Balancing Act

"Consumers need a healthy balanced diet and they need balanced, credible information," [said National Hot Dog & Sausage Council President Janet M.] Riley.  "When it comes to nutrition and cancer, check with health sources such as your doctor, dietician or the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. You can be assured that they will tell you that a healthy diet can include processed meats like hot dogs alongside your vegetables, grains and dairy."

Uh huh. I can tell you right now that if I swore off hot dogs for life, my doctor would pretty much immediately break into his happy dance. But as much as such obvious damage control as Riley's statement is often termed "irresponsible" and "deceptive," one has to wonder: Is anyone ever really fooled? It's not much different that displaying sugary breakfast cereals along side from fruit, juice and the occasional waffle and declaring it "part of a balanced breakfast." As one wag is said to have pointed out, you could swap out the cereal for dry dog food, and still say the same... (Actually the dog food, from what I understand, is better for you. Sure there's a higher allowance of bug parts and the taste isn't said to be anything great, but when was the last time you heard of a dog developing diabetes from eating Eukanuba?)

The cynic in me says that very, very few people are convinced that hot dogs are health food based on a statement from the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, and parroted by the American Meat Institute. "Never take at face value someone you already know has a reason to lie to you," may not be stamped on one's forehead at birth, but it's not rocket science, either. After all, these are companies that derive their profitability from selling us stuff in the here and now, and aren't going to be on the hook for what happens thirty years from now.

Rather, it's all about cover. Cover for the person who enjoys the taste of hot dogs, but wants to deflect criticism that they're placing food above their health. Cover for the parent who wants to avoid a public meltdown by placating their child with a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Cover for the person who's buying the cheapest, most filling food that they can find, but doesn't want to think that they're compromising their future health because of it. Cover for the shopper who's too "busy" to know what's in half the food they eat, but still wants to think that they'll looking out for themselves. Cover for the person who wants to outsource the thinking to government and/or corporations, by convincing themselves that if it were that bad for them, it wouldn't be on the shelves in the first place. Cover for an entire society that has invented the idea that children should be allowed to subsist on a high-carbohydrate, sugar-laden, high-fat, obvious-vegetable-free diet until they either graduate high school or are unable to move unassisted. (And then allows itself to think that voting age will bring with it an 180° turnaround in eating habits.) Cover from the pressure that we put on ourselves and each other, and are afraid to stand up to. Cover that we wouldn't need, if we had the courage to stand up for, and to, ourselves.

We take all sorts of risks on a daily basis - most without a second (or first) thought and many of them unnecessary. Saying "Yes, I understand that if a long, healthy life is my top priority, I shouldn't be eating this, but I'm willing to trade a month or two off the end to indulge in yumminess today. Now go get bent and let me eat," might do us all a world of good. It would most certainly let food producers off the hook from having to nearly lie to us to our faces on a daily basis. Acknowledging that we enjoy certain foods that, while they made sense for lumberjacks, pioneers and serfs, are way out line with our current lifestyles seems to be one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves these days. Not everyone is of the opinion that the future must always be prejudiced over the here and now. Maybe the most unhealthy part of our diets is the groupthink that we attach to them.

Hat tip to Mike Elgan.

Pick a Side

In 2009, Margarita "Maggie" and John Anderson of Oak Park, Illinois decided that they were going to spend the year patronizing black-owned businesses, going out of their way to spend money with enterprises owned by fellow African-Americans. And sparked a current of outrage from aggrieved Whites who felt that the decisions of a family of four who lived just outside of Chicago victimized themselves and everyone like them.

Some of it is simple to understand (and perhaps simple-minded at the same time). "If we have to act as though the color of someone's skin doesn't matter," the logic goes, "why shouldn't everyone else?" Many Whites come across tired of being painted as racists due to the sins of their fathers, grandfathers and earlier generations, and this has, to a degree given them the largest investment in the idea of a post-racial society, as it is a society where punishing them (in their eyes) for the crimes of the past is no longer condoned. This partially manifests itself in the idea that if everyone simply pretended that race wasn't important and acted like that in their daily lives, that the status quo would wash way all of the lingering vestiges of the past, and create the meritocracy that the United States had falsely claimed itself to be in the past.

One of the things about modern America is that race has become less important. And a certain level of amorphous tribalism (which both includes and transcends race) has taken its place. It's amorphous in the fact that it's not carefully marked out or delineated; different observers often come to different conclusions as to where the boundaries are drawn. Be that as it may, people are often very sensitive to it, and therefore, activities that emphasize it often come in for added scrutiny. For instance, while the Anderson's experiment in buying Black for a year isn't substantially different than making the choice to buy "local" for the same amount of time, race triggers tribal awareness (and resentments) in a way that locale does not. So online posters who complained bitterly about the Andersons bypassing better (lower priced, better quality, et cetera) white businesses often claimed to see no problem with refusing to patronize a better business that just happened to be outside of an arbitrarily defined geographical area.

As time moves on, some tribal boundaries will continue to shift, while others will continue to ossify. Some will change seemingly overnight, while others will take decades to move even a small distance. But because the new tribalism is an internal construct, it will be an interesting mirror on ourselves and how we see our places in the world. Our prides, anxieties, aspirations and resentments will all be written into how we see the tribal divisions around us. Which will make them interesting ways to see how good a job we're doing at building the world we say we want. And of understanding if others see progress in the same way that we do.

Once too many...

Despite the kids' firm belief that Lucky never learned, this time, tragically, he was ready for them.

Pied Pipers

One of the things that I dislike about campaign season is that candidates for high office often demonstrate just how poorly they think of us. Another thing that I did like is how people often prove them right.

