Polarization Response

The Housewife wanted to respond, but Blogger is being a booger, so here is the reply she sent off-site for me to post:

I tried to post this as a comment but it wouldn't let me. You can copy & paste it if you want.

Let me preface this comment by saying that I grew up in a home where my dad was a long time member of a union. Eventually he took a low level management position. When he was fired by the company a few years later, he had little recourse and frequently commented on how the company wouldn't have been able to treat him so unfairly if he hadn't left the union. My parents never really recovered financially from that economic hit. I get on a very personal (as in the memory of an entire school year without breakfast) level what you are saying.

But the private sector unions deal with something public sector unions don't, the realization that at some point, they could break the company, unless we are talking giant corporations. We've frequently seen employees forgo all kinds of strides they'd made to help the companies they work for remain solvent in tough times. The public sector doesn't have to worry about that because government growth seems to be a given. The government employee at odds with the government employer seems out of whack somehow. If the Wisconsin governor ran on this issue and it's what the voters (who we would say are the true employers)wanted then shouldn't he do what he was elected to do? Can you comment on the elected officials who have fled the state?

On the other hand I'm always astounded by how these budget cut discussions play out at every level. Massive hidden wastefulness is overlooked while the areas where the electorate can actually see their tax dollars at work and don't mind paying for, teachers, police, firefighters, are often the first things on the chopping block. Really? There's NOTHING we can find to cut before we get to those? This isn't an issue so much in my state where the state doesn't engage in collective bargaining with state employees but local teacher associations negotiate with local school boards by means of majority vote. Teachers did head to the capital in a sort of "support" protest this week, though. I haven't heard any teachers here comment on whether or not they think our system superior.

Looking forward to your other posts on this!

Polarization

Wisconsin is in the news. A complex situation is being painted simplistic. I have tried to step back and see why. Here are my thoughts:

Should public employees (including teachers) contribute to their health and retirement systems, maybe even a significant amount? Yes. Does that mean the protesters are entirely off-base on that? Some, but not really (and many have been willing to compromise). More on that in a bit, but it is related to the following point. The Republican majority in state government want to also virtually end all collective bargaining rights. Is that off-base and unnecessary, even a bit insidious? Yes, almost entirely. And the protesters are rightly uncompromising about that.

The protesters are fearing, rightfully, that any cave-in by them will demolish most everything they have attained, and remove what power they have left to influence their work and their lives. They have watched it everywhere else in the country, inside government, inside education, and inside the private sector. The “reformist,” or “cost-cutting,” group will say that compromises need to be made to “save” jobs or “balance the books,” or some other what looks on the face of it to be sensible reason. But jobs often don’t get saved, the money is diverted elsewhere, and control is virtually entirely transferred to (mis)management. And compromise is only in one direction: from labor to management and administration, to business, to corporations, to privatization, to “reallocation” (bonuses for the higher ups), to tax-cuts that are meaningful only for the wealthy. The assault on labor is relentless, the commoditizing of it frequent, and the neo-feudal, neo-serfdom more apparent by the day. Do unions sometimes get wasteful, corrupt, close-minded, selfish, or even a bit coercive? Yes. Is union management often abysmal? Yes, and a long-standing phenomenon (start one’s understanding with Oil!). Is all that about unions what is truly causing the financial problems? Not really. More on that in a bit too.

The anti-union crusade says “no compromise” on its part. This is a pattern long in evidence. “Take a little now” and hammer away constantly at the rest. Eventually all is removed or most power gutted. Along the way, inflame the underlying current by spouting off nonsense about communists, socialists, revolutionaries, chaos, trying to take control of, using emergency powers, one-party system, and all sorts of emotional triggers having little to no connection to unions.

Some of those who have private sector jobs in Wisconsin are also turning out to protest against the unions, against the public employees. They hold signs like “If you don’t like it, quit,” and “if you don’t like that, try you’re fired.” They have a point in that they the producers, or at least the tax-paying workers of the private sector (classic producers in the strict economic sense being now rare), cannot be burdened too much without collapsing the system, and you don’t need to be a follower of Ayn Rand to understand that. Even the valid counter-points by the teachers, that they directly help mold and make productive the future producers, as well as pay taxes themselves, do not take away the point itself. Yet these “producers” who are counter-protesting become unwitting pawns in a chess game above their heads. For they, many of whom have jobs that are not entirely stable themselves and hence are lucky to be employed and not “burdens” that have to be “supported,” are raging because the employee benefits they have are usually not as good as the public sector. They do not see that the benefits of the public employees are often not really excessive. Why don’t they see? Perhaps because the process of benefits stripping has become near-complete in the private sector. The benefits of the public sector then LOOK excessive in comparison, as nearly everyone has by now nearly forgotten what life was like before the corporatization/globalization/privatization/free-market hyper-manic campaign began in earnest over 40 years ago.

