André da LobaMany travelers from rich Western countries spend time volunteering around the world, but some argue that this "voluntourism" ends up doing more harm than actually helping communities in need.
As students, retirees and others head abroad this summer in search of experiences volunteering, are they really looking to help others or just themselves?
Read the Discussion »André da LobaMany travelers from rich Western countries spend time volunteering around the world, but some argue that this "voluntourism" ends up doing more harm than actually helping communities in need.
As students, retirees and others head abroad this summer in search of experiences volunteering, are they really looking to help others or just themselves?
Read the Discussion »Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
When I was 7 years old my father bought me a Bag of Laughs. It was the early 1980s and, as with most every school morning in Lagos, Nigeria, we were stuck in traffic. My father was at the wheel, listening to Bob Marley on the eight-track. I sat in the back, staring at the street peddlers walking in between lanes jostling can openers, batteries and other random items at car windows.
A boy, older than me but still young enough that he should have been in school, dangled a toy outside my window. It was a yellow cloth bag cinched at the top with a picture on one side of a cartoonish open mouth laughing madly. Inside the bag was a little battery-operated mechanism. If you pressed a button, the bag shook violently and made uproarious sounds like a guffawing crowd. My father slipped a few naira notes through a crack in the window in exchange for the toy. Sitting there behind my parents, I pushed the button over and over again, grinning endlessly at the obnoxious crowd contained in my little hands.
Until recently, that Bag of Laughs was one of the few memories that popped up whenever I tried to think positively about Nigeria, the country of my ancestors.
I was born in New York City and lived in Nigeria only between the ages of 7 and 9. That's when my mother left my father, taking my younger sister and me to live in Ivory Coast, then England and finally the United States. We were not raised to imagine ourselves as woven into the fabric of Nigeria, let alone as lovers of it. As children our parents always spoke to us in English, reserving our indigenous language, Igbo, for the secrets that passed between adults over our ears.
Coming of age in foreign classrooms, my sister and I slowly shed our native skins. We let teachers mangle our names, then adopted their mispronunciations — introducing ourselves with syllables our own relatives tripped over.
At home we caught snippets of phone conversations between our parents and relatives still living in Nigeria. "So and so's house has been attacked by armed robbers." "The police do not do anything. Some of them are even in on it." "You can't trust anyone." "There's no hope for this country." As the years turned into decades, Nigeria saw economic struggles, the rise of email scammers and Boko Haram, a terrorist group. Whatever childhood memories of birthday parties and schoolyard antics we had treasured were soon dulled by these new testimonies. Before too long we began to dislike and to fear our home country, to expect nothing but the worst from Nigerians. It most likely would have stayed that way, if not for my father's sudden death.
When I was 29 my father died back in Nigeria, within weeks of a cancer diagnosis. My older brother, then living in New York City, and I left the States to go back and bury him. In accordance with Igbo custom we had to bury him in his ancestral village of Akunwanta in southeastern Nigeria. So we flew into Enugu Airport, drove the two hours to Arondizuogu, and then down a red clay road to the enclave bearing our family name, Akunwanta village.
Akunwanta is the piece of land to which I can trace my paternal ancestry as far back as possible. It is the second part of a hyphenated last name I do not use. There was the dust from which my father came and the dust to which he was returning. I was returning. Suddenly, my life in the United States seemed like a storybook, so far away it didn't seem tangible.
After that, I couldn't get Nigeria out of my mind. I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that there was a land and a people that rightfully claimed me. Choosing to ignore that seemed oddly irresponsible in light of the genuine plight of illegal immigrants here in America and across the globe, who reluctantly left their countries out of financial desperation. It seemed oddly disrespectful in light of the growing number of refugees who fled their countries because of war. And it seemed oddly confusing as a black woman to choose as my home a country with such a deep-seated history of prejudice and injustice toward minorities.
