For Love, Not Money

In a past life, I was a child and youth care worker. It was my first "real" job out of college. I worked in residential treatment, with children who had been taken out of their families' homes for (sometimes truly horrifying) abuse or neglect. (There was a subset of cases that also came down to one parent or the other having truly tragic taste in significant others.) Then I spent a stint as a foster care case worker.

Considering the overall stress level and high stakes of these jobs, the pay was abysmal. When I first started, the secretaries made more per hour than we did. When I finally gave it up and moved to Washington State, the first job that I was able to find and really hold on to was testing video games. It was a step up. By the time I'd really started building a career for myself as a software tester, about a year later, I'd doubled my salary. There was less paid time off, but other than that, the benefits were comparable. I'd gone from a job that placed the health and well-being of vulnerable, and previously victimized children in my hands to one that pretty much little more than: "Take this program and make sure it does what we say it does." And even though I'd felt well paid at the job, all things considered, that was just proof that I didn't understand the job market I was living in.

And so when I read the headline of NPR's piece: "Poverty Wages For U.S. Child Care Workers May Be Behind High Turnover," my first thought was: "ya think?" And the article isn't talking about the hard cases, the people who are working with the children with special needs, past traumas or mental health issues. It's talking about the run of the mill workers in daycare centers and the like.

When I was a child care worker, it was decided that salaries needed to be increased, and I was drafted into a working group to discuss how to make it work. At one point their was a presentation about salaries in the industry, and the idea that our organization, in order to attract the best candidates, wanted to make sure that we paid within the top 25%. "That sounds reasonable," I remember myself saying, "But it doesn't get you around the fact that the top 25% of no money is still no money." When you can match the pay rate of a child care worker by testing Playstation games all day (which, from having done it, I can tell you is a lot less fun than it sounds), it's going to be hard to find child care workers.

The closing of the article is one of the heartbreaking things that a lot of us had to deal with:

Antunes says she's passionate about her work, and the thought of leaving the field makes her feel guilty. She knows the child care system desperately needs people like her to stay.

The problem now is that the system relies on passionate people not wanting to leave. But that forces people into difficult choices. I left, because in the end, it was a really high-stress position to be in, especially as a man. People tend to look at men who work around children with suspicion, and in the field, I found myself pushed into the enforcer/disciplinarian role, which reduced the amount of time you could really enjoy what you did for a living.

The times, they have a-changed, and I don't think that things would have worked out as well for me now, as they did then. The Dot-Com boom was still reverberating, and software jobs were thick on the ground. Rather than needing any specialized education or credentials, you simply needed to be bright enough to be trainable to do the work. In contrast to social service work. The bar in Washington State was higher than that in Illinois. From looking at the classified ads, I realized that once I'd moved here, I no longer had the qualifications to work a job that I'd just spent four and a half years doing. But that still leaves Ms. Antunes, after 30 years in the field, and having had to return to school to earn a four-year degree, making little more than the starting wage at the McDonald's nearest to my home.

And people still think that child care is too expensive.

Background

So I was reading a post on Google+ where the poster related feeling dehumanized and what a scary feeling that was. And the first thought that crossed my mind was "you get used to it." Which, taken at face value, can be a terrible thing to say. But you do become accustomed to it; or at least I did, because I came to realize that the people I interact with see me in a way that is driven by their experiences and desires, rather than my own, and they don't owe me any differently.

And the first part of that is easy to live with, but the second part can be hard, because it can be frightening to understand that to a certain degree, you're simply something between an extra and a prop for so many of the people that you meet. You worry that their stories, the ones that they are the heroes of, may have something very unpleasant scripted for you. But eventually, you come to really understand what it means to be an prop - that it's not about you. Just like your story, the one in which you are the hero, isn't about them. For there to be something unpleasant scripted for you, you would actually have to have a place in the script. And usually, I don't. I'm just another self-propelled piece of the scenery.

And I'm okay with that. I'm fine with only being as important as the ficus in the corner. Their stories don't need to cast me in a speaking role; that's what my story is for.

