Boston’s Scar: On Our Expectation of Tragedy

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

When I was seven, I watched terrorists fly airplanes into buildings. When I was five, two teenagers killed their teacher, and then their classmates, and then themselves in an attack on their high school. Before I turned one, a truck exploded in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds and injuring almost 700. And three weeks before my nineteenth birthday, the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly visited brutality on the Boston Marathon.

If it happens over, and over, and over again, should we accustom ourselves to tragedy? To terrorism? Should we become used to breach after breach of decency? Would it benefit us to force ourselves to foresee mass-casualty incidents?

If we had expected Boston, would we feel any less pain?

Every worldview is built on a first premise – the bedrock assumption upon which all else rides. We assume that there exists an Almighty presence – powerful and unseen – and therein we find religion. We assume a basic set of properties – physical rules, features of time and of space – and along comes science. We assume that zero means nothing, and so we have math; that “I” refers to oneself and that “he” refers to another, and so we have language.

And then there’s that broader, less theoretical set of assumptions that guides our behavior. The social norms and societal conventions: we assume that others won’t raise their voices in the library and that they’ll recycle their empty Coca-Cola cans. Then, the expectations of heavier consequence and loftier import: that shoppers will pay for their groceries before they leave the store; that other drivers will stop at the stop sign; that a run through town will go unbroken by IEDs, a sidewalk will be unrattled by nails, and restaurant windows will remain unshattered by bitter reverberations.

The thinker John Locke had his own first premise of human interaction. He called it the “state of nature.” It was the idea that men live in peace until the quiet is breached – until rights are ignored, or disregarded, or assaulted. Change rises out of the embers of injustice. We follow the rules until someone else breaks them.

The rules were broken on 9/11. We shifted our collective consciousness to reconcile the gulf between our American idealism and the hard reality that razed two towers. Did that day change our assumptions, our expectations of one another? Have we become a passive people living in a weary stupor, awaiting the inevitable? A young classroom eliminated at gunpoint. A movie audience mutilated by the bullet. A Patriot’s Day marred by a billow of smoke and ash. All in the same year.

Would we be better off accepting violence as our new first premise?

Maybe. We know that, according to medical authorities at several Boston hospitals, every victim who wasn’t killed on site on April 15 will likely survive. How could that be? “What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore,” wrote one area doctor in the New Yorker. “Everyone’s imaginations have come to encompass these once unimaginable events.”

As the week’s violence drew to an close, we saw a wave of reactions from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s high school and college classmates. They seem jolted. According to one friend, the suspected bomber spoke cryptically about the event just a day after he walked unscathed from Boylston Street – during the crippling confusion that followed the explosions. “Yeah, man, tragedies can happen anywhere in the world,” Tsarnaev  said, according to CNN, at a UMass Dartmouth gym, “It’s too bad.”

Tsarnaev cynically voiced an expectation of tragedy. But is it something the rest of us really prepare for? That he was comfortable with expecting tragedy may well have enabled him to carry it out. If we believe violence to be inevitable, why shy away from our guns?

Americans find ourselves shocked, disquieted time and again when terror rears its head. Writing for the Boston Globe, one doctor on the scene shared an alternate perspective on the medical response, saying that he had “never been in any kind of tragedy like this.” Neither had most of his colleagues seen trauma of this sort. “These events are not something the medical community generally prepares for.” Terror and massacre are still the American exception, not the rule.

Yes, the anticipation of moral turpitude is sewn into the fabric of our nation: our government has black hawk helicopters, predator drones, and a nuclear arsenal that could blow up the world several times. The constitution calls for a well-regulated militia. We’re not naïve.

But speaking in Boston last Wednesday, President Obama said that the city had been thrown from a certain “state of grace.” Somewhere, John Locke nodded in approval. In this country, as in Boston, grace is the rule – the expectation. Last Monday was the exception. One day we grieved for the dead, and the next we danced in the streets, celebrating a return to normalcy. The state of grace does not account for improvised explosive devices.

Leon Wieseltier authored a piece in the New Republic earlier this week that critiqued the pervasive American desire to “move on” immediately after tragedy. “Only a stupid society would come away from the events in Boston with its sense of its security unshaken,” he wrote. “There is a scar.”

But it’s important to remember that we’re shaken because we’ve been caught off guard. And though we must always seek to avert that scar, that incision, when we miss the signs or let something noxious slip through the cracks, we should feel deeply shaken.