I started to imagine what it would be like to live in a place where you did not have to explain some aspect of your identity on a daily basis, where you did not have to offer people a reason, no matter how subtle, for why you were among them.
When I am in Nigeria, my name alone places me in recognizable context. A few years after my father's funeral, I started going back to Nigeria for weeks and then months at a time, writing and working from there. I let myself be wooed by the little ordinary things: the bath towel sun-soaked warm through mosquito-netted windows; eating pineapples in season, cut round and sweet; the way women sway in form-fitting long printed Ankara skirts going to work or market.
Each time I boarded the plane to return to the States it was with a surprising hint of sadness. I became increasingly uncertain about what I was really going back to. Sure, there was the reliable infrastructure of basic necessities like electricity and medical care. Yet, back in Nigeria, I had the irreplaceable experience of feeling connected to an untapped part of myself. I was gaining insight into my ancestral and communal identity as a Nigerian, as an Igbo woman.
At some point I started entertaining the idea of moving back. Maybe just to try it for a few years. I spoke of it tentatively, trying to gauge reactions from friends and family. My mother considered it a miracle. My siblings were stunned, wondering why I'd leave for a country rife with corruption and ethno-religious factions. And I had my own concerns. What if I'd been away too long for Nigeria to ever really feel like home? Could I actually make a difference in the development of my country, or would I be just one more returnee, in for a rude awakening and endless frustrations? In my less introspective moments I simply wondered how I could give up my regular jaunts to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.
My questions were endless. But so was my desire to know the country that claimed me. So, finally, I bought a one-way ticket for this summer. I am moving to Nigeria. I say it aloud, mostly to myself. And I laugh at the surprise of it.
On my most recent visit, approaching Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, I looked out the plane's window at the clusters of dry green bushes and the expanse of clay earth. The large mound of Aso Rock loomed in the background. I descended and walked to the line for those holding Nigerian passports. I no longer anticipated an airport official trying to redirect me to the line for visitors, those with visas, those who are not from this country. The passport control officers rarely change, and they remembered me now.
The man in the tan uniform flipped through the pages of my green passport and looked up at me. "My beautiful sister, you have returned."
"Yes, ooo" I said.
"How was your journey? Did you bring me something?" He teased.
"It was well. Not this time, Oga." I greeted him playfully but with respect.
"Oya," he stamped the page and slipped my passport back to me. "You are welcome home."
Enuma Okoro, the author of the spiritual memoir "Reluctant Pilgrim," is a public speaker and communications consultant.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider the constitutionality of a law that lets citizens born in Jerusalem list Israel as their place of birth on passports. The case was brought by the parents of a boy born there in 2002, not long after the law was enacted over President George W. Bush's objections that it interfered with the president's authority to conduct foreign policy. The Obama administration takes the same view, asserting that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiated by Palestinians and Israelis.
When is Congress justified in overriding the president's foreign policy wishes? And when should it back away?
Read the Discussion »
Doug Bandow, Cato Institute
Religion is one force capable of transcending normal political and ethnic differences.
Mausi Segun, Human Rights Watch
The violence has less to do with religion than with decades of corruption, underdevelopment, and conflicts over land in a changing climate.
Michael Jarvis K. Bokor, English professor and blogger
As Boko Haram grows bolder, it will likely find allies, and establish cells, among disgruntled Muslims in other countries.
Louisa Lombard, geographer
The scale of conflict is indicative of how national wars provide opportunities for more localized score-settling.
Ebenezer Obadare, sociologist
Under the religious rage are grievances about corruption and official impunity, primitive infrastructure, and a lack of social mobility.
David Cook, professor of religious studies
Bases close to Cameroon, and recruits over the border, make Boko Haram harder to fight.
