The More Things Change

To the degree that Time is a measure of change, aging means being present for more and more change. And as I have grown older, I have become more and more cognizant of not only the change that has has occurred during my lifetime, but the curious ways in which we not only resist, but deny, change. I am at that point in life where I have a certain amount of clarity into both the tendency of people older than myself to say that certain things are the same as when they remember them and people younger than myself to say that things have always been as they currently experience them. And at a point in my life where the constant pressure of change is shifting from endless possibility to an everpresent burden.

Still I hope to never ossify into a person who opposes change because they have lost the ability to understand the new world that it continuously brings into being.

Certainty

We understand two things that government and institutions do not always grasp: As people we can act to do the right thing, first. As people we can make a difference because we are no longer alone and isolated.
David Amerland. "Sunday Read: Change"

This statement, uplifting as it may be, makes a supposition - and it leaves that supposition unstated - namely that "the right thing" is indisputable, universal, and/or eternal, and perhaps more importantly, self-evident. It also supposes that the differences we can make are always unambiguously positive ones. But bad ideas do not flourish in the world because there are wicked people who love to spread misery and woe - bad ideas flourish because people's imperfect moral sentiments often lead them to believe that they have found the right thing, when they haven't considered the costs - or who will be tasked with paying them. As the saying goes, there is nothing so expensive that someone else can't pay for it.

Low-hanging fruit like the migrant/refugee crisis in Europe make it easy to be armchair humanitarians because we can look at the photo of a drowned child and denounce the immediate circumstances that lead to the tragedy without fear of being contradicted and we can declare that "Someone needs to do something," without being told: "You're someone - do something." But it's the very fact that we aren't the ones tasked with doing something that allows us to listen to nothing but our own understanding of the situation and demand that someone else do the work of easing our consciences.

Most of us do not differentiate between what is right, and what is right for us - what makes us feel good. This often leads to a myriad of different understanding of just what the right thing is, and this is not due to a lack of sufficient intelligence and sensitivity. It's a simple consequence of tens or hundreds of thousands of people each listening to their own understanding of right. Governments are tasked with working out these differences - often, and unreasonably - such that they gain the enthusiastic agreement of all parties involved. Representative governments must represent ALL of their citizens and their varied interests - not just the ones on a particular side of an issue. So while it's easy to be critical of government bureaucrats who appear to founder, dither and look to opinion polls when in the teeth of a crisis, few people are supportive of a decisive response that either turns out badly or costs them more than they wanted to pay. And in a society that votes for its legislators and executives, those people are accountable - and when we choose to hold them accountable, we do so on our own terms. In politics, there is no such thing as managing expectations - you either meet them or you don't. Whether or not those expectations were realistic is your problem.

It is said that in economics there are no solutions - only trade offs. When it's not our responsibility to make those trade-offs, it's easy to forget that.

Lances Ready

When I was young, gender issues were commonly framed within the not-entirely-serious idea of the Battle of the Sexes, and, as they say, all's fair in love and war. People's understanding of how gender and gender identity influence people and work within the world have changed, but all's fair in love and war has not. And so when I read Noah Berlatsky's New Republic article using reaction to the news that Kermit the Frog has a new girlfriend to address the fact that the public typically only engages with issues of domestic violence when men are the perpetrator, my first reaction was to shrug.

Back in the days of The Muppet Show, Miss Piggy never met a problem that she couldn't "karate chop" a solution to - and that included her disagreements with Kermit. Mr. Berlatsky takes exception to the fact that this was often found to be hilarious, and, in all honesty, rightly so:

When women (or female pigs) hit men, it's funny because it's unexpected—and because it violates our sense of how gender roles should work; when men are beaten, they cease to be men, and become emasculated and feminized. Likewise, Piggy’s karate-chops are funny because women who are powerful and violent cease to be classically female, and become swaggeringly masculine. That turns Piggy into a feminist icon, to some degree—but it's also why she's treated, throughout Muppet shows and movies, as a joke.

However, there is, and, I suspect has always been, some discomfort with Miss Piggy's way of solving problems. A discomfort that perhaps leads Megan Carpentier, writing in The Guardian, question the accuracy of the narrative, and perhaps to indulge in a little of what we would typically label victim-blaming:

It’s now clear that [Kermit] was also always colluding with the producers and directors to make sure that Miss Piggy looked like a violent, egotistical harridan and he was seen as the sensitive, Rainbow-Connection-bleating ex-hippie who gracefully put up with both her personality and living in her shadow.
Kermit the Frog's new girlfriend is younger, thinner – and blander

While one can go a bit overboard with using the "relationship" between a set of puppets as a stand in for serious issues in human relationships, in the end, Berlatsky is on to something. But he's also wasting his time.

