Black-hole Decision Making

I find myself faced with environmentally framed decisions which I feel completely ill-equipped to make. It's hard to make a rational cost-benefit determination when you can only guess haphazardly at what those costs and benefits might be, or at least their exact measures. How am I supposed to make decisions on no information? For instance:

1) The bathroom, kitchen cabinets, and fridge in my new apartment are full of half-used toiletries and food belonging to previous residents already departed. Whenever I can waylay both of the other current residents more or less simultaneously, we're going to cull the collection. Obviously the environmentally (and fiscally and otherwise, I suppose) responsible thing to do would be not to simply throw everything out but to spend the next few months living off the two varieties of Herbal Essences shampoos (extra moisturizing and anti-frizz, both of which, conveniently, my hair could benefit from), the duplicate bottle of my face wash, and the myriad body washes left behind (and eating lots and lots of soy sauce and mustard?) so as not to allow huge quantities of perfectly good products to go to waste. And I likely will do this (at least for the bathroom supplies—using an unseen person's leftover shampoo seems a lot less gross than their leftover food, plus the food stuff isn't stuff I'll eat, or at least not quickly enough for it to benefit the stuffed level of the fridge with any alacrity).

But then what to do with the unwanted dregs? I'm a compulsive recycler (I've been known to fish roommates' bottles out of the trash, rinse them, and put them in the bin), but I know that the plastic recycling process isn't actually all that efficient, that the water wastage required in rinsing out a container (especially one containing body wash or something that foams seemingly eternally) is a nontrivial factor in this equation, and that—oh wait—washing loads of liquid pollutants (which is what toiletries basically are when you get down to it) down the drain where they eventually end up contaminating rivers and groundwater and such probably isn't the best of ideas. So, do I simply toss the whole thing—bottle, contents, and all—into the trash, hoping the bottle will remain intact enough to keep the contents from spilling out into our (eventual) water supply, and not wasting the water to endlessly rinse it, or do I spend an afternoon rinsing out bottles of Worcestershire sauce and conditioner, wasting untold gallons of water?

See, what I need to know: Exactly how inefficient is plastic recycling? (I'm sure this is publicly available if I really looked.) How much water is required to rinse out a shampoo bottle? (I'm sure I could figure this out on my own.) But then, how much water wasted counteracts the beneficial effects of recycling? (This is possibly close enough, given the inefficient nature of plastics recycling, to be significant.) What are the environmental effects of pouring bath products down the drain? (I am aware we do this daily anyway as our daily doses of shampoo, conditioner, face wash, body wash, shaving gel, toothpaste, mouthwash, and whatever gels, pomades, or mousses are already in our hair wash out and down the drain, but just because we already do it to some extent doesn't mean it's a problem. Peeing out all the drugs we take is doing awful things to fish, frogs, and other animals, including leaving them hermaphroditic thanks to 12 million American women's birth control pills.) Does anything thrown away in its container actually remain contained after being crushed and compacted and tossed in the landfill?

2) Since I always use my flip & tumble bags at the grocery store, CVS, etc., I'm finding that I actually have a dearth of paper and plastic bags around my house. In my area, paper recycling has to be either put into a paper bag to separate it from the other recycling, or tied neatly into a coherent package with twine. The latter sounds nigh impossible (only a small percentage of my paper recycling is regularly-sized and -shaped paper—what to do about all the receipts?!), but it seems beyond ridiculous to be sure to get paper bags at the grocery store for the sole purpose of restraining my paper recycling. (This is less a cost-benefit thing than just an annoyance thing.) Until recently I was making it by on the occasional Whole Foods bag the roommate would bring home (he's slightly less perpetually armed with reusable bags since he doesn't carry a purse), the small bags his beer comes home in, and then (a windfall!), somewhat embarrassingly, a stash of paper bags I filched out of a neighbor's recycling bin one day. But now? Nothing. I appear to be the only person in this apartment who cooks, so apparently I'm the only one who ever buys anything at the grocery store. (Odd.)

Plastic gives me an even worse conundrum. The other day I went to empty the bathroom trash, but then I realized I didn't actually have any plastic grocery bags to replace the bag with. (I would just dump the trash into the kitchen trashcan, leaving the bag there, but our toilet has a weird leak that the trashcan has been living under to catch, so everything was kind of soggy and gross, and the bag actually needed replacing.) So when I went over to the old place to swap out some stuff I'd unwittingly taken for some stuff I'd unwittingly left, I also grabbed a substantial portion of the stash of plastic bags we had accumulated over the past two years in our kitchen closet. (Of course, over half of them are the somewhat less conveniently sized bags that you get when you buy clothes or something somewhere slightly fancier than the grocery store.) But someday, these too will run out, and then what? It's ridiculous to buy trash bags, at least for that size trash can. (Seriously. How thoroughly stupid is it that stuff is manufactured—and we spend money on it—the sole purpose of which is to throw away?!) But again, is it much less stupid to refrain from using my reusable bags once or twice to build up my supply of plastic grocery bags to line the trash with?

3) Composting brings me to a problem in a similar vein. I had decided once I moved I would resume collecting my vegetable peels and such to take to the compost dump. (Another point entirely is that the compost site is only for residents of my old city, but that I live much closer to it now that I've moved across city lines. I'm going to just do it anyway, since I only composted for maybe two months of the time I lived there, so they owe me a good thirty-odd months of accepting my food waste on principle. Not that they check resident status at the entrance...) But I refuse to simply use my plastic bin unlined by anything else, because as the waste accumulates, it liquifies, starting to smell and leaking putrid liquid in my bag as I carry it. So here we are again—I can line with a plastic bag, which I not only have a dearth of, but I don't enjoy doing because then I'm still stuck with the now-disgusting bag to dispose of later, or I can line with a paper bag, except I don't have any of those either. Is it better or worse to purchase paper lunch sacks to contain the veggie refuse (introducing waste, including water waste in the manufacturing process) to prevent all my biodegradable waste from entering the landfill, where it is no longer to actually decompose due to lack of oxygen and thus absence of the bacteria that break it down? (An apple core only rots measurably faster than a styrofoam cup when you bury them in your backyard for science class, not when you throw both of them away—shrouded in a plastic bag, no less!—to enter a landfill.)