The American right sure seems to like stories about foreign countries killing their citizens. Most recently, leading GOP candidate Rick Santorum claimed that 10 per cent of the Netherlands' deaths were from euthanasia, 5 percent forced, and that "elderly people in the Netherlands don't go to the hospital" or, if they do, wear bracelets saying "do not euthanize me," all of which is false.
The Dutch Euthanize Their Elderly, and Other Scary GOP Lies About Europe

This hits upon my impression of the political version of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - namely Rage, Anxiety, Ignorance and Distrust. And to my mind, none of these are positives in campaign season.

(While you could just as easily termed Rage as "Outrage," to do spoils the acronym, so we'll leave it where it is.) It's easy to spark outrage through telling people that innocent people are being murdered by politically wrong-headed foreigners who simply don't have the morals to have any respect for life. On top of it, over the past ten or so years, many Americans have become used to being outraged at Europeans for one crime or another. But Rage is almost always a distraction from the point at hand. Because even if you consider it appropriate to be outraged about something, the act of being angry does not, in and of itself, lead to any sort of positive changes. When politicians see people as easily provoked to Rage, they also see them as easily distracted.

Politicians often seek to sow Anxiety, because when it comes to motivating people to make grants of power, fear is very successful. Not only do people tend not to think things through when Anxious, but they are often willing to concede quite a bit of authority, in return for being lead to a place of safety. Mr. Santorum is clearly seeking to frighten people with the idea that the American health care system ever comes to look like that of Europe, they, or their loved ones would never be safe when going to the hospital. But, from where I sit, it's difficult to look at people who squeak with Anxiety every time you prod them, and not come to think of them as being basically cowardly. Part of it is just an artifact of modern American society - we tend to see ourselves as having a lot to lose and that understanding of the world tends to make risk aversion into a virtue. But someone who understands themselves as being able to scare you on demand isn't likely to see you as someone willing to stand up when the going gets tough, regardless of what they tell you to your face.

But one of the biggest problems might be the political instinct to rely on the Ignorance, willful or otherwise, of voters. Rick Santorum has made some demonstrably false statements during his recent campaigning. For instance, the idea that President Obama said that everyone should go to college (for which Mr. Santorum labelled him a "snob"). Someone who makes a statement that some basic research will show to be untrue is convinced of one, or more of a few things: One) their audience won't know any better, Two) their audience won't actually go and verify the statement that was made and/or Three) that if someone else comes along and says "that isn't true," their audience will ignore them, or assume that they're now being lied to. It's difficult to see how someone who considers you some combination of uneducated, incurious and closed-minded can, at the same time, think highly of you.

The act of demonizing people in other nations is, perhaps, one of the simplest forms of spreading Distrust. It would be difficult to imagine that anyone who took Mr. Santorum's claim about Dutch hospitals at face value would be ready to take a Dutch politician at face value. And, of course, to the stereotypical conservative voter, who would be in favor of establishing a system like that of the Netherlands here in the United States? Those dastardly Democrats. Who are, of course, to be Distrusted. But again, what is the positive side of being able to provoke someone to distrust with so outlandish a story? While we don't often feel that it's a good think to trust everyone, being quick to Distrust anyone who can be flimsily linked to someone else that you've also been primed to dislike is often considered primitive and dysfunctional in the wider world.

Of course, for the most part, this is simply my cynicism talking. It's not like Mike Santorum (or Mike Daisey, for that matter) is going to go on the record with the idea that he thinks that his audience is a bunch of easily-manipulated schmucks. Heck, he may not even believe it himself. It's a safe bet that the people who go to political rallies don't see themselves as being looked down upon by the politicians that they vote for. So maybe, as they say, it's just me...

Stacked Deck

In a past life, I used to work with children who had been taken out of their homes for abuse or neglect. In my years of doing so, I heard three words over and over.

"That's not fair!"

Normally, my response was the same one that my father had taught me: "Well, life isn't fair." And I'd meant that in the same way my father had - that you shouldn't expect life to be fair, so make your peace with it. But one day, instead, I said "You're right. It isn't fair. Nothing about this is fair. You guys have gotten a really raw deal." Silence followed. "What?" I said, "It's not like I don't know why you're here." That became the start of a six or seven-way conversation about childhood. While we had a social worker for the unit, and the kids all went to therapy to talk about whatever circumstances had landed them in treatment, I don't know that they often had the chance to simply commiserate with one another over the crap hands that they'd been dealt. I told them about the kinds of things that I was doing when I was their age, and they told me, and each other, about the circumstances of their lives. It was a hours-long round of Misery Poker, where I always had the worst hand. Which was, really, as it should have been.

I was already inured to the horror stories that they would tell - you had to be, otherwise you simply couldn't manage. (It is, perhaps, one of the strange paradoxes of working with children under those conditions, being hard-hearted was almost a necessity.) But if I though that I was a misanthrope to begin with, I realized that people are always up to doing something to get you to dislike them even more.

While it's common for people to say that they learned some valuable lesson from the mouths of children, instead I simply came away with an appreciation for a simple fact that I already knew: Compared to these kids, and a lot of others, I'd hit the parenting jackpot. As much as I argued with my parents (sometimes, because the dysfunctional roles we played were so ingrained that forgetting the script bred suspicions) and as much as they had their flaws, they were really a great set of parents. And as far as the few children that had actually interacted with my parents were concerned, I'd been raised by a pair of real softies (although my own experience of them had been somewhat different). The difficult part was the realization that at a certain point in the future, it wasn't going to matter. Once they got to be a certain age, there was going to be no more sympathy, understanding or even concern. If the kids didn't rise above their pasts, those pasts would bring them down. I hadn't had to climb that same hill.

I didn't follow the children after I left that job. I needed to make a more or less clean break to decompress. And only by visiting regularly could I have kept up with any of them. But I do think about them from time to time, and wonder what life would have been like if I'd drawn the same hand that they had.