Misconceptions

by Andrea Elizabeth

The most troubling statement in the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius’ defense of Obama’s new requirement that employers provide birth control coverage is that ‘birth control is necessary for women’s health’. This is an overreaching statement. If it is necessary for some women’s health, it is going too far to say it is necessary for women’s health in general. Pharmaceutical birth control has been around for less than 100 years, so how can it be necessary? The idea that consequence-less sex is a right for every woman regardless of age or marital status is a misconception only held since the ’60′s.

One of the best explanations about the difference between liberals and conservatives is brought out in Bill Moyer’s interview: “How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World“. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cautions against vilification of the other side, but also points out what is necessary for humanity – rules, clarity, consequences, and stability.

There is good, and there is Good

by Andrea Elizabeth

Mitt Romney had to spend a lot of energy yesterday explaining what he meant by his statement indicating that he’s not worried about the poor. Sharing his belief that they have an adequate safety net was supposed to smooth things over. A couple of ladies on The View thought throwing hungry people some food and thinking that is all it takes, is out of touch.

C.S. Lewis has some interesting insight on that,

2. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage him. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal it’s absurdity. Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistaken for the elixir of life.

3. Since political issues have here crossed our path, I must make it clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creature owes to it’s Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Problem of Pain (pp. 114-115). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Deerslayer pt 1

by Andrea Elizabeth

We were able to finish the first half of The Deerslayer in the car yesterday. I am enjoying Cooper’s philosophical approach to race issues, which is learned through conversation between people with various points of view. It is also very nice to hear him describe the American landscape before it was all cut down. His description of mental infirmity seems pretty insightful too. Yet there is the English tendency to compartmentalize and categorize everything. Before modernism, people though they could gain complete understanding by enough study. While this seems arrogant to us now, I think it is right to take a stand on things. Bullying others into assuming that same stance is another issue. Burying it in a good story is more polite.

Lady Liberty

by Andrea Elizabeth

In listening to immigrants’ stories about coming to America for work, it seems like “America” is this insatiable entity that requires endless amounts of coal and steel, which its citizens don’t care to produce for themselves. It’s as if there was one will in America for all of this. I know there are renegades who fled west to escape the industrial revolution, but even they, like the Native Americans, caved to certain conveniences made by industry.

It’s like America is two people, one dominant male, one submissive female. The male driven by conquest, competition, greed, and creativity; the beautiful female loved for her natural beauty and resources, but defeated by a hunger beyond anyone’s ability to control. There are some kind husbandmen who try to restore what has been taken from her, but they are token efforts. “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he will have dominion over you.” It is a fallen world.

But one can’t deny the creativity and not be impressed by the sky scrapers, super fast, comfortable transportation, and well appointed living conditions. They are amazing. The land was willing to provide for these things to its own detriment sometimes. And sometimes to its improvement. I don’t agree that all has been improved, but perhaps erosion would have been more destructive otherwise. Destruction can’t be totally demonized either. The beautiful Grand Canyon is carved out by violent water and fault lines. The mountains are produced by cataclysmic collisions and explosive volcanic eruptions. Nature is a force to be reckoned with, but it wasn’t intended to be so in isolation. Figuring out what interventions are necessary is given to us. I tend to like the pre-European Native American approach, but its too late for that now. Maybe people did need more to do.

Happy 4th and Vive la France

by Andrea Elizabeth

Part of it has been busyness and part of the reason I haven’t written so much is because I am a slow processor. It is one reason why busyness throws me off. If I have 3 things going on and it takes me a week to absorb one thing, then it will take me three weeks to absorb each thing, and of course within those three weeks other things happen, so I have to wait for a lull to even write about the first thing. I have a couple of hours of lull this morning, and the one thing I’ll pick to write about is the 4th of July and Bastille Day.

Compared to the writers I like to read, I have a very limited education regarding the things I like. I like America and Europe, especially English writing and the French language. I can like them all without prejudice against either even on the 4th of July and Bastille day, the days that we commemorate the Americans being against the English Aristocracy and the French being against their own. I don’t even have anything against aristocrats or cats, as a group. Therefore it was while I was watching Sense and Sensibility with my daughter and her friends that I realized that it was kind of funny that we were watching it on the 4th of July. There is a burn ban in most of Texas so we didn’t do our annual fireworks, and our guests had just gotten back from a long drive and we didn’t want to go out to one of the lake celebrations.

On Bastille day, I took a slightly different group of girls to meet another group of girls in San Antonio to watch the premier of the last Harry Potter movie, which was very well done, btw. Just as I did nothing American on the 4th of July, except to make hamburgers and potato salad, I did nothing French on Bastille Day. I’ll take the time now to make a French connection. I liked Emma Thompson’s (who was in Harry Potter and Sense and Sensibility) French princess in hers and her then husband’s (who was also in one of the Harry Potter movies) Henry V ou Henri Quinze.

Only you can prevent it

by Andrea Elizabeth

Pollution and beetles are killing the views and the trees at the highest elevations of the Smoky Mountains. It’s a shame.