Gah, I need numbers! I need data! (Better yet, I need someone else to gather the numbers and data and make a nice little website telling me what to do!)

My other option—and don't think I haven't already done this to some level on light-waste weeks!—is to sneak my paper to be recycled into an unsuspecting neighbor's under-stuffed paper bag. I'm pretty sure that's technically illegal, though, not to mention embarrassing if I they catch you. And it doesn't help with my bathroom trashcan!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Subscriptions

I've always been rather disappointed by the subscription model's triumph over every other reasonable way of doing things, presumably primarily because I just can't shake the feeling that after paying month after month for one's entire life, one doesn't actually have anything for the trouble. This is pretty much the argument for buying a house rather than renting: you may still spend your life paying for a place to live, but at the end of it all, you wind up with a house. At any rate, I've always chafed at the idea that cable TV and phone service, for example, require eternal payments. (I mean, I understand the concept that you get something as long as you pay for it, but back in the day when people were predicting we'd all carry tiny computers and communication devices in our pockets, monthly service fees were never part of the picture.) I would probably have less of a problem if the pricing seemed more reasonable, but I think it's pretty obvious the companies just charge you as much as the disposable income you have (or debt you're willing to acquire), so I'm less likely to accept it as a legitimate cost of providing service.

I think this is one of the reasons I have such issues viscerally with the idea of e-readers. They're not subscription, but it leaves me feeling the same. If I'm going to pay for books, I want to actually own something afterward. I mean, clearly you do still have your digital books, but it doesn't feel as substantial or as real as paper books. Digital books seem less than two-thirds real, but you're paying two-thirds the price of a real book. (For some reason I don't have this issue with music. I have no problem buying music online, at least actual MP3s. (Now, the old iTunes songs that would suddenly become useless if you switched from Apple to anything else, on the other hand...))

Anyway, all of this is what makes it so weird that today I found myself suddenly having a vision of a happy, unencumbered future where I would hardly own anything, just pay for and use things as I needed them and then not have to deal with them any longer. This is (as far as I can tell) motivated by two things.

First, I'm moving in a few weeks, so I've been on a purging spree. I spent last weekend listing the majority of my DVDs and a not entirely insignificant number of books online to be sold. Going through all those movies and posting them for such insignificant sums of money while realizing how much I'd spent acquiring them in the first place (and how little use I'd since gotten out of them) was pretty dispiriting. I was sitting there thinking to myself how much richer I'd be if present me had somehow managed to go back and tell past me not to spend so much energy trying to build up a DVD collection when I really wouldn't watch them all that frequently (I'm not the kind of person who enjoys watching the same movies over and over, it seems), my tastes would change, and once Netflix came around (hm, a subscription service I'm more or less at peace with—eventually, at least) I would entirely quit buying new DVDs and then quit watching the old ones as my DVD collection became more and more of an afterthought. (Then I started wondering what things I'm spending money on right now that I'd lament as shortsighted and misguided in five to ten years...)

Secondly, I joined Zipcar today. For some reason, I'm really, really excited by its entire concept, even though it is in no way different from anything else one might pay for and then not own at the end. Somehow, I think it's pure genius that you can have rights to occasional use of a car while not having to own, maintain, or insure it, etc. while not feeling the same excitement about cell plans or TV. (Maybe it's because cell phones and TVs aren't as annoying to take care of? A cell phone isn't a big enough investment for you to be terribly put out when you have to replace it; TVs don't really require any maintenance, just a place to sit.) For some reason, I see Zipcar as a liberating service rather than a restraining one. I wonder if this is is because I come at it from not owning a car, so it only adds to my possibilities, whereas if I were replacing a car with Zipcar, I might resent that I was still incurring vehicle-related costs but without even the benefit of owning it.

And there's the rub: why is owning something inherently better? The reason you own things is so you can use them when you want them. But if everything is set up to be easily accessible and not terribly expensive, you can still pretty much use them when you want them—and all without having to store them anywhere!

And that's when I realized that between Zipcar, Netflix, and my local library, I was doing an awful lot of using-without-owning that I was pretty excited about. (I mean, I haven't actually used a Zipcar yet, but how can it disappoint?) Part of me feels like I'm throwing money away with Netflix, but then again, I do feel like it works pretty well with the way I watch movies. I can watch stupid movies I would never want to pay to go see or even to rent individually but am still for some reason interested in; I can watch really random and obscure stuff; I can watch weird stuff without feeling judged by the Blockbuster clerks or like I'm making them feel awkward (I'm looking at you, Ms. "And here's Eve Ensler—oh—Monologues"); I can watch stuff without even exerting the energy to go out somewhere to get it; I can work through a list of things I feel like I should see without ever having to actually decide "OK, today is the day"—it just shows up on my doorstep, and then once it's there, of course I have to watch it...eventually; since I never really want to watch a movie more than once a year (or longer), I don't feel like I'm wasting money on any particular movie. The library was similarly freeing (though I'll still definitely make an argument for having a book collection...but I'll admit my habits of the past few years were a little overboard and perhaps counterproductive). The library is great for new books I feel some push to read because I keep seeing them reviewed in all my news sources but probably don't actually want to own, particularly in hardcover (I hate hardcover books for some reason), but which are too time-sensitive to wait for the paperback editions. It's also good for all the stuff I feel like I should read or to fill in the gaps. There's less pressure to get a certain dollar amount's worth of enjoyment out of any given book, so since there's less at stake, like with Netflix, I'm more prone to dabbling.

So what's next? I really like the idea of owning almost nothing, just renting/borrowing what I need as I go. It feels more truly environmentally responsible: rather than every house having a car and presumably largely overlapping DVD collections and—to a lesser extent, I would guess—book collections (and whatever else I'm not thinking of yet because I'm too in the box), it makes way more sense to share a smaller numbers of cars, movies, books.

Really, to make another dent in my acquisition habits, it would have to be clothes. Unfortunately, that seems a little more problematic to implement well. I know people who use Bag Borrow or Steal so they can have fancy, expensive purses while not having to actually make the investment. Unfortunately (well, fortunately) designer handbags aren't really on my radar, so that wouldn't be quite so useful for me, but I applaud the concept for those who are interested. I think you can do that with fancy jewelry, too. Maybe kitchen supplies? I don't really need to own a panini press, a blender, a waffle iron, a pasta maker, a rice maker, such a variety of cake and pie and muffin pans, and so forth—wouldn't it make sense to share (and not have to store everything all in my house)? I've pretty much decided that I'm not terribly interested in actually owning a house (like cars, they're an awful lot of work), so I'm more or less unconcerned with renting for the rest of my life, unless that's going to leave me ruined in retirement.

