A Catty Comment on the Weather

So this is how people react to winter where I grew up (and yes, I'm from North Dakota, but the mindset is identical - so laconic that you'd think tempers had frozen solid):

[S]ome Minnesotans took it as just another winter day, even in the state's extreme northwest corner where thermometers bottomed out at 38 degrees below zero at the town of Hallock and the National Weather Service said the wind chill was a shocking 58 below.

"It's really not so bad," Robert Cameron, 75, said as he and several friends gathered for morning coffee at the Cenex service station in Hallock. "We've got clothing that goes with the weather. ... We're ready and rolling, no matter what."

(Source: AP via Columbus Dispatch)

And this is what happens here in Southeastern Ohio: Monday morning, with a scant 3/8 inch of snow on the ground, school is delayed two hours, with my husband - and our one and only car - out of town for the day.

Another 3/8 inch fell this evening, again on bare ground, and I'm already wondering what'll happen tomorrow. Not to mention Friday, when we'll get subzero temps, which also typically crash the school system. Adding to my antsiness, the radio station that posts closings is super-slow to update and the school's website has been down for over a month.

I realize that the root of these hassles is poverty. Well, okay, also an absurdly nervous superintendent. But if the region weren't so poor, roads might get cleared. The school district's website might get fixed. And there'd be less worry about kids being underdressed for the conditions. Those same kids don't get subsidized meals when school is off, nor do their parents typically get paid if they can't make it to work.

Failing that, I'd love at least an improved weather prediction service. Like this one (via Lynn Gazis-Sax at Noli Irritare Leones).



(Translation: Temperatures have been pretty darn brisk in Germany, too - at least for those not snuggling their own personal furry heat source.)

Frustrated as I am with the capriciousness of my school district's snow day policy, I'm not blind to my blessings. A friend of mine, a transplant from Indiana, loaned me her car Monday so I could haul my kids to my office, meet with students, and then schlepp the kids to school by eleven. When I thanked her that evening, she said:

None of us have family here.
And so all of us have family here.

Laboring by the Insurance Clock

I'm feeling taciturn and mildly mopey today because I have a nasty sinus headache and the Tiger (who has tonsillitis) just yakked up his lunch. So, from the department of "it could be way worse" comes this news about how the recession is stranding people without health care. The New York Times (via Broadsheet) reports that when the Archway cookie factory in Ashland, Ohio (yes, Ohio again!) went belly-up two months ago, it left its employees stuck without health insurance.

While no one has died (yet) as a result, the company's irresponsibility made it shockingly hard for one baby to find its way into the world, as the Times recounts:

[Starla] Darling, who was pregnant when her insurance ran out, worked at Archway for eight years, and her father, Franklin J. Phillips, worked there for 24 years.

“When I heard that I was losing my insurance,” she said, “I was scared. I remember that the bill for my son’s delivery in 2005 was about $9,000, and I knew I would never be able to pay that by myself.”

So Ms. Darling asked her midwife to induce labor two days before her health insurance expired.

“I was determined that we were getting this baby out, and it was going to be paid for,” said Ms. Darling, who was interviewed at her home here as she cradled the infant in her arms.

As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Ms. Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills.

I couldn't fathom how Starla Darling could be left stranded with those bills if she was still insured. It turns out the company misinformed her - or to put it bluntly, Archway lied. The Mansfield News Journal connects the dots:

On Oct. 4, [Darling] received a certified letter stating that, as of two days from then, she would no longer have a job or health insurance.

Darling says she asked and doctors agreed induce labor the next day, before the insurance expired Oct. 6.

After seven hours, with doctors about to send her home because the effort to induce was not taking, she began hemorrhaging.

"My placenta tore away from the wall and both the baby and I were literally inches away from death," she said. "We were rushed into emergency C-section, with both of us hanging tight to our lives."

Darling said doctors had to cut her open with no time to administer pain medications. Afterward, she learned her health insurance had already expired, despite the certified letter. Archway had stopped paying its part for employee health insurance months prior.

"Apparently, employees were paying their share of health insurance, but it has been reported that the company had not been paying since June," Meghan Dubyak, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, told the News Journal on Friday.

Ugh. It's one thing for a company to slide into bankruptcy; it's quite another to lie to your employees. Also, can I just note that the credit crunch only began in September, not June? Archway had a problem for a good long time before credit froze up. It obviously had other mismanagement issues.

Former Archway employees are really stuck. Most can't afford COBRA coverage anyway on their meager unemployment benefits. But even if they could, their former employer's actions have rendered them ineligible. The Wall Street Journal gives more detail (via Michael Panzner at Daily Markets):

Archway was self-insured — and when it filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 6, there wasn’t enough money in its coffers to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of outstanding health-care claims along with all its other debts.

Workers weren’t eligible for Cobra, a federal act that gives certain laid-off employees the right to temporarily continue health-care coverage at group rates. That’s because Cobra doesn’t apply when a company terminates its insurance plan.

This story is disgusting from start to finish. About the only thing Archway is not culpable for is the hemorrhage Darling experienced. To the best of my knowledge, induction of labor is not a particular risk factor for placental abruption.

Otherwise, Darling's story and those of her co-workers (follow the links above for those other stories) demonstrate why health insurance desperately needs to be de-coupled from employment. Insurance costs are bleeding employers (and indirectly, their employees, whose wages are depressed when premiums rise). As Archway's "ethics" show, a few employers can't be trusted to make their employees' health a priority in hard times. Most perniciously, as the recession/depression deepens, the number of uninsured is going to skyrocket.

Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Racism's Door

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm still worried about whether American racism - overt and latent - might be strong enough to tip this election to McCain? Frank Rich thinks it won't, according to his last column in the New York Times:

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

But then the Columbus Dispatch thinks race could be enough to drag Obama to defeat in my neck of the woods. The Dispatch may be deluded enough to endorse McCain but it's in close proximity to the various Ohio bellwethers. As am I, minus the delusion (or so I hope?).

Here's my encounter with racism on the campaign trail. It's enough to make me plenty nervous, even as it stokes my hope for slow, slow change.

The first day I went out knocking on doors for Obama, I met a frayed-looking middle-aged couple enjoying the mild sunny Sunday afternoon on their porch. They were the very first people I found at home as a freshly minted canvasser. They lived in a neighborhood of modest homes built in the 1950s. I wasn't out in the impoverished countryside; I was among young families and retired professors.

The man said he was genuinely unsure who'd get his vote. And so I sat with them for a good half hour, asking what issues worried them.

It didn't take long to unearth a major concern. The woman said she planned to vote for John McCain. But even if she didn't ...

"I have to tell you something," she said. "I'm not racist." Long, long pause. "But I'd have a problem voting for a black man for president."

Before we were sent out to canvass, we'd been warned that we'd encounter open racism sooner or later. I still wasn't prepared for it in my maiden experience as a canvasser.

And so I circumnavigated. I asked them how they felt about the economy, which had just begun its meltdown. I inquired how they felt about the current president. Once they'd expressed their deep dismay at the status quo, I wondered out loud if they might want to take a chance on the new guy, even if they had to go outside their comfort level.

I wasn't trying to convince the wife, who'd made her allegiances clear. I was just trying to gently nudge the husband back into his self-declared role of canceling out his mate's vote.

But she was the one who eventually moved - not into the Democratic column, but possibly into a different sort of self-awareness.

"You know," she mused, "Maybe I am a little bit racist after all."

I tell this story not to open her up to mockery. In the late September sunlight, the day before my birthday, I took her reluctant but unforced confession as a gift, the more precious for its fragility.

As I said a day ago, canvassing is very much like teaching. You plant a seed. You hope for gentle rains. You never know for sure what will sprout and grow and blossom.

And then there are people who dash your hope altogether. My younger son, the Tiger, is having some trouble with a kid in his kindergarten class who's hitting and calling names. About half his classmates are also being bullied. The insults include "stinky black," aimed at one of the Tiger's friends who is half Latina, half African-American, coupled with taunts that "Obama is stinky."

Kids don't make this shit up on their own. I don't know if he's getting it from his parents - at least theoretically, it could come from other relatives - and I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt than judge them prematurely. Whatever the source, he's sure not inventing racism out of thin air.

Here's what we're up against. The Columbus Dispatch reported on the ubiquity of such attitudes a few weeks back:

Like most other Democrats in southeastern Ohio, Hendrickson, a single mother of two struggling to support her family as a waitress, voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary.

With Clinton out, Hendrickson says she plans to vote for Republican John McCain. She doesn't trust Democrat Barack Obama.

"I just don't feel comfortable with him," said Hendrickson, 36, of neighboring Portsmouth. "I don't think he's being honest about what he's going to do."

The political landscape of the 14-county southeastern region, a swing area of Ohio where chronic unemployment and poverty have left many feeling forgotten, would seem to favor Democrats.

But an uneasiness with Obama prevails in Appalachia, and for many it comes down to race.

"I'll be voting for a Republican for the first time in my life," Jeff Justice, a 46-year-old ironworker, said as he finished his lunch at Hickie's.

Asked why, Justice, a white former Wheelersburg resident now living in Florida, didn't hesitate.

"He's black."

But as the economy has tanked, people's willingness to set aside their prejudices has seemingly grown. At Salon, James Hanrahan suggests that racists fear lots of thing even more than they fear black people. As Sean Quinn reported at FiveThirtyEight, a canvasser in Pennsylvania witnessed the following exchange:

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

It may be cold comfort to those whose retirement savings have evaporated over the past few weeks. But if tomorrow's vote is close, we can reasonably assume it will have been the economic meltdown that pushed bigots into voting for a black man. If Obama does well enough to claim a mandate, we can still assume "it's the economy, stupid."

Either way, these elemental fears of economic survival are surely multiplying the number of people who call themselves - with a dose of charming self-mockery, to be sure - "Rednecks for Obama." I took this photo a couple of blocks from my house, but I've seen more than one similar sign since then, including one deep in the woods while canvassing yesterday.


By the way, I'm not at all suggesting that self-proclaimed "rednecks" are racists. Only that the current crises are inspiring them to vote for a candidate who - for reasons of race, yes, but a host of other reasons as well - doesn't look like their typical guy.

I am suggesting that if "rednecks" are turning out for Obama, all of us who back him had better do the same.

A new, kinder chapter in American history just might begin today.

In the Belly of the Bellwether

About being the "bellwether" in this election: It's wonderful and horrible. I've been grateful to be in a spot where - in some small way - I might possibly help tip the election toward Barack Obama. Now, on Election Eve, I'm nervous as hell.

Technically, Athens County, where I live, isn't even the bellwetheriest part of Ohio. That has been variously identified as Chillicothe, west of here, or Perry County, which abuts Athens to the north, or maybe the entire southeast region of Ohio. The town of Athens itself is a little island that combines progressive politics with the kind of neighborliness that you thought went out of fashion after 1959. It's dotted with nearly as many Obama yard signs as there are houses. Athens County voted 63% for John Kerry in 2004, which I believe only Cuyahoga County topped.