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
For at least one night each spring during the Civil War, in places like Louisiana and South Carolina and Georgia and Virginia, Confederate Jews commemorated how God freed the children of Israel from slavery. They retold the story of when God is said to have sent down 10 plagues to help free the Hebrews from their bondage, the last of which was the slaying of all Egyptians' firstborn children, and how the Jews marked their door posts with the blood of a slaughtered lamb so the Angel of Death would know to "pass over" them. Thus, they celebrated their liberation more than 3,000 years ago from slavery in ancient Egypt, and their exodus.
Some of those commemorating Passover may have gathered with their families around a dinner table partaking in a Seder — possibly served by slaves. Many others were on the battlefield, holding impromptu Seders or simply noting the special night for a moment in their minds as they focused on fighting for their home states — Southern slave states.
For many American Jews today, particularly those descended from immigrants coming through Northeast corridors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that Confederate Jews fought on the side of slavery offends their entire worldview, rooted so deeply in social justice. Even the idea of there being so many Jews in the American South, decades before Ellis Island opened its gates, is a strange idea.
But just as Robert E. Lee, an Army officer for 32 years, sided with his home state of Virginia against the federal government, many Jews found a homeland in Dixie over the centuries and decided they could not take up arms against it. To them, after all they'd suffered and fled throughout the ages, the South was their new motherland, the land of milk and honey (and cotton), and it was worth fighting for. "This land has been good to all of us," one Jewish-German Southerner wrote. "I shall fight to my last breath."
Hailing first from Spain and Portugal as early as 1695, then later from England, Germany and the Caribbean islands, and even later from Poland, Hungary and Russia, one-fifth of all United States Jews settled in the South before the 20th century. In 1800, Charleston, S.C. — whose 1790 state constitution guaranteed freedom of religion — was home to the largest Jewish community in America; by 1861, a third of all Jews in the South resided in Louisiana.
These Jews arrived fleeing tyrannical governments and centuries of expulsion, massacres and all manner of restrictions on personal liberty. Coming to America and finding Dixie — where they were respected as citizens and allowed to vote, own property and live as they chose — was a blessing. They set up as peddlers and shop owners, artisans and innkeepers, shoemakers and tailors, salesmen and farmers. Some became businessmen and bankers, lawyers and physicians.
Others became politicians, some quite prominent. At the start of the war, Judah P. Benjamin was one of Louisiana's senators, and the second senator of Jewish descent in American history (after David Yulee of Florida); he became the Confederacy's attorney general and chief of espionage operations, and later secretary of war and secretary of state. In the waning days of the Confederacy, he argued for freeing the slaves to enlist them to fight for the South. Benjamin's cousin, Henry M. Hyams, served as Louisiana's lieutenant governor during the war. After the war Benjamin Franklin Jonas, a former Confederate soldier, became the third Jew in the Senate.
Jews left their mark on the South in other ways. A Jew named Manasseh was a popular innkeeper in the 1700s in Virginia, and he is believed to have been immortalized in the name of his location, Manasseh's Gap — known now as simply the famous Manassas, the site of the first major battle of the war. Moses Ezekiel, a Richmond-born Jew and highly decorated Confederate soldier, later became the world-renowned sculptor who crafted the ornate Confederate Monument that graces Jackson Circle at Arlington National Cemetery. He is buried there, among his fellow rebels, under the inscription "in simple obedience to duty as they understood it." In all, approximately 3,000 first-, second- and third-generation American Jews fought for the Confederacy. (About 7,000 fought for the Union.)
While the South, like everywhere else, did exhibit anti-Semitism, many Southern Jews felt the North was more deeply anti-Semitic. Popular Northern newspapers denigrated Jews; Harper's Weekly said that all Jews were secessionists, copperheads and rebels. Other papers blamed the Jews for destroying the national credit. Union general Ulysses S. Grant exhibited the greatest bigotry of all when he issued General Orders No. 11 in December 1862, "the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history," according to Rabbi Bertram W. Korn The orders called for the expulsion of all Jews within 24 hours from Grant's territory at the time, which included parts of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Grant and his men believed Jews were solely responsible for the common practice of illegal trade with the enemy – a forbidden but economically necessary practice. Some Jews did engage in such illicit commerce, but so did a lot of people on both sides. To add to the offensiveness of the order, Union soldiers forced Jews from their homes, confiscated their possessions, denied them rail transportation even as they were being evicted from their towns, revoked trade licenses and imprisoned them. A few weeks later, when Lincoln found out about the order, he revoked it — "I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners," he said.