I'll have to give this more thought, but I'm definitely excited about the general idea of having less stuff and a less cluttered living space and life. If the subscription model gets me there, I guess count me in.

Thoughts on States' Rights

Despite my absolute abhorrence of gun ownership and use and secret desire that the Second Amendment had never been written (or the punctuation therein had at least been applied less ambiguously), I find myself supporting the Supreme Court's recent decision (McDonald v. Chicago) that local or state laws cannot entirely prohibit handgun ownership. Why? Because I believe in a strong central government more strongly than I believe in gun control. I think it's pretty self-evident that states should not have the ability to entirely rescind rights given to its residents by the federal government. (Disclaimer: I have never taken a constitutional law course, and so while I know there are things going on with the Fourteenth Amendment and incorporation and such, I'm not even pretending to speak authoritatively about specific legal precedent, etc. This is all just one average citizen's "common sense" thoughts with very little background info other than the text of the Constitution.)

Only the First Amendment explicitly states it is enumerating rights that "Congress shall make no law respecting"; the rest simply refer to rights of "the people," "any person," or "the accused." Thus it seems to me it's entirely legitimate to assume that the entire Bill of Rights, with the exception of the First Amendment, describes rights that all U.S. citizens have and that neither the federal nor state or local governments can take away. (Lucky for us, the First Amendment very definitely was part of this mysterious incorporation process that somehow the Second Amendment was left out of, because it apparently seemed pretty obvious to everyone else that if Congress can't censor what you say, neither should your state legislature or city council.)

In general, I think the rights conferred upon citizens by the federal government should be the absolute minimum recognized by states, that states could grant extra rights but couldn't take away any already granted by the federal government. How can a state claim jurisdiction over something that the country of which it is a member has already granted to every citizen (resident?)? If people could be citizens of the U.S. without somehow being under the jurisdiction of any other governmental body, there might be a case to be made that states can then do whatever they want and if you don't like it you can go someplace else, but to me it seems like it's entirely pointless to be granted a right by the federal government if it's entirely possible every single state (you have to live somewhere!) would curtail it. Then where would you be?

Thus, the first issue I have with state's rights: that (in some cases) a person who is a resident of both the United States and a specific state is thought to somehow be primarily under the second-tier state's jurisdiction and only secondarily under the jurisdiction of the first-tier, overarching federal government. (I know the Ninth Amendment confers all powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states, but I'm talking here about the ones I think it does very definitely enumerate.)

At first blush it seems all very nice and reasonable that local governments are best situated to rule and regulate themselves, that the people in an area may have different concerns than the country overall and that they might prefer to regulate different aspects of life or regulate life in different or opposing ways to those of some other locale. After all, who wants some distant bureaucrat telling them how to best run their own affairs? However, I think local rule can only be truly fair and effective when communities are remarkably homogeneous and when everyone there chose to live there.

Regarding the inevitably incomplete homogeneity: I think local rule tends to silence minorities (of all varieties) even more effectively than federal rule does. On a nationwide scale, people who are the minority in a city or state might be either a much larger minority (say, African-Americans in New Hampshire versus the entire U.S.) or even the majority (say, conservatives in Massachusetts versus the country at large). There is simply more room for a meaningful debate about equality and representativeness and more impetus toward protection of minority rights on a nationwide level due to the increased visibility and larger numbers. Protecting the rights of one gay couple in some random small, overwhelmingly conservative and/or religious town may not seem like a legitimate issue to the rest of the townspeople (it's just a few people being deviant or provocative or asking for special treatment), whereas on the national stage gay rights are at least a recognized concern, however divided governmental bodies and the populace at large may be on the issue. Minorities deserve protection no matter where they are, but if they're a small enough minority, a lot of times it's not even clear to the majority that they are a distinct minority that merits protection. It's helpful for a more removed federal government to make these calls.

Regarding choice: If every state had a clearly-enumerated list of laws that was easily compared to that of every other state and if all residents of a state chose to move there based on their willingness to be bound by those laws, I would have no issue whatsoever with states enacting whatever laws they so desired. However, the vast majority of people (myself excluded) probably did not simply pick a state they wanted to live in based on the political and social attitudes represented therein. People live places for all sorts of reasons: they were born there, their parents moved them there when they were still minors, that's where they went to school and so they stuck around, that's where the job they found is or their job relocated them to, that's where their or their spouse's family is, that's the kind of climate they enjoy or has the sort of landscape they find enjoyable (hiking, rafting, skiing, beaches, etc.). While many of these may in some way reflect legal structures (regarding industry regulation or educational funding or what have you), the laws of a place are very rarely a conscious consideration of any one individual when planning to relocate. It could be argued that that is the fault of the individual, not the state, but I find this pretty unrealistic.

In addition, there are plenty of reasons why the state you're in now is likely to be the state you stay in. Many poor people lack the resources to relocate or the skills to find employment in certain other regions of the country. And, more than anything else, people just tend to go for the status quo, so all other things being equal, they tend to stay put.

Moreover, it's not like everyone is just born into some limbo state and brought to the age of majority in an entirely neutral place then left to select where they want to live. I think it is deeply unfair to have minors be stuck some place that may have pretty extreme laws they never voted for or even tacitly accepted by willingly choosing to reside there. Pity the poor gay kid stuck against his or her will in a red state without hate crime legislation, gay marriage, civil unions, nondiscrimination policies that include homosexuality, etc. What about teenagers who want contraception who live somewhere they can't get it without parental consent? What about atheists (or just science nerds) living somewhere that mandates equal time for intelligent design as evolution? What are they supposed to do? It's hardly their choice to be there, and they have absolutely no representation. (I'm sure equally terrifying examples could be generated regarding living in a ridiculously liberal state, but I'm having trouble coming up with those since I just don't think like that. Or, you know, maybe not, since liberal states tend not to restrict what people can do; you can always be more conservative than your surroundings, but being more liberal than your surroundings often runs you up against legal bounds.) Simply because the adult population of where they live is unlike them, these children are stuck in what is quite possibly a hellish existence for them. With a stronger central government making many of the decisions that are now left up to the states, laws would probably be a little more balanced and mainstream, severely disturbing a much smaller percentage of the populace.

