Politics (n.): many tics

You know, I'm proud of the Democrats. Sure, they lost the House. Sure, popularity is down. But they passed a gigantic health care bill that the country desperately needed. They took a chance that they would lose seats in Congress, that they might lose their own jobs, but they did it for change they believed in.

The whole point of being a democratic country (well, technically, it's representative government) is that power is spread out. We don't like tyranny. We don't like people having too much power. So for a states(wo)man, it should be the case that power is not the be-all end-all. What matters is not holding power, but doing something with it.

People seem to forget that.

People also seem to dislike when they get what they asked for. A giant point in the last presidential election was that the candidates both claimed to be Washington outsiders. Well, here's Obama, being not very good at playing the Washington game. I like it, because he's mostly doing what he thinks is right and reasonable.

Unfortunately, the opposition is not always reasonable. Not that Democrats are always the best role models either, but damn! Congress Republicans are frustrating! Why must it always be about trickery and getting the advantage and spinning things so the other party looks bad?

That would lead me back to a digression about my previous question: can't we voters ever get straightforward information?

But I'll spare you for now. Let's just finish with a quote from Douglas Adams of galactic hitchhiking fame, repurposed for my own, er, purposes:

"...it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made [Senator] should on no account be allowed to do the job." (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

A Speech to Remember

As I was walking up Bancroft St. this afternoon, I found my way blocked by some policemen. They were allowing nobody to cross the street behind Zellerbach Hall. After I waited for a few minutes, a motorcade turned into the street. Police cars at either end flanked a couple of SUVs. I looked into the silver one and saw...

Try To Feel Again

Are pictures of suffering still effective in raising emotions in our society? Have we all become desensitized by the images of violence and death and victimization we see everyday, on TV, on the internet?

Yes and no. I think pictures can still affect us. A picture of a single starving child is still much better at encouraging people to be generous than figures on the debilitating reach of malnourishment throughout the world.

But I think our attention spans have shortened to the point that we no longer think about what the pictures mean (I mean, this is why I use short paragraphs). This is not to say that we think or feel nothing. We feel our initial reaction, our gut instinct of awe or sadness or pity as our mind processes the situation represented by the picture. Look at this photograph:

What was your reaction upon seeing this photo? Mine was initially, 'Oh, another starving child, how sad.' My attention was divided between this and the text and what the professor was saying, but it still seems to provide support for the "we are desensitized" theory, right? As the picture continued to stay up on the Powerpoint, however, I kept looking at it. And then I saw the vulture. 

I was transfixed by horror. All I could think was 'Oh my god.'


But if the professor had put the picture on the screen and flipped to the next slide with a few words, leaving it up only for a few seconds, I wouldn't have understood the context. Then again though, isn't that the kind of environment we usually see these pictures in? On TV, with the anchor or a narrator speaking, and some sort of text every now and then, a quick flash of a picture in between to highlight the subject? Or online in an article, surrounded by text and flashing click-me ads?

Maybe we don't really look at the world around us anymore, and the same applies to these photographs. We're too engrossed in ourselves and the people around us, and even the world around us - but all in the form of our mental construction of these things. You could argue that everything we see is a mental construction, that's true, but my point is that we see what we expect to in pictures, not what's actually going on.


So I have an assignment for you. It's probably easiest to do online, when you have some control over the pictures you see. Next time you see a photograph that invokes some kind of gut reaction in you, stop and look more closely at it. Notice the details, ask where this was taken, who it was taken by, what the situation was, who the people are. Find out not just what the photographer took a picture of, but what she meant to show.

Now or Never?

Have you ever heard the saying "Live in the moment"? Of course you have. But you've probably also heard from your parents or other elders that you'd better "start thinking about your future."

Huh. So which is it? What are we supposed to do? There's plenty of arguments for both sides, but as usual, it's all about balance, and about following the right advice at the right time. I mean, if you're thinking about the future all the time, there's no meaning to life. If it's all about the destination, rather than the journey, then

1. You won't know what to do when you get there.
2. You won't know what to do if you don't get there.
3. You're wasting the majority of your life. It's like going on an airplane and never looking out the window. Unless you're afraid of heights, though I'd hope you're not afraid of life.

 At the same time, a lot of society's problems seem to be a result of short-term thinking. Beyond imagining jet packs and flying cars and hubristic scientists managing to destroy the world, we don't consider what the world will be like even 20 or 30 years in the future.

Joel Pett, USA Today, 12/7/09

Politically, there's a lot of problems that need to be solved. A lot of them need solutions now. But in the same way that people only think about aiding the poor of foreign countries - or even their own! - during an emergency, I think people get too hung up on quick, visible results. We look the other way as we pass the burden of even bigger problems on to future generations.

