It’s always hard for me to follow this type of devastating natural disaster without feeling helpless and also a little guilty. The helplessness is easy enough to manage (though not by blogging – that just feels even more bourgie: donations to the Red Cross can be made here and donations to UNICEF can be made here [I, in my usual state of indecision, gave to both]). It’s the recognition of not being as globally conscious as one imagines herself to be (in fact, borderline globally unconscious) that is harder to tackle. Our current national hyper-focus on Haiti belies the fact that the United States, and even we, citizens with a particular interest in the region, often ignore the unique challenges of Haitians in the country and here, in the United States.
From Renard Sexton over at FiveThirtyEight.com
The earthquake that struck the Carribbean nation of Haiti last evening has brought rapid and significant attention to the impoverished and conflict-affected country. With more than 10 million people and land area slightly smaller than Belgium (or about the same as Massachusetts), Haiti has long been the poster case of the vicious circle of colonial and foreign intervention, poverty, violence and political instability.
In the case of Haiti, however, natural disasters, along with environmental and agricultural overuse & degradation, have exacerbated the earlier trends to create an even more devastating situation of both political and environmental instability. In addition to relatively rare major earthquakes, each summer about seven to ten tropical storms crop up in the south Atlantic, with a few turning into hurricanes. Invariably, at least a few hit the island of Hispaniola, and batter the Haitian people.
In other words, this country and her people cannot catch a break. The United States has been a good ally, as a trading partner and a provider of international aid. But still, so many issues go unaddressed. The question now, as Sexton points out, is how the US responds in the next few years:
As discussed this summer, Obama stated in an April speech that, “while the United States has done much to promote peace and prosperity in the hemisphere, we have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership.”
The key question will be if that partnership for Haiti entails simply a year or two of above-average food-aid and reconstruction assistance, then a drop off the radar screen until the next hurricane, coup or food shortage, or instead something that more fundamentally changes the equation.
For example, what is to be done about the American and European agricultural subsidies that make farming in Haiti (among most of the developing world) economically infeasible for so many? And as well, how will the devastated natural environment, including degraded land and polluted water and air be revitalized to support a sustainable society, economy and government?
The one issue Sexton didn’t raise – and it’s an interesting omission, given that it seems to be the primary concern amongst Haitian activists - is extending temporary protected status (TPS to the wonks) to undocumented Haitian immigrants. Andrea Nill has a good re-cap of the issue here.
I understand that the lede in this article (“Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier”) is meant to pique interest, but in the words of my friend Leah: “Yeah, duh. Sorry to whoever wasted the last 10 years conducting that study.” Some dispiriting findings include:
After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner…Moreover, there was a steady weight gain among all women over the 10 years of the study.
I find it interesting that “complacency” and “your partner has a great metabolism and keeps things you shouldn’t eat like ice cream in the freezer and he seems able to have one bite of it while you wake up face down in a bowl of dulce de leche” do not appear as rationales for why women who live with partners gain more weight than those who live alone.
This was interesting on the baby front::
Almost all of the weight gain happened with the first baby; subsequent births had little effect.
Sorry Mom. It was all me. Can’t blame Rob anymore.
But here’s the real gem, buried a few paragraphs down:
Also by the end of the study period, there were fewer smokers and risky drinkers than at the beginning, more women who exercised less and a larger proportion without paid employment.
So basically regardless of whether or not I live with a partner, I am bound to get chubs, and lose my job. Awesome.
Watch this Senate vote highlight reel from Think Progress:
And forgive me my nerdiness, but this all reminds me so much of the final scene from Annie the Musical where FDR promises Annie the New Deal just in time for Christmas:
So this kid is admittedly not as talented as the boy on the ukulele but wow, the empathy at :27 kills me.
My good friend John Neffinger has an interesting post up at The Hufffington Post re: progressives and health care messaging. Here’s the crux of John’s argument:
The center does not hold without the left. If the left is not visible, then the center appears to be the left, and that makes moderate voters wary. Progressives could have gone out and created the political conditions to make elected Democrats reform our health insurance system – they could have advocated the Medicare-for-all approach they really wanted instead of throwing their lot in with the pragmatic center. If that had happened, we could be talking about bargaining away Medicare-for-all to end up with a robust public option, instead of bargaining away an already-gutted public option to end up with a bill that will force millions of Americans to buy from private insurance companies with nothing to control the premiums they are charged.
John makes the point that we can still turn this ship around, and perhaps more importantly, learn a lesson moving into the next big fight:
Later today immigration reform advocates will begin the long process of moving reform legislation through Congress. Realistically, they may hope to achieve an “earned path to citizenship” to bring illegal immigrants who have lived here for years out of the shadows, but requiring them to pay fines and back taxes and to meet an English fluency requirement. To reach that legislative goal, their equivalent of the public option, then someone needs to be visibly advocating something further left, the equivalent of single-payer: maybe something like unlimited amnesty with visitation for family members. (That is not impossible to argue for: we are a welcoming, pro-family country, built on immigration, and if we do a better job enforcing our employment laws then illegal immigrants won’t find work here and will deport themselves, etc.) The key point is that without some further leftward position to balance the debate, conservative Democrats will not be able to support the moderate approach that progressive reformers want them to, because it will literally be the most liberal position in the debate. We know how that works because that’s exactly what just happened on healthcare: conservative Democrats insisted on maintaining some daylight between their position and what is seen as the left’s position.
I’ve long believed in and have always spoken out for the rights of same sex couples and fully agree with Governor Corzine when he writes that, “The marriage-equality issue should be recognized for what it truly is — a civil rights issue that must be approved to assure that every citizen is treated equally under the law.” I couldn’t agree more with that statement and urge those who support equal treatment for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to let their voices be heard now.
You know how every now and then you get a song stuck in your head? And you know how there are some that get so lodged in there that you wake up hearing it? Well, this is one of those. (I also highly recommend the whole album.
One of the finer sociological nuances of being a child of the 1980s is that AIDS has been forever present in our generational psyche. To wit, my mother loves to tell people about how at five years-old, inspired by a public service billboard, I sat her down and asked “What’s all this about sex, drugs and AIDS?”
My poor mother – no one deserves such a precocious kid. And yet, who better to ask? My mother spent the 1980s teaching health and sex education at our local urban high school (what a fascinating intersection of time and place, right?) and so I was encouraged to ask questions that probably would have been shot down in less progressive homes.
When I was even younger, my mother lost one of her best friends to the disease. I couldn’t have been more than three or four years-old at the time, but I remember my mom explaining to me why she was so sad, and how she had lost her friend, Edward. Retrospectively, it strikes me that when Mom talked about Edward, AIDS was simply the subplot – the real narrative focused on an incredible individual who could take the ordinary and with wit and creativity make it extraordinary.
On World AIDS Day, the National AIDS Trust is urging you to Respect & Protect. In honor of those we have loved and lost or never known, and those we are blessed to have living happy lives, I encourage you to do the same.