(Of course, the same argument can be made regarding citizenship on the national level—a relatively small percentage of the world's population actively chooses in which country they want to live, and even if there were free movement between all nations, minors would still be stuck where their parents want them to be. This is one of the reasons I think Hobbes's social contract is full of crap—nobody alive today actually made a conscious choice to leave the state of nature and join into the leviathan. Regardless, we as a country can't really do much to change that, but we could try to make life suck less for kids who aren't like their parents who happen to live in this country.)

And now the flip side of mobility: especially nowadays, everyone moves across state lines. (OK, not everyone, but 22 million people moved across state lines between 1995 and 2000, which appears to be about 13% of the population. In five years. So obviously way more than that has moved across state lines at some point in their lives.) It is absolutely impossible to be aware of every difference in law between your old state and your new state, especially before moving. (I'm still blown away that there's not a nice handy website that encompasses all state laws ever and permits them to be compared; states' websites are hit or miss, and they're all obviously in different formats and pretty much impossible to compare.) So you move to another state because of your job or something, and then the next thing you know, you learn you can't talk on your cell phone while driving, or your 17-year-old son can be charged with statutory rape for sleeping with his 17-year-old girlfriend, or you can't get a no-fault divorce without a year's separation first, or gay partners of biological parents don't have any legal rights over kids that were previously considered equally theirs, or it's illegal for medical insurance to cover abortions (or the reverse of any of these scenarios, though again, I'm having trouble seeing how discovering that the opposite of any of these was the case would be as problematic—I guess there are plenty of people who would like the 17-year-old boyfriend of their daughters to be made sex offenders as punishment for premarital sex (essentially) and would be disturbed by the kind of laws that doesn't make it statutory rape if both parties are under 18 and within two years of each other's ages or whatever, right?). Most of these situations are ones that people would never expect to find themselves in in advance (divorce, abortion, children committing sex crimes, etc.) so they aren't that particular about seeing what the law has to say until it's suddenly applicable. How do you know, short of reading the entire legal code (which I assume is pretty obviously ridiculous) what random laws there may be that might crop up to impact your life in ways you never imagined?

If laws were consistent nationwide, there might still be things you never thought to look into, but you'd have a much better chance of hearing or seeing something about them if they were applicable to everyone in the entire country. You'd know that if it only took a month for your brother and sister-in-law to get a divorce, you could get one in about the same timeframe without having to remember that they live somewhere that's not New York (although actually I think that changed recently). You'd know if you read some story about surrogate mothers winning custody of the kids they bore that you'd better beware of that sort of thing if you're using any sort of nontraditional means of reproduction. (You'd know if you read some story about surrogate mothers suing for and losing custody of the kids they bore that it obviously wouldn't be an issue for you, rather than getting lulled into a false sense of security and then, ta-da, oh, that story took place in some other state and is actually the exact opposite of what would happen in your state.)

Basically I just don't think modern life works well with such a fractured system. In the age of the internet (which brings information about myriad such situations people find themselves in, often without making it clear how this may differ from state to state) and of frequent inter-state relocations (which suddenly and entirely (and largely unnoticedly) change the rules by which one is to abide), so many independent sets of laws seems pretty ridiculous. And then of course there are the ones, like most family laws, that turn into a giant mess when one party relocates. If you have a child with a partner you're not married to and then that partner leaves you and takes the kid to another state, which state's family laws apply? If you're gay and the state they went to doesn't recognize civil unions, domestic partnerships, or non-biological parents' rights but the state you resided in and formed your family in did, now what? Wouldn't it just be easier if it were the same everywhere? So yeah, I think states are pretty anachronistic, personally.

Fighting for our Freedoms?

Preemptive disclaimer: I do not say this to downplay the real sacrifices, both on the battlefield and in later life, members of the military have and do make. (In fact, I think what our military asks people to do to their psyches is unconscionable and exploitative, but that's an entirely different can of worms I don't feel like getting into at the moment and has nothing to do with the specific, individual soldiers holidays like Memorial Day are meant to honor.)

HOWEVER:
I really, truly, honestly do not understand what people mean they thank our troops "for fighting for our freedoms!" Sarah Palin (I know, I know) tweeted this yesterday [edited to add spaces because my blog is not limited to 140 characters]: "VETERANS, not reporters, give freedom of the press. VETS, not politicians, give freedom to vote. VETS, not campus radicals, give freedom to assemble." Normally I would write this off as Palin being Palin, but I have heard the exact sentiment (though perhaps not those specific examples) every Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and many Fourths of July of my life from real-life, normal people I know. (At church, it was always "...who gave their lives for us to have the right to sit right here today and worship as we see fit.")

I just don't get it. I'm not trying to make a political statement abut war or the military or mock Sarah Palin for being an idiot (shocking, I'm sure) or decry the American habit of fetishizing our troops or imply that our troops aren't nice, honorable people or anything; I legitimately do not understand. (So if you can explain it in a way that seems at all coherent, please do.)

The general "fighting for our freedoms" formulation seems to imply that had we not fought in any or all of the wars we had, our country would have been taken over by our enemy or our government would have been overthrown or something catastrophic would have happened that would result in a totalitarian regime that would control our lives in unprecedented ways, banning religious expression and free speech, censoring the press, and doing who knows what other evil things. That's just plain untrue. In World War II, we weren't fighting for the freedom of American citizens, we were fighting to prevent Germany's gaining European hegemony. (The Pacific theater might provide more of a case since Japan actually did attack American soil, but again, had we not retaliated, I don't think anyone actually means to suggest that Japan would have rolled tanks into Washington and abolished freedom of speech.) If I remember correctly, World War I had even less to do with the U.S. Vietnam and Korea, though part of the general communist threat to the dominance of democracy and freedom in some grand sense, didn't have anything to do with fighting for U.S. citizens' rights.

