Category: People

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People Writing

Me and Emily: Getting to know you

Today I packed my trunks with borrowed books and made my way through the gray and thoughtful day to fulfill my duty returning my overdue books to the library.

The library is my main charity because I am almost always late returning books and consequently pay nice fat fines. We have a very good deal worked out between us: I check out books whose yellowed pages crack with unused age; and in exchange give them money they can use to buy bright, eye-catching masterpieces of the moment, such as Who Moved my Cheese.

Still, my room has taken on a slightly acidic smell from failing books and my cat can’t lie in the sun on my desk, and it’s time to return my library and begin anew.

Among the books I returned today were Emily Dickinson books: the spine stretched Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet, the book that roared; Portrait of Emily Dickinson by Higgens with is mention of Emily like bits of candied pineapple among the cake of others faces.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

There was the enigmatic Open me Carefully with letters from Emily to her sister-in-law with little interpretation, which was remarkably refreshing. Fisher’s We Dickinsons was an easy read, a fanciful tale of Emily told from the perspective of her brother and geared for young high school eyes and ears — all goodness and humor with nary a dark spot to spoil the white pages. It’s badly out of print, having scrubbed all the parts suited to the macabre nature of youth.

There was Habegger’s My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickson, with a minimum of all that sentimental rubbish about the poet. There was another book, and now I can’t even remember the name but it had a green cover, an author whose name began with ‘H’ and repeated bits and pieces from most of what the other books said, which is probably why I can’t remember it and didn’t bother to write down the title. I am not a biographer or responsible historian. I am only a curious person.

If you search for books on Emily Dickinson at Amazon or some other online books store you’ll literally find thousands about her, covering every aspect of her life from sex to prayer:

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, by Roger Lundin

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, by Genevieve Taggard

Emily Dickinson and her Culture: The Soul’s Society, by Barton Levi St. Armand

Emily Dickinson’s Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge, by Daneen Wardrop

Feminists Critics read Emily Dickinson, by Suzanne Juhasz (ed)

Visiting Emily, The Diary of Emily Dickinson, Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, A Vice for Voices, Emily Dickinson the Metaphysical Tradition…

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After a while, though, the books begin to blur together, differing only in their amazing variation of interpretation of a single word or simple act.

There are online sources devoted to Emily, too. One only has to search on Emily Dickinson to return hundreds of thousands of pages, including complete collections of her poems — in two different spots. Considering the number of poems in question, that’s a lot of poetry. Emily Dickinson wrote close to 2000 poems, and over 1000 of her letters to friends and family have survived, though not always unedited.

And the conjecture about her life! There is much fascination with the fact that she only wore white later in life, but if she had just chosen to wear black, nothing would have been said about the sameness of her dress. Her letters and poems are pulled and used as proof of her erotic love for both man and woman, so much so that it began to irritate me greatly, the historians can become so self-sure about their interpretations. I have to think that if she had truly loved as many people as has been claimed, there would have been no room left for writing — all her time would have been spent in a tizzy of frustrated longing with swirls of faces floating about.

Then there are the bees. She wrote passionately several times about the bees. I am sure there was something kinky about that.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

We hear stories about her reclusiveness, but facts surface and we find out that she actually attended church from time to time, or would visit a friend, and see people who visited. In truth, if she weren’t Emily Dickinson we would look at her life and not see anything more than an affluent, educated woman with a small circle of friends and family who liked to write a lot, was generous with those in need, but reserved and even shy around strangers and larger crowds, liked to cook and garden, didn’t like to travel, and didn’t go out very much.

There are facts we know: Emily Dickinson was the middle child of three children, born to affluent parents in a town, Amherst, Massachusetts, steeped in family history. An Older brother named William Austen, a younger sister named Lavinia. Mother ill much of her life, father domineering, but not punitive, and brother leading an interesting but not outstanding life. She and her sister were educated, and were encouraged in their education but not to the point of independence; neither married, both lived at home, took care of their mother, and then their father and then each other.

They had a considerable number of friends who held them in respect and affection, and both were regular correspondents, even with those who lived in town. Both did travel some, but not much and primarily to visit family, or in Emily’s case, to get care for her eyes, which troubled her most of her life.

