Morning Fog

Musing on the Month of January

January is one of our coldest months and, depending on where you are in the country, can often be gray and wintry.  Years ago I thought of that as a negative, something to be endured.  That was until I noticed the magic of the solstice.  Sitting at my university-dorm study desk facing west in about 1966 or so, I realized one fine January day that the rosy glow of the setting sun on the horizon was occurring a good 15 or 20 minutes later than it had before the Christmas break.   And that, as Robert Frost wrote, “has made all the difference.”

 

Of course, the shift toward more daylight actually starts from the winter solstice, occurring December 21 or 22, but it’s only a minute or so per day, so it can creep up on you.   I’m a light-sensitive person -- I always want to be up literally at the crack of dawn, too -- so once I focused on what was happening, January didn’t seem so bad.  It’s not winter, it’s pre-spring!  (At least until the evil of “daylight saving time” rears its head; more on that in a month or two.)

 

Another noticeable thing about January is that the usually efficient U.S. Postal Service tends to go off the rails this month.  The Christmas mail has been speedily delivered but then, it seems, the entire USPS takes a Caribbean vacation after the New Year.  Bills arrive after the payment due date, packages seem to move more slowly, magazines sometimes just disappear altogether.  It’s a trend I’ve observed for eight or ten years now; has anyone besides me noticed? 

Just guessing here, but I suppose seasonal employees have been let go, and the regular employees who have been working overtime take some time off.  These days we’re less and less dependent on snail mail to bring news, bills, or paychecks, so it's of little import; by February things will be back to normal.

The Inauguration

The inauguration is over, Barack Obama is now our 44th President.  A few random observations from watching the proceedings today:

First, it's impossible to watch the ceremony without being impressed by the "orderly transfer of power."  It's almost a cliche to mention it, and our tradition in this regard is neither unique nor exceptionally long, yet considering the bitterness and partisanship that have dominated our political scene for several years, we should be thankful for it and never take it for granted.

Second, it's difficult to imagine any American not being inspired by Obama's impressively direct and inclusive inaugural address.   His reference to bedrock old-fashioned virtues -- "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism" --should remind us that we can and must restore our unity. 

Last, regarding our now-former President, George W. Bush.  He's been much vilified, he's unpopular; and to a moderate like me, who believes both the right and left can have valid ideas, he was frustrating because he offered so little that could be supported.  But Obama supporters should thank ol' Dubya because Obama's electoral margin in many states was slim; the historic election outcome that was finalized today might have been different if it weren't for an unpopular war and a serious economic meltdown.

Virginia Republicans Vote Early Against Early Voting

Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates continue to turn their backs to the twenty-first century.  On January 19, at 7 AM on a national holiday, they rejected a bill aimed at letting more Virginians cast ballots by "early voting."  Currently, in order to vote by mail (or in person before the election), Virginians must swear to one of 17 specified permissible excuses, and the penalty for false declaration is stiff.  Twenty-six other states now offer "no-excuse" voting by mail; and in Virginia, the idea is supported by our Governor, the League of Women Voters, the Electoral Board Association, and the Registrars' Association. 

Republicans often claim that alternative voting opens the door to fraud, but that's doubtful in this age of computerized poll books and simple cross-checks.  Really, it's just old-fashioned partisanship; most of these Republicans no doubt foresee that change would operate to their detriment by adding to the growing voting power of the state's urban areas.  So Virginia, it seems, may have to wait for this step, which seems inevitable to anyone whose head isn't buried somewhere. 

Reinforcing this message of "Rapidly Forward Into the Past," a Republican-controlled subcommittee also rejected bills that seek to democratize the way the boundaries of legislative and congressional districts are determined.  This self-preservation style of politics is completely normal, of course; some would say there is no other form of politics.  While we might wish for a more responsible approach, we can hardly expect it from a state (technically, Commonwealth) capital that still touts, as its main claim to fame, being the Capital of the Confederacy 150 years ago).

Volunteering

Today is the 24th annual national observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Tomorrow, with the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, we will see living proof of where King's work has led us (see my entry for January 15, Race: Ideal and Reality).

 

But there’s a second aspect of MLK Day – a day of national service.  First, a small gripe; the national service idea was added as a feature of the holiday in 1994 but to be honest, this year was the first year I’d ever heard of it.  Was everybody else better informed than I was, or has the publicity for this effort been really poor before now? 