Obviously the Revolutionary War was fought for the principles of democracy and freedom (though actually not the ones Palin or anyone else mentions since those tend to be part of the Bill of Rights, which didn't come until later). The War of 1812 seems a legitimate case of fighting in defense of the country and thus, by extension, the freedom of its citizens. Even the Civil War was legitimately about protecting a way of life in the United States (each side would have that perspective, even, though obviously they disagreed about which way of life deserved protection). But nobody still living knows anyone who fought in any of these wars, so presumably those aren't the people actually being thanked (which is a pity, really, because Memorial Day seems to be turning into Veterans Day part 2 or a Military Appreciation Day or something instead of a day of remembrance for those who have died).

So how about the current wars? I mean, I know we were attacked, but even so, and even despite the fact that it was indeed intended to be an attack on the American way of life and presumably on democracy and freedom, the terrorist groups we're talking about simply don't have the power to take away our freedoms. They're not big enough or strong enough to keep you from exercising your freedom of speech in this country. They're not in a position to tell you you can or can't worship as you please. And really, the 9/11 attack has nothing to do with Iraq at all, though I suppose had it turned out Hussein actually possessed WMDs, those would have posed a legitimate threat to America or Americans (depending on what he would be planning to do with them). Of course, even so, I'm still not sure anyone's ability to blow up chunks of the country in any way gives them a chance to deprive us of our freedoms unless they are able to then take over the country and replace the government.

So I wouldn't find it nonsensical if people thanked the military for "fighting for freedom" or "fighting for democracy" or even "fighting to protect our interests"—one or the other of those is actually applicable in every conflict we have gotten involved in. But fighting for our—Americans'—freedoms, especially fighting for specific freedoms like those of free speech, press, and assembly? I think that necessitates a deliberate (and inaccurate) reframing of the entire narrative of the American military's actions.

Regarding Palin's statement specifically, I do agree that reporters are not who guarantee or protect freedom of the press, politicians are not who bestow suffrage upon us, and protesters are not the source of the right of assembly. But neither are vets of any war in the past 300 years responsible for the granting of those rights (obviously) or even the protection of them in any literal sense. It's not veterans who give us the right to assemble peacefully, it's the first amendment to the Constitution. Barring an invading force of extreme power, the only way for our freedoms to be abridged is through the United States government itself in concert with a lack of attention or political will on the part of the citizenry.

Looking to be Offended

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On Douches and Assholes

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The Darndest Things

Adults swapping cute-child stories seem to be the last bastion of socially acceptable mockery. Is there ever a situation where "[Offspring] said the cutest thing yesterday!" ever doesn't mean, "God, children are so delightfully stupid!"? Your job as a parent is to correct your child's misconception and explain the world in a way so as to help them understand how things work, not go around and tell all your friends the dumb way your child thought things happened.

Especially if the misunderstanding involves sex, death, reproduction, or religion, probably the reason they hold such quaint misunderstood notions is because you did a really bad job of explaining it the first time around. If your kid says something 'cute' based off a baby being in someone's stomach, that's because someone was too squeamish to explain a uterus (or didn't even bother with the distinction of "a special compartment inside of Mommy"). When a kid worries a watermelon might grow in their stomach, dollars to donuts that's because some uncle or friend of the family told them not to swallow seeds or that's what would happen. How is a child supposed to not hold a warped view of reality when people insist on telling children out-and-out lies (Santa Claus, storks, boogey men who will steal you away if you don't stop crying) or oversimplifying the truth to a degree that it's no longer even slightly accurate? Your child is only going to know what you tell them (until school age, but even then, what the larger pool of adults tell them), so if they don't understand something, it's not cute, it means you're failing them. (It should be embarrassing for you to tell your friends how poorly you must have explained reproduction for your child to come out with that doozy.)

We do all agree that a parent's primary job is basically to turn their child into a real person, right? You're supposed to teach your child, help your child negotiate relationships, show your child how to do things, model behavior, etc. All too often I feel like adults think "having a baby" is a decision about them and what they want out of life, about liking pre-rational children and thinking they're adorable and wanting to have one for their very own. Well, that's not quite how it works. You're not making the decision to have a cute little baby, you're making the decision to bring a person into the world. Let's act like they're actually a person with (to varying degrees depending on their level of development, but almost always more so than they're given credit for) their own legitimate goals and not just an accessory or a lifestyle choice or something to give you meaning and purpose and make you happy and fulfilled.

At the very least, if you're going to laugh about your child's misguided notions, don't do it in front of them. I'm sure parents don't think they do this, but they totally do. Even if they don't tell the "cute" think Child A said today when Child A is in the room, they'll talk about a cute thing another child who's not present did. (Children aren't stupid. They know if you talk about their sibling or your friend's children with your friend, you talk about them too.) Or they'll tell the story when the child is in another room playing and ostensibly oblivious. Children hear. And if they're anything like me as a child, they're mortified. Children can tell that "cute" is code for "stupid," even if that's not what you think you mean. Why else would everybody be laughing merely from hearing the thing the kid said repeated with absolutely no build-up or context? It's humiliating to have your parents tell a story about you thinking something that you have since been told is not the case solely for the amusement of others. It's humiliating and bewildering to hear them tell the story of what you said and hear people laugh and still not know why it's funny. You were simply trying to clarify something about the world, and all they can do is squeal about how precious you are. Children don't want to be precious, they want to understand.

Civilization

I'm too civilized.

Lest that sound conceited, let me hasten to explain I see this as a bad thing. (And perhaps I should rephrase: I place too much stock in the tenets of civilized interactions. Or: I rely too heavily on civilization.)

I thrive, insomuch as I do thrive, on order and predictability. My natural instincts seem based upon other people behaving as I would expect in a given situation (by which I think I mean as society expects, but probably the rest of society doesn't really). I become distinctly uncomfortable when people don't play by what I perceive to be the rules of social contact: random strangers asking for money for themselves or to save the environment or for gay rights, the gymno-dancing guys on the train who demand your attention and appreciation and try to demand your money, children too small to recognize that they're in your personal space, teenagers and their inherent unpredictability, and the like. I don't even like participatory theatre because I feel they are breaking the "rules" of theatre and violating the fourth wall. My ire is activated most strongly by people behaving as they like despite rules to the contrary, rules that enhance the flow of life in all its efficiency: people riding their bikes on the sidewalks despite the "no bikes" symbol emblazoned at every crossroad, people who stand on the left side of the escalator clogging everyone else's progress, people who walk four abreast on the sidewalk with a stroller and a dog so they're impossible to pass. Cutting in line, not waiting one's turn, demanding attention and special treatment—all the gravest of sins in my world. The vast majority of things I get angry or concerned about have nothing to do with anything real and inherently wrong; they are simply triggered by people failing to follow the laws (yes, as I perceive them) of polite civilization.