Emily was interested in books and magazines and journals and was very well read; she loved her dictionary and liked to spend time just reading its pages, discovering new words. To some extent she was interested in the politics of the time, being for the freeing of slaves, but resisting the popular call to join the Christian revolution sweeping New England when she was younger. In fact, if she stood out for any one thing more than another, it was her ambivalent feelings about religion.

“Heavenly Father” — take to thee
The supreme iniquity
Fashioned by thy candid Hand
In a moment contraband –
Though to trust us — seems to us
More respectful — “We are Dust” –
We apologize to thee
For thine own Duplicity –

Emily was a good cook and had a passion for gardening but was indifferent to most other housework. She would make care baskets for those ill, worry about those in trouble, mourn, greatly, friends and family who died, and liked to tease those she cherished. She was friendly with neighborhood children, but didn’t attend many functions, nor did she see many people. One can sense in her letters and in letters about her, that she lived the life she wanted, not one forced on her, by either family or circumstances. In my favorite letter to her sister-in-law Sue, Emily wrote:

We go out very little – once in a month or two, we both set sail in silks – touch at the principal points, and then put into port again – Vinnie cruises about some to transact the commerce, but coming to anchor is most that I can do. Mr. and Mrs. Dwight are a sunlight to me, which no night can shade, and I shall perform weekly journeys there, much to Austin’s dudgeon and my sister’s rage.

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I could go on and doing so repeat other facts easily found online (thus forcing that student coming here to seek answers for their paper, “Who is Emily Dickinson” to give up in frustration at this point and move on…). I think the important thing to remember, though, is that Emily Dickinson wasn’t that different from many unmarried, affluent, strong-minded, white women of the time except for two important things: she loved to write, and she could write. Whether you like her writing or not, it was and is powerful and complex, and I think that’s why so much conjecture happens — how could someone who writes like this lead such a simple life?

The answer is in her work. Emily saw the richness, the nuances in everyday life — of simple likes and dislikes, bees in the spring, autumn leaves, books, family and friends, dictionaries and words, questions of God, slavery, and dying.

How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone,
And doesn’t care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears –
Whose Coat of elemental Brown
A passing Universe put on,
And independent as the Sun
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute Decree
In casual simplicity –

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I started this quest trying to better understand Emily Dickinson but after reading page after page about her life, I find myself no closer to understanding what she was like, fully, as a person. All we know about her is through her writing: her poetry and her letters. Unfortunately, writing allows the writer to hide in plain view.

The funny thing about this research is that I am not, or was not, a fan of Dickinson poetry. Oh, there were some poems that I liked, but for the most part, I found her work to be cryptic: too verbally rich with too many impressions compressed into too few words. I could not find the key that would open her poetry to me and allow to read poem after poem without feeling an ache in my neck, product of restlessness that lets me know that no matter how much I try to discipline my mind, what I am reading is not connecting with me.

It was a chance remark that sent me on this quest: about Emily Dickinson being unpublished except for a few friends and family while she was alive. I had not studied about Emily Dickinson in school and didn’t know about her obscurity in her lifetime. It amazed me that she wrote thousands and thousands of words that went unpublished during a time when all intellectuals — male and female — aspired to appear in print in one way or another.

I wondered, did she mind?

He scanned it-staggered-
Dropped the Loop
To Past or Period-
Caught helpless at a sense as if
His Mind were going blind-

Groped up, to see if God was there-
Groped backward at Himself
Caressed a Trigger absently
And wandered out of Life.

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Did she mind that she was unknown? Did she mind that her works weren’t being read by many others? We talk about the writer who loves to write regardless of the audience but scratch this insouciance ever so slightly, and you’ll find that there is a drive within most of us to be read. I am not so ‘pure’ as a writer as to be indifferent whether my writing is read or not.

Was Emily indifferent? This sent me to the library and the Internet, and eventually, to a deeper look at her work. In them, over time, I found a connection to Emily Dickinson and her work, and I wonder if that is the strength of her longevity and the root of her popularity — she articulates our formless thoughts and that’s why her writing is so unique, and sometimes so difficult.

Before my readings, I found Emily’s poems difficult to read, and could count on two hands ones that I liked; now, I find I can read all of her work and it means something to me and I can’t bear to choose between the writings to find favorites.

I found the key to Emily Dickinson’s poems — it was within me all along. But it was in her letters and in the words of those who discussed her after death that I found the answer to the question, “Did she mind?”