No, we cannot move on immediately, but the violence in our backyard does not reflect our essential being; it is – to borrow from James Joyce – a nightmare from which we are trying to awake; a truth that we are coping with; a fracture that we are trying to heal. The bombings at the Boston Marathon were a blow to our senses, a tremor within the very ground we stand on. To have expected it would have been a tragedy in its own right. We should be shocked, and we should be appalled.

Premeditated killing is not a circumstance to which we can be sensitized. To get used to death and terror would be to walk down a path that leads only to paranoia and mutually-assured destruction. We can’t get used to it. We must always hurt. If we expect tragedy, then we will let fall the full weight of contempt on every man, woman, or child who looks and talks like the Tsarnaev brothers. If we expect tragedy, then we will come to conclusions about millions based on the actions of two.

When that first premise is broken, our task is to fix it; to walk a cautious and ever-hopeful path; to be grounded by empathy and revel in our capacity to restore and reroute the state of grace when it is breached. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s nineteenth birthday marked the year that he would allow his expectation of violence to overtake him. I pray that mine will usher me into a world in which we assume grace, elude bloodshed, and never grow comfortable with tragedy.

Posted in Gun Debate, National Security | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Anti-Congress: Why Chris Christie Is the Most Electable Man in Politics

Posted on February 5, 2013 by

Written for the Huffington Post:

The President steps away from the podium, Beyonce belts out a few bars (or does she?), and then – without delay – comes the question: Who’s next? Somewhere in Trenton, a large man with a short fuse is the answer. Chris Christie is the most electable man in the country. It’s simple: Americans regard Congress with scorn. Chris Christie is the anti-Congress. Americans will seriously consider electing him president in 2016.

The 113th Congress’s nine percent approval rating stems from the difficult truth that President Obama is a shepherd with an unruly flock – one with whom this country is deeply disenchanted. But “nine percent” is abstract, a difficult figure to grasp. Just how bitter is American cynicism? With just how much ire does Citizen X gaze upon her leaders?

Public Policy Polling sought a tangible answer to that question. Its recent poll (the results of which were published earlier this month) did just that. According to PPP, Congress is less popular than brussels sprouts, traffic jams, and NFL replacement referees. But it gets worse: Americans have less taste for Congress than they do for root canals, colonoscopies or lice. Nine percent means insurmountable attrition and enough cynicism to makes the writings of Christopher Hitchens look like they’re smiling.

Why such severe disillusionment? Congress is stuck. Consider the filibuster, through which senators can shift the agenda by merely talking about something other than the floor’s proceedings. We watched again, last week, as Harry Reid’s hopes of doing away with the filibuster disappeared in a Congressional inferno. But beyond the filibuster, parliamentary procedure allows for any senator to stop a bill from reaching the floor. Chairmen of committees can ensure that certain controversial ideas never see the halls of the Cannon or Dirksen office buildings; such ideas live and die in hearing rooms.

Or consider regulations surrounding the debt ceiling: Congress may authorize spending beyond the government’s means, then prohibit the president from borrowing money. Paul Krugman summarized last month’s Republican approach to this issue as “openly threatening to use that potential for catastrophe.” I’d summarize it as GOP lawmakers simply bringing to bear the tools of engagement that legislative precedent grants them.

Give a toddler a delicate martini glass and warn him not to break it. That’s Congressional protocol. Don’t act surprised by the inevitable: He’ll grab it and he’ll play with it, he’ll shatter it, and he’ll hurt himself. Such legislative immobility has become convention. We can assume that the normality of gridlock – the comfort of being anchored in a sea of antagonism – has had a disenchanting effect on Americans. Not only is gridlock legal, but it’s encouraged.

Members of Congress issue statements and arrive at decisions based purely upon political efficacy. For better or for worse, Chris Christie doesn’t. Representatives put up a virtually impenetrable block against President Obama, shrouded in an ideological guise, but stemming from partisan convictions. Chris Christie doesn’t. When he thinks the president is right, he pats the president on the back. When he doesn’t, he’s sure to tell you so.

After Hurricane Sandy, Christie has stumbled upon an asset that Rudy Giuliani exploited in the years that came after 2001: becoming the instantaneous champion of those who hurt; the one who mends, who restores faith, who rebuilds.

But this Congress has granted Christie’s case a new flavor. In being that champion, in mending, in restoring faith, he’s had to fight Congress all the way. And when your enemy is loathed more than root canals, colonoscopies and lice, you aren’t just a rebel with a cause – you’re a hero among men.