Government is often bloated and wasteful, and we have enlarged requirements and expectations, as well as entitlements, excessively, and those are without doubt both deep stressors on government budgets and unsustainable. But a just as true source, and maybe truer source, of financial problems across all government is that government has been essentially de-funded. Corporations and the very wealthy top .1% have, through multiple machinations, largely escaped meaningful tax responsibility, and pay far less proportionally (and often less even in actual dollars) than the average Joe or Josephine. A comparison of now to 50 years ago is telling, and available to anyone with even modest skills in history and economics. And a comparison of now to similar Roman times is well, chilling.

Even when the wealthy pay more, they have far more, and they feel it far less, than the average person, and in some cases, don’t feel it all. But what they have paid has steadily fallen in real terms. They have defunded governments across all levels, including local. They have defunded schools and education (they send their children to private ones anyway). They have disconnected themselves from their fellow citizens. Just like the wealthy of Rome.

Bitterly and ironically, this is infuriating, given that those corporations and wealthy who have benefitted most from laws and shaded conditions have hurled the loudest epithets accusing others of class warfare, when they themselves have waged the severest and most successful class warfare in America in the last 100 years.

My father tried to warn me this would happen, that the assault on collective bargaining, and all that was made possible by it, would transform the country for the worst. He tried to tell me that greed and selfishness were trumping patriotism and the common good, but I didn’t want to believe it. And now I watch its last phases. I wish he was around so I could apologize.

Climate of Fear

In a first of what may be many parts, we are going to address a cultural paradigm. A paradigm that is accepted by both “liberals” and “conservatives” in America. It is a cultural paradigm of fear. A fear, a dissolution of community, that Vance Packard warned us about 40 years ago, it has many facets, and many effects, including the relations between men and women, let alone among people generally.

We will begin with a fearful subject: rape. Yes, I know as a man, even an academic, I should be cautioned about speaking on this subject, but that too is one of the problems: if one is considered unqualified to comment merely because of gender, we have gravitated into silos of dismissive ignorance. Rape has gone from caution and awareness about it, to pandemic fear of it or concern over it. Do statistics bear this out? Let’s look:

Since rape is an underreported crime, researchers have used careful surveys to meld data and get a more accurate picture of rape in America. However, the statistics cannot reliably factor out undiscovered wholly false reporting (which, according to researchers, when it does happen, happens for a surprisingly wide range of reasons, depending on the individual). They cannot reliably factor out rebuffed non-coercive/non-harassing advances later reported as rape. The statistics also do not factor out consensual sex later reported as rape. Although all three of these would reduce the actual incidences of rape (it being obviously statistically impossible that all reports are genuine), researchers presently have no reliable method to estimate false reporting of these types: some sources say it is as little as 2% of the cases, others (law enforcement and prosecutors, especially) say it is closer to 50%. Whatever the actual rate is, researchers are hopeful that their survey methods can filter out at least some of this false reporting.

Researchers estimate about one-sixth of rapes are reported. The most recent reported U.S. rapes averaged, rounding up, about .03% of the general population, or about .06% (again, rounding up) of the female population, disregarding gay rape. This therefore gives us a figure of up to .36% actual rapes against females (including female on female rape, which cannot be separately factored at present). This figure is less than the figures derived from the older National Women’s Study (NWS) survey; however, even despite general agreement by most researchers that incidences of rape have declined by up to 60% since the survey, we shall liberally use the higher figures from the survey, which indicated:

.7% (7 out of a 1000) of females in the U.S. are raped in a year
29% of these are below the age of 11
32% are 11-17
22% are 18-24
7% are 25-29
6% are over 29
4% experience rape in multiple age categories or are otherwise not age accounted

There is deep tragedy in the just-above statistics. Yet they also bring to light something else: while research indicates college age women are fearful about rape, research also indicates that the most fearful group about rape are women over the age of 29. Yet, as the above statistics point out, this group has the lowest rate of any of the groups.