Teach the Children

When I was in junior high school, one of the group assignments we were given was to create our own version of the 6 o'clock news. For our team, I had the weather report (I remember working in a marijuana joke) and the closing editorial. My editorial, was something of a rant, because it was about something that actually bothered me - the habit of adults to think that as children, we were too stupid to understand the difference between television and reality. When I read "7 Reasons So Many Guys Don’t Understand Sexual Consent," it was like I was 12 again.

As a high-school student in the 1980s, I could have told you that each of the points that "David Wong" brought up were bogus. It's not like anything that he said is new. Just like the idea that, broadly speaking, media that "the Left," takes exception to is treated as some form of insidious mind control isn't new. That said, he does hit on something real in the piece:

If you're wondering, no, I've never in my life groped a woman who didn't grope me first. This is not because I was a gentleman who cared about consent. If you'd cornered me in high school and asked me why I hadn't just grabbed a girl at a party and made her kiss me, I'd have said it was because I wasn't cool enough, or hot enough. "I'd have to lose weight and make the football team to do something like that!" See, I was told that the ones who held back until they had permission were the pussies, the cowards, the nerds.

For the record, if you'd cornered me in high school and asked why I hadn't just grabbed a girl at a party and made her kiss me, I suspect I would have told you that a kiss wasn't worth being beaten up, thrown out of school or going to jail for. I knew, by the time I was in high school, that sexual contact with a person without their consent was a crime. In the same junior high school where I'd pontificated about being treated like idiots by adults, a rumor had gone around that a boy had cornered a girl behind the building one day after school and "felt her up," as we called it back then. It was a scandal. It also turned out to be a good reason to beat up unpopular boys - I think at least two were pummeled on suspicion of being the perpetrator.

Mr. "Wong," in another article, tells us that he grew up in a small town in one of the deep Red counties in Downstate Illinois. I, on the other hand, grew up Upstate, in a kind-of-blue distant suburb of Chicago. And I suspect that a lot of the difference can be chalked up to that. He describes the 25th Anniversary Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the one with Kathy Ireland on the cover, as "the first porn magazine [he] ever owned." Where I came from, if you'd described the Swimsuit Issue as "pornography" and weren't a feminist, people would have told you to go back to Wheaton*. And while sure, I'd heard the Swimsuit Issue described as pornographic when I was in school, I went to a Roman Catholic high school - and as far as the Benedictines were concerned, a model in a tube top, miniskirt and heels lounging on a Mustang counted as pornography.

Of the "7 Reasons," five of them were attitudes that we associated with people who were, to be blunt about it, backwards. And that included large swaths of Downstate, whom we tended to regard as unsophisticated hayseeds. Not that we saw ourselves as urbane and cosmopolitan; we understood that we lived in what people in Chicago termed the boonies. (Yes, I grew up a Black kid in the boondocks.) But at least were weren't living The Waltons or something.

Reason #3, "Sexual Assault = Guy In An Alley With A Knife" was sort of a given for most people, I think, although I'd stumbled into a book with sections of the New York State legal code in it as a young teenager, and had come to understand that Rape, at least as a legal matter, wasn't about force or violence, but about consent and age. And while I wasn't a sharp legal mind, I presumed that "consent" was more or less what we'd always thought it was, agreeing to do something. That understanding, interestingly, got me into a lot of trouble, when, as a young college student, I insisted on a pedantically literal interpretation of "violence," and so made a stand on the idea that sexual assault was not inherently violent, since a lack of consent did not require or necessarily imply, violence. (Yes, I eventually learned to find better hills to die on.)

And reason #2, "All Sex Outside Of (Heterosexual) Marriage Is Wrong" was a basic assumption of most Christian denominations that I was familiar with, and being nominally Roman Catholic myself, and attending a Catholic high school, I was well versed in it. But when I read this:

Remember when people implied it was hypocritical for Jennifer Lawrence to complain about stolen nude photos while also posing nude for a magazine? Same deal -- if you grew up hearing that all naked photos are sinful, what difference does it make if the woman consented to the sin?

