the rural areas.  The long term demographic transition of industrialization, that began in the 1880's in the United States, involves the shift in population from rural areas, small towns and villages In the 1950's the declining population of rural communities is viewed as progress. "How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" asks a popular song of the 20th century, speaking of soldiers returning from World War I and World War II. Mechanization and science take over farming, fewer farm workers are needed, and industrial growth in the nations cities and suburbs beckon young people from farm to city. American government farm policy of the 1950's was to actively wring the people out of agriculture.

There was a brief exurban surge in the late 1960's and early 1970's, of "back to the land" folks, former hippies, disenchanted urbanites and the first trickle of elderly retirees taking advantage of improved social security benefits to return to their childhood home towns. I helped document this five or six year demographic reversal for sociologist and demographer Thomas Ford at the University of Kentucky in 1976.  But it was short lived and the larger population shift away from rural areas re-emerged in the late 1970's.

It's was then that we begin to realize that there's something wrong, and that people who wanted to be farmers and small town dwellers were being forced off their land and out of their communities.   By the early 1980's farmers started to organize nationally and regionally, and popular culture got on board with institutions like Farm Aid (first concert in 1985), to assist farmers and farming communities facing crushing debt from mechanization.

But rural farming communities were not the only ones hemorrhaging population, the mechanization of coal mining and timbering both, helped depopulate non-farming rural areas as well.

Today its become so common place that we've stopped noticing it, stopped being aware that far from stopping, it is getting worse than ever. You drive through small rural towns through out this nation and what you see are empty store fronts, boarded up windows, and empty lots where buildings have been torn down. Around those empty down towns, there are empty houses, in various stages of decay and demolition.

But it didn't stop in the small towns. The industrial cities that rural people flocked to from 1880 to 1970, are now experiencing abandonment, decay and desolation. We noticed it first in the inner city slums of east coast cities in the 1960's. Factories moved out, property values skyrocketed, middle class families moved out, and slum landlords turned once prime housing into substandard apartments for poor people who paid exorbitant rates for tiny pockets of ill-maintained space. Then along came urban renewal and gentrification in the 1960's and the 1970's. Convention centers and upscale shops got built, upper-middle class urban professionals renovated 100 year old row houses in "transitional" neighborhoods, and built rental apartments in their basements. Only the deterioration of the inner cities continued around the convention centers, and not all urban neighborhoods made the "transition".

In some cities whole neighborhoods became ghost towns, boarded over, condemned and in some cases razed. While portions of most of the large industrial cities of the east coast, and upper mid-west have been lost, there are some cities, like Detroit that are more striking than most http://zfein.com/photography/detroit/index.html.



Photo of Detroit skyline copyright by Z. Fein Photography



Only about half the population lives within Detroit city limits compared to the city's height in the 1960's. Gone are the automotive jobs, and so are the people, leaving behind empty skyscrapers, office buildings, schools, police stations, and thousands of empty homes, and empty lots where homes once stood.

We know these things, we see the pictures of the deteriorating urban landscape in our movies and television shows, as the back drop to gritty stories of crime and drug wars. We forget that those are not movie sets, but are real places that are no longer habitable neighborhoods and communities.

The second indicator of decline will be discussed in the next installment.

cultural change and language change

In our last two sessions, my SOC 101 class (the one in the classroom)and I have been focusing on the elements of culture, beginning with language, and talking about changes in culture. Last Thursday we were coming up with examples of words that have come to have different meanings -- both denotations (the direct, explicit, dictionary meaning) and connotations (implied or suggested meaning).

In light of this conversation with my students I find it interesting, that apparently the meaning (both denotation and connotation) of the noun "barracuda" has evidently undergone some changes. According to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary (copyright 2004) the second meaning of "barracuda" is a person who "uses aggressive, selfish, and sometimes unethical methods to obtain a goal, especially in business."

Now my 1941 Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, doesn't even have that meaning, it just defines barracuda as "voracious pike-like marine fish." So the application of the name to humans is one example of the changing nature of language.

Now, it would appear, that the Republicans either like the idea of Sarah Palin being labeled "aggressive, selfish, and sometimes unethical" or they think the word means something entirely different. Certainly the Heart song "Barracuda" that the Republicans have chosen (with out the group's permission) as Palin's theme song, does not use the term in a wholly complementary way --the person being called "barracuda" appears to be a preditory and lying person.