Comma Dot Comma

What is government for? One (probably) positive outcome of the dragged-out-to-the-point-of-utter-numbness political campaigning is that it has caused me to stop and think through (a bit) what I actually believe the role of government to be. I have gut reactions to certain issues and I can think through my arguments on those issues, but I’ve not carefully considered the underlying political beliefs before. An interesting article on the morals of politics also contributed to this line of thought. So here’s a tentative sketch.

1. The primary purpose of democratic/republic government is to protect the freedom of its people to live their lives unmolested: that includes citizens and residents without the rights of full citizenship, such as children, legal immigrants, and those who are incapacitated by law or circumstance (prisoners, the mentally ill).

This means governmental provisions to protect us from external threats. (Not necessarily a standing army– diplomacy, drafts, readiness to stand firm when necessary.)

It also means protection within, when acting on our own freedoms causes harm or unnecessarily restricts the freedom of others. So basic policing and a criminal justice system are necessary, as are laws forbidding property crimes, violence, fraud, and some environmental damage. No consequence of lawbreaking should permanently rescind the right to life, or the right to vote.

Freedom and justice, the two biggies.

2. The government is the best vehicle for collective action by the people of the nation. When a majority of people or their elected representatives decide that we value something and want to undertake a project to express that value, the govt. and taxation is the way to go. For example, we value having a reliable network of highways. A perfect project for the government to build and maintain. Other examples– funding for medical research, aid money and intervention in poor countries in Africa. The caveat to this function of government is that it should not enact any projects or plans that conflict with role #1. Thus the Japanese-American internment camps of WWII were wrong, because they caused harm and restricted the freedom of people the govt was supposed to protect, even though a many leaders (including the president) were in favor of it. The government should not neglect its duty to protect the freedom of anyone, regardless of how risky one appears to the general population, unless that person has broken the law.

There is great value in having the government (local, state, federal) initiate these types of projects at the behest of the people. Why? Because no institution is better positioned to justly administer the programs and funding for an entire community, state, or nation. I believe that every child in this country should get enough to eat, and I am willing to pitch in to make that happen. Could I personally make sure that each child gets a lunch? No. Could my church? No. How about the Gates Foundation? Most likely not. But because of the government, every single poor child in public school is guaranteed at least one balanced meal a day.

Things the government should not do:

1. Protect people from themselves. This means that most “victimless” crimes should be decriminalized, including drug use. However, they should probably be regulated, to better protect the rest of citizens from their ill effects. Laws protecting us from ourselves should only be enacted when the cost to society for someone’s idiocy becomes too high to bear, and that step should be taken carefully at best.

2. Change or enforce cultural values against the will of the majority. I don’t really know why the government is in the business of officially recognizing marriages and divorces. Why should it care? Births, deaths, and parentage/guardianship, yes. The rest, not so much. If the country is tending more and more toward reckless spending and greed, so be it. If the movies and music are getting trashier and trashier, oh well. These are issues for families, churches, and other grass-roots organizations (if these groups are doing what they ought, they should be able to build a majority, right?). The exception to this rule is when cultural values are infringing on the safety and freedom of some people in the country; such a situation resulted in the Civil Rights Act.

A few corollary thoughts:

1. It’s a Republic. So the role of our elected leaders is not exactly to enact the will of the people. It is to keep track of what the people care about, and do the research and hard work and rigorous thinking and careful compromising that the people don’t have time or inclination to do, and propose action accordingly. Let’s say I think the financial bailout idea stinks (I do) and I call my representative and tell him so (I didn’t, too lazy). His job is not to vote against it. Why not? Because I don’t know enough about how the economy works to say what the right course of action is. His job is to find out how the economy works, thoroughly investigate the proposed action as well as other alternatives, weigh their various costs, risks, and impacts, figure out what will best allow me to to keep living my free unmolested life, and vote for that, and then let me know what he did and how he took my concerns into account. Evidence-based decision-making, dudes! No knee-jerk reactions, deciding from the gut, or mindlessly parroting the electorate.

2. No religion promoted by the government. Elected officials who are religious can be open about how their religion affects their decision making. But no laws, policies, or projects should ever be enacted whose only basis is religious, or whose intended outcomes are primarily religious. Not even if I personally agree with the religious goals or motivations. Why? Because I don’t want anyone telling me I have to wear a headscarf in public or pray in tongues at the baseball game. And I don’t want anyone telling Jews, Buddhists, and Atheists that their children only qualify for the school lunch program if they pray to Jesus before meals. I love Jesus and wish more people did, but faith is an invitation and not a precondition for the benefits of citizenship.