I was surprised. Where I came from, there was the idea of compounding a sin. Sure, naked photos - or photos of women in tube tops, miniskirts and heels lounging on Mustangs - were sinful, but you could always do worse - and forcing the woman into it or stealing the photos counted as doing worse. Confession didn't allow you to lump multiple wrongs into a single sin. Sure lust was a sin, and letting that lust lead you to premarital sex was also a sin. But forcing a woman into sex was worse. Maybe the idea that you could work your way out of Hell stood in the way of deciding that if you were going to sin, you may as well go big or go home.

But I started this off with the idea that a big chunk of the article seemed like blaming "the media" where it wasn't warranted, and so let me go back to that. The piece makes a big deal of the bad acts of Harrison ford roles in various movies. And this was the sort of thing that wound me up when I was twelve. The fact that Harrison Ford's characters in the movies were always putting the moves on women who would rather be dipped in boiling oil but suddenly came around was never understood to be the way things actually worked - Han Solo, Rick Deckard and Indiana Jones were fictional characters - and "Forcing Yourself On Women Makes Them Love You" was something that only happened in fiction - which is why it worked for them, but everyone else went to jail for it. You could have asked any of my friends, and I suspect that they would have told you that. Not because we were somehow uniquely inured to media blandishments, but for all that the adults around us seemed to think that we'd do anything we saw on television, doing something stupid, or criminal, because you saw someone on television do it was generally seen as the mark of a moron. Adults may not have thought us capable, but the expectation was there, and by the time most of us were in seventh grade, we'd internalized it.

And I think that's the thing that's missing from this piece. Mr. "Wong," at no point, mentions the role of parents, peers and community in all this. The idea that "Everything Women Do Is Intended To Stoke Male Hunger," for example, isn't something that children learn from the media. It's something that they learn from the people around them on a day-to-day basis. Their fathers, brothers, friends and neighbors. And maybe even their mothers and sisters. Where I grew up, we didn't see the Swimsuit Issue as pornography, because the idea that the only reason a woman would wear a skimpy bathing suit was to entice men wasn't a thing for us. The difference between Sports Illustrated and Playboy was that inside a Playboy, the women didn't wear any clothes at all. Anybody could have told you that. If you can't see the name of the publication, but one talks about nude Vegas showgirls, it's a pretty safe bet which is the porn.

People who have difficulty with the idea of consent are not, I suspect, evenly distributed throughout the population. Because I don't suspect that wonky ideas like "Asking Permission Is A Sign Of Weakness" or the things that happen in movies are a good model for real life are evenly distributed throughout the population. My father wasn't the most feminist guy you'd ever meet - not by a long shot. But while I never picked up his habit of referring to women as "broads," I did pick up on the understanding that if he ever caught me mistreating a woman, I'd have to answer to him for it - and it wouldn't go well for me. And I can't think of a single person I knew when I was growing up who openly bought into the anti-consent mindset set forth in the Cracked article. I suspect that there must have been some - after all, it was rumored that a boy had cornered a girl and groped her behind the junior high school. But there was another story, and as it came out of the public high school, I wasn't around when was supposed to have happened either, and it went something like this: Jock accosts girl in the hallway, and won't take "no" for an answer. Girl, being a soccer player (just about everybody whose parents could afford it played soccer) steps back, tees off, and boots him between the legs. Hard enough, allegedly, that she ruptured his scrotum. Everyone agreed that he had it coming. True story? I have no idea. But the fact that the overwhelming consensus was that he was asking for it says to me that our problems with consent weren't due to society. After all, we'd seen Harrison Ford movies, too.

*Wheaton being Wheaton, Illinois - where Billy Graham went to college. Wheaton College's reputation for being scarily fundamentalist was applied the the entire town.

Bad Followers

There are many good reasons to vote for a particular candidate. There are many fewer good reasons to vote against a candidate. But the fact that some number of supporters of a given candidate may have engaged in some act of criminal behavior strikes me as falling into neither category.