In the South, Jews lived as everyone lived, and many Southern Jews accepted – alongside their co-regionalists – the institution of slavery. "Jews in America are very much a part of the American political landscape of their time; they're not necessarily different," says Lance J. Sussman, the senior rabbi at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pa., and a visiting professor of American Jewish history at Princeton. "They are often chameleon-like. Southern Jews and many Northern Jews had no issue with slavery."
That said, Jewish opinions on slavery were not exclusively regional. New York's Morris Raphall, the leading American rabbi of the period, shocked many Jews and non-Jews by defending slavery on biblical grounds, saying in 1861 that "slavery has existed since earliest times," that "slaveholding is no sin," that "slave property is expressly placed under the protection of the Ten Commandments" and that the reason Africans were slaves in America was because that's what God wanted for them. In contrast, Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore — in the slave state of Maryland — argued against every one of Raphall's biblical claims. (His congregants did not agree, and he was forced to flee to Philadelphia.)
And like many Southerners, Confederate Jews who joined the rebel army did so for a number of reasons. "Most Jewish Johnny Rebs, like their fellow countrymen, believed they were fighting for their own liberty and in defense of their homes," wrote Robert Rosen in his book "The Jewish Confederates." At the same time, a strong element in the decision to fight for the Confederacy was simply that everyone else around them was doing it. Records show that 75 to 85 percent of all young white males in the South served in the military.
Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.
Still, the idea of Jews fighting or rooting for the South is bewildering to many Jews today, especially those descended from Russian Socialists who came to America with ideas of class and economic equality and who identified with blacks and other excluded groups. According to Rabbi Sussman, the Civil War was the turning point for Jews in coming to see that slavery was wrong and based in racism, and the experience put the modern American Jew on a path of advocating for and supporting civil rights and empowerment for all people. "For thousands of years of history, nobody believed that valuing a human being as a commodity was inherently wrong," he said.
The Passover narrative, he adds, didn't become an abolitionist-related story until after World War II and the Civil Rights era. "Originally, Passover was theological. It's about redemption and the power of God. It's not really about setting human beings free in a universal way. The text says that God frees the Hebrew slaves because God loves the Hebrews. God doesn't free all slaves for all of humanity or send Moses out to become the William Lloyd Garrison of the ancient free world."
In viewing the past from the mind-set of the present, I couldn't help wondering whether some Jewish Johnny Rebs believed another Jewish holiday — Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement — was their redemption for fighting on the wrong side of history. On Yom Kippur, Jews typically spend the day fasting, engaged in prayer, asking God and fellow man for forgiveness for wrongs they committed against them. But I'm probably wrong. According to Rabbi Sussman, the Jewish Confederates "felt they had nothing to atone for. In terms of the hierarchy of values in the modern world, antebellum southern Jews prioritized their beliefs the way everyone else around them did and rallied to their flag."
On Aug. 23, 1861, Rabbi Max Michelbacher of Richmond, Va., who wrote a "Prayer for the Confederacy," which was distributed to all Jewish Confederate soldiers, asked General Lee to grant a furlough for the Jewish soldiers to attend synagogue for the High Holy Days. Because of the exigencies of war, Lee declined, but his response to Michelbacher eloquently illustrates the way that ecumenical regionalism overshadowed any sense of religious difference between the two men: "I feel assured that neither you or any member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart." In closing, he added: "That your prayers for the success & welfare of our Cause may be granted by the Great Ruler of the universe is my ardent wish."
Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.