About a month ago, I made a sudden decision to leave my fairly interesting, fairly well-paying, office job in order to return to teaching and writing. I had to move fast because the semester was about to start– I put in my notice, sent around my resume, and within two weeks had a full teaching load lined up for fall, and a slow, part-time phase out in place at my old job. I’d been planning to stick with the gig at least until the end of the spring semester– it wasn’t a perfect fit (gray cubicle, lots of meetings), but there was no strong impetus to look for something new. But you know, sometimes when you pray about things like work, answers come. With encouragement from Dr. G, I took the spiritual hint and shifted gears.

I knew for sure it was the right decision about a week ago– sitting in that gray cubicle feeling grouchy, exhausted, and headachy, with a persistent tickle in my throat. I had to go teach in a few hours and I decided I’d better do the whole class sitting down (usually I’m a roamer), with a throat lozenge. But within 10 minutes of setting foot in the classroom, my energy returned and my niggling aches and pains disappeared. I was happy to be there. It felt just right.

Being a college teacher sounds prestigious, and it is fun to be a part of the learning process with my students and focus my energy on what I know best. But actually, for most people, college teaching is tiring, low-paid work. That’s because the majority of college teachers are like me: “part timers” called adjuncts. In the community college system here, there is a policy of hiring up to 3 adjuncts for every two full-time faculty members. Adjuncts live class to class, semester to semester. No job security, no benefits, no vacation or sick time. An adjunct in my local community college system who taught 12 3-credit courses in a year (four per semester and four in the summer– the rules limit us to 3 per semester but sometimes there are exceptions) would make less than $29,000. An English composition adjunct would grade about 1200 essays during that year, and spend about 576 hours in class, not including planning time, reading time, helping students outside of class, and grading smaller homework assignments. It’s mentally and emotionally challenging work, though many of the adjuncts who do it love the work and being in an educational setting. They are dedicated.

Universities are also staffed more and more with part-time teachers and graduate student teachers and teaching assistants, rather than full-time faculty. Full-timers have more responsibilities than part-timers– they are expected to actively add to the knowledge in their field through research and writing, review and evaluate the work of others in their field, sit on planning committees that decide the direction of their department and their discipline, and, in many cases, bring money into the institution by winning grants. They also advise and mentor upper-level students. People are often surprised to hear that Dr. G teaches just a few courses each semester– that’s because he’s doing all those other things. He works year-round, even though he doesn’t teach a single class during the summer months.

There is definitely a place in higher education for part-time and student teachers. Adjunct teaching is good for both professionals and schools, because working people active in their field can come in and teach a class in the evening, pass on what they know, and earn a few extra bucks. They bring new perspectives and authenticity into the institution, which might otherwise become stuffy and insulated. And I believe that every graduate student should take a course in pedagogy and teach a class or two under the close mentorship of an experienced professor, as part of their training for a career in higher ed.

The problem is that those grad students are often not fully prepared to teach or closely supported while they do. And, as for the alleged “part timers”– too many of us are not part time. We cobble together a schedule of a few classes at this institution, a few more at that one, until our schedules are completely full. The schools save tons and tons of money operating this way. Even if a department has to go through the hassle of hiring 10 adjuncts to each teach three classes each every semester, it would rather do that than create five full-time positions and pay three times as much. At the community college (though perhaps this does not hold true at four-year schools or private schools), this hiring model may help keep tuition costs down.

The reason this strategy works is that there are so many people like me: qualified educators who have graduate degrees and are willing to make financial sacrifices to stay in a college setting doing what they love. There is no incentive to offer people $50,000 to do what they will just as eagerly do for $20,000.

But this is not just about educators– it’s about students. How are students best served? In most cases, adjuncts do not have an on-campus presence outside a mailbox and an email address, and are therefore not very accessible to students outside of class. They are generally not well connected to what is happening at the college and can’t alert their students to new opportunities and resources as well as a full-timer could. There may be professional development opportunities available that would help improve their teaching or expertise in their field, but chances are they are too busy making ends meet to attend. When those full-timer faculty committees are meeting to set the direction of the department, adjunct voices are likely not included. And, unless they take particular initiative to seek out their fellow part-timers, most adjuncts are unlikely to interact with other teachers and exchange ideas. Even the most effective and accomplished adjunct is less equipped to serve his or her students than a full-timer with the full campus community and network of resources behind her.