Each time Christie acts against the will of Congress, confronts John Boehner, or operates out of step with either party’s legislative agenda, his speechwriters begin to pen the first lines of his election night victory address.

While Christie’s most significant political liability will invariably be the Republican base, a painful reality has been seared into the collective psyche of the Republican party: winning the base spells trouble in winning the country.

In 2008, we bore witness to a moderate candidate who felt forced to pander to the fringes of his party as a means of reaching the GOP nomination. By the time McCain was nominated, he had alienated millions of conservative democrats. We saw the same thing this year, but to a more severe degree.

Mitt Romney was the ‘etch-a-sketch’ candidate, altering his platform at his own convenience. Romney’s political volatility may have been his poison. He appeared a man who would ascend to the presidency at any cost. An opportunist and a sellout is a noxious mixture.

Whatever his confidences, Chris Christie doesn’t betray them – at least, he hasn’t yet. In recent weeks, Christie has wrestled with whether to accept a federal expansion of Medicaid for New Jersey. If he opts to take the money, he wins the hearts of Democrats, independents, and his current constituents. If he doesn’t, he’s one step closer to securing the support of friends to his far right. Even Christie’s dilemmas are victories; his lose-lose scenarios are win-win. He can be a Jon Huntsman with a little gusto and a real chance.

Chris Christie holds the rare opportunity to govern his state within the framework of his own moderate conservative ideology, while maintaing measured reason; it’s a worldview that renders him not blind to rationality or averse to nuance, but receptive and cautious in his acceptance of his president’s word. Christie can defy legislative immobility. And he can do it all while the cameras are rolling.

Posted in Campaigns, Healthcare, Political Goings-On, Political Polarization | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Guns and Glaciers: Why the NRA is Wrong About Newtown

Posted on December 28, 2012 by

Remember what Kurt Vonnegut wrote about Sandy Hook Elementary School? It was tucked within the first few pages of Slaughterhouse-Five:

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden. I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows as inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

“You know what I say about people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.

Harrison Starr seems to be speaking frankly and directly to a fractured American public, spawned by a fractured Newtown. He is insisting that a race whose end is out of sight isn’t worth running; that an epidemic that can’t be cured overnight is nothing short of a lost cause; that gun violence is better left to hollow prayer and band-aid solutions than to sensible long-term remedies. But Harrison Starr is wrong.

Last Friday, Wayne LaPierre, CEO and Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association stood behind a mahogany podium and delivered the his organization’s official response to the Newtown massacre. In a sing-song timbre, LaPierre began. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Before he could deliver his next sentence, that statement sank into sea of punditry and antagonism.

On Sunday, LaPierre appeared on MSNBC’s Meet the Press. During the program, host David Gregory offered him – albeit forcefully – an opportunity to clarify his Friday remarks. No clarification was necessary. LaPierre proved unrelenting in his conviction that the principal problem is the person, not the weapon. The mentally ill, he said – or “lunatics,” as he tastefully called them – are the dominant players in the debate over guns in the United States.

Mental illness is surely a factor in the debate. Liza Long’s now-famous Blue Review piece “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” gave voice to a desire to shift the debate from gun control to aid for families of kids who are mentally ill. Long’s son, Michael, is violent, erratic, and – disturbingly, more problematic – undiagnosed. He needs help. And so does his mother. She describes a bleak conversation with her son’s social worker, who advised that the family’s best bet in finding treatment and therapy for her young son was “to get Michael charged with a crime.”

Few deny that the American penal establishment – entangled with the nation’s mental health establishment – is afflicted by deep-seated systemic failures. No one – neither President Obama, nor the vocal families of Newtown’s victims, nor the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (which has more than a million mental health records on file) – professes that the mental health issue should not play a significant role in our national conversation.

Yes, Jared Lee Loughner, who carried out the January 2011 rampage in Tucson, suffered from mental illness. As did James Holmes, who killed 12 people in July at a movie theater in Aurora. As did Ian Stawicki, who made headlines last May when he murdered five in a Seattle coffee house. And it is presumed – though not confirmed – that Adam Lanza did, too. But as Sen. Chuck Schumer said on Sunday, “trying to prevent shootings in schools without talking about guns is like trying to prevent lung cancer without talking about cigarettes.” Yes, many mass shooters are mentally ill. But in want of proper treatment, they kill people – and they do it with guns. So let’s talk about guns.