Sources: Eli N. Evans, "Preface," in Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten, eds."A Portion of the People"; "A Civil War Seder," in Heritage: The Magazine of The American Jewish Historical Society. Winter 2002; Bertram Wallace Korn. "American Jewry and the Civil War"; Letters from Robert E. Lee to Rev. Max Michelbacher of Richmond, Va., congregation "Beth Ahabah," August 29, 1861; Rabbi Max Michelbacher, Prayer for the Confederacy; National Center for Jewish Film, "Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray"; "Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War," Exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. 2013-2014; Robert N. Rosen, "The Jewish Confederates"; Rosen, "Jewish Confederates." Heritage: The Magazine of The American Jewish Historical Society, Winter 2002; Jonathan D. Sarna, "When General Grant Expelled the Jews"; Interview with Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, Jan. 16, 2014; The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Judaic Treasures of The Library of Congress: Three Views of Slavery and Secession.
is the author of the forthcoming book "Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal." She gives special thanks to Rabbi Lance J. Sussman for his assistance.
If you spend enough time on the Internet you'll eventually encounter a conspiracy theory. If you watch closely enough, sometimes you can actually see one being born.
For years now some on the right have speculated that the Obama administration is trying to politicize the national census. Yesterday, Noah Rothman argued on Mediaite that the theory was proven correct by a New York Times article about changes in the way the Census Bureau plans to ask about health insurance coverage.
The idea is that the new questions will show a reduction in the number of uninsured people starting in 2014, which may make it seem as though the Affordable Care Act is working better than it really is. The change in questions will also produce a "break in trend" within the census surveys and thus make it impossible to statistically compare 2013 and 2014 with earlier years.
Therefore, the White House must have ordered this sinister change to promote President Obama's signature domestic initiative.
But the article that Mr. Rothman cites, by Robert Pear, doesn't support the theory. Mr. Pear reports that census statisticians had been trying to change the questions about health insurance for more than a decade (in other words, before Mr. Obama was president) because … wait for it … the old questions were not accurate:
"When asked about their insurance arrangements in the prior year, people tended to give answers about their coverage at the time of the interview — forgetting, for example, if they had Medicaid for a few months early in the prior year. People are continually moving on and off Medicaid rolls. The number of people who say in surveys that they have Medicaid coverage is almost always lower than the enrollment figures reported by federal and state agencies that administer the program."
Mr. Pear also explained that the new questions were designed to produce more precise information on respondents' coverage. "The new survey asks people if they have coverage through an exchange, if it has premiums and if the premiums are subsidized"— because consumers often conflate Medicaid with subsidized private insurance.
Heinous! An outrage!
India's Bharatiya Janata Party, the presumed front-runner to lead the next government, has clarified its stated plan to "revise and update" the country's nuclear weapons doctrine.
BJP President Rajnath Singh told the Hindustan Times in an interview published Monday that the party has no intention of reversing the "no first use" policy that was adopted in 1991 when it was previously in power. As the title suggests, the policy commits India not to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Abandoning "no first use" would undoubtedly exacerbate tensions with China, which subscribes to "no first use," and Pakistan, which does not.
Now the BJP needs to go further and explain in detail to Indians, and the world, exactly what elements of the nuclear doctrine it does plan to alter. If the BJP wins the election that began on April 7, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, is expected to be the next prime minister and pursue a more muscular foreign policy.
As we editorialized on April 9, instead of abandoning the "no first use" doctrine, whoever wins the election would do better to improve ties with Pakistan and start an arms control initiative that could lead to regional equilibrium on these dangerous weapons.
As costs for DNA sequencing drop, hundreds of thousands of Americans are undergoing the procedure to see if they are at risk for inherited diseases. But while federal law bars employers and health insurers from seeking the results, insurers can still use them in all but three states when considering applications for life, disability and long-term care coverage.
Should insurance companies be barred from seeing genetic information when considering those policies so people can get the tests without fear that the results would be used against them?