Our current understandings of social justice don't tend to be about establishing an equitable society as a good end in and of itself. Rather they tend to be about addressing historical imbalances - attacking the social structures that elevated one group of people at the expense of another. There are different hierarchies that concern different people, but generally "the stereotypical affluent/wealthy, straight, white male" sits atop all of them, in a perceived central location in society, and everyone else radiates out from that point. And, generally speaking, conceptualizations of social justice view injustice as being solely a matter of the center pushing out against those farther out in the circle. While there may be a million personal reasons for this, it also fits neatly into the sort of Good-versus-Evil Manicheaen duality. Wealth, heterosexuals, whites and/or men are bad and poverty, non-heterosexuality, non-whites and women (and/or other people who do not identify as male) are good.

While it has been noted that this rather simple way of looking at the world has its problems, and some fairly serious ones, it's not going anywhere anytime soon, if at all. Whether locking others out of being seen as good is a strategy for maintaining access to scarce resources in what is perceived as a zero-sum game or simply a means of holding on to romantic ideals about the self or others, it's a beneficial adaptive strategy, which is why it has survived for so long.

Like it or not, society only advances through one enlightenment at a time. And a lot of the things that we find ourselves working to change are the result of both biological and social wiring, and thus, deeply ingrained. Thus, for the time being, articles like Mr. Berlatsky's are quixotic, at best. It strikes me as unlikely that Kermit the Frog will be on the receiving end of Miss Piggy's stereotyped karate chops as often as he was back in the day, if at all. Violence in general is more frowned upon in children's programming than it was when I was a child, and Piggy's hauling off and decking someone with a loud "Hiiii-ya!" is much more likely to be seen as a racist mockery of eastern martial arts, and thus Asians and Asian culture, that it was then. And so what we're left with is the online reaction to Kermit's new significant other, and if a columnist calls out Kermit as having faked the thumpings he received in decades past, who cares?

But if someone tilts at the windmills long enough, someone may actually see the giant hiding there. One can make the point that all of the great social justice movements of American, and even world, history started this way. So as much as I don't see the profit in taking up the lance myself, I salute those who do.

For Thee, Not Me

Kim Davis has drawn quite a bit of attention for her refusal to issue marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky. Part of this is the religious aspect of her refusal - she has claimed that her religious faith effective trumps the secular rules of the jurisdiction in which she works. People who support her have also taken this tack.

“They’re taking rights away from Christians,” Danny Kinder, a 73-year-old retiree from Morehead, said of the courts. “They’ve overstepped their bounds.”
Kim Davis Ordered Jailed in Kentucky Gay Marriage Dispute

But it's worth keeping in mind that the Davis case is simply one part of a larger issue. People simply don't like having to follow rules that they understand place them in hardship, leave them at a disadvantage or simply disagree with. For instance in the European Union, asylum-seekers are required to file their claims in the first EU nation they enter - but few have been doing so, fearing that they won't be allowed to move on to the countries in which they want to settle - so they attempt to make it to those nations, and then file.

Much of this is a matter of people's moral sentiments, and the value that they place on their own ethical judgments. For a Latin American coming into the United States looking for a better life, the rules that require them to apply for an entry visa, and likely be denied, simply aren't fair - and so they are circumvented.

This habit that people have of claiming personal exemptions from rules is likely as old as rules, and it isn't going anywhere. And that leaves the rest of us with the responsibility of understanding what rules we're going to enforce - and which ones we really would be better off ridding ourselves of.

Cherry Harvest

Davis testified that the Bible teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman and that sex outside of marriage is a sin. Court records indicate Davis herself married when she was 18 in 1984, filed for divorce 10 years later, and then filed for divorce again, from another husband, in 2006.

Many Christians believe divorce also is a sin, and an attorney for the same-sex couples repeatedly questioned her about this in court. Asked if she would religiously object to issuing a marriage license to someone who has been divorced, she said "That's between them and God."
Clerk Who Opposes Gay Marriage Gets More Time

So... if a heterosexual couple chooses to sinfully marry one another, "That's between them and God," but if a homosexual couple does the same, "it would violate her Christian beliefs to issue a license to a same-sex couple that has her name on it?"

Really? There's a cynical argument than can be made here - perhaps that Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis is taking a stand on this issue because it looks as though it will enhance her prestige in the Christian community, while blocking the remarriage of divorcé(e)s wouldn't have the same effect.

But it's likely that what's really going on here is simpler. My own suspicion is that Davis would argue (to both men and her god) that her ignorance of the sinfulness of heterosexual couples who present themselves for marriage licenses is their own doing - how was she to know that they were still married in the eyes of God, and therefore not eligible to be with one another? After all, is she her brother's (or sister's) keeper?

Situations like this erode the relationship between believers and the secular by catering to the suspicion that "faith" is being used as a convenient fig leaf for what would otherwise be considered blatant bigotry. (After all, desegregation brought many of these same arguments.) And that, in turn, gives the believers a reason to feel that they're being persecuted for following the dictates of their doctrines.