During the course of their exchange, David Gregory uncovered (and his guest confirmed) that the NRA’s criteria for supporting congressional legislation was straightforward: if an idea may reduce loss of life, it’s worth trying. Gregory followed up by asking LaPierre if the NRA would support any form of reduction of high capacity magazines. LaPierre sang a tune of evasion for a few minutes before conceding that it wouldn’t. Then Gregory asked if there was any gun regulation that LaPierre would support. There wasn’t. Not even one.

It seems to me alarming that the nation’s chief gun advocates can’t – nay, won’t – acknowledge inherent dangers in weaponry, even as a mechanism of mitigating those dangers. Hazard, they say, lurks only in its operators. A December 16 piece in The Atlantic noted that the Second Amendment, while safeguarding Americans’ rights to guns, “doesn’t say a single thing about the right to own bullets.” The same notion was central to an old Chris Rock comedy routine. “I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars,” Rock would say. “Five thousand dollars per bullet…and people would think before they killed somebody.” You remember the old adage about truth in humor.

Taxing or regulating bullets could prove effective in reducing loss of life, thus the proposal fits snugly in LaPierre’s criteria. James Holmes bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet. Had anyone been watching, one might assume that such a purchase would have been a red flag of sorts. High capacity magazines in assault weapons allow a gunman to shoot off thirty or more rounds without having to reload his weapon. But LaPierre and the NRA are adamant: “A gun is a tool; the problem is the criminal.”

They are fatally mistaken. If last year we had borne witness to 8,583 murders caused by rocks, I would likely be an advocate of rock control. And had those deaths been caused by umbrellas, I would be in favor of umbrella control. But nearly 70 percent of murders last year were caused by guns. Firearms act as subservient accomplices in homicide. Yes, people kill people. But they kill people with guns.

Gun violence in this country will not end in full until there emerges a new lethal instrument that usurps the gun in efficacy and vogue. With anticipation, we dread that day. Harrison Starr couldn’t have predicted the melting of the glaciers.

The solution doesn’t eliminate the problem, but renders its victims fewer. Wayne LaPierre’s soapbox is wearing thin, and while it would be naïve to think or to claim that we can wholly eliminate gun violence, it would be a deadly crime not to try.

Posted in Gun Debate, Journalism and Media, Law, National Security, Political Goings-On, Youth | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Prelude to Longer Piece on Sandy Hook

Posted on December 16, 2012 by

Because I am immersed in finals week, I have yet to publish a piece on the Sandy Hook massacre. I hope to do so in the next few days. In the meantime, I believe this screenshot that I took of the NRA’s website will suffice.

For the record, there are also no results for the terms “Newtown” or “Lanza.”

Image

 May we be safe and may tonight’s speech not be last we hear of this issue.

Posted in Eclectic Thoughts | 1 Comment

One Week Later: Israel’s Right and its Responsibility

Posted on November 30, 2012 by

Written for the Emory Wheel:

Consider a hypothetical situation.

About a year ago, someone took a hammer to my kitchen window, leaving shattered glass strewn about the floor.

My family and I aren’t of retaliatory blood, so we swept up, replaced the panel, and put the incident behind us.

A few days later, we awoke to another mess. Our front lawn had been dug up, spilling dirt into the driveway and leaving the carcasses of daisies to shrivel in the sun. Again, we cleaned up quietly and went about our lives.

But it wasn’t long before my family couldn’t keep up with the damage.

We awoke each day to a new sordid surprise: paint scraped off of the side of our house; rain seeping through where roof panels had once sat; sewage pipes uprooted; damage with such consistency and such severity that the very foundation of our house began to rot away. Each time, we swept up the mess. Each time, we kept quiet.

You’re wondering: You allowed all this? You didn’t take legal action? You didn’t seek out the people who’d been carrying out an unprovoked assault on your home? It sounds, to you, absurd. Because it is absurd.

None of this happened to my family, nor to my home. My telling is diluted. In reality, the narrative was much worse.

Instead of a hammer, it was a rocket. Instead of a shovel, it was a rocket. Instead of a scraping tool, or an axe, or a jackhammer, it was a barrage of rockets. And instead of my family’s home, it was the schools and streets, playgrounds and homes of Israel’s southern region.

For anyone to live in constant fear that they may die by rocket fire seems a way of life unbefitting of the civilized.