Air pollution is shrinking scenic views, damaging plants, and degrading high elevation streams and soils in the Great Smoky Mountains. Even human health is at risk. Most pollution originates outside the park and is created by power plants, industry, and automobiles.

Views from scenic overlooks at Great Smoky Mountains National Park have been seriously degraded over the last 50 years by human-made pollution. Since 1948, based on regional airport records, average visibility in the southern Appalachians has decreased 40% in winter and 80% in summer. These degradations in visibility not only affect how far one can see from a scenic overlook, they also reduce how well one can see. Pollution causes colors to appear washed out and obscures landscape features. Pollution typically appears as a uniform whitish haze, different from the natural mist-like clouds for which the Smokies were named.

The burning of fossil fuels produces tiny airborne sulfate particles which scatter light and degrade visibility. Increasingly, visitors no longer see distant mountain ridges because of this haze. Annual average visibility at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is 25 miles, compared to natural conditions of 93 miles. During severe haze episodes, visibility has been reduced to under one mile. Sulfate concentrations increased in the region by 27% from 1984-1999. Electricity-generating power plants are the source of most sulfates. (more here)

Egyptian revolution not all it’s cracked up to be

by Andrea Elizabeth

Meet Niall Ferguson

Muslim-Christian clash in Egypt leaves 13 dead

Thursday, March 10, 2011 | Ryan Jones

One of the various misrepresentations regarding the Egyptian revolution was that the participation of some of Egypt’s Christians meant that there was no underlying Islamic agenda.

Many media outlets went out of their way to paint a picture of Muslims and Christians standing arm-in-arm in search of freedom. And in some isolated examples, that may have been an accurate portrayal.

But with the increasing influence of and attention on Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt, Christians are starting to feel the heat, as evidenced by a brutal clash between Muslims and Christians in Cairo on Tuesday that left 13 people dead and more than 140 wounded.

The armed confrontation was preceded by Muslims burning down a church in the Helwan neighborhood of Cairo last week. To rub salt in that wound, the Muslims returned to the burned-out church on Tuesday to conduct mass Islamic prayers on the site.

Coptic Christian spokesmen told reporters that as arguments between the Muslims and the Christians who gathered to oppose them escalated, Muslim gunmen opened fire, killing six Christians and resulting in a pitched street battle.

A Coptic priest told France’s AFP news agency that Tuesday’s battle was not the only trouble of late for Cairo’s Christians. After the burning down of the church in question last week, more than 1,000 Christians had publicly demonstrated at the weekend to demand protection and equality. They were fired on by Muslims.

The priest revealed that Muslims in the area have been regularly firebombing Christian homes and workplaces and throwing stones at Christians who try to publicly demonstrate for their rights.

Egypt’s new military rulers have taken to action to date against the offending Muslims.

During the 18-day revolution that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, while many news outlets were showing Christians and Muslims as a united front, a large number of Christians were actually being slaughtered by Muslims taking advantage of the general chaos in Egypt.

In one particularly gruesome incident, Muslims in southern Egypt massacred two entire families, including young children, for the crime of being Christian. In total, 24 Egyptian Christians were murdered in January.

A number of Christian sources also indicated that their community had in no way been fully behind the revolution, since many knew full well that it would eventually be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. While Egypt under Mubarak was anything but ideal, a new Islamic Republic can only mean a life of severity as second-class citizens for Egypt’s Christians.

(from Israel Today)

The problem with sweat shops

by Andrea Elizabeth

Last night PBS aired Triangle Fire (free streaming video available) on their American Experience series. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory wasn’t exactly a sweat shop, since it had 1911 state of the art sewing machines and windows, but it was close. The film focuses mainly on workers’ conditions, but mentions immigration, the American Dream, the American work ethic, overcrowding, industrialization, private enterprise, strikes and unionizing the garment industry, and codes that were enforced after the tragic fire that killed 146 people.

To me the tragedy is in how society at large disregarded the mostly immigrant girls in the first place. This caused people to look away from their plight, believing that at least it was better than where they came from: natural disasters in Italy and persecution of Jews in Russia. Much of their paychecks went to families who were worse off back home. But I don’t see the villain as private ownership in general, as the film implies. They disparage rich businessmen, like Carnegie, even though they mention the libraries, parks, museums and their other contributions. At least they discuss somewhat the problem of insatiable appetites that fueled industry in the first place.

If industry is the problem, and the Old Country wasn’t industrialized, why were the people there starving to death? I guess a non-industrial society is too susceptible to drought, natural disasters, and tyrannical rulers. Turns out those same conditions existed in the Triangle Building. But I believe unions just turn that upside down. I prefer law enforcement to give equal treatment, which they sadly didn’t, so who else did those girls have?

The fact that the stairwell was locked is the particular reason so many perished. The owners kept it locked to prevent theft before the girls could be inspected upon leaving. When they knew of the fire, the owners escaped without unlocking it. This should have been manslaughter and they should have been prosecuted. They were let off. Unions get a foothold where there is corruption. But I also believe outsourcing is the result of corrupt unions. Still, inhuman industrialization is the ultimate source to blame. But it’s all we now know. It’s a mess.