Thinking about the moment is great for your personal life. You've got to enjoy it while you've got it. But when the decisions are ones that affect all of society, we need to think about the future. We have to be creative and innovative and look outside what we would normally do. There's bound to be a solution that may not be quite as effective in the short term, but will help (or at least not hurt) in the long term. As I said, it's about balance, about compromise. We've got to stop cheating on the scales by adding extra weight to the short-term side.

More That's Not Going In My Paper

I'll be more professional in my paper, but Joe Lieberman, you are an ass.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpockele/ / CC BY 2.0

Although maybe I shouldn't call you that, since you're obviously not working with the Democrats (who chose a donkey for the party symbol anyways?).

The Democrats are quite willing to negotiate, because they need your vote to pass reform. Making new demands every time something is close to being settled is simply an abuse of your current power.

You were all for the Medicare buy-in 3 months ago. What happened? Are those insurance companies in Connecticut looking for a new board member when you're done with your term? Will you be the next Billy Tauzin?

Time is running out. People's desire for reform moves in waves. It didn't quite happen when Clinton tried it, although that was also partly his fault for going for perfect rather than enough. But now the wave is back, and if we don't get this done, it will move past, leaving 1 in 8 million Americans without health coverage. Again.

And Democrats: Lieberman isn't going to go for the public option anyways. And the public option is crucial to making sure premiums don't rise too high. So why not focus your efforts on one of the more reasonable Republicans instead? Someone who cares more about their constituents than about political ideology? Maybe Senator Snowe?

Anatomy and Protests

Okay, anatomy was relatively easy. Except the final was a fiasco. The professor couldn’t get the projector working for the histology identifications, so it took over an hour before we could go back to the first 10 questions. Then it was too bright, so she turned off the lights. And then we couldn’t see our papers, and she kept flipping back and forth, and people were talking, etc. Didn’t feel like a final at all.

I have more to say, though, so oh well, there goes my 75 words.

The protests are still going on. On Friday, the police arrested some 60 people who were in Wheeler Hall to prevent them from entering locked classrooms and throwing an all-night hip-hop party that might disturb finals the next day (like anatomy). Well, quite a few of those in Wheeler were simply students who happened to be there, studying for finals because the hall was open 24 hours.

The next night, while we were in the anatomy chatroom on bspace (which basically hosts all the course websites), asking and answering questions, someone mentioned that she heard people marching past her house. Everyone just said they hoped that there wouldn’t be any protests during our final, and forgot about it.

In the morning, I found out what happened. According to the Daily Cal, close to midnight on Friday, a bunch of protestors marched to Chancellor Birgeneau’s house (which is inside the campus), carrying torches. No, nothing was burned, but they did vandalize the outside of the house. 8 of the 40-75 people in the original group were arrested, but only 2 of them were UC Berkeley students.

I hope nobody will take this as a reflection on the rest of the Open University protestors, because they are not affiliated. It really was as Governor Schwarzenegger said (though I hate to agree with him), “an act of terrorism.”

The Stupak Amendment

I’m working on a paper for my public health class right now. We’re supposed to analyze the health care reform bill passed by the house from the position of a randomly assigned stakeholder. But because the controversy over abortion rights is far-reaching and divided, our professor doesn’t want us to spend the whole paper arguing about that. Or any of the paper, for that matter. So I’ll write about it here instead.

I think the fact that the ball of health care reform has started rolling is great. We’ll get something, even if it isn’t perfect, and that can be tweaked later. America is the only developed country that doesn’t have some kind of national plan for universal coverage. The last country to share that distinction was South Africa. Good to know we’re behind the country in which a girl has a better chance of being raped than of learning how to read. Anyways, the Stupak Amendment to the House bill says that any plan paid for or subsidized by federal money cannot cover abortion unless it’s proven to be rape or incest.

That’s great for anti-choice lobbyists, but exactly how would you prove it was rape? From police reports? I’ve read from various sources that anywhere from an estimated 60-80% of rape victims don’t report the crime. Why? Because it’s often someone they know, because they’re not comfortable going to the police, because even if it wasn’t their fault, they will become ostracized. There are plenty of reasons.

What about these women, who make up the majority of rape cases even in the most conservative estimate? Will they not be able to salvage their lives and move ahead if their income is low and they are forced to use the federal subsidies? They already have enough to deal with. This amendment does nothing more than create hardship for these women. I can’t even begin to comprehend how difficult their situation would be, and it’s related to my minor! How can those mainly white male Representatives, sitting comfortably on Capitol Hill, understand the plight of these women?

Even if women are allowed to purchase a supplemental policy (assuming their income is over 400% of the Federal Poverty Level and they are not being helped by the federal subsidy), it's useless. Abortions are used when the pregnancy is unwanted or unexpected. Why would you buy a plan against that when you could just use contraceptives? Women don't expect to have abortions, it happens when the pregnancy is accidental! We need more female representation in Congress to point out the issues that are obvious to women, but invisible to men.