You cannot make Remembrance grow
When it has lost its Root –
The tightening the Soil around
And setting it upright
Deceives perhaps the Universe
But not retrieves the Plant –
Real Memory, like Cedar Feet
Is shod with Adamant –
Nor can you cut Remembrance down
When it shall once have grown –
Its Iron Buds will sprout anew
However overthrown –

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Categories
People Political

The evil that is Ashcroft

I have no comments to make after reading this article.

Mike’s Link Blog copied an article about Ashcroft, John Ashcroft’s Patriot Games by Judith Bacharach, in its entirey, from Vanity Fair. Before the magazine moves to have him remove it, you have to read it.

Remember, that this is a story about the Attorney General of the United States – the highest legal office in the land.

We have fallen so far.

Within weeks of Ashcroft’s arrival, the revolution began, although initially only his subordinates realized it, as it came in the form of a scolding memo. According to a former Justice Department lawyer, the phrases “We are proud of the Justice Department” and “There is no higher calling than public service,” both of which had been pro forma in certain letters sent out to citizens and congressmen above the attorney general’s signature, were to be excised. A call to Ashcroft’s office provided an explanation of sorts: “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; therefore we could not have a letter going out that would have the word ‘pride’ or ‘proud.’” Moreover, “there is a higher calling than public service, which is service to God.”

The oddest details seemed to carry grave theological implications, even in the Netherlands, where Ashcroft attended an international anti-corruption conference in May 2001. There, a trio of Siamese cats scampering about the residence of Cynthia Schneider, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, produced alarm in the Justice advance team, according to a highly placed source. “Are there any calico cats at the residence?” they inquired of embassy staff. Ashcroft, who would be dining with Schneider, considered such creatures “instruments of the Devil,” his people explained. (Ashcroft has denied any antipathy toward calico cats.)

Equally startling was the new composition of top staff. “To go from a Justice Department that was diverse, led by a woman,” recalls one ex employee, “to that first wave of primarily white guys, that was a major change.” Even after that first wave subsided (there was a flood of departures, including, after two years, Viet Dinh, the chief architect of the Patriot Act), the results were similar. Qualified female attorneys, complaining that Ashcroft “can’t look a woman in the eye,” found promotions to the highest levels almost nonexistent. Black men would be replaced by white men. In honor of Women’s History Month, Janet Ashcroft, once an outspoken opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, was asked by her husband to make a speech to women staffers. “Which is kind of a novel thing,” one listener says dryly. “And he introduces her by saying she’s the woman who taught him how to put dishes away. Yes, that’s what he said to the women lawyers. He said she taught him you should rotate your china, put your new plates on the bottom of the stack, so you don’t wear them out.”

I am speechless.

(Thanks to Teresa Hayden, who has copied another excerpt if the entire article has to get pulled.)

Update

From the Globe and Mail:

I am aware that many Americans are happy to trade their civil liberties for security, and as a visitor after 9/11, I’d rather an immigration officer erred on the side of precaution. But you do wonder where and when all this will end and what effect it will have on the ideals that once made America.

If the dissection of John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice in this month’s Vanity Fair is anything to go by, it seems that America will soon be at war with itself � because the application of the law is being invested with a moral zeal whose goal is, in the words of the U.S. Attorney-General, “not simply to investigate crimes but to prevent them before they occur.”

Second update *snicker

Calico cats admit fear of Ashcroft

The poll also revealed that other breeds, including Persians, short hairs, and even Siamese get their hackles raised when Mr. Ashcroft’s name is mentioned. “Strangely enough, only those funky hairless cats that look like skinned weasels seem immune to the Attorney General,” mused Miss Kelly. “I guess when you look like that, you don’t have much left to worry abou

Categories
People Political

Ralph Nader: Unsafe at any speed

I’ve never been a huge fan of Ralph Nader. Of course, some of this is explained by my long ago engagement with a man who was an ardent member of the Seattle Corvair club. Nader didn’t kill the Corvair – American’s never could handle the unusual styling– but he didn’t help.

I am aware of Nader’s involvement with OSHA, as well as the EPA. I am aware of his battles for the consumers, the little guys like you and me. I know he’s written books about women in the marketplace, and how we’re not paid equally, or treated fairly. Every one of these things should guarantee that I support Ralph Nader, but I just don’t care for him. Never have. Never will.