We aren't at all typical of the region, though. Much of the surrounding county suffers from rural poverty (though generally not as bad as what I encountered this weekend). Our neighboring counties are even worse off; in August of this year, three of the state's six counties with unemployment rates upward of 10 percent were adjacent to Athens County.

And so it's not at all surprising that people in southeast Ohio often feel disenfranchised. This feeds into my three big fears for tomorrow:

• Republicans will try to suppress the vote through challenges to voters at the polling places and various other tactics.
• Democrats may stay home because they think Obama's got it sewed up and their vote doesn't matter anyway.
• Racism may prove more durable than we've all hoped.

At school pickup today I heard a rumor that the GOP has been using robocalls to deceive some Athens voters into falsely thinking that their polling places have changed. Maybe this is just a rumor. If the vote is close, though, I expect that Republicans will comb through every last voter registration, hunting for the most minute or irregularities.

Based on my occasional canvassing work over the past month I'm pretty sure people aren't too complacent. When asked if they planned to vote, people quite often said they'd already voted early. Of the rest, most said "I wouldn't sit this one out for the world." At least in and around Athens, the general sentiment is that this is a historic election and we'd be fools not to vote.

Apart from those who live in the most grinding poverty, even a lot of the less likely voters sound motivated. Yesterday, I dropped off literature at a trailer home where a dead deer lay in front of the steps. The residents were in the yard. They told me they were definitely going to vote on Tuesday.

As for my third worry, racism? Well, that's a topic for my next post.

Update 11:15 p.m., November 3: In an all-too-apt illustrations of how rumors spread and morph, I botched the one above. I originally wrote that postcards were allegedly being used to deceive Athens voters about their polling places. At my local Obama campaign headquarters tonight, other volunteers set me straight on the actual allegation, which involved robocalls to do the same thing. Either way, it's second-hand information. I've updated my post to reflect the most accurate gossip I could gather. :-)

Starving the Political Imagination

While canvassing for Barack Obama this afternoon, I visited the poorest, saddest, most hopeless place I've ever encountered up close in this country. Sure, I've passed urban housing projects ... and kept going. Today, I walked willingly into a pocket of grinding rural poverty. What I learned about my poorest neighbors' lives will keep me awake tonight. As well it should.

I went out with another woman who teaches at my university, and we decided to start with Pine Aire Village, a trailer park on the outskirts of the next town to the west. ("Mobile homes" is not the right term; there's no mobility to speak of in this place, just transiency, eviction, and abandonment.) She'd been out there fifteen years ago when she'd had a nanny who lived there, so she knew the way.

The first thing we noticed were all the largish dogs lunging at their chains. The next thing? My friend said, "Wow, things have really gone downhill since I was here the last time." Most of the trailers are rusted. Virtually all of them are surrounded with that sprawl of junk typical for rural poverty: broken toys, old tires, unidentifiable plastic parts. I remember this from the Indian reservations that dotted the North Dakotan landscape of my childhood. The only difference is that Appalachia has bigger hills and a lot more trees.


We spoke first with a man and his teenaged daughter who were excited about Obama - well, at least the girl was, though she wasn't quite old enough to vote. The girl seemed sweet and sincere and even enthusiastic. Her dad was sure that voting wouldn't change a thing. They took a yard sign anyway. I wondered how long it will last before it's stolen or trashed or just incorporated into the overall junkyard effect.

From them, we learned that the trailer court was teeming with drugs. I didn't ask what kind. Thinking back to what my former hairdresser told me about rural drug use, I'm guessing meth and Oxycontin.

While my friend went back to her car to fetch them their yard sign, I strolled a few steps down the road. A man with blackened teeth (maybe my age, but he was so run down I couldn't tell) approached me and asked who or what I wanted. I explained that I was volunteering for Obama and looking for a particular house number. He told me I wasn't going to find it or anything else down at that end of the court. As he spoke, he moved in front of me, almost blocking my way. That's what clearly tipped his behavior over from "possibly trying to be helpful" to "definitely trying to intimidate." It didn't help that he kept mumbling loudly that he wasn't going to vote, he didn't believe in voting, but no matter what he would never, ever vote for Obama.

My friend came with her car just then and rescued me. Ensconced in our metal cocoon, we drove down to that end of the court anyway. My hostile new friend was right. We didn't immediately find another number on our list - though we did once we rounded the corner, and I'm still wondering what he was trying to deflect or protect or hide.


What we did find: A swastika, spray painted in red on an abandoned trailer. And then another, and another.

My friend is Jewish, but frankly she was still far more worried about vicious dogs. Myself, I was pretty nervous about the combination of nasty dogs and anti-Semitism, but if I'd said that we probably would've felt compelled to give up, and neither of us was ready for that.

The next place we knocked, a young man barely old enough to vote answered the door sleepily. He said he'd just laid down for a nap but then proceeded to ramble on about how he was voting for the sheriff, which meant he couldn't vote for president, though he kind of liked Obama anyway, but hey he had to go to court, so he wouldn't be voting for anyone ... My friend thought he was on something, though it's possible he was just paranoid and confused due to his legal troubles. Then, in a sudden flash of coherence, he warned us to keep our distance from a certain red pickup truck whose owner drank constantly and kept a bunch of mean dogs. This was apparently the pack of dogs we saw upon our arrival.