It’s now been more than a week since Operation Pillar of Defense ended. We’ve had time to reflect. The regional conflict remains hazy and oft times complex – even impenetrable. But one thing is clear: Last week, Israel rightly defended itself against those who sought to bring its citizens into that shadow of constant fear.

Israel is not without profound, sometimes devastating flaws. It is a society whose legal statutes often pull from the norms of biblical antiquity; one which is deeply and continually invested in an occupation of the West Bank that poses threats to its own democratic principles and to its Jewish underpinnings; one with a system of government that proves inefficient time and again.

Because the Israeli government’s constituency extends far beyond the borders of the Jewish state, it has already begun to face criticism on these issues.

The era of a subservient global Jewish community has passed. These issues are difficult and important.

But the action that Israel took last week doesn’t fall under that umbrella of flaw. The sobering truth is that Israel’s use of force was warranted. Consider a concise sequence of events – a far cry, I hope, from the convolution of the news cycle:

Yielding to international pressure, Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. The withdrawal granted Palestinians living in Gaza full power to assemble (by whatever means) its own governing body, its own internal legal systems, its own investments. A few months later, the people – whether by coercion or by choice – elected Hamas, who vowed to bring years of prosperity to Gaza.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. In its founding charter, it calls for the destruction of the Jewish people in the Jewish state.

Not a century ago, someone carried out a similar vision – a memory seared vividly into the collective psyche of the Jewish people. By absolutely no means is the Holocaust the basis for Jewish self-determination, but by all means is it a reason to shudder and recoil at Hamas’ words.

Since its ascent, Hamas has opted away from substantial investments in infrastructure or medicine. It hasn’t moved toward opening a robust competitive market. Instead, it has prioritized weaponry supplied in large part by its allies in the Iranian regime. Those weapons are katyusha and qassam rockets.

Hamas launches them from schools, mosques, and hospitals. The rockets land in Sderot, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon, Kiryat Malachi – Israeli towns where Israeli kids play on playgrounds and rush to shelter when their afternoons are pierced by warning sirens.

It’s easy to fall victim to certain western conceptions that compel us to view Hamas as a political opponent or ideological dissenter of Israel’s. But Hamas is not a righteous army of freedom fighters. Its militants are not “activists.” They are terrorists. Hamas does not protect its citizens. It plants fear in the hearts of both Israelis and Palestinians and dispatches the cursed and capable hands of death upon them.

Had my family taken action against simply the first act of aggression (the mere broken window) we would have been justified beyond doubt.

Israel has seen an average of three rockets per day over the last 11 years; more than 22 thousand pieces of burning metal crashing into small towns over the last year alone. Can you imagine even one rocket landing in your neighborhood – even one time?

I mourn for the infant whose only crime was serving involuntarily as a terrorist’s shield.

I thirst for a partner for peace who will cease to cloak itself in smoke and bullets. I pray that combatants in Gaza and in Israel will lay down their arms and labor for their own safety, their neighbors’ safety. But we aren’t there yet.

Last week, Israel carried out its obligation to unshackle Israelis from the chains of existential fear. In a heap of shattered glass, a hammer is not a valid partner for peace.

Posted in International, Israel, National Security, War | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Farewell to Truth: Duplicity in the 2012 Campaign

Posted on November 16, 2012 by

Written for the Huffington Post:

It’s an abiding message, but one we keep learning the hard way. David Petraeus scribbled it across his forehead in permanent marker this week: things are not always as they seem.

The 2012 election season played host to exceptional political duplicity. Like never before, candidates proposed policies bereft of accountability. They zigged and zagged to pander to donors and special interests. Identity was malleable; some candidates seemed to forget that alchemy went out of style some millennia ago. Politics is politics, but this year was different. Machiavelli is turning in his grave.

Sure, stories tend to have two sides. There is precedent in both political and philosophic history for a plurality of voices — sometimes contradictory. Madison wrote in the Federalist papers of the ever-constructive, ever-important role of factions in a vibrant democracy. Social and political dissent and a variance in opinion helps maintain the vigor of our government. Schopenhauer, the nineteenth century thinker, would call these truths complementary objects of a single reality.

But complementary truths from the same candidate? Let’s call them lies.

Take the Ohio senate race.

State Treasurer Josh Mandel ran an unsuccessful senatorial challenge against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. At an August rally for Mitt Romney, Mandel revved up a crowd of workers at a coal mine in the state’s southern region:

“There’s (sic) a lot of radical organizations throughout this country, funded from places like Hollywood and New York City. People who’ve never stepped foot in Appalachian Ohio. They’re trying to convince the American people that coal is a liability. We understand that coal is an asset.”