Read the Discussion »Gentrification "has become shorthand for an urban neighborhood where muggings are down and espresso is roasted," wrote Times reporter Andrea Elliot. A Salon piece described it as the result of "sweetheart deals" between the public and private sectors "that never pay off for the public." And don't even mention the word around Spike Lee.
However one might feel about the topic, most everyone would agree that the process benefits the wealthy more than the poor, and tends to erase socioeconomic diversity. Are there ways to curb its effects?
Read the Discussion »Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse's-eye view.
"What if we gave her some aloe vera gel?"
The question was from a thin woman, and though her query came out of desperation, her face was pinched with fury. She was a relative of the patient in the room, a young woman who was dying of an infection.
That's where gel, which the relative embraced as an herbal remedy, came in. It fell to me, the nurse, to explain why aloe vera could not cure the infection, could not save this patient's life. But what I was really doing was something we often fail to do in hospitals: facing the anger and fear that accompany impending death.
It's not easy to talk about death. President Obama acknowledged this reluctance when he tried to include reimbursement for end-of-life conversations in the Affordable Care Act. The conservatives' ease at recasting such efforts as government "death panels" shows how hard the topic of death is for many people.
There is a point of breakdown at which a body will irrevocably fail. In health care we understand that in terms of physiological details. What's hard for all of us is accepting the painful truth that people die.
The patient in this case had received a stem cell transplant from a matched donor to treat her cancer. She had been taking immune suppressants to keep the donated cells from attacking her own body. The challenge is that such patients are susceptible to infections that wouldn't trouble healthy people. That's what happened with this patient. She contracted a fungal infection, and despite our best efforts at treatment, it got into her brain.
For several weeks she had been asking for all curative treatment to stop, but her doctors kept saying it was too soon. At the point where I was assigned to her, the doctors had finally agreed that nothing more could be done to save her life. As a result of that decision the extended family had gathered to say goodbye. That was the group I walked in on when I took over the patient's care in the afternoon.
The relatives from far away had not seen the patient's sad and slow decline. They were not prepared to say goodbye, and they were angry. The doctors had given up on her, they said. Her husband wanted her to die. No one was trying hard enough to find the one thing that could save her. Maybe aloe vera gel would be the silver bullet.
I had been this patient's nurse often in the past, but not recently, so I didn't have solid answers for them. "Wait," I finally said as the questions came fast and furious, "I'm not putting you off. I need to read her chart so that I can accurately tell you what you want to know. I will come back."
I was lucky; I had time to sit down and make sense of the patient's treatment history, even though there wasn't a lot of sense-making to be done. Roughly 30 percent of patients are dead within a year of such stem cell transplants, and this patient fell within that group.
You can't tell a family only that, though, because there's no balm in it. And by balm I mean empathy for just how terrible it is for someone known and loved to die.
I went back to the room and again was lucky to have the time to really talk with the angry relatives. I told them the story of this young woman's cancer treatment, how she got high doses of chemotherapy to kill her cancer and the infusion of stem cells afterward essentially gave her a new immune system. I talked about immune suppression creating vulnerabilities to odd illnesses, like fungal infections. I told them the patient herself had been asking to go into hospice care long before her doctors assented.
I said that a body can get too broken to be repaired and, despite all our drugs and scans and cutting-edge procedures, sometimes we just can't fix someone, even if we ourselves helped create the problem that is killing her.
The aloe vera gel came up again, and I said it probably wouldn't hurt. The thin woman, now in the chair, her legs tightly crossed in front of her, waved my suggestion away with a quick flip of her wrist and I realized that the relatives weren't really intent on giving the patient aloe vera; what they needed was for someone in the hospital to understand how much they wanted this young woman to live, how desperate they were to reverse fate.
We can call this denial, hubris, fighting until the bitter end. But why not call it what it is? Being human and fearing death, the family could not, in the words of Dylan Thomas, stop raging against the dying of the light.