Of course now with Nader throwing in as an independent Presidential candidate, my lack of enthusiasm for him might be more understandable. After all, some say he threw the race to Bush in 2000 by siphoning off votes from Gore. I don’t know if this is true, but I don’t think his race hurt Bush.

Now, I’m already hearing that some disappointed Dean supporters have switched their support to Nader since Dean semi-dropped out. Why? It’s all in the process. The thing with many of the Dean supporters is that the process is more important than the results. Some really are indifferent if we have four more years of Bush, as long as the process, in this case a fight against a–what does Nader call it? Duopoly– succeeds.

That’s why I just don’t care for Nader. To him, the process was always more important than the result. The general fight was always more important than the specific battles; more important than even the results of those battles.

Nader sees everything in black and white. Corporate bad. Non-Corporate good. Everything he does, is based on this simple premise. The fight for the environment isn’t ‘for’ the environment, as much as it is against those corporate interests that would exploit the environment. A fight for public forests, isn’t necessarily to help the forests, as much as it is to fight the logging companies.

The same extends to issues of civil liberties. According to Nader, the fight for rights for blacks, women, and now gays, isn’t a fight for these groups as much as it is a class fight. In some ways, you might agree with him. In fact, isn’t reframing this into a genderless, sexless, colorless, raceless issue more effective in the long run?

At first glace, it seems the appropriate thing to do, but this breaks down in reality. When you see these struggles as a struggle of ‘class’, you tend to discount the individual differences and cultural clashes that arise with each fight.

The fight for rights for blacks isn’t just a struggle to ensure that blacks are not exploited by corporate or other class interests; it’s also a struggle for acceptance by the poor white folks that live in the trailer flying a confederate flag amidst the hills of Iron County, Missouri. How does one frame this as a ‘class’ dispute, especially one connected in some way with evil corporate intent?

The fight for women’s rights isn’t just a struggle to ensure that we’re treated equally in the marketplace; it’s also a struggle to make sure we’re not raped by college football players because a coach doesn’t see any harm with women treated as objects, as long as his boys aren’t ‘distracted’ from winning.

And now, with gay rights. How does one reframe full rights for gays into a class struggle that ignores issues of personal perceptions and biases? Just saying so isn’t going to make it so.

Nader has said that there is no difference between the Democratic party and the Republican party – both are equally beholden to corporate interests. Bottom line, that’s all Nader sees.

In 2000, before the election, Todd Gitlin took a closer look at the issue of this claim by Nader, and Nader’s politics. He wrote:

At bottom, Nader’s all-or-nothing gambit is not politics, it is moral fundamentalism – as if by venting one’s anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all those recalcitrant people who happen to live here.

The arrogance of this “worsism” – the worse, the better – is chillingly expressed by a Nader voter in Portland, Ore., interviewed in Friday’s New York Times: “If Bush gets in, I feel that it might bring things to a head much more quickly. Pollution’s going to increase in the short term, but I think that will bring a lot more people into the environmental movement a lot more quickly. Sometimes you’ve got to hit bottom before you come back up.” Notice how the means – “a lot more people into the environmental movement” -has become the end. Notice the spurious assumption that the masses will rise up if things come “to a head.” It didn’t happen after Reagan’s depredations on the environment. It won’t happen now.

Well, we’ve had four years of Bush. I wonder what that Oregon voter now feels about the issue?

Ralph Nader is a man with a mission, always has been, to better the human condition. However, he does so by discounting the messier elements and focusing only on the bloodless aspects of our struggles. From the article, Nader Confronts Minority Critics:

But behind the political skirmishing there are some very real differences in approach towards race between Nader and his critics on the Left. Where they see a Green Party and presidential campaign made up largely of middle-class whites, he sees “constituency group” critics hooked on “symbolism” instead of progress.

Where some of his critics see a candidate who, in the words of writer Vanessa Daniel, “appears to be tiptoeing around an elephant when he fails to mention … race and racism,” Nader sees a more “systemic” class struggle against corporations, of which racial discrimination is an important but lesser component.

And when potential supporters all but plead for a warmer, more human personal touch, Nader stubbornly remains who he is: a solitary and frequently awkward man who brags that his campaign is “about ideas, not emotion.”

