Karen McKim's Open Salon Blog

Next big voting bloc: All the Single Ladies

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:05:16 -0400

News: Obama leads Romney among single women by 36 percentage points. There are 55 million single women in the United States, a big enough bloc to swing the election.

All the single ladies, all the single ladies!
All the single ladies, all the single ladies!

Now put your votes up!
Look at the polls, we just got pull.
We’re doing our own thinking.
We won’t take lies; if you want this prize,
You’re gonna hafta loosen up.
This voting bloc is ready to shock;
We’re rocking this election
We’re Five-five mil and we’ve had our fill.
We're gonna pick the next prez-dent.

Cuz if you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us.
If you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us.
Don’t pretend that it’s yours when it’s my body.
If you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us.
Wo oh oh-oh, oh oh oh, oh oh oh, oh oh oh

I got a right to choose I will not lose.
I’ll marry whomever I please.
If I act up, don’t call me slut.
You gotta learn to care what I think.
We need no permission, did we mention
We care about contraception.
You have your PAC but you still lack
What you really need to win this thing.

Cuz if you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us.
If you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us;
Don’t pretend that it’s yours when it’s my body.
If you want us then you gotta keep your laws off us.
Wo oh oh-oh, oh oh oh, oh oh oh, oh oh oh

Can you speak with more than one type of grammar?

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:05:50 -0400

I was fascinated by the speech patterns of a fellow bed-and-breakfast guest this past week. A certified Master Gardener from Minnesota, he was visiting Wisconsin with his wife and another couple to see a few noted gardens and attend a plant auction in a nearby Amish community.

As my husband and I shared wine and cookies with them in the Victorian-style sitting room, none of us had any reason to present any particular persona. We were simply being friendly as we crossed paths one evening.

This man--I’ll call him Bill--had retired from an information-technology career at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Still active in his early 70s, Bill had an expert's knowledge of gardening. He explained why he was visiting Wisconsin.

“We could of went to St. Paul…” he started one sentence. He chose to attend this particular plant auction because “I seen Amish nurseries...” When discussing the plantings at the bed-and-breakfast, he expressed appreciation for "them hydrangeas." He made few comments that did not include at least one example of non-standard grammar.

I’m not interested in what is 'correct' or 'incorrect.' What intrigues me is how this happens.

In the car on the way there, I’d been reading about our hard-wired human instinct to imitate each other--particularly in language. That research rings true with me: For at least half an hour after watching any 90-minute British film, I have to make an effort not to mimic the actors' accents and speech patterns.

So I cannot help but wonder: How does someone get educated, live, and work among standard American English speakers and listen to more than six decades’ standard American television and radio without having it affect his or her speech?

My parents used standard grammar, so I don’t know what it’s like to have more than one readily available set of rules. I know that people who do can switch between them. Like many white folks, I’ve heard black friends use standard American grammar in the workplace and use a different speech pattern with friends outside work. I can understand how and why they do that: They're moving between subcultures and using the grammar accepted in each.

But people like Bill and me live in same subculture. If I could have spoken openly with him, I would have asked if he was able to turn his non-standard grammar off and on and if so, whether he was aware when he was using each, and why he thought his non-standard grammar was coming out in the 'refined' setting of the bed-and-breakfast.

I would have asked if phrases like "we could have gone” or “those hydrangeas” catch his ear in the same way that phrases like "we could of went" and "them hydrangeas" catch mine.

I'll probably never know. Those are not questions you can ask politely, and at this stage of my life I'm not likely ever to live and work among people who don't use the same grammar I do.

If anyone reading this has personal experience in being able to use more than one set of grammatical rules, I'd love to know what you think.

And now, on to the voting booth!

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:03:12 -0400

In a memo prepared for the March 30 meeting of Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board, GAB staff report finding five (5) fictitious names among 900,938 valid signatures calling for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker. Despite the alarms of fraud raised by Madison's right-wing propaganda mill, the MacIver Institute, and amplified by Governor Walker’s friends at Fox, only Adolf Hitler, Mick E. Mous, Donald L. Duck, Fungky Van Den Elzen, and I Love Scott Walker were determined to be fictitious. (Princess High and Mohammed Ali were, upon review, determined to be legitimate electors.)