Mandel’s layers of dishonesty would be comical if they weren’t so disturbing.

An ambitious Ohio politician — at a campaign stop just beyond West Virginia — deriding “radical organizations” in “Hollywood and New York City” is much like Newt Gingrich pushing the notion that “the literati sent out their minions to do their bidding.” New York? Hollywood? It’s almost shocking that Mandel didn’t mount an attack on his Bubbe’s matzo ball soup recipe in the same breath. The 35-year-old is a strong supporter of AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition. Assailing the Left for being out of touch, über intellectual, or foreign to the strains of being a coal miner is crooked and laughable from a Cleveland native whom the New Republic called “a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jewish family.”

We tasted a different flavor of duplicity in the closely-watched race between Brad Sherman and Howard Berman in California’s 30th congressional district. The two incumbent Democrats have virtually identical political records. Both have worked to alleviate local and wider scale environmental issues. Both have supported lending to small businesses and employee protection in the entertainment industry. They share nearly twin records on foreign policy.

Aside from their truly negligible policy differences, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman are socially liberal, fiscally indistinguishable candidates. The two are cut from the same ideological cloth. But if you watched the war they waged against one another this year, you’d never know that.

Sherman chastised Berman for taking trips outside the United States with taxpayer dollars. But Berman had taken most of those trips in his capacity as chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The candidates worked hard to make the distinctions between one’s support of Israel through missile defense and another’s support through increased sanctions against Iran. An October debate even saw physical aggression play out between the candidates as they sparred over who was the true author of a piece of left-wing legislation.

The Los Angeles Times called the nearly yearlong Berman v. Sherman spectacle “a debate over debating.” Both men became architects of artificial differences that didn’t actually exist. They accentuated their real, marginal distinctions in unnatural and counterproductive ways.

And one final instance, lest we neglect to mention duplicity in its purest form.

History will not forgive the Republican party for nominating a chameleon instead of a candidate. During the campaign, Mitt Romney’s views simply took on those of his audience.

After the first presidential debate – for which Romney was lauded in conservative circles and lambasted in liberal ones — Gail Collins summed up the former Massachusetts governor’s positions: “taxes will go down, but not revenues. The health care reform plan will go away, except for all the popular parts, which will magically remain intact.” From the campaign’s outset, his statements and proposals were steeped in very little math, subject to very little consistency, and comprised of very little truth.

The dishonesty and denial seeped well into election night. After it had become clear that President Obama would take Ohio and the networks called the electoral college in his favor, Romney waited more than an hour to concede defeat. In the same hour, Karl Rove forced Megyn Kelly to parade around Fox News headquarters on live television, searching for the misplaced plus or minus sign that would change the electoral outcome projected by every major news organization in the world.

Hubris and wishful thinking are a noxious mixture. The vicious narrative that ended last Tuesday night — in whose epilogue we read about the downfall of a venerated American hero — may have amounted to a victory for certain worthy political causes, but it dealt a devastating blow to truth.

Posted in Eclectic Thoughts | 3 Comments

An Endorsement With an Asterisk

Posted on November 12, 2012 by

Written for the Huffington Post, published October 31, 2012:

It felt almost as surreal as it did cold.

I was a shivering, wonderstruck ninth grader. He was just minutes into his turn at the helm of the world’s most powerful engine. Between us were a cement barrier, a military guard, and an armored limousine wall. As the sirens whined, I waved, then he waved back. And then he was gone.

Minutes earlier, I had been on my tip toes, trying to steal a glimpse of the man himself, but my eyesight was too weak, and the podium was obscured among clusters of naked trees. I had laid my feet flat and settled for the megatron.

Now, as the inauguration parade began, I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and made eye contact with the President of the United States. My innumerable thoughts were drowned out by the cheering thousands behind me and beside me. I had just seen Barack Obama take the oath of office. Now he was looking at me.

I was blissfully unaware. He knew that the celebration would be short.

Nearly four years later, his critics’ words are a thunderclap: “He hasn’t done enough.”

They’re right. It would be irresponsible to claim that President Obama should be reelected exclusively on the merits of what he has accomplished. It seems without doubt that he has not achieved nearly enough; so speak the fractured limbs of a nation still in pain.