Do I disagree with this? How can I? I can understand what Nader is saying. We do focus too much on symbols and not the underlying causes. We’re distracted by specifics, when we should be working on universal cures.

At the same time, though, we only have to look at history to realize that change isn’t global. Like the pictures in the papers, change is the little dots that seen from a distance, form a solid picture. Change is local. Change happens one event at a time, based on the passionate acts of a people pushing through change regardless of cost to themselves.

Change is both emotion and ideas. Change is messy.

The odd thing is, I think Nader is closer to Bush in outlook than not. Both believe that everything boils down to corporate interests. It’s just that Bush thinks meeting corporate interests would be good for the people, and Nader thinks that not meeting coporate interests would be good for the people.

Take away corporations, and both would fall over.

Categories
People Political

Share the Wealth

Outsourcing, legal visitor worker programs, and immigration – these are issues that will hopefully become part of the political campaigns this year in the US. They should be issues talked about in every country; this world is getting smaller, and we have to start thinking globally. Time to share the wealth. Unfortunately, when it comes to sharing, it tends to be those who can least afford it who are required to give the most.

There was a tragedy in the news today–19 Chinese die collecting cockles (a shellfish) in a dangerous bay in England. Gangs had bussed the workers in, most if not all assumed to be illegal aliens, and then left them to die when the tides cut them off from shore.

Imagine paying someone all that you own to flee to a new country for a better life for your children, a country where you can’t speak the language, and don’t know the customs. Then, once you arrive, you’re coerced into backbreaking work in order to get enough money to feed your family. Rather than the ultimate prize you hope to get – citizenship for your children if not for yourself, safety, enough to eat–you get death.

And now we see that it happens in England, too.

In come the heroes on horses. The conservatives will say, “Let’s legalize the worker’s status so that they can come into the country and do jobs our people won’t do. They’ll have a better life, and our companies will prosper.”

What happens though is that a new underclass of worker is created and formalized; where before people could hope to break out of the status of being an illegal alien into being a citizen, now they’re boxed into that status forever. Yes, it may be safer, and they may live longer – but they’ll be consigned to a dreamless existence as a member of the worker Class. Paid enough to survive but not enough to hope. Living longer, but not living better. That’s what conservatives promise.

But the liberals are not much better when it comes to steedmanship as stewardship.

Protectionism doesn’t work, they say. Let jobs go overseas to help people in other countries. Open our borders. Help create new jobs in other countries. Spread the wealth.

So we create factories in Mexico through NAFTA, to provide jobs for the many people who need it and to funnel needed money into the Mexican infrastructure. And jobs are created, and there is some prosperity. But rather than the equalizing effect that was hoped for by NAFTA, we now have two countries whose people have been tossed from jobs: those in the United States because of jobs going to Mexico; and now those in Mexico, when these same jobs have moved to other countries such as China, because the sudden affluence and competition for workers in certain areas in Mexico have suddenly made them too expensive for corporations seeking a quick buck. What’s left is more colonias, empty factories, and broken promises.

Of course, Mexico’s loss is other countries gain. Countries such as China, Nicaragua, and Indonesia.

But no one has embraced outsourcing more than India. The people of India have prospered with outsourcing, especially in the IT field, and this has pissed some people off. They talk about how sloppy the work is from offshore efforts, but contrary to these disparaging viewpoints, the people from India I have worked with have been intelligent, well trained, capable, dedicated, and with terrific senses of humor. There is nothing wrong with the quality of the work, and, as a confirmed liberal, no, as a member of humanity, I don’t want to deny them work. I don’t want to see their country harmed.

Besides, you have to admire the sheer energy of the Indian people in their determination to not only embrace their new role in world economics, but to expand on it. Indian universities now include computer training for all degrees, and much of the college system has been regeared to this new economy, with a new emphasis on training engineers. Out of the two million graduates this year from colleges, over 200,000 will have engineering degrees.

The “Teching” of India is so pervasive, that it has even impacted on the culture of gender in the country. For instance, rather than more traditional beauty contests, the Miss High Tech Bangalore contest is opened to women in the IT industry, to show that women in IT can be feminine as well as competent. Instead of questions about world peace, the women have to demonstrate IT knowledge. And poise, and beauty, and look good in a bathing suit, that sort of thing. Well, it is a beauty contest.