So, I’m gladly diving back in to a field I love, but I feel a bit like I am contributing to the problem. And yet, I want to do this work. I have to start somewhere and see what doors open along the way. I just wonder if there is any way I can contribute to improving the system in the meantime.

Tara’s wonderful blog post earlier this summer with excerpts from her childhood journal sent me in search of my own journals. I wondered if perhaps I, too, was a charming and precocious child. It turns out I didn’t keep journals much–the only one I could find is from seventh grade. Distinctly not charming. In fact, it is as excruciating and awkward as I myself was at that age.

A significant portion is devoted to imagining how everyone I know would react if a) I suddenly died b) I ran away (the town is “monotonous and cruel”) or c) they read the journal. I was sure that one schoolmate would come away from reading it with an awareness of “how shallow she is.” I did not spend any time wondering how my older self would respond. Clearly I had too much trust in future me, who has no compunction about outing past me on the internets.

But some of it still caught my eye. A little meditation on how it feels to stand at the plate in a ball game, scraping dust off one toe with the other, and try to remember everything your coach told you. A dissection of why I prefer to be angry than happy (it’s more interesting!), and a side note on how God communicates. I’m glad I did sometimes duck out of the maelstrom of the age and take note.

In some ways living in Phoenix makes me feel like a kid again. Growing up in an agricultural valley in Northern California where rugged ranchers and stoic individualists abounded prepared me well for AZ. Gun racks hanging on truck cabs don’t even phase me. But even more than that, it is the sense of something happening– of being on the cutting edge of major changes. California always had to deal with problems and opportunities before the rest of the country, whether immigration, growth, or the new economy. Arizona in the 2000′s is right there where it’s all happening. Over on the East Coast, there’s a lot of talk, but most of the implementation happens elsewhere.

Immigration is up front and personal in Phoenix, which is a major hub for people arriving overland from central and south america. We have an infamous sherriff on a major round-up mission of “illegals.” We have a new law that makes business owners very antsy, because it can shut them down permanently if they knowingly hire workers with false or no documentation. There are grim predictions of the economy collapsing as the labor supply dries up. Which goes to show that immigration reform is a non-partisan issue– businesses who need employees will be holding hands with the human rights activists, singing kumbyah in no time.

And, as one of the sunniest habitable areas on the planet, Arizona is trying to become a major generator of cheap, efficient solar power– currently we have plans to build the largest thermal solar plant in the world. For over two decades, it’s also been one of the two fastest-growing states. Arizona has to deal with urban sprawl, pollution, and resource managment more or less by the seat of its pants and the hair on its chinny-chin chin. Where will all these people live, work, and dump their garbage? Where will they get water? How do we get them to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? We have one of the worst K-12 public education systems around, making Phoenix a magnet for experimental schools and programs. And the growing population is taxing the resources of the health care system.

With construction as one of the biggest industries in the state, we are taking a major hit in the economy, resulting in legislative deadlock on the budget for next year. Everything domestic issue that the presidential candidates bring up– energy, education, economy, health care, immigration– is the stuff I experience in rush hour and allergies and personal stories every day. It’s kinda fun in a way.

Until the 2000 elections, when I learned about convicted felons being disenfranchised, I didn’t quite realize that in this country we like to continue punishing people well after they have served their prison time. It came as a bit of a shock. Now Dr. G has cowritten a policy paper on the issue of lifetime sanctions for felony offenders. I’ll link to it once it comes out. He and his cowriter advocate two things: 1. Except in rare cases, lifetime sanctions on former convicts should be abolished or replaced with shorter-term sanctions. 2. Use of criminal background checks should be regulated and have sunset provisions (that is, people would be able to access only a certain number of recent years of a person’s record).

These sanctions are created for two reasons– continued punishment, and to reduce risk of further harm to society. Examples of these punishments at the state level include not being able to vote, not being able to get public funding for education, and being barred from hundreds of different jobs. Examples of preventing risk include sex offender registries and bans from adopting children. In most cases, Dr. G explains, these lifetime regulations are unnecessary and have ethical problems. This is a big deal because these laws affect 16 million people* already.