The NWS dispelled the common myth that most women are raped by strangers:
Only 22% did not their attacker or did not know them well
9% were victims of husbands or ex-husbands
11% by fathers or stepfathers
10% by boyfriends or ex-boyfriends
16% by other relatives
29% by non-relatives such as friends or neighbors

These statistics give strong suggestion that under-reporting is heavily related to the fact that most rapes occur by non-strangers. It also explains much of the previous set of statistics about age groups, especially the very youngest: much of this is happening inside the close circle of extended family and friends.
Another clarifying facet: Incidences and prevalence of rape are two different things. A fair number of women turn up as repeated rape victims (40%), and class, drugs, alcohol, profession, etc. often play large roles.

Another aspect is that psychological/emotional trauma is more likely than physical injury:
70% of women reported no injuries
24% reported minor injuries

What then to make of all this? Well, before we start, let us make something clear: Rape prevention, rape reporting, and care for the dignity of the victim, all continue to need attention to.

But the climate of fear is wrong. It is not reality. This climate has an effect on society, and in turns gets an effect from society.

Even women who have not been raped are affected by the fear that they may be raped in the future (Gordon & Riger, 1989). This fear affects women's quality of life by restricting their movements (Valentine, 1992; Warr, 1985) and, as a result, their capacity for work and leisure (Green, Hebron, & Woodward, 1987; Riger & Gordon, 1981; Riger, Gordon, & LeBailly, 1978; Stanko, 1990).

Where does this fear originate? In many places. Fear is related to, among many females, increasing time alone without a male or a reliable male, in moving to new neighborhoods without an adequate sense of community, our highly individualistic society of disconnected “self-reliance,” excessive promotion of independence, opportunity, and expectation, lack of simple, even platonic, male escort that was standard in the past, of the overburdened and time-jammed males—even fathers and brothers—of our society who do not and cannot “be there” often enough, of overburdened and time-jammed females of our society who similarly cannot wait, coordinate, or even have enough connection, of mixed messages of modesty, freedom, sexual expression, absence of dressing norms, etc. thrown into a volatile mixture of confusion, frustration, and sometimes even anger.

As if our culture needed any more dysfunction between the genders, or any more social disconnection or lack of community.

Here is the simple, frustrating, and complex reality:

1. The majority of men, the VAST majority of men, are not sexual deviants, predators, stalkers, rapists, abusers, etc. Despite what the culture tells us, despite what that cable channel promotes, despite the constant shallow “statistics” promoted by a shallow media and the chattering class to promote agendas and jobs of those “specialists” only too willing to believe what they want to believe.

2. Yet this climate of fear overshadows so much. Not only are men insulted and degraded, they may even get a little emasculated by this climate. The insidious message that they cannot be trusted to be non-rapists, and worse, the feeling from females that the men cannot be trusted to be non-rapists, damages both genders. Blind fear causes us to stumble into bad effects across the general population, thus self-punishing the many out of excessive fear of the few.

3. Still, our disconnected, excessively individualistic society of fractured “community” means that we don’t know and have little familiarity with far too many of the individuals that surround us, or that pop in and out of our lives and change with dizzying regularity. Aside from a pretty close circle, we don’t know who we can REALLY trust, and so we have to be cautious.

The caution should be focused, selective, and wise however.

For example, you can promote awareness with sayings like “Normal people know the difference between consensual social interaction and assault. Do you?” When one wants to make a point in an organization or society and set or restore good order and discipline, you make examples of the few; the majority, who already believe in what’s right anyway, will not feel punished, and the remaining few deviants will be cowed into line.

We desperately need to put some glue back into the civil society. If, as appears likely, economic fracturing is on the horizon, we will need that glue to get through it.

Living Down From Our Principles

Because we chose to play cynical and selfish games that made a mockery of our supposed support of the principles of freedom and democracy, it now blows back on us. And makes the appeal of radical Islam exponentially stronger. I once spent 2 days with an Egyptian professor. He related to me how infuriated and crushed the U.S. made him. Why? Because he said that the moderates like him were caught between a rock and hard place. On the one side were Mubarak’s corrupt and repressive forces, which they could tell were stuffed with American money and support. These forces repressed them anytime they moved for democratic things like real representation and real freedom of the press—the very things the U.S. trumpeted that it championed. On the other side were Muslim radicals who hated the moderates as much as they hated Mubarak, because the moderates envisioned a truly democratic future, a secular one, one infused with the protections and moderations that the best parts of Western culture embodied. Which left the moderates little to nothing in the way of support while they watched the angry and disaffected grow and become swayed by the radicals. If it weren't for the relatively even manner of much of Egyptian society, things would be worse, much worse.

Policies, both active and passive, have consequences. And what happens elsewhere does matter. Things for us to think about--what we say and don't say, do and don't do. What happens here matters out there. And increasingly, the reverse is true as well.