There’s even a term for the new woman CEO: sheEOs.

And this new embracing role in India won’t stop with just call centers or IT jobs. Business process analysis has moved, as is accounting, some medical analysis, and upcoming biotech work. As Chris Anderson at Wired writes:

Today’s Indian call centers, programming shops, and help desks are just the beginning. Tomorrow it will be financial analysis, research, design, graphics – potentially any job that does not require physical proximity. The American cubicle farm is the new textile mill, just another sunset industry.

Chris thinks this is a good thing, freeing American workers to take on new roles of innovation and enterprise, leaving the debugging work, and spreadsheet calculations to others. Leaving aside the implications to the people in India, in actuality, what is happening in the US is that there is an erosion of the middle class, with a few escaping into the rarified atmosphere of those who make it, the rest slipping down into an ever increasing number of lower paid Wal-mart workers, literally creating and then eating themselves by only making enough money working at Wal-Mart to shop at stores like Wal-Mart.

The conservative heros say, but moving jobs to cheaper places is good because more profits mean more jobs and more taxes in this country, or other Western countries. The liberal heros say, well we’ve had our time in the sun, now its time to share the wealth. And look at how much it improves the situation for women in countries like India? Both groups jump up on their steeds and race away from what they see in an inevitable fact of life, each knowing that they have done good.

Both groups couldn’t be more wrong, because both see the workers having to be the ones to adapt, to pay the price. To share the wealth.

Just as with Mexico, as prosperity increases the costs of outsourcing to India over time, the same jobs that fueled that economy will begin to, have begun to, drift to other countries promising yet more cheap labor. What happens when a country the size of India stakes its future on the outsourcing needs of other countries?

In another article in Wired, this was addressed specifically:

“Someday,” Janish says, “another nation will take business from India.” Perhaps China or the Philippines, which are already competing for IT work.

“When that happens, how will you respond?” I ask.

“I think you must have read Who Moved My Cheese?” Aparna says to my surprise.

Janish gets up from the couch, and to my still greater surprise, pulls a copy from the bookshelf.

Who Moved My Cheese? is, of course, one of the best-selling books of the past decade. It’s a simpleminded – and, yes, cheesy – parable about the inevitability of change. The book (booklet is more like it – the $20 hardcover is roughly the length of this article) is a fable about two mouselike critters, Hem and Haw, who live in a maze and love cheese. After years of finding their cheese in the same place every day, they arrive one morning to discover that it’s gone. Hem, feeling victimized, wants to wait until somebody puts the cheese back. Haw, anxious but realistic, wants to find new cheese. The moral: Be like Haw.

Janish gave Aparna a copy of the book for their wedding anniversary last year. (He inscribed it, “I am one cheese which won’t move.”) She read it on a Hexaware commuter bus one morning and calls it “superb.”

The lesson for Aparna was clear: The good times for Indian IT workers won’t last forever. And when those darker days arrive, “We should just keep moving with the times and not be cocooned in our little world. That’s the way life is.” Or as Haw more chirpily explains to his partner, “Sometimes, Hem, things change and they are never the same. This looks like one of those times. That’s life! Life moves on. And so should we.”

If you’re among the pissed off, such advice – especially coming from talking rodents chasing cheddar around a maze – may sound annoying. But it’s not entirely wrong. So if Hem and Haw make you hurl, return to where Aparna began when I met her that first day – the sacred text of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, whose 700 verses many Indians know by heart.

The Gita opens with two armies facing each other across a field of battle. One of the warriors is Prince Arjuna, who discovers that his charioteer is the Hindu god Krishna. The book relates the dialog between the god and the warrior – about how to survive and, more important, how to live. One stanza seems apt in this moment of fear and discontent. “Your very nature will drive you to fight,” Lord Krishna tells Arjuna. “The only choice is what to fight against.”

How to survive. That is the question of the new century, isn’t it?

According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSC) in India, this won’t be a problem because by the year 2010, there will be a population shortage in the United States, leading to a shortfall of 5.6 million workers:

The National Association of Software and Services Companies, India’s premier IT lobby, said in a recent report about 1.3 million US jobs will move offshore between 2003 and 2010.

The US, it added, would face a domestic labor shortfall of approximately 5. 6 million workers by 2010 due to slow population growth and an aging population.