Let’s say a drug dealer with a felony charge completes his prison term and is sent back into the community to go and sin no more. “Become a productive citizen!” we tell him. “Except, you can’t get financial aid for school, there is a big list of jobs you will never be allowed to do, and for the jobs you can get, employers are pretty much going to rule you out based on the criminal background check. Good luck! We wish you the best! And oh, you don’t like these policies? Too bad, because you will never be able to vote to change them.” These sanctions not only put him at an immediate disadvantage in getting back on his feet, but likely severely limit the opportunities he has to create a better life for himself. Multiply his dead-end situation by 16 million. That’s just ridiculous. Punishment for a crime should be contained to a specific time period; once you’ve done your time, you should regain full citizenship. Anything else is, in my opinion, unethical except in cases where vulnerable members of society, such as children, need additional protection.

Voting in particular is an essential check on government abuses. Imagine if the government started picking on a particular group. Let’s say, Christians. Draconian laws are passed against Christian assembly and prayer. People are convicted of felonies for carrying bibles and spend years in prison. People plot to vote in more open-minded leaders. But once they get out of prison, they find their right to vote has been rescinded, so they can’t do anything legal to change the situation. The government has effectively taken a group it doesn’t like and found as many ways as possible to reduce its power. Dangerous policy, indeed.

Dr. G also pointed out the good research on what happens to people over their lifetimes and after they get out of prison. The fact is, people commit less and less crime as they get older. Some studies show that by the time career criminals are 40, their criminal activity goes into steep decline. Nearly everyone is done with crime by the age of 60. * In addition, the longer someone stays out of prison, the less likely they are to be arrested again. By the time someone has been out of prison for seven years, you can’t tell the difference in risk of offending between that person and someone who’s never been convicted*. They blend right in to the general population. So, then, there is no need for lifetime bans and sanctions, since people become much lower risks to society with each passing year.

That’s why the indiscriminate use of criminal background checks should be reigned in. The common wisdom”once a criminal, always a criminal” just isn’t true. To withold opportunity and trust from someone for a conviction from 10 or even 20 years ago makes no sense, in light of the facts. Let’s not stigmatize people lifelong for the crimes of their youth.

*Updated5/7

The best online resource on this issue is Chris Uggen’s webpage. The 16 million figure comes from his 2006 paper with Manza & Thompson, available on his research web page:
and another paper:

“Scarlet letters and recidivism: Does an old criminal record predict future offending?”

Esme was very careful with the ficus. In the old days she used to drag them around by their tasteful white wicker root baskets but it turned out that if you put one near the window in the sun all its leaves would fall off. They would grow back and then when you moved it to the shade they would fall off again. Those fibrous leaves were hard to vacuum up. Now she just kept the trees on either side of the pulpit with the white lights still wound around them. For weddings they’d run a green extension cord from the back wall and presto, twinkle-o, ready to go. What was it with ficus and weddings, anyway? All the girls wanted them. And the white lights, and some precarious arch from the Rent-A-Center as a, what did they call it, “focal point.” The worst part about the ficus was dusting the leaves. The assistant pastor said that the whole point of the ficus was the shiny leaves and if they weren’t shiny then why did the church board vote to pay for the real thing instead of getting the lower-priced fake ones? It was incumbent upon Esme, he said, incumbent, that she be a good steward of the ficus. She was thinking of having business cards printed up: Esme Howard, Ficus Steward. Or maybe Ficus Stewardess? In her mind trees and plants were outdoorsy and you shouldn’t have to dust outdoorsy things. They grew in dirt, for goodness sake, with a layer of green-gray moss over the soil for good taste. The assistant pastor also said that ficus were a type of fig tree. They remind us of our Lord’s homeland. The fig, a mighty symbol, he added, staring over her shoulder as if into Jerusalem. She’d never seen a fruit on either ficus but now while she dusted she sang, “Oh give us some figgy pudding, oh give us some figgy pudding,” and thought about those tiny, tiny seeds inside figs. More like grit than seeds. In a perfect world a fig would have a pit that you could eat around, and the leaves on the tree would stay shiny of their own accord. She took up her cloth and moved to the next branch, individually wiping each bright, elliptical leaf.

Sometimes I’m really tempted to blog about work. Encountering the intricacies of my workplace culture for the first time, it seems like ripe, low-hanging fruit ready for the picking. The grapes! The nectarines! But, no. In general, I try to avoid it. To me, my workplace is sort of like a person and I apply to it the standards that I apply to other people. Though I’m not perfectly consistent, the intent is to protect other people’s privacy. A blog is essentially an international public forum and while my particular blog is not being read by thousands (or anything like it), you never know who’s looking. So, while I have chosen to air my private life worldwide, I can’t assume that other people and organizations would do the same. When I’m blogging about people other than myself, I usually try to get permission from them first ( if they are bloggers I just assume it’s okay). Some people, like Dr. G, have just given a blanket permission. Other people can have, in this forum at least, some say in whether (if not how) they are portrayed.