In addition, I have very bad instincts and poor judgment when forced to react quickly. Take the predictable nature of my life out of the equation, and I just simply die. I'm only still alive because the only split-second life-or-death decisions I ever need to make involve traffic, and luckily everyone else is paying attention and trying not to kill me as well. (I'm the kind of person who would die in a fire despite the fire alarm going off simply because no one else seems to think it's a real fire and aren't panicking and running out. I'm not going to be the first one to shrug off the dignity of normal life to break for the exits.)

So what happens when I suddenly find myself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or (for those of you who prefer less absurd thought experiments) an extended natural disaster situation? After hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, I somehow doubt people wait patiently in line for what they are aware is insufficient food or medical supplies. Generally the laws of society break down and people are left to fend for themselves, doing whatever is necessary to do so. I can just see myself refusing to make a pain of myself and thus failing to make it onto evacuation buses or getting the dregs of whatever supplies are being passed out because everyone takes more than they actually need or, again, goes before their turn. (Now, in true cases of immediate life or death, I imagine I would overcome my natural tendencies and push and shove with the best of them, but in only moderately dangerous situations—situations where the social order has broken down due to whatever event but where we're not actually in danger of imminent death—I would be at a severe disadvantage since my tendencies toward order and such would be less quickly eroded than others'.)

This is only made worse by my absolute distaste for guns. It is generally thought that in case of any event in which your basement stockpile of canned goods, bottled water, and gold bars might be needed, a gun is as well. (It has been brought to my attention that New Englanders may be unfamiliar with this idea. I suppose that means I have chosen my location well and that in the case of the rapture, belated Y2K disaster, or nuclear holocaust, I will be surrounded by fellow dazed and overly-civilized New Englanders and will perhaps not be taken advantage of.) I'm not entirely sure of the reasons most people would prefer to have a gun in the case of some sort of situation in which the government has collapsed or is simply too busy or too understaffed to deal with the general lawlessness (e.g., Katrina), but I would imagine it is seen mostly as a tool to ensure you don't get pushed around and taken advantage of by other less scrupulous people. There's also shooting squirrels for food and such, I guess, but that only matters once you've run out of tuna fish.

So it seems most people think that in the case of social collapse, people need weapons to protect themselves from people attempting to steal their food/water/supplies (seems reasonable) or looting for other items (though obviously this depends on the disaster; the end times don't seem like a particularly useful time to collect 18 televisions). There is also the idea that there may be roaming gangs with guns (probably, again, primarily to collect food and such from others, but given the situation, they could also simply be having fun terrorizing everyone else or, given a particularly severe and presumably permanent disaster, could be setting themselves up as the new powers that be—I mean, seriously, would you want to have to rely on a sketchy right-wing militia in an emergency situation?), though I have been mocked for this idea as well. (Again, I am particularly thankful to find myself currently situated surrounded by people who find such ideas absurd. I am sure were I still living in Georgia, it would sound much less outlandish in context.)

OK, so as a not particularly strong or intimidating woman with an extreme distaste for guns and unreasonably strong beliefs in civilization and its attendant rules who thus is obviously ill-prepared for the collapse of civilization, what happens to me in such a situation? My food all gets stolen, maybe I get forcibly kicked out of my house or wherever I'm holed up if someone with a gun thinks it's a better base of operations than wherever they are currently, I go out and collect food only to have it taken by someone with a gun who thinks they would benefit from it more than I, I go out to barter for something I need only to be ripped off with no recourse. There is pretty much no way for me to demand adherence to the laws of humanity and justice from from those I encounter without a sizable population (or just a powerful one in form of the government and its police force) backing me up and enforcing such rules.

(And all this is ignoring the more devastating results of a breakdown of society: rapes, hate crimes, torture... People are vicious, and when they feel threatened they will do all manner of abhorrent things to feel in control. When they're the only ones with weapons, they feel strong and like showing off their absolute power and taking advantage of those who are powerless. Once the balance of power has shifted and the rules of polite society and the restraint and civility that come along with them have vanished, I would sure hate to be a gay guy in the middle of, say, Oklahoma. Actually, I'd hate to be a woman much of anywhere. People only have rights because of civilization; take that away, and suddenly people are less concerned about equal rights or being PC. [That's not to say I think everyone secretly hates women and gays and racial minorities, but some people certainly do, and they're more likely to be the ones with guns... Plus, it only takes one.])

So, cheery thoughts this morning. I guess I can either just trust that civilization will never fall, at least for more than a day or two wherever I may be at the time, or I can suck it up and buy a gun. I find it pretty stupid to assume nothing like that could ever happen here and to me, but I don't want to be the kind of person who owns a gun in the interim, so I guess I'll just die if things ever get terrifically bad.

***

Incidentally, I read an article a few months ago that laid out the difference between moral transgressions and societal transgressions (killing someone versus failing to adhere to the rules of etiquette) and said that psychopaths tend not to make such distinctions. I started to get concerned, as I've long been aware that I tend to find social violations (the gross misuse of homophones, strangers on the street telling me to smile, riding bikes on the sidewalk) to be nearly as significant as actual moral violations (being mean to people, hurting people, being unfair). Apparently psychopaths fail to make the distinction and thus don't find their moral transgressions to be any more significant than the average person finds the transgression of using the wrong fork. I fail to make the distinction and thus find violations of etiquette and manners to be nearly as significant as the average person finds moral transgressions. I am unsure whether this puts me on par with the psychopath or makes me the anti-psychopath.