“If the labor shortfall is not met, the US economy will lose out on growth opportunities resulting in an estimated cumulative loss of two trillion dollars by 2010. Global sourcing in the form of immigration, temporary workers and offshoring can overcome this shortfall,” it said.

Not only the US – according to the reports the NASSC is putting out, every Western country, from the Italy to New Zealand, will also be suffering labor shortages. The impact will be felt elsewhere, too. China will be undergoing its own labor shortage by the year 2020

This leads me to a recent article that came out in Business Source today. In it, the author, Paran Balakrishnan, talks about how India looks towards the future and its role in the world:

It was a Nasscom executive who put the New World Order in perspective. Yes, he said, in the coming decades India will face competition in fields like software services and business process outsourcing (BPO).

But by 2020 we will be the only country in the world left with enough manpower to meet global needs. ‘We have a sustained competitive advantage to 2020 because of sheer demographics. In terms of working age population India will be the only people-surplus country,’ he said.
…
But consider the fact that by 2020 the even the world-beating Chinese will be facing the unimaginable – a tiny population shortage. That will impair their efforts to compete in fields like high technology where India has a competitive advantage currently.

Other reports support this assessment based on the average retirement age of the existing working force, but with a caveat: human behavior tends to have a habit of screwing of labor projections.

For instance, some tasks will be automated to increase the productivity of workers, as has happened with our own timber industry in this country. Additionally, many of those who have left the job force now due to unemployment can return to it, and many older Americans are choosing to work past the retirement age. Shortages in specific types of work, such as the current ones in education and the health care industry will be met by retraining existing work force members – as is happening now. In other words, people adapt to meet the demand.

And hopefully what happens is that traditionally low paying jobs like teaching and nursing get a much needed and deserved boost in pay scales. That is, unless there’s a source of disposable workers that can be tapped in order to deliberately keep wages down.

This leads to the another option, which Balakrishnan writes about:

For as long as anyone can remember the Government’s slogan has been: Hum do, hamare do (ed: One couple, two kids). Is it time to take a re-look at that slogan? Should we still be campaigning to persuade poorer people in this country to have fewer children?

Or, is it time to look at the entire issue once again in the light of what’s happening in other parts of the world. Once upon a time these might have seemed like futuristic problems for the next century. But now in 2004 we are well and truly into the next century and its problems are racing to catch up with us.

Should we still be campaigning to persuade poorer people in this country to have fewer children?

These are words to chill your soul if you were to hear them spoken in a country like the US, much less the most heavily populated country on Earth. My dear Reader, meet the Disposable Worker Class.

Round and round and round we go and where it stops, nobody knows. This game of musical workers doesn’t end with the workers; it ends with the people playing the music, and pulling out the chairs.

Rather than thinking of a ‘decreasing labor pool’, we should be looking more positively to a decreasing world population with less stress on the resources of a badly overextended planet. Where now a child is a commodity to plug into a factory, or the window of a drive-in McDonald’s, in the future a child should return to being a gift.

Share the wealth. Yeah.

Where employers – from work gangs to major corporations – now shift jobs, or workers, around at the whim of a dollar, they should be the ones made to share the wealth, not to strip it from the skin, and the dignity, of the workers.

Categories
People

We don’t need no stinken’ white knights

Sheila Lennon points to Jimmy Carter’s new weblog and specifically his current travels to Africa to help eradicate the Guinea worm. I’m afraid my reaction was less than positive. As I wrote in an email to Sheila:

I did a bit of reading in the weblog. I am not being deliberately contrary – truly I’m not– when I say this, but I thought that Carter’s recital of his good works that day was appalling. It was condescending, and the trip seemed more an effort to make rich white Americans feel good than to work with the people of that country to solve this problem, within the culture of the country.

Rows of children were lined up and instructed in what to do and then permitted to return home. Classes disrupted. Leaders lectured.

Listen to this:

” There was considerable consternation among all of us about the basic cause of their failure and a lot of embarrassment among officials when confronted with Ghana’s poor performance, but obvious dedication to their duties. After a long series of speeches, I was anointed as an honorary king, clothed in a robe and hat, given a long hair whisk as a symbol of authority, and urged to dance around the arena accompanied by a chorus of drums. After this performance we went to a nearby club for a brief lunch, detailed visual assessments of Ghana’s lack of progress, and another series of speeches.