We read that famous poem as an exhortation: "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." I wonder if it is instead a reckoning of how very difficult it is to let life go; the poem was, after all, written about Thomas's own father. "Wise men at their end know dark is right," the poem tells us, but they and "good men," "wild men," "grave men" do not go gentle, because death inevitably brings regret for what might have been, what now will never be.
The idea that compensation be given for discussions about patients' health care choices at the end of their lives targeted this existential knot. It takes time to untangle the threads surrounding death — guilt, fear, anger and love — but it's work that needs to be done, by nurses and doctors, following the patient's preferences and physical reality. Because no matter how much we hate it, death will come.
I've seen a fair number of people die, and the truth is, some go gentle into that good night, but many do not, regardless of their intentions. For my patient it was the same. Her mind seemed to have acquiesced weeks before, but her body, so fragile and battered by disease, hadn't. A good friend of mine was her nurse the day she died. "I need to talk to you," she told me soon after the patient's passing. So long in coming and impossible to reverse, the end itself had been bloody, even gruesome. It was a hard memory for my friend, a seasoned oncology nurse, to bear alone.
I've never forgotten that afternoon in the hospital. Outside, day turned to dusk and then evening. The patient occasionally moaned, but was mostly silent. The thin woman in the chair was still angry, but as dark filled the windows outside the frustration in the room sublimated into a dull acceptance. We did not go gently into that good night, but we went, nonetheless.
Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."
Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
There are many possible explanations for why my 5-year-old daughter has yet again asked if she can change her name to Sam. Sam can also be a girl's name, I explain hopefully. No, she clarifies, sighing at the dullard she has been given for a mother. She wants to be Sam the boy's name.
"What's wrong with being a girl?" I ask. My daughter responds that girls like princesses and fairies, and things that are pretty. She is not interested in those things. She is interested in Super Mario (something she's heard about at school and doesn't fully understand) and "Star Wars."
I have consciously not forced pink things or dresses on her because I happen to be a woman who doesn't particularly care for pink or for dresses. When my daughter was a toddler I observed a friend's 3-year-old taking a pretend makeup kit out of a plush purse and applying fake lipstick. "I don't know where this comes from," her mother shrugged. "I don't even wear makeup." I immediately went home and read "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture." I've been waiting ever since for the princess phase, assuming it would engulf my daughter regardless of what precautions I took. Now I think I should have been preparing for something else.
When my daughter turned 5, my mother took her to see "Cinderella" on Broadway. She came home with a Cinderella doll and a CD which she played obsessively while dancing with the doll. "Are you Cinderella?" I asked, loathing myself for hoping she'd say yes. "No," she said, rolling her eyes. "I'm the prince dancing with Cinderella."
I try to come up with reasons that being a girl is good. An image of those women in romantic comedies who hang out with "the girls" and cry into their chardonnay comes to mind. But I don't know any women who are actually like that. So I point out that you can get to be a mother, which is the most amazing experience in the world. "Don't you want to be a mama?" I ask my daughter. She starts to cry. "No," she says. "I want to be a pilot."
I feel a pang of failure. How is it possible that, despite the fact that I have held a job for my daughter's entire life, I have somehow failed to convey that one can be both a mama and a pilot?
On the bright side, I have accidentally achieved what many mothers strive for: a non-girlie girl. The other mothers in my Facebook feed share posts from A Mighty Girl ("For smart, confident and courageous girls") and Amy Poehler's Smart Girls ("Change the world by being yourself"). This was the kind of mother I'd planned on being. I'd anticipated conversations about why there were more important things in the world than being beautiful or having a tiara. But these conversations never even come up. I purchase the book "Rosie Revere, Engineer" in an effort to show my daughter that you don't have to be a boy to invent things or have a job. We read it a few times but she doesn't like it because Rosie wears a dress.