The other issue is feminism and male domination. My first impression is that the tough, powerful men were jerks, and that the factory girls were very feminine with their Gibson hairdos, beautiful shirtwaists and long skirts, which were going out of style. Their saviors were also the wealthy suffragettes who wore mannish jackets and shorter skirts. The modern female commentators, who also champion their cause, had mannish haircuts and style-less blouses. Something is wrong with this picture. Despite the long hours, these girls were experiencing freedom and independence and were putting off marriage, maybe because the reason they had to work was to feed mouths that their parents couldn’t. The idea of a man providing for and ruling his family was losing steam, probably because in the industrial revolution, machines replaced his advantage of greater strength. It made male dominance obsolete.

The other problem that was mentioned was that no one was regulating abuses and safety violations. Perhaps if injurers were prosecuted, thus motivating owners to have safer conditions, unions wouldn’t have gained strength either. So I blame corrupt government more than private owners. And if black people, unborn babies, poor girls, and splayed carriage horses on the ice, were seen as equally human to rich white men (I’m not going to quibble about the humanity of horses), many other abuses would be prevented as well. Since people need authority, I think the government, mainly the judicial system, should protect them equally and send the right message to owners.

Miss Marple, Edmund Burke, movies, and healthcare

by Andrea Elizabeth

Instead of watching the Academy Awards, which I’d forgotten about, we watched Miss Marple, whom I’d never watched, much less read, before. Curious about the inspiration for this respected spinster sleuth, I queried Wikipedia, which gave some interesting accounts of her mother marrying her aunt’s husband’s American son, her unhappy first marriage which lead to a famous 11 day disappearance, and her being a nurse during WWI and working in a pharmacy during WWII, giving her a very good knowledge of poisons. On the critical side,

Twenty-five years after her death, critic Johann Hari notes “In its ugliest moments, Christie’s conservatism crossed over into a contempt for Jews, who are so often associated with rationalist political philosophies and a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that is antithetical to the Burkean paradigm of the English village.

This lead me to look up Edmund Burke. Though I can’t find anything about villages or Jews in the article, I do sense a kindred spirit. He has some very interesting things to say about both the American (which he was for) and the French (which he was against) Revolutions, as well as about being English.

Back to villages. When people talk about the advantages of modernity, their most convincing argument seems to be about advances in medicine that have dramatically decreased infant mortality, communicable diseases, and alleviated so many other ills. I suppose I’m torn because stories of primitive little village doctors making house-calls and tribal natural medicine (not necessarily shamanism) are so appealing. The quandary comes when a person is forced with a choice in the modern age. It seems village people always cave in once their child or other loved one gets sick. Now with extremely expensive cures available, it seems that one has to participate in a more and more global pool to afford and have access to them. Cranford and The Village have some interesting things to say about that. I suppose there’s no going back, but I fear that letting people go will become more and more difficult as time goes on. And this will lead to more and more dependence on global economies, as well as increasing the difficulty in deciding to what measures one should go to preserve a life.

Back to Miss Marple. In one mystery, I wont give the title and thus spoil the plot, Miss Marple showed a disturbing lack of consideration for the humanity of  the two murder victims. They were annoying characters, and the sympathy was for the murderer, who was mercifully euthanized by her loving husband who didn’t think her delicate constitution could handle the trial and imprisonment. Miss Marple let him get by with it. I believe our culture has an intolerance for being annoyed or discomforted, and believes that certain classes, if not races, and genders shouldn’t be, at all costs. When one feels that this is unjust, then is he going to say that everyone should be pampered, no matter what the cost?

Sweating through Gulliver

by Andrea Elizabeth

Halfway through Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, which I’m listening to while I do Pysanky, I’m wondering why I’m not really enjoying it. The descriptions are very English field guide-ish and scientific, while maintaining opinions of various people’s likes and dislikes. Since Gulliver was a ship’s surgeon the focus on anatomy (as an aside, he thought the tiny Liliputions admired what was revealed by his tattered trousers, but when the tables were turned and he was the small one, he was disgusted by the huge female anatomy exposed during nursing. This was shockingly graphic.) is understandable, and while it is somewhat interesting to know of the practicalities of how much size matters and it’s baser consequences, it is not very entertaining or uplifting to me. Entertainment isn’t necessarily my goal, but I guess I don’t feel potty humor is very artful. Art is my goal.

Wikipedia gives helpful understanding as to some of the symbolism. “Much of the material reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade. For instance, the episode in which the giant Gulliver puts out the Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it can be seen as a metaphor for the Tories’ illegal peace treaty; having done a good thing in an unfortunate manner.”

At least his action is meant as a criticism, though Gulliver doesn’t seem to feel it. It also seems steeped in human depravity as it was meant to “deflate human pride”. In another article, Wikipedia provides,

Published seven years after Daniel Defoe‘s wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe’s optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe’s novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes‘ radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.

Political studies is too steeped in dialectics for me, though I find it ironic that a political ordo is being described above. Like Crusoe, I must be an individualist.