A recall election is officially ordered.

I'm not surprised. I spent several afternoons doing data-entry from these petitions. The voice of the people was handed to me in half-inch-thick stacks of 50 petitions. Approximately 50,000 hours of data entry were needed for the signatures turned in to the GAB in January. During my first volunteer data-entry shift in late February, I worked my way through four stacks—2.6 pounds of pure democracy.

I came to the job with a dry sense of civic responsibility, expecting as much fun as data entry usually offers. Three hours later, after my first shift, I left vibrant with affection for my fellow citizens and gratitude for the process of self-government.

Late on that gray February afternoon, about 60 of us brought our personal laptops to a large, plain basement room in a large, plain suburban office building, where we sat at folding tables and plugged our computers into extension cords taped to the floor. The instructions were projected in PowerPoint on the wall.

Working with photocopies made before the petitions were turned in, we entered circulators' names into a database in preparation for answering challenges that were expected from Walker’s organization. Once we were set up and instructed, our work was entirely between ourselves, our keyboards, and our stacks of petitions. This was work, not a social event.

As I unclipped my first stack, I expected to encounter many sloppily written, even illegible names. But instead, every page contained carefully written names and addresses, as if every signer felt the same need to speak in a clear, strong voice. Only a few were sloppy, and I did not see one that was completely illegible.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. At roadside booths during November and December, I had collected signatures myself. Everyone took time to listen to our instructions: "Print your name clearly in the first column; sign your normal signature in this column. Then print your mailing address here, and your voting municipality here—make sure you check one of these boxes to indicate whether it’s a town, village, or city. I can look it up for you if you don’t know. Finally, make sure you get the date right; today is..."

Even in the cold winter wind, people would remove their gloves to get a good grip on the pen and position the clipboard firmly in front of them to make sure they got the right information in each space. No one scribbled and ran. When they were not being used, we kept the pens in our pockets to keep them warm; people didn’t want to sign with slow-flowing faint ink.

Personalities emerged from the petitions as I keyed in the names. One circulator’s signature was written in careful Palmer Method penmanship, but Melvin’s hand shook and applied uneven pressure as he inscribed his information. I looked at the signatures he had collected: Esther, Lucille, Phyllis, Francis, Alvin. Most were written in similarly shaky but disciplined old-school penmanship. Several lived at the same address. Melvin must have circulated the recall petition among his friends in an old folks’ home.

Names like Britney, Brandon, Jason, and Ashleigh filled other petitions. On one, I recognized addresses in a student-housing neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin campus in Eau Claire, where my son attends school.

On petitions from Milwaukee and Madison, I recognized addresses from tony upscale neighborhoods and from the poorest areas. Most petitions came from cities I did not know as well—northwoods Minoqua; east-central industrial Appleton; southeastern bedroom suburb Brookfield; and the Mississippi River town of Onalaska. Dozens came from little villages and townships I'd never heard of.

I wondered whether another reviewer would notice that on one of the petitions I had circulated, most of the signatures had the same last name and were dated November 24. How many other Thanksgiving gatherings had been occasions for petition-signing? Dozens? Hundreds? Maybe thousands. Petitioning had begun just the week before.

I did not see one obviously fake name on any of the petitions I worked with. I thought of the Tea Partiers in Arizona and Texas who have signed up to review petitions online, eager to find ridiculous attempts at fraud. Slogging through un-amusing page after page of real names and addresses will be their appropriate reward.

When I was done, I returned my petitions to the stack of 10,000 others that had been entered by others during the same shift. At the end of the night, they would be put back with the other 142,350 petitions. News reports have put their total weight at between one and three tons.

Because of the road conditions, my husband was coming to pick me up in our four-wheel-drive vehicle. As I waited for him in the twilight, I thought about the signatures and watched the snow fall. Not one of the nearly-weightless snowflakes would, by itself, make any difference. But as they piled up, they were transforming the dirty-gray February landscape and making Wisconsin fresh and clean again.

You don't have to take my word for it. Just look at this blizzard of democracy .

The loyalty of liberals

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:03:20 -0400

As the civic life of America dissolves into partisanship and dysfunction, I cannot think of anything more worthy of study than Americans’ civic values.