This young man wasn't sure whether he was actually registered to vote.

Across the street, we spoke with a lovely woman in her early eighties - bright, thoughtful, warm, still perfectly sharp. Her tiny yard was neat. Inside, her home was tended with care. I was almost more touched by this than by the naked despair on every side of her.

She followed the news closely, she said. She despised McCain. But she was just heartbroken that she couldn't vote for Hillary, and so she was planning to sit this election out. We spent twenty minutes discussing with her how the best thing she could do to defeat McCain would be to hold her nose and vote for Obama. In the end, I think she probably will, unless she's feeling poorly on Tuesday or life otherwise intervenes.

Canvassing is like teaching that way. You plant a seed. You never know if it'll sprout. Pine Aire - despite its would-be picturesque name - is pretty arid ground.


From there, things deteriorated. A fifty-something woman with leathered skin and long platinum hair told us that nothing you did mattered, "them politicians" only cared about money anyway. She hated Bush, she hated the war, she worried about jobs. But she wasn't even registered to vote. (I guess we should've asked that first.) While we spoke, three men sat drinking beer in her yard, listening to loud country music. Every time she stated a political opinion - and she had many, and could cite pretty persuasive reasons for them all - she'd immediately collapse into herself. Her shoulders would slump, and she'd repeat her mantra that voting wouldn't change a thing.

This woman - who fought so hard against the ravages of time on her flesh but couldn't even imagine waging a political fight - could have been the poster girl for nearly everyone we spoke with. Time and again, we heard that one person's vote didn't matter. That politicians were all corrupt. That all our jobs were getting sent away overseas and we couldn't stop it. That there was no reason to even register to vote.

This is yet another cruelty of poverty, all the harsher because it locks us into a society where some are desperately poor: People are starved of hope. They are deprived of any sense of agency and efficacy. They are so far beyond disenfranchised that there's not even a word for it.

This is intentional. If all the people I met today did vote, they'd break strongly against McCain and the Bush legacy. Of course, we don't know how many of them would have an issue with Obama's race. (That's a matter for another post.) But they are so deeply discouraged that they can't even begin to imagine a politics that would give a damn about them and their lives.

All photos courtesy of my husband, who visited Pine Aire a few weeks ago while researching the local history of coal mining. Prudently, he stayed in the car and didn't go too far into the trailer court. This is why he didn't see or photograph the swastikas. Believe me, they're real, and I'd be too afraid to take pictures.

Free Rice, Now in New Flavors

Photo of rice terraces in the Philippines by Flickr user ~MVI~, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've mentioned before that I've had some fun with Free Rice, a procrastination vocabulary-game site, which donates a few grains of rice to hungry people for each answer you get right. By now, they've donated some 42 billion grains. I have no idea how much this translates into in terms of satisfied tummies. I think its main service is publicizing the hunger problem as well as the failure of the United States to join other wealthy nations in pledging to donate 0.7% of GDP toward solving the world hunger problem. Indeed, we ranked dead last in OECD figures for 22 developed countries in 2007.

Anyway, just in time for school starting, Free Rice has now expanded way beyond its original vocabulary game. I was excited about the multiplication facts. No, I haven't forgotten that much of my education; the Bear is in third grade, and I'm thinking this might help him learn to multiply with less nagging (me) and stubbornness (him).

Some of the other subject areas are diverting for grow-mutts. There are Famous Paintings (which gets hard fast, and I guessed cleverly) and World Capitals (ditto, except I totally embarrassed myself). In foreign languages I aced the German and the French, which tells you it's easy. My French is pretty rudimentary, and I bailed as soon as I hit level 10 of 10. I got to level 8 with my Dora the Explorer Spanish plus a few cognates. There are also Italian, chemical symbols and English grammar, which I didn't try yet.

Happy procrastination!

Parenting between the Cliffs of Risk and the Rocks of Pragmatism

Cliffs and rocks at Big Sur, California, photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday in comments on my feminist homeschooling post and at her own blog, Marcy of Marcy's Musings suggested that my arguments against long-term withdrawal from the paid labor market were driven by a politics of fear. She pushed me to keep thinking about this, since they way I mix my feminism with my parenting is definitely not driven by fear. It’s a balance between risk-taking and pragmatism, which recognizes that "choice" is illusory unless you've got a clear picture of the trade-offs.

Honestly, a lot of people (feminists or not) might say I take a few too many risks. Too many years in grad school? Check. In an "impractical" field? Check. Married a foreigner whose training is in philosophy? Check. Rode home the other night on my bike after midnight - alone - through the big city of Berlin? Check. In other areas, though, I'm boringly risk-averse: I won't talk on a cell phone while driving, and I'm very careful with my kids' safety.

We all take risks - some smart, some stupid - and the trick is to figure out which risks are worthwhile. Marcy recognizes, for instance, that her decision to stay home with her kids through their school years entails a financial risk. She doesn't deny it, though she reduces it mostly to the risk of divorce, while I see the issue as broader: a spouse can also die or become disabled while kids are still young. My husband narrowly escaped death twice, and he went through a prolonged period of disability.

My story is far from unique. The Sungold family tree indicates why it's important for women not to become too dependent financially over the long term. One grandma was divorced from an alcoholic husband in her early twenties. (Circa 1912! Imagine the scandal!) She raised her two daughters alone until she met my grandpa nearly two decades later and then gave birth to my dad. One of my dad's half-sisters was divorced while her daughter was still tiny. His other half-sister was widowed in her early fifties. My maternal grandma was widowed while still in her early forties, with four children to support, the youngest (my mom) only six years old. Both my mom and her sister were divorced while they still had young children at home. Their two brothers remained married to the same women into old age.