It became increasingly obvious to me that a basic problem was that Ghana’s officials, from field workers to the president, considered the drilling of deep borehole wells as the primary solution to the Guinea worm problem. The common theme was “a deep well will eradicate our Guinea worms.” Although highly desirable and much needed in every village, this is not the way to eradicate the disease. Extremely expensive and time-consuming, with no assurance of finding potable water in many areas, the borehole dream had become a substitute for simple filtering of each drink and keeping people with emerging worms out of the ponds.

Most communities throughout the world have eradicated Guinea worm without drilling a well, and many people are still infected even when blessed with a good underground source of water. Just stopping by the local pond for one drink is all it takes. I explained this to them in very strong terms, had the ministers adopt the same sermon for our joint press conference, and we continued this explanation during our very pleasant visit with President Kufuor when we returned to Accra.”

Now imagine me as a visiting dignitary, a former leader from another country. First, I have been assured that the President will drop everything in order to meet with me later, at my convenience – after all, I am only in the country for a few days. Following, I head into a town – let’s say New York, shall we – and have the adults and children line up so that we may examine them, ask them questions. We also break into your country’s classrooms to tell your children how your fast food is killing them, forcing the children’s parents to show off their obesity, and then sternly lecturning the mayor and city council about how food nutrition labels aren’t working, and that the children must be prevented from eating at these places. They should go on more hikes, too.

And then, “… when all our meetings had been completed, we felt that a new day may have come to the US in its effort to eliminate unhealthy fast food. The president pledged full personal support to us and to the assembled news media, and there is little doubt that his ministers and key health workers will now join in a proper effort with a renewed sense of dedication.”

By the way, dig this jacket I picked up on 5th.

Tomorrow, I head to Canada.

What the world does not need right now, is more American Presidents swooping into their worlds uninvited and telling them how to live.

I know that Sheila’s probably disappointed in my reaction, and most (all?) my readers will be also. But there is a very real difference between a commitment to spend time with the people of Ghana, or any other country for that matter, and work through change, then to ride in on a white horse, line the people up for a photo op, and then move on smug in the assertion that you’ve shown the world a better way to live.

If Mr. Carter wanted to raise awareness of the Guinea worm because there was something we in the West could do to help, I could see his actions. But from what I can read, the solution to the problem is very simple and there’s nothing we can do to help. Rather it is the people of the country themselves that will have to make changes in their lifestyle to meet this problem and a former American President coming in for one day, lecturing the leaders on how to do things better, and then leaving with the almighty smug feeling that things will now be better because of his benevolent, but stern, sermon – isn’t going to make a bit of difference.

There is a very real hypocrisy by our actions such as these. We have become very good at telling other people how to live, a trait shared equally between conservatives and liberals in the United States. Frankly, in the Western world.

We demand change in others, but we can’t even effect humanitarian change in our own countries – how can we possibly think to impose our standards on others, when we are noticeably lacking in same ourselves?

More than not cleaning our own house before telling others to clean their’s, when we charge in like the heros of yore, we do so without careful regard for the consequences. The impact of our actions, whether good intentioned or not, can leave things worse then if we had done nothing at all. Our own experiences in Iraq demonstrates this.

Iraq is better, we say, because Saddam is no longer in control. The world is safer, we say, because Saddam is no longer in control of Iraq. But people are dying in Iraq, women are being raped all too frequently in Iraq, minorities are being oppressed in Iraq, and our country is even more afraid then it was two years ago. Exactly how can any of this be considered ‘better’?

I don’t know that I have enough understanding of what’s happening in Iraq to make the claim that it’s ‘better’. I don’t know that any of us outside of Iraq does. All I know is I’m seeing a country heading into bloody civil and religious war, started by one faction in this country making things ‘better’ by invading the country without UN support, and another faction in this country making things ‘better’ by getting us to pull out now.

But this is about Jimmy Carter and him trying to work to eradicate the Guinea Worm, not Iraq. No one can deny that eradicating the Guinea Worm would be a good thing. And no one can deny that Mr. Carter has the best intentions in the world, and that his approach most likely is the better one for the people of Ghana.

But frankly, the world doesn’t need any more knights in white armor, charging in to save the day.