 

Well, no matter.  By all accounts, the response has been terrific this year and hundreds of thousands of people nationwide have taken up the challenge to do a little extra to assist in a good cause.  No doubt many of these people have already done something similar before -- we Americans have always been pretty generous in donating our time, money, or both, to help others.  As a fairly regular participant in community service myself, for example, I’ll be assisting with a blood donor drive soon.

 

But the real genius of focusing a holiday on service is the potential for new volunteers to step forward.  Starting with just one day, it’s easy to stick a toe in the water and find out what a rewarding experience volunteerism can be. I hope many of those around the country who are contributing some time and work today will discover something they’ll be inspired to continue during the coming year.

Dangerous Docs

A very late act of the Bush administration was a regulation to prevent employers from disciplining health care workers who refuse to participate in medical procedures that offend their ethical, moral, or religious beliefs.  It's scheduled to go into effect Tuesday, January 20.  Bravo to the seven states and two organizations that have filed in court to block this regulation; it's totally nonsensical.

I'm all for freedom of religion but it's a matter of individual conscience, and should remain in the personal sphere.  No one should be able to impose his/her beliefs on others who may not share them, especially in a field like health care, where it might be dangerous or fatal to do so.  David Stevens, of the Christian Medical and Dental Association, claims the proposed regulation protects patients who have religious reservations about certain medical procedures, but the patients whom society really needs to be concerned about are the ones who might want these procedures and who consider them completely acceptable.  How would such people be protected from mistreatment or neglect at the hands of medical caregivers who might refuse to provide the treatment or even suggest it?  Mr. Stevens doesn't seem to worry about them..

In politics, the usual solution would be some compromise for religiously-correct health care workers.  We are already familiar with options such as private practice and denominational hospitals.  One seemingly viable suggestion: Any physician who opposes a practice on religious grounds should be required to inform his patient of the existence of this conflict of interest.  Stockbrokers are required to do this; should we expect less in the medical care field, where lives are at stake?

Even so, I'm doubtful that there is any middle path that can protect everyone.  One example: What about emergency care when the religiously motivated physician is the only doctor around?  All in all, the proposed regulation attempts to codify individualist views about abortion or other procedures into generic "rules" affecting us all.  It is a camel's nose that could threaten to bring down the tent of our civil society.

The concept of professionalism posits the existence of a common set of standards independent of the individual's personal preference.  People who won't offer a client a full range of options aren't living up to their professional responsibilities, and those who refrain from performing elements of their work out of moral repugnance define themselves automatically as amateurs.   A professional soldier might have moral qualms about killing, but if he finds he can't do it, then he needs another line of work.  It's the same in health care.   Hospitals and other public institutions don't have the option of employing people who might refuse to do parts of the work they were hired for; they'd be rightfully subject to lawsuits (and the non-performers should be accountable). 

I also have difficulty justifying the opt-out approach ethically.  Most religions preach tolerance and understanding for the views of others.  I'm not a doctor (I don't play one on TV, either, if you were about to ask); but if I were, I'd find it difficult to refuse a certain treatment to another human being only because it offended my sensibilities. That would be dishonest and immoral.

The CMDA website says its goal is  'to motivate, educate, and equip its members to...glorify God.'  (Not to practice medicine!)   I'd prefer that CMDA members glorify God by giving up their own lives or health, not mine.  My radical but inescapable conclusion:  These are "dangerous docs" who really shouldn't practice medicine at all.  There may be openings in the ministry, where they could do less harm. 

The Big TV Switch

The February 17 deadline for TV stations to switch over to digital broadcasting is fast approaching.  Now we’re hearing that the program to issue the $40 coupons for people who have antenna TV, and thus will need the converter boxes, is in trouble.  The program is out of money, and many people won’t get the converters by the drop-dead date. 

 

No surprise here.  Really, could this Rube Goldberg program have been set up any more ineptly?  First, you “apply” for your discount; even if you did so when the discount cards first became available, you found that there was a six to eight week wait…for what?  How could the process possibly take so long in the digital age?  Who needs this credit-card-type doohickey they send you?  Wouldn’t a rebate system, where people could buy their converters and get money back afterward, serve the purpose better and faster? 

 

The biggest blunder was totally mishandling the publicity for the program.  People don't care about the date of the changeover; what they need to know is when they need to do something.  So in this case, the responsible agency (the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration)  should have set and publicized a clear deadline to apply for these coupons – a date determined by back planning from the conversion date to include the long wait for the coupon, buying the converter, and hooking it up.  After the deadline, sorry, you would pay the full cost of the box yourself. 