Jonathon Haidt’s recently released book, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, is worth reading for two impressive explanations: 1) how human brains make and justify value judgments with nearly instantaneous reflexes rather than with reason, and 2) why our species evolved ‘groupishness’ and how that insight can help us think constructively about politics and religion.

However, I had hoped that Haidt would also make a convincing case for his theory that humanity’s moral senses can be distilled into a few basic building blocks, much as our sense of taste can be parsed into sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Haidt argues that all human values systems are based on only six moral foundations:

care/harm,
fairness/cheating,
liberty/oppression,
loyalty/betrayal,
authority/subversion, and
sanctity/degradation.

Libertarians, obviously, value ‘liberty’ above any other foundation. Haidt finds that liberals value ‘care’ and ‘fairness,’ while conservatives value all six foundations equally.

Humanity has been struggling to explain our moral sensibilities since we developed reason, so it’s no surprise that Haidt has not found morality’s Rosetta Stone. The Righteous Mind is an intriguing, rewarding read, but ultimately fails to make a good case for a universal, six-element morality matrix.

Like any other human, I come at his findings from my own moral home base. If these are the six universal moral taste buds, I should be able to describe any situation that evokes my moral outrage and find a reason for my reaction in at least one of Haidt’s moral foundations.

Okay, let’s try it. Mitt Romney’s tax returns revealed that he paid an effective tax rate of 15% on his income, which came from investments. That is lower than the rate paid by most paycheck-dependent families. Romney commented: “I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”

Do you feel moral outrage? I do. But why?

Haidt would attribute my reaction to a 'fairness' violation and predict I would complain, “The wealthy and powerful are…gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their fair share of the tax burden.”

I agree with that statement, but it does not touch the bedrock value that triggers my outrage. Even if there was no one "at the bottom" being exploited, Romney’s remark reveals a blindness to our moral obligation to support our community, commensurate with our resources and ability. I value fairness, but life's not fair and I can live with different tax rates and inequalities of net worth—as long as those differences and inequalities are not so great that they harm our community.

The main element missing from Haidt’s theory, for me, is community. I value behavior that contributes to building, maintaining, and not-damaging the network of human interdependencies. All of us, not just the oppressed and vulnerable, depend on this network. It has a value separate from, and greater than, that of any individual. Triggers that set off my ‘community’ moral alarm include:

not making contributions to the community proportionate with one’s ability to contribute, such as by tax avoidance or not voting;
damaging the commons by actions such as vandalism, pollution, or appropriation of common resources for private gain;
sowing civic discord, such as by promoting intra-group conflict or lying about matters of public-policy interest; and
damaging the mechanisms by which the community operates, such as by interfering with voting rights or by exercising power in ways that are not accountable to the community.

I feel so strongly about this value that if it was one of Haidt's six, I would identify it as ascendant, the single value that in a conflict should trump any other.

Hearing this explanation, Haidt might attribute my outrage at Romney’s behavior to a sense of ‘loyalty.’ And yet on his Moral Foundations Questionnaire (take it at YourMorals.org ), loyalty was my lowest score for any of the six foundations, lower even than the average among all liberals.

How could I score so extremely low on loyalty when I place such a premium on responsibility to community? The problem is that for Haidt, loyalty is manifest in activities such as being "proud of my country’s history," and whether someone "showed love for his or her country," "conforms to the traditions of society" or "did something to betray his group."

With that skewed definition, Haidt finds—not surprisingly—that liberals are "ambivalent at best" about loyalty. Looking only for an American-flag decal, Haidt overlooks the loyalty expressed by my “Fox News Lies” bumpersticker. (Political lies rip at our civic fabric and impair our collective ability to make wise decisions.)

Haidt's writing is charmingly honest and accessible, so he does a good job explaining the evolution of his theory. In oversimplified terms, his matrix evolved as he worked to tweak it so that his disgruntled conservative subjects were satisfied by the scores they received.

Well, okay, that's one measure of accuracy when you're studying subjective attitudes. Now, Professor Haidt, in the interests of service to our national discussion of political values, how about parsing out ‘loyalty’ to capture service to one’s community (not just being proud of its history) and making contributions to something greater than one's personal bank account?