When it comes to my work organization, I believe it has the right to determine how it wants to present itself to the world, especially since reputation is important to its success. If I were a journalist investigating the organization, that would be one thing; as an insider, I can’t disassociate myself from it enough. If I could keep both myself and my workplace anonymous, then I might be more willing, but sometime in the last few months this blog became connected to my first and last name, which can in turn be easily connected to my organization. I have no particular desire to hide my identity, so that’s no big deal except that it further restricts the subjects I feel free to talk about on the blog for the sake of people and organizations associated with me.

Thinking about it, I realize that I do talk about Dr. G’s work sometimes. Probably I should stop. That’s a little bit different, though, because his work is so independent that the few things I mention bear little relevance for his organization as a whole. Still, probably I should think more about how what I write could affect his professional reputation and err on the side of caution.

The same thing should apply to writing about my specific church, too, though for some reason that organization feels like a somewhat different category. Is it?

I tend to have an outsidery, satirical perspective on organizations and their quirky cultural mileus, and a lot of things strike me as funny or make me roll my eyes, and that is bound to come across in my blogging. So it’s probably best to just leave it alone.

The line gets fuzzy when I’m focusing on my experiences and ideas, which are personal and only indirectly related to other people and places. If I inscribe the circle too small it starts to get boring. But maybe that’s a false assumption. Here’s an idea: you can challenge me with the most mundane topic you can think of and see what I can do with it. That might be fun. Say, a dirty kitchen sponge.

When I’m doing creative writing for myself or for official publication, though, all bets are off. I will use any of my past and present experience in any form I choose and make any kind of judgment I want to about any of it. That is bound to include people and organizations. Maybe it’s a contradictory stance but really, if I had to worry about all that stuff I would never get anything written.  Double standard!  Awesome!

Here’s a blogging code of ethics.

And here’s the Colbert Report Metaphor thing

And here’s a cute cat I kind of know who could be included in a picture book. Vote for Chloe!

P.S.  Karen– I dominated in Risk so thoroughly that I ran out of pieces.  Beginner’s luck, I’m told, as well as bad strategy.  In a rematch today I got trounced.  My little pink squares seemed to cower more and more as the game wore on.  They knew their days were numbered.

All the animals and plants started flattening out like soggy pancakes, and no one could do a thing about it. The rich people noticed it first, when the fruit-bearing trees and rose bushes in their pleasure gardens began to sink and widen at the bases. They fired their illegally hired landscaping people but it didn’t help. Next it was the race horses, whose ankles thickened while their backs thinned until they couldn’t race. That’s where we get that old saying “easy as saddling a racehorce,” to describe an activity that seems straightforward but is actually impossible. The foodstuffs began to be affected as well. Everything tasted the same as before, except it was all the shape and consistency of a soggy pancake, causing no end of trouble for the food packagers and distributors, as well as for small children, who had been use to identifying disgusting food by its shape.

I don’t even want to talk about the housepets. It got to where you couldn’t tell a gerbil from a chihuaha; they were all just furry amoebas sliding around the house, and you tried not to step on them. People worried that humans would be next, since many of them had been sagging and thickening for a number of years. Fortunately, however, their rates of sagging and thickening did not increase. It seems they had built up some sort of tolerance or immune response. Scientists applied for multi-million dollar grants to study the phenomena, but when they came out with their results ten years later, the people had already voted to put a pancake on the flag. “Moot!” they cried. “Moot, moot, moot!”

Inspired by Russel Edson:

A woman was collecting snails at work. She had a good-sized pile on her desk when the boss came in.
These snails are all wrong, he said.
They do a good job of sorting and stapling, she said.
They will never do for the presentation, he said.
The woman had to admit he was right. Their big client was a sea albatross who was related to the boss by marriage.
Okay, said the woman. But don’t come running to me when the big client chokes on his mackerel and decides to give his fortune to the union.
You always say that, said the boss.
The snails didn’t say anything. They refilled the stapler and filed themselves under “E” for escargot.

My new favorite dorky comedian, Demetri Martin, did a Comedy Central show over the weekend. He had a whole segment of charts and graphs. His were super funny, since it is his job to sit around thinking of funny things. He had a line graph showing the effect of a girl’s cuteness on how interested he is in hearing about how intuitive her cat is. I’ve been inspired to make my own charts, which are amateur but I had fun making them.