 

Well, that didn’t happen.  It can be argued that the poor are disproportionately affected by the failure (compassionate conservatism at work).   Obama wants to postpone the change, but that would just multiply cost and confusion.  It doesn’t seem too late, even now, to establish a rebate arrangement; the agency has records of those who already got their discounts, so they wouldn’t need to pay double for anyone.

What Oxford U. Hath Wrought

I've been very impressed with the overall quality and interest of the series bundled under the rubric "The Oxford History of the United States," comprising seven or eight volumes, each covering different period.  The series began back in the 1980's; one of them (Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause) has already appeared in a revised edition, which offers an insightful explanation of why property rights have played such an overweening role in U.S. history. 

As one who for much of his life spent more time on the history of various foreign places, I found these volumes provide a really great reintroduction to American history.  They incorporate a lot of detail, the latest historical scholarship, and are generally rich not just in telling what governments or Presidents were up to, but in describing economic circumstances and aspects of people's everyday lives.

Case in point: the latest (?) in the series, What Hath God Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe, covering the period 1815-1848.  Howe provides fascinating details about the development of transportation (mainly canals and railroads) and communications (the telegraph) as one of the key historical threads running throughout this period.  He offers rounded portraits of the key players of the time; Andrew Jackson of course, but not neglecting Martin van Buren, Henry Clay and others. He also clarifies the confusing history of political parties during the era - Federalists, Whigs, Democrats of various stripes - and the even more splintered progress of churches.  All in all, an excellent and enlightening read.

Race: Ideal and Reality

As I've mentioned already, today is Martin Luther King’s birthday (though we formally observe MLK Day a few days hence) and shortly, the nation will inaugurate Barack Obama as its first African-American President.  We have come a long way from the day when the founding fathers, apparently without pausing to look around them, declared “…that all men are created equal.”  It set a fine and worthy ideal, even if it wasn't real at the time. Lately the election of Obama as our next President has been heralded by some as the demise of racism.  I wish that were true; realistically, I know it’s not.

 

We’ve crossed other finish lines before that turned out to be only mile-markers.  The Civil War, the subsequent Amendments – perhaps at the time these events occurred, people might have supposed discrimination had been banished.  No such luck. 

 

In more modern times, Truman’s 1948 Executive Order for integration of the military is one I remember well.  I grew up as an “Army brat” mostly in that desegregated military, but in North Carolina in the early 1950s, it was easy to see the differences blacks experienced between life on the base and life in the still-segregated community off base.  Twenty years later, during my own army service, the reality was that units were integrated, but personal relations between blacks and whites were in an uneasy state of truce, a truce that was broken occasionally by racially-sparked disorders in public areas on bases.

 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, a triumph of Lyndon Johnson’s political art, was a major advance too.  Yet one of my most vivid memories of racism comes from that same year.  I was studying at a university in a Midwestern state with no history of official racism, yet at a football game that fall, white fans near me in the stadium were chanting “turn the nigger loose!” (i.e., ‘put the team’s best ground gainer in the game’), even though there were black students only a couple of rows away.   There are lots more examples, including all the voters who unabashedly voiced racial slurs directly to TV cameras in 2008, and there is much evidence that anti-Latino racism is on the rise, but the gist is clear: Work remains to be done.       

 

Still, there’s reason to be optimistic.  Most of the earlier milestones along this path were court decisions, or laws passed – in other words, top-down stuff.  The election of Barack Obama, though, comes from the bottom up.  It shows that for the first time, grassroots attitudes may be changing.  And that’s the real news of the election, so far as race is concerned. 

 

(Please read on for a thought about a related development on the Voting Rights Act)

Getting Started

This is an unusually auspicious time for me to kick off a new endeavor.  At this time of year we begin to see noticeably longer hours of daylight; my wife and I will celebrate our wedding anniversary soon; today is my birthday as well as Martin Luther King’s, and we will inaugurate a new U.S. President in a few days.

So I’m pleased to be finally creating this weblog now, after meaning to do it for nearly five years.  

The delay in starting might have saved me some work.  After all, it’s a lot easier and cheaper now to set up a blog than it used to be.  And maybe the road ahead is shorter, because with the huge number of blogs now being created every day, I sense an end in sight: five years from now, I won’t be surprised if everyone has moved on to different technology and nobody will be blogging.  I realize that’s not what Technorati predicts, but …time will tell.