So, in those two generations, only two of eight women enjoyed a husband's support throughout their childrearing years. (And those two were farm wives who worked from dawn to dusk and beyond.) It's not that the women in my family are unusually flaky, either; those who divorced did so only under considerable duress. While none of the women in my family chose single motherhood, they still had to find ways to cope, financially and emotionally. For instance, both my grandmas were teachers, and that's how they held their families together.

My family tree suggests why it's neither pro- nor anti-feminist to say that women run greater risks the longer they're completely financially dependent on a mate. The risks are simply a pragmatic reality.

Now, Marcy interprets my argument as saying

women shouldn't have the freedom to do what we find fulfillment in, if it means we might be dependent on the men in our lives, because if those men should fail, we will be in serious trouble. We should follow the current cultural pattern and go to work so we will have a "safety net" in case our husbands should walk out on us.
(Read the rest here.)

No, what I'm saying is something different. I'm suggesting that we need to balance a quest for fulfillment with awareness of the risks of long-term dependence, which grow over time. Only if we're realistically aware of the risks can we make informed and conscious choices.

I'm not at all arguing that mothers should take six weeks' maternity leave and then plunge back into work full-time. I'm not inveighing against stay-at-home parenting. My own choices have tilted in that direction since my first baby was born. I chose to take the financial risk of parenting first - and working for pay only secondarily - during my kids' preschool years. I believe kids need intense attention while they're very young. As infants, my boys got that almost entirely from their dad and me. Starting from around their second birthday, they went to daycare half-days with six other kids and a wonderful caretaker; they loved it, and I could work part time. Only now, with both kids in school, am I returning to work full time. I'm lucky I'll still be able to pick up the kids after school, since I can grade and prep classes at home. My work responsibilities have allowed me to spend lots of time with my kids, and to enjoy the sort of self-fulfillment that Marcy describes. I was lucky that my husband supported (and quite literally subsidized) this arrangement. Other people make other choices, and that's okay too, as long as their choices are conscious and well informed.

Indeed, failure to recognize the importance of active, involved parenting - and its rewards for children, mothers, and fathers - poses very significant risks of its own. The truth is, most jobs are a hell of a lot less interesting than mine, and it's very common for parenting to be far more fulfilling than paid work. That goes for most of men's jobs, too, although lots of fathers still find their fulfillment through the breadwinner role - sometimes too narrowly, at the expense of closer relationships with their children.

Where I differ from Marcy is mainly in the length of time we're spending outside of the paid labor force. The risk here is that re-entry into the labor force becomes increasingly difficult, the longer you've been out. For women, this has historically translated into a substantial risk of poverty in old age or upon their marriage ending. (One of my aunts is in precisely this position now, at age 76.) If the kids are still at home, they're hurt by poverty, too.

In other words, I'm arguing that we need to consider the long-term perspective in our decisions. For me, it made sense to roll back my career to spend lots of time with my little ones. That was a risk and a trade-off. It struck me as worthwhile - and it was. But I see how its costs continue to rise over time. The choice to homeschool, if it means two decades or more outside of the labor force, carries risks and sacrifices that would be too costly in my life. Above all, my children would depend on me completely if my mate's health failed again.

Other folks are free to take that risk, and for some parents whose circumstances are different than mine, it may make sense. However, it would be misleading to portray these significant risks as minimal or to argue that homeschooling may be a more feminist choice than relying on the public schools. The only feminist choice, I'd say, is one that's thoroughly informed.

Finally, I really haven't addressed the elephant in the room: socioeconomic class. It should be clear, though, that the capacity for real choice depends on a certain level of prosperity. In many families, both parents must work in order to avoid eviction and keep the utilities on. That's when choice - even to take a brief maternity leave - can become an unattainable luxury. And that's why poverty has to be a central issue for feminists. That would be a whole 'nother post.

The Nanny Diaries' Classy Critique of Class

Here's my latest installment in my series, "Reviewing movies that everyone else has already seen." (The first one was "Juno.")

I watched "The Nanny Diaries" this weekend (on DVD, how else?) and thought it did a surprisingly nice job of reflecting critically yet unobtrusively on how social class functions in the United States. If you've seen it, you know that its portrayal of Upper East Side matrons is merciless. They're self-absorbed, petty, bored, materialistic, and completely unavailable to their kids. They scheme to get their children into the right preschools. They mandate hours of French instruction every week for their preschoolers. They spy on their employees with nannycams hidden in teddy bears. They're a more selfish but equally obsessive version of the mothers that Judith Warner profiles in Perfect Madness: Motherhead in the Age of Anxiety. It's easy to take potshots at them, which the movie plays for both laughs and tears.

While that's probably the most obvious level where the film deflates class privilege, it's not the most interesting one. There are more subtle - and sober - messages about the nannies themselves. And I thought that was cool, and unexpected, for a Hollywood movie.

The first of these is how class and race intersect in toxic ways. The central character, Annie, is a white gal from New Jersey, fresh out of college. When word spreads among the rapacious matrons, they fall all over each other trying to hire her because, as one of them says bluntly, "she's white." And she's not an immigrant.