Homemade Holidays

As someone who is now entirely nonreligious, I am having more than a little difficulty with holidays. Christmas is obviously problematic. I love Christmas cookies and Christmas trees and Christmas lights and Christmas presents and Christmas dinner and Christmas stockings and Christmas carols and Christmas traditions, but I feel really uncomfortable celebrating a holiday the accepted origin of which is to celebrate Jesus' birth. (I know people who actually celebrate Jesus at Christmas are in the minority, but that's not really the point...especially as among the set of people I know, they're not really. I also know that Christmas and virtually every other holiday had pagan roots and the rituals were all whitewashed, but that doesn't really help.) Even the dreaded too-secular Santa Claus has his origins in a Catholic saint, despite all Coca-Cola's best efforts to make us forget that. Even such inoffensive holidays as Thanksgiving attract my ire. (See: Gladsgiving.)

I just read the book Good Without God by Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard. He feels that nonbelievers, just like everyone else, have the need for significant rituals and ceremonies in life, markers of time and occasions, celebrations of life and meaning. With that, I agree. Unfortunately, from there he decides that a humanist "congregation" (and he's a humanist "rabbi" because he's culturally Jewish; otherwise I guess he'd be a humanist "minister") should meet weekly (on Sundays, even); their children should go to Sunday school; they should have sermons about ethics and morals; they should celebrate "naming days" where a child gets "guideparents," secular weddings, secular funerals; they should celebrate a winter light holiday; they should even replace prayer with self-calming rituals like rational-emotive behavioral therapy. He does admit that sounds a little churchy (you think?) but claims it all meets fundamental human needs.

Now, I do agree that there do seem to be fundamental human needs for ritual and structure; ceremony; making meaning; lifting things above the ordinary; marking birth, transition to adulthood, commitment to a partner, and death, but I have a visceral reaction to what appears to be appropriating religious traditions wholesale. Just because nonbelievers need community and meaning doesn't mean they need a replacement for every single aspect of a religous life. To me, that smacks of being unable or unwilling to fully let go. (A feeling I really do understand. I miss singing hymns. I miss Christmas Eve services.) I'm sure there are nonbelievers who feel a church-shaped hole in their life on Sunday mornings, but I'm not one of them. Even before I had a problem with the God part of religion, the organized part of religion drove me crazy; why would I replace that with organized non-religion?

That being said, I do feel cheated out of holidays and do think it's important to celebrate the things that are meaningful in one's own life or worldview. I've been thinking about what existing holidays I can celebrate with some degree of personal integrity, what sorts of holidays are universally celebrated regardless of the specifics each religion puts on it, and what kind of holidays I might make up to add meaning in my life without simply appropriating existing ones and stripping them of their godly aspects.

The new year has always been a favorite holiday of mine. I like the idea of new beginnings, the cyclical and repetitive nature of time and life, a chance to stop and take stock of where you've been and what you've done in the past year and where you're going and what your goals are in the coming one. (The beginning of the school year used to serve a similar purpose for me, complete with its own school-supply-shopping-and-orgnanization rituals.) Similarly, birthdays serve an obvious (and related) purpose. They also mark time and are often occasions to reevaluate, and then there's the very humanistic bit of celebrating one's life and time on this earth.

That may be it as far as existing holidays. I'm OK with Halloween as is, but I'm not sure it's a super-humanist-y sort of holiday (and then there is the fact that it's All Hallow's Eve and all that, but I suppose that's counteracted by all the pagan stuff the religious aspect is shellacking). I like Fourth of July fireworks and cookouts, but that's pretty secular to begin with, and I'm kind of uncomfortable with unbridled patriotism, so that's not going to become a big meaningful one for me.

So then there are the big seasonal holidays that seem to be almost universal: some sort of harvest festival, some sort of spring rebirth/renewal festival, some sort of light-and-feasting festival around the winter solstice. People like food, people like flowers and sunshine, and people feel the need to be merry and well-lit in the dark days of winter.

What I'd really like is to celebrate personal holidays: anniversaries of my becoming a reasonable human being, of my entering adulthood, of the awakening of my interest in current events and the real world, of my deconversion, etc. Unfortunately there are no sharply deliniated dates I can pin down as the definitive day anything like that happened. (Of course, not that the lack of dates stops anyone else, so I guess I could just mash all those into June and August, which have a severe lack of good holidays, anyway.) Other than that, I guess there's always celebrations of favorite authors or personages (apparently Darwin Day is a big deal for humanists), but none of those sound particularly moving at the moment.

Maybe I'll just start giving my seasonal rituals and markers holiday-type names just to make them feel more official: Commencement of Asparagus Season, First Daffodil Spotting, No-Cancer-Yet Day (day after annual dermatologist visit), the Seasonal Closet Switcheroo, First Bike Ride, Crunchy Leaf Day, First Snowfall Day, Fatten Up for Hibernation Week, and the like—the more ridiculous the better.

Frustrations of a Free Market

Sorry, this is rather unwieldy and probably merely exposes my fundamental ignorance of all things economic...

I hate corporations. I really can't think of any company I would unreservedly support on all aspects of their product line and business model. Google comes closest, I suppose, but I can't even think of a first runner up...and while I like Google, they're certainly not perfect either. Obviously corporations are necessary since we can't all grow our own food and make our own cars and TVs and clothes and such these days since all of our very specialized knowledge and skills leave us unable to do much of anything else and because there's almost certainly someone out there better at inventing/making an X than we are. In theory, I will admit capitalism sounds like a good idea. Division of labor, competition, efficiency of markets—all this sounds great. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't seem to reflect the theory at all.

The general thought, or so I am told, is that in an open market, consumers purchase what best fits their needs, so the company that provides the best products makes the most money, and everyone (well, that company and the consumer pool as a whole) wins. Eventually one would assume other companies get the idea and make similar/better things, introducing competition (including price competition) and making the consumer even more likely to get exactly what he or she desires. I'm sure this is actually the way it worked in the very beginnings of capitalism, but it certainly doesn't anymore.