On Halloween a parent pulls me aside and tells me how much she loves the fact that my daughter is dressed like a pirate. She is a boy pirate, of course, with pants and a fake beard and a sword. I don't tell this mother that my daughter is a pirate only because she decided at the last minute not to be Darth Vader. Girls who dress as pirates are spunky, mighty girls. Girls who dress as Darth Vader make the other parents uncomfortable.
Perhaps I'm avoiding the obvious: that my daughter is transgender. One day she tells me that, in her next life, she wants to be a boy. I ignore the fact that she has chosen to believe in reincarnation and ask her, "Do you feel like a boy?"
"Of course not," she says. "I'm a girl." Then she says: "But I wish my name were Charlie."
Charlie is the brother of her best friend at school, who, of course, is a boy. This gets me wondering about a different possibility.
For the second year in a row, my daughter is one of a handful of girls in a class dominated by little boys. And in what seems to me like a pretty girlie impulse, my daughter wants to dress like her friends. This means her favorite color right now is plaid, and her outfits consist primarily of T-shirts layered under flannel hand-me-down shirts from her older brother. "This is just like Emmett's shirt," she says as she buttons up a red and white flannel shirt over a blue striped T-shirt. Emmett, who as a 4-year-old boy probably doesn't pay the slightest bit of attention to his wardrobe, is the Vogue magazine of my daughter's life.
When I ask her if she would like to wear her glow-in-the-dark space shuttle necklace, she contemplates it and then says she'll wear it over the weekend. I pull a rumpled skirt from her drawer and ask why she never wears it to school. She says she'll wear it on a day she doesn't have school. Is she afraid Emmett won't play with her if she looks too much like a girl? Is peer pressure causing my daughter to slavishly dress like a boy? Perhaps she isn't such a Mighty Girl after all. Maybe she's just as vulnerable as the girls dragging Snow White dresses to school.
Back when my daughter was on the far edge of 3 she went through a combination pink/Hello Kitty phase. It was so brief I wouldn't even remember it save for the wake of pink detritus it left scattered throughout the house: a soft pink duvet cover in her room, a now-ragged lunch box with a picture of the ever-placid Hello Kitty in a tulle tutu. The Internet says that my daughter's desire to be called Sam is probably not a big deal. Renowned experts say that gender identity is fluid and still forming at this age. My daughter seems pretty sure of herself, but maybe that, too, is just a phase. And ultimately, no matter how many theories I come up with about the motivation behind her decisions, she is going to be who she's going to be, and I will love her the same.
For her birthday she asks for a new duvet cover, to replace the pink one. After much Googling we settle on a blue, green, yellow and white striped cover. The day it arrives she bounces on her little toes, strokes the cover and says she can't wait to go to sleep that night to try it out. As I fold up the old pink cover she asks what I will do with it. "I don't know," I tell her. Maybe a girlie girl somewhere will want it. "Let's save it," my daughter says. "For when I like pink again."
Hana Schank is the author of "A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life" and a consultant on website usability.
Loren Brandt, economist, University of Toronto
Continued financial repression and the fiscal well-being of the central government will help to avert a Lehman-like crisis.
Ann Lee, author, "What the U.S. Can Learn From China"
Should the economic situation deteriorate appreciably, the Chinese authorities have plenty of room to maneuver and stop the hemorrhage.
Yasheng Huang, author, "Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics"
China may resemble Japan in how its bad debt will eventually get resolved. But the truth is, bad debt leads to crises or slowdowns.
Albert Park, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Any sign of slowdown in China is greeted with headline-grabbing proclamations of impending financial collapse. And each time, nothing even close to collapse has occurred.
Karl Gerth, author, "As China Goes, so Goes the World"
While rooting for the rise of the Chinese consumer, we may also want to contemplate the consequences.
C. Cindy Fan, author, "China on the Move"
Beijing makes incremental and frequent changes, gradually. Chinese citizens are good at devising strategies to deal