Since the movie's a comedy, it's not going to give us a blistering critique of how nannies are often women who've been forced to emigrate in order to feed their children in a faraway country. But it doesn't ignore that reality either. There's a painfully funny scene where the matrons drag the nannies en route to a seminar on "conflict resolution" and the matrons sit on gilded chairs while the nannies are pressed up against a wall as if in a police lineup. While the nannies are being interrogated about their grievances (which of course will be punished, not resolved!), one of them, a black woman from Africa, says that she's had to leave her children in order to raise a rich family's kids. That moment is not played for laughs. There's no way you could. You see the discomfort of the matrons as they struggle to repress this knowledge, to sink back into their comfortable denial. And you're reminded of how easy it is for any of us with relative privilege to repress and deny the reality that poverty lives cheek-by-jowl with wealth - that the enjoyment of class privilege depends on that juxtaposition of the rich and poor.

The movie's most subtle insights on class privilege deal with Annie (played by Scarlett Johannson) and her post-college employment dilemmas. Her mother, a nurse who's struggled as a single parent, fiercely wants Annie to enter the financial world and enjoy the security she lacked. But Annie is burnt out after working her butt off in college and has neither the drive nor the desire to become a high-powered businesswoman. Becoming a nanny is her little rebellion against lower-middle-class ambition. It's a gentle but revealing commentary on how class privilege hurts even those who are above the poverty line but still feel constrained from taking chances. In the end, Annie does take a real chance, enrolling in an anthropology graduate program. (Well, humanities grad school is not just chancy; it's a pretty sure ticket to being perennially underpaid. But that would be another post.)

Sure, you could fault the movie for being mostly about a pretty young white girl whose problems are nowhere near as severe as those of the women of color tending their charges in Central Park. There's certainly a need for exposés of the exploitation - and even trafficking - that nannies and other domestic servants too often suffer. But given that it's a romantic comedy and not a crusading documentary, "The Nanny Diaries" went much further than I'd expected in untangling the fraught rat's nest that is social class in America.

Image from Flickr user Roger528, used under a Creative Commons license.

Extremely Unfree Rice

I cooked rice this evening for the first time since I heard that its price has skyrocketed. My house is now redolent of basmati and my belly is happily full of delicious chick pea curry and spinach with paneer that my neighbors cooked. I guess it's the smell of privilege, though not the kind of privilege that I think we should feel bad about having; it's the kind that ought to be extended to all of humanity.

And you know, if it weren't for the completely misguided and shortsighted idea that we can keep guzzling gas if we just plant enough corn for ethanol, there might actually be enough food to go around. It used to be that I saw "corn as high as an elephant's eye" when was a kid only if we were driving through a small patch of southeastern North Dakota and southern Minnesota into Iowa. The landscape of my Great Plains childhood was durum wheat. Now, over the past several years, I've seen corn spread across Ohio like a malevolent stain. It's even taken over large swathes of southwestern Germany. Amazing how subsidies and the promise of a new market can totally warp agriculture! Whatever happened to the wacky idea that crops are meant to feed people?!

The price of rice locally has gone up about 50 percent (says my neighbor who just bought a jumbo bag of basmati at our town's one and only Asian grocery). Some of the big American retailers are restricting sales to no more than four bags. This is no big deal for southeast Ohio, where we have oodles of other food choices. But if you're poor and live in Vietnam or China, the rice shortage may threaten your ability to get enough calories.

Nothing is really going to change until citizens demand an end to the sort of perverted agricultural policy that would have made the Soviets proud. Or if we want to maintain an ag economy based on subsidies, let's at least diversify and remember that we need food even more than we need cheap fuel. (I feel almost stupid writing that - it's so obvious! - but duh, I guess it's not quite obvious enough.) And here's a really radical idea: If we could manage to conserve - by tightening our fuel consumption standards, driving fewer miles, and moving rapidly toward hybrid cars that can be plugged in and charged - we could decrease our appetite for ethanol and allow the appetites of actual humans to be sated instead.

This is a minor tangent, but if you haven't already discovered the Free Rice game, now's not a bad time to check it out. It's a vocabulary game, and the site's sponsors promise to donate a grain of rice for every word a player gets right. I'm sure the amount of rice donated won't make a dent in the hunger problem, but the awareness it's raising just might make a difference. And the game is seriously addictive. I quit cold turkey last fall, but when I played it again a few days ago I noticed they've got a bunch of new words at the higher levels, plus a new algorithm that feeds you the words you missed a few turns later, so I might actually learn something. (Hint: If you get up to about 44 or 45 - out of 50 possible levels - and don't know a word, assume it's something medical or archaic or related to weaponry. Oh, and if you're clueless but one of the possible answers has two words instead of one, that's usually the best guess.) Let me know if you get all the way to 50 - or have any clever ideas for tackling the hunger problem.

The muscari in the photo grows next to our elementary school; I took the picture.

Depo-Provera for the Kids

German condom/anti-HIV ad: "For young vegetables, too." I've seen this and others in the series posted publicly at bus and subway stops all over Berlin. Photo by flickr user compujeramey, used under a Creative Commons license.

I heard an extraordinary story this evening while I was serving on a panel on reproductive rights at my college. One of the other panelists was a young, smart, committed Americorps worker who's been dealing with foster kids. When she first started her job, a 14-year-old asked her if she could procure condoms for her. The girl had very little money and was afraid of getting busted for stealing them.

So my co-panelist said sure, I'll work on getting you some. But when she approached her supervisor, she was told, "What? you've got to be kidding. This girl has already had chlamydia. She can't be trusted with condoms. We'll put her on Depo-Provera."

When this boomeranged back at the girl, she protested that she didn't need birth control after all.