Let's say that it could be proven that a supporter of Hillary Clinton was behind the arson and graffiti attack on the Republican campaign office in Hillsborough, North Carolina. This fact, in and of itself, would change nothing about Mrs. Clinton's credentials and/or fitness to be President of the United States of America. Likewise, if it could be proven that a supporter of Donald Trump was behind the arson and graffiti attack on the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, that fact, in and of itself, would not make Donald Trump any better or worse a candidate for the presidency.

To me, these ideas are fairly clear-cut. After all, each candidate is likely to draw some 30+ million votes come election day. That's simply too large a group of people for none of them to have serious chips on their shoulders, mental health issues and/or some really bad ideas about what constitutes political engagement. Even if only one in one-hundred of the people in each camp are really pumped up about their chosen candidate, we'd still be talking about hundreds of thousands of people. It's unrealistic to presume that groups of that size would be completely free of anyone who thinks that spraypaint and accelerant might be a good way to make a political point.

Not to say that this is the sort of behavior that we should come to expect every campaign season. Just that looking to lay it at the feet of a candidate is a waste of time. And the implicit logic that says that a candidate who attracts "crazies" must be the problem themselves is simply broken. Even if candidates were in the business of trying to make people not like them, they can't be guaranteed of that outcome. Sometimes, you just can't get rid of a mad bomber. (This is where I note that of all of the reasons why I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump, the fact that he's earned the support of White Supremacists isn't among them. My disagreement with the policy positions that drew them to him was in place long before their endorsements surfaced.)

I don't see presidential campaigns as battles in a great war between good and evil. They're simply political squabbles between political parties. And any yahoo can vote for a political party, whether the party wants them to or not.

Give A Man A Ride

So I found a little snippet on LinkedIn that goes something like this: "A guy looked at the Corvette the other day and said, 'I wonder how many people could have been fed for the cost of that car.' I replied, 'I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people who make the trucks that haul the copper ore.' That's the difference between capitalism and welfare mentality. When you buy something,you put money in people's pockets and give them dignity for their skills."

I've never been a fan of telling people that you'd spend their money better than they did. But in this case, I prefer the saying about teaching a man to fish. It's shorter, leaves out the smug self-satisfaction and tells us how the guy is going get by during those times when 'Vette sales slump.

But for me the wonky thing about this is that it claims to illustrate "the difference between capitalism and [a] welfare mentality." The alleged "dignity of work" has nothing to do with capitalism. I'm pretty sure that in communist China right now, there's someone finding dignity in work, while at the same time, someone else is finding mindless drudgery. Whether or not a person derives some level of personal dignity from labor is completely independent of whether or not they are paid a wage or supporting their family by that work.

Rather than being a tale of how capitalism brings people livelihoods and dignity, this is a defense of consumer culture that claims that to "buy something" can be seen as a form of charity that's just as effective as direct giving - mainly by ignoring the percentage of a purchase that goes to middlemen or is skimmed off in the name of "shareholder value." And this isn't to say that the corporation-driven American consumer culture is a bad thing. You can make the argument that it is, and if you want to hear that argument, people will line up around the block to tell it to you. But the argument that I'm making is lets see it for what it is. Buying luxury items, like cars capable of driving faster than is legal on any public stretch of road in the nation, should not be recast as a favor we're doing for the working classes. It's something that we do for ourselves as individuals, because we derive something from it. That something could be dignity, enjoyment, the attentions of people we want to have sex with or any number of other things.

The welfare state, as it exists in the United States, and in other places, is there because there is a recognition that left to it's own devices, society would gladly confine itself to that set of people it deemed necessary to keep things going, and consign the rest to fending for themselves - preferably somewhere far away. Corvettes are nice (I like driving them myself sometimes), but there isn't enough demand for them to take up the slack in the labor pool that's been created by the combination of historical gains in efficiency and the primacy of the 40-hour work week. We shouldn't tell ourselves that there is.