But on issue after issue, the Obama administration has moved in the direction of progress, even if it hasn’t yet attained exhaustive success. It is the collection of alternatives — the terrifying nature of what could have been, and what could still be — that amount to a ringing endorsement of President Obama for another term.

Under the belief that Obama should have treaded further on the issues he has undertaken — that he hasn’t done “enough” — it would be counterintuitive for us to veer sharply toward a radical alternative. Progress unfinished is but a puddle of futile hope. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

Some issues on which Obama has made real headway seem only spoken about in hushed murmurs, eclipsed by Washington’s hyperbole-prone discussion of the favored children of the media — the issues that take up airtime. We are best served not by shouting about how the president has spent money (indeed, he has — and lots of it), but by assessing where and on what he has spent it.

Take, for example, the environmental realm. Experts across the board agree that the president’s deepest failure in the area took the form of a cap-and-trade bill that, had it passed, would have cut the nation’s carbon footprint by 80 percent by 2050. The bill ultimately disappeared in the congressional inferno.

Scarred by legislative burn-marks, President Obama felt the sting of his mistakes. He swiftly issued (by executive order) what the Washington Post recently called “the most sweeping attack on air pollution in U.S. history,” placing severe limitations on the production of toxic gasses. Some have grumbled that these regulations immobilize the coal industry. For those in the sustainability sector, such a truth is a far cry from tragedy.

Perhaps this administration’s pinnacle environmental accomplishment is its groundbreaking fuel-efficiency rule: by 2016, all new cars will be required to average 35.5 miles to the gallon. The rule will cut back on 1.3 million barrels of oil each day and reduce carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons.

Bill Maher — comedian by name and social commentator by practice — noted last week a paradigmatic shift from the fantasyland of the Bush years to a sobering new reality. “Before Obama got in (to office) the Smithsonian couldn’t mention global warming as a possible reason the glaciers were shrinking.” By merely acknowledging certain truths, President Obama has restored the nation’s standing as the world’s top investor renewable energy.

Despite his reforms, however, President Obama’s work isn’t yet adequate. And now, the House Republican budget — supported in full by its proud architect, Paul Ryan — outlines cuts topping $897 billion, many of which will uproot the seeds of sustainability that Obama has planted and spoil the fruit that his constituents have borne. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

The thirst for more doesn’t end at the ozone layer. Examine the changes in the classroom that the last three and a half years have seen.

The stimulus package took effect at the recession’s apex. Most of its funds appropriated toward education were spent on ensuring that teachers kept their jobs. Since that initial groundwork legislation, however, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been met with exceptional success in driving the translation of their own policies into state ones.

In the process, the president has taken a page from the Republican playbook and painted his education initiatives in a laissez-faire glaze. The Race to the Top initiative has invited states to compete for a limited sum of money, which has been awarded to the legislatures who most thoroughly employ administration education policies — implementing merit pay for teachers, building data systems to track student progress, and the like.

The tactic has worked: Upwards of thirty states have actually altered their education platforms to heighten their grant prospects.

But Obama’s most assertive push has been his fight against Bush-era education policies. The administration has exempted 33 states from the laws of No Child Left Behind. The states who qualified for exemptions did so by proactively seeking out ways to sidestep NCLB’s über-idealistic requirement that every student perform at least grade-level work in English and math studies by 2014.

Again, a noble effort. Again, insufficient. The vast majority of Obama education policies are blueprints — semi-complete plans for full implementation in the coming years. In a February GOP primary debate, Mitt Romney was emphatic in declaring that “we need get the federal government out of education.” He has echoed such sentiments deep into the general election season. But the only avenue through which states can legally forgo unhealthy NCLB practices is federal government action — precisely the kind that the President Obama has begun to take. If he hasn’t done enough, then let him do more.

Was my optimism on that frigid inauguration day for naught? The morning had begun as my dad and I sprinted through the streets of Arlington to catch the 4:30 am subway car that would take us — at a bumpy, rhythmic adagio — to Capitol Hill. We had stood in line for five hours, watching the sun rise over the Mall, wondering if perhaps our president-elect was doing the same. The symbolism didn’t escape us.

Indeed, we have been awakened to the limitations of “hope and change.” The environmental and education issues I present are simply a case study representative of the phases of forward movement. But the progress we’ve made rings hollow if we halt it abruptly. President Obama hasn’t yet done enough; I’m opting to let him finish what he’s started.

The sun is peaking out. Let it rise.

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