First of all, no matter how a market should behave, it never quite does because it's full of people who don't exactly act rationally in their own self-interest (shocker). People buy one brand over another because they like the packaging better, because they like the ads better, because it's the brand their parents used or that they have always used (particularly with personal care products like shaving cream and feminine hygiene items, lifetime brand loyalty is ridiculously high and surprisingly affected by parental use), because it's the only brand that works with their other related device (iTunes; video games and gaming systems; printer cartridges; razor blades), because it is carried in more stores, because it has an image that they like, because it's the only thing available (utilities companies that are the only companies available in certain areas), etc. A brand of soap could easily be better than the one someone has used for ten years, but people don't regularly have blind soap-testings to see if maybe their wallets should be voting for a better soap. Maybe Rock Band is superior to Guitar Hero, but if everyone has Wiis, everyone's going to be playing Guitar Hero instead. How is this the exercise of freedom of choice and rational weighing of the options? (Even if someone does regularly switch toilet paper brands to see which is the best, if everyone else is just using one brand because that's what they grew up using, it will be to no avail. Heaven help the poor lone rational actor.) I thought economists had recently 'discovered' this irrational phenomenon (judging by the recent spate of books, at least), but that hasn't seemed to significantly undermine faith in markets.

Even if you were entirely rational and made the best decisions for yourself in alignment with your principles, how exactly does one go about voting with one's wallet? If there is an infinite array of every possible choice, then it's obvious that simply selecting and purchasing the one that best fits one's needs will work quite nicely, registering one's preferences and encouraging companies to do more of what that company/product did and less of whatever is entirely undesirable.

In real life, though, there aren't infinite choices. If you want a computer, your infinite options are suddenly very limited in scope. You get two options (assuming average computer literacy): Windows or a Mac. Find Microsoft and Apple equally repugnant? Too bad. Want something more intuitive than Windows but less expensive/interconnecting/trying-to-run-your-entire-life than Apple? Again, good luck. In many situations, perhaps even most, the option you actually prefer isn't even available.

Now, I assume the pro-capitalism response to this would be that if nobody makes what you want, you can always start a company yourself to fill the gap. Obviously a nice sentiment, but come on; you obviously can't create a phone, a car, a TV, all the clothes you ever need, a health insurance system, and a food supply system that will best serve you all in one lifetime. There's way too much expertise you don't have and don't have time to learn. Plus, isn't that whole point of having companies exist—the division of labor? I would guess the more reasonable pro-corporation response would be that if there's really an unmet need, a gap in the market, someone will rise to fill it. Yes, well, unless it's less likely to make them money for some reason, or if the demand isn't high enough, or, or, or...any one of a number of reasons.

Doesn't constant competition in a market actually make it less likely that the best product will ever be created? Even if everyone is vaguely dissatisfied with the current offerings, they will likely still select what they consider to be the best available option, and there will likely not be a raucous demand for a better widget since this one is good enough. Never mind that much better widgets could easily be made; it's not worth someone's while to make them and then worry about how they're going to brand them, advertise, and get enough market share to make it worth their while.

Speaking of advertising and marketing, they warp the competition even further. It quickly becomes less about which brand of thingummy-bob is actually better and more about who has the best ad ideas or the most effectively designed marketing campaign. (Obviously advertising doesn't move people who are passionate fans of Brand X to consume Brand Y instead because it has funnier ads, but for people who have no strong feelings or who aren't fully informed, brand preferences can be easily influenced by the quality or ubiquity of advertising.) Brand recognition is also a problem for anyone trying to improve the market in any area where there are already entrenched competitors. Nobody wants to switch to the unknown because nobody else is using the unknown. Better to keep using an iPod because everyone else has one than to take a chance on some no-name MP3 player, right?

Then there's the problem that consumers often don't even have access to the information they would require to make rational decisions. Say someone only wanted to buy meat that had been raised humanely. Until very recently, they would be entirely unable to do this as nothing was labeled as cage free or free range or organic until enough people made enough noise. Say someone wanted to select which cell phone to buy based not on price or available service providers or features but on some other less popular criterion. Good luck trying to figure out which cell phone currently on the market has the smallest carbon footprint or is made by workers who are exploited the least.

...Which leads to my primary concern with the market system. Given that one's wallet can vote based on various aspects of the product in question itself (price, color, size, function, features, durability) or on any given aspect of the company as a whole (business ethic, country of origin, environmental effect, labor practices, humaneness, ingenuity, charisma of the guy in charge, or simply the fact that it's the best-known and therefore is assumed to be the best, period), how is the market supposed to effectively transmit all these choices to the companies' decision-makers? What happens when a company thinks people are buying all their stuff because their ads are awesome but people are really buying their stuff because of their decent labor practices? They'll spend more money on awesome ads, which would be kind of unnecessary. Or what if a company interpreted their high sales as consumers saying their features were better than their competitors' features but in actuality, their competitors have shoddy environmental practices and nobody wants to buy their stuff to send them a message? They won't try to improve their product's features because they think people love them, even if they're not even as good as those of the competitor.

Obviously it would never be the case that consumers as a whole would have the same response to any given aspect and that the company would entirely misjudge a giant movement, but I think that even makes my point stronger. With so many competing groups making purchasing decisions based on so many completely different aspects, how is anyone supposed to figure out what's actually working and what the consumer wants? I guess the idea is that it doesn't really matter, and if slightly more people favor one thing, it will have an advantage over others, regardless of whether it was preferred because it came in cute colors or came from an environmentally conscious company, and then the company and its attitude toward design and production and labor and environmental practices, etc., will hold more sway in some greater uber-market. Nice thought, but most of us want our better computers, toothpaste, or jeans now, not when the market finally subtly shifts in three decades to reflect the choices consumers are making now.

To me it really seems like consumers, rather than simply voting in a clear-cut manner on whether Product A or Product B is the best, are involved in complex behavioral shaping attempts. Oh, good, you quit exploiting Asian workers for pennies a day! I guess that means I can buy your products now since everyone else is still doing that. Oh, look, a slight design change. Yeah, I don't care so much about that; no reward for you. Urg, your CEO is kind of a jerk; maybe I'll show my disapproval of his comments by boycotting your products. Hey, your new source for raw materials is deforesting the earth at an even more-rapid pace than the last one—I'll stop buying your stuff even harder! (Great, I'm sure that last message came through loud and clear, considering there's no way for them to even note that change in your opinions.) Shaping works all right to train pigeons to perform tasks like pecking buttons to get food, but I'm not all that convinced it would work very well to convince unwieldy corporations to behave in accordance with your system of ethics all while producing stuff you actually like and that will improve your life.

(Obviously corporations don't actually care what you think, and I don't guess the free market really cares if you feel fulfilled and happy either, but still, doesn't it seem inefficient to anyone else to have no clearer way to communicate than through a simple up-or-down buy-or-not vote?)