If you do that, my bet is that loyalty will shoot right to the top for liberals like me.

Note: I've added this book to my growing list of resources for talking with your right-wing neighbors.

What I wish Obama would say for Trayvon

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:03:43 -0400

It's been said that Democrats have a harder time articulating their values than Republicans do. The Obama Administration's response to the Trayvon Martin killing is, I think, an excellent example of a characteristically Democratic response. Obama has, as yet, said nothing. His press secretary said:

“We here in the White House are aware of the incident, and we understand that the local FBI office has been in contact with the local authorities and is monitoring the situation. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Trayvon Martin’s family, but obviously we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter. I would refer you to the Justice Department and to local law enforcement at this point.”

Now, imagine the national discussion if a president made the following statement:

My fellow Americans, I am speaking to you tonight about a national tragedy that affects every man, woman, and child in our beloved nation. It is the tragedy of fear. It is the tragedy of the price we pay for fear in hardened hearts and in pointless violence.

Trayvon Martin has paid for our nation’s fear with his life. Another of our fellow citizens, George Zimmerman, who could so easily have been Trayvon’s friend, will now live the rest of his days knowing he ended another's life.

Trayvon’s killing calls America, once again, to examine race issues. It is right that America should conduct this examination. But I am not talking about race tonight.

This incident will also energize debate about gun rights and gun control. But I will not talk about guns tonight, because it is not the Second Amendment that is causing Americans to arm themselves against one another. It is fear.

There have been times when Americans were justified in fearing each other. As European-Americans spread across our continent, our forebears attacked each other brutally and spent many nights in fear. As America grappled with the scourge of slavery, our forebears lived in fear of their owners, in fear of slave rebellion, and finally in fear of their own brothers as the Civil War pitted Americans against each other.

Fear caused some to kill and some to be killed. But this great nation was not built by victims and killers. This nation was built instead by the Americans who had the courage to talk to one another, to reach out, to work together, to risk getting to know strangers. Fear is not our heritage. Courage is.

Citizens in America today enjoy levels of peace and safety that are among the best in the world. The rate of violent crime in America has dropped by almost 20 percent in the past decade. Crimes against property in America have dropped by 25 percent during that same time. Americans own more things, more property, than ever before and the odds that any of us will be the victim of theft have not been this low since 1972.

We do not need fear one another. Caution is always wise, and it depends upon information and upon calm control, not fear. We can take action against crime in hundreds of cooperative, preventive, and civil ways without arming ourselves against one another.

I am asking all Americans to join me, at some time over the next week, to spend an hour in contemplation about fear in America, about the part each of us plays in spreading fear, and the part each of us could play in calming it.

When a voice on the television or radio tries to alarm us, we need to ask whether that voice is speaking the truth, or is hoping to raise ratings or revenue with shocking stories. When our neighbor or friend tells us of a rumor of violence, do we pass the story along, possibly embellishing it, or do we check the facts?

And when we encounter someone trying to rouse fear in our own or our neighbor’s heart, can we find the courage to speak out and say, “Enough?” Can we find the courage to stand up against fear with as much energy and conviction as those who promote it?

And when we are aware of a real risk to our safety, do we respond with immediate thoughts of force and violence, or do we respond by working with each other to seek out peaceful, civil ways to diminish the threat? America is rich in service and citizenship. Hundreds of neighborhood groups around America operate every day in courageously peaceful ways, assisting police rather than taking over for them, helping newcomers and visitors find their way through their communities instead of attacking them. These citizens have the courage to talk, to communicate, to collaborate, and to work with their neighbors to use nonviolent methods of resolving disputes and fears.

I am only your president. I do not hold any levers that calibrate fear or courage in American hearts. Some will surely find reasons to criticize me for what I have said tonight, but I cannot let my fear of their criticism keep me from speaking to you about this. I am sworn to insure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. And in that capacity, I am asking you to help. I am asking every American to stand with courage against fear.

Thank you.

Note: I've made a few edits in this post following some of the comments to improve the clarity of its intended focus, which was not particularly to criticize Obama, but to explore the possibilities of progressive moral leadership.