I don't know if the girl ever did get put on Depo-Provera, aka "the shot"; my co-panelist didn't ever find out. (And of course all of this is second-hand, but my co-panelist seemed pretty reliable, and a colleague of hers confirmed some of the details later in the evening.)

But boy, can I understand why she wouldn't want it. Just in case you've forgotten, Depo-Provera was highly controversial in the 1970s and 1980s because it was tested on poor women, partly in developing countries, partly among American minorities, where free and informed consent was a virtual impossibility. The FDA kept it off the market for many years and provoked strong public opposition with its approval in 1992. How it morphed into a respectable form of birth control, I don't know; I was out of the country for most of the 1990s (though I did somehow get in on the Starr Report).

Depo-Provera has a much nastier risk profile than its hormonal cousin, the birth control pill. This starts with nuisances like nausea. If the pill makes you queasy, you can get off it and return to normal within a few days. If the shot makes you sick, you're stuck with it for three months, as my co-panelist pointed out. The emotional side effects are also harsh. The only person I knew who was on it suffered from serious mood swings - and no, I don't know why she stuck with it.

More seriously, a few years ago the FDA required a "black box" warning for Depo-Provera because it induces bone loss, which may be irreversible. What a perfect drug for a 14-year-old girl who might still be growing!

This is such a lousy idea that it's tempting to just rant at the social worker and call her evil idiot. And yet, I think if I do that, I overlook how overburdened that worker must be, with a swollen caseload and never enough resources. This region is quite poor and for reasons both budgetary and human, the temptation must be tremendous to do anything, everything, to stop yet another child from being born into the foster care system. Compliance is obviously another big selling point: a girl living in unstable circumstances might forget to take the pill, which is a non-issue with Depo-Provera.

And yet ... the idea that her history of chlamydia meant that condoms would be inappropriate? That is just Orwellian logic. What will she catch next time - maybe HIV? Adding to the sick absurdity, her infection didn't actually come from consensual sex; she got it from being raped.

What I don't know - and am trying to figure out - is how much power the state has to force or coerce girls in foster care to get the shot. Whatever power it has would presumably come from its parental role. Which raises a related question: Can a parent legally force his or her underage daughter to get Depo-Provera? If I find any answers (in comments here, or through my thus far fruitless googling), I'll let you know.

Clinton Slanders My Ob/Gyn

I think the latest flap about Hillary Clinton distorting the truth may be slightly overblown. This time, her problem seems to have been sloppy fact-checking, not outright lying. But this particular episode cuts very close to home for me.

Up 'til a few days ago she's been telling a story about a young pregnant woman in southeast Ohio who was denied medical care at the local hospital for lack of a $100 upfront payment. The baby was stillborn, and the woman died, too. Now, Clinton is right that the health care system is broken. But she relied on gossip and no one on her staff verified the story before spreading it all along the campaign trail.

These are accusations that hurt my neighbors, my doctors. Here's how CNN debunked it. (Video via Alternet.)



The hospital accused of this heartlessness is O'Bleness, our one and only local hospital. (The CNN anchorwoman totally mangled its name.) The doctors so accused are at River Rose Obstetrics and Gynecology. Now, O'Bleness is a small-town facility that does not always offer cutting-edge care; financially and technologically, it just can't. But these obstetricians are fine doctors, good human beings, and I hate seeing them libeled and slandered.

I know about this firsthand. I gave birth to the Tiger at O'Bleness and had just about a perfect experience, apart from the nurse anesthetist having been sprayed by a skunk that same morning and still stinking to high heaven. The doctors at River Rose attended us, and I'm still very happy with them. They've been wonderful with everything from my infernal UTI to a slow-motion breast cancer scare I had over the past year.

If you've been following my blog, you know that I reflexively take a critical position toward medicine (one example is here), so when I say my ob/gyns are good, it's not just empty words. These doctors listen. They take you seriously. They don't make unfounded assumptions or leap to conclusions.

They also don't just cater to the well-heeled. I was in there just a week ago, and I was struck again by how their waiting room is a microcosm of rural poverty. You see teenage mothers accompanied by their own thirtysomething mothers. You note that these young women are on their second or third baby. You smell the acrid odor of cigarette smoke, even though smoking is banned in the building. You hear the exhaustion and impatience in the women's voices as they deal with their kids. You see new mothers feeding their babies formula, even though both the hospital and the physicians strongly promote breastfeeding.

This is not the picture of a practice that turns away the needy. And it turns out that in this case, too, neither O'Bleness nor River Rose denied care to this terribly unlucky young woman. As O'Bleness states on its website: "We provide care regardless of patients' ability to pay." And in this case, as the New York Times reported over the weekend, O'Bleness admitted her without any delay.

Was the distortion of this story an honest mistake on the part of the Clinton campaign? Could be. But if so, it shows egregious negligence:

Linda M. Weiss, a spokeswoman for the not-for-profit hospital, said the Clinton campaign had never contacted the hospital to check the accuracy of the story, which Mrs. Clinton had first heard from a Meigs County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputy in late February.
(Source: The New York Times)

What exactly happened remains unclear. The expectant mother apparently visited another clinic closer to her hometown where she'd once owed money at an earlier time when she'd been uninsured. The Washington Post reports that Holzer Clinic - a local chain of for-profit providers - had taken her to court for a debt, which she however repaid in full back in 2005.

It's unconfirmed that Holzer was the outfit that turned her away, but I think it's highly plausible. I get some of my healthcare there, and the doctors are good. (Disclosure: one of them is a friend of mine.) But Holzer is pretty tough when it comes to bill collections (first-hand experience there, too!) and the people at the reception desk are known to stonewall, at least at my local branch. If their books erroneously caused them to think she owed money, I can easily imagine the receptionists sending her away.

So it looks like yes, lack of insurance almost certainly caused her to miss care that might have made a difference. At the same time, the woman suffered from preeclampsia (according to the WaPo), a condition that sometimes still proves lethal to mother and child even with the best of care. A college classmate of mine suffered that fate. So did the wife of a former co-worker of my husband's. They were both well insured. Sometimes nature is brutal.

I hope both Clinton and Obama will make health care reform a priority. The only real answer is single-payer system that would ensure everyone gets the care she needs, whenever she needs it - "Medicare for all." But it's neither ethical nor politically effective to rely on unvetted stories that slander my smart, kind, and dedicated health care providers.

Hair-raising Tales of Parenting in Poverty

Yesterday I mentioned I had a slew of reading to do. But my other beginning of the term preparation is my quarterly, whether-I-need-it-or-not trip to the beauty shop. (And yeah, believe me, I needed it.) I spent a few hours there yesterday morning, getting highlights and a sleek new cut and a big dose of class consciousness.

My last hair stylist was also a college student, so she and I could talk about the university and be more or less on a familiar, comfortable, middle-class wavelength. My student stylist is about to graduate and was booked out anyway, so yesterday I tried a new stylist. She did a great job on my haircut and color (I went pretty red!). Along the way, she told me some fairly hair-raising stories about her life.

Apart from the student, every other stylist I've known in this town has lived in modest-to-wretched conditions outside of town. Lots of them are single mothers. They struggle to make ends meet. This gal, who I'll call Helen, was no exception.

The problems start with that most basic need, housing. Helen recently moved out of a small trailer whose main charm was its proximity to her aging mother's house. Over a period of years, her landlord had refused to fix the roof, where water pooled and leaked into the trailer. Over that same period, her younger son's asthma returned. Everyone got bronchitis repeatedly. Helen had multiple episodes of pneumonia. One day Helen went to the emergency room with severe chest pain. It turned out to be bleeding around the lung (hemothorax) caused by toxic black mold. And black mold can only thrive on moisture. For this privilege she paid $450 a month in rent, not to mention the medical bills.

She says she's been lucky that those doctors, and others, have put her on a payment plan. This is necessary because her health insurance situation is abysmal. Her employer doesn't provide any. I think she mentioned having some catastrophic coverage but she pays out of pocket whenever she sees a doctor. She's had melanoma and needs treatment that would cost about $500 per month. She has no idea how she'll finance it. She already has thousands of dollars in medical debt. Her kids were eligible for state-subsidized insurance, but their eligibility got revoked, then reinstated upon appeal, which didn't exactly enhance her sense of security.

Helen's kids go to a rural school that's lately been plagued by sexual harassment scandals. But it seems to have more mundane problems, too. Both of her sons have been harassed by bullies without the school taking action. They're athletic kids, but she's raising them to try to take the high road, so they don't usually fight back. I worry about the kid who's been harassing my Bear during recess by getting in his face, chasing him, and poking at him. She worries about the child who threatened her second-grader with slitting his throat. When she reported this to the school, the bully was told he'd been busted. He was ordered to stop the harassment and leave his knife at home. No other consequences. The next day, he threatened Helen's son again, this time calling him a snitch. Helen hopes to get her kids enrolled in my kids' district, but I think she probably missed the deadline for inter-district transfer applications.

After school, a lot of the kids hang around on the streets. The scene, as Helen described it, sounds like what you might expect in a decayed urban neighborhood but not in a declining coal town in the beautiful Appalachian foothills. And yet, these kids are dealing and doing drugs just like any gangbanger in the 'hood. Helen is pretty confident her own kids are dodging this - so far, anyway. But she knows Oxycontin, crystal meth, even heroin are prevalent. She knows people who've died as a result.

One reason Helen is pretty sure her eighth-grader isn't doing drugs is that he's amazingly frank. Not long ago, he voluntarily confessed to her that he and his girlfriend had had sex. She read him the riot act on condoms (luckily, the girl was on the Pill, but she wants him to protect them both) and after much drama the kids have agreed not to repeat the experience anytime soon. It happened after school when the boys' father was supposed to be on duty. It could've been worse; there've been three pregnancies so far in that eight-grade class.

Helen works full-time, and she does her job well. She goes to church on Sunday and keeps her kids busy with sports. She seems to be making the best life she can for her kids. Her only real screw-up, as she readily told me, was mating with a couple of loser men. But she lives in Glouster, Ohio, a town where as of 2000

The per capita income for the village was $11,837. About 24.2% of families and 28.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 36.3% of those under age 18 and 21.4% of those age 65 or over. (Wikipedia)

And Glouster, as we all know, is located in the richest country in the world. I sure feel that irony when I spend a heap of money on what's really a luxury. (No one ever expired for lack of hair color, though I bet a really bad dye job could be at least psychologically lethal.) And yet, if I didn't go to this salon, which is fancy by local standards, I'd go somewhere that paid its employees a whole lot less. That wouldn't help Helen either.

I don't know how to fix the poverty problem. But a single-payer health system would be one good start. Moving away from local school financing would be another.

Photo of Barbie in pins by Flickr user Mz Kit Kat, used under a Creative Commons license.
Photo of the Glouster hotel by Flickr user shuggatang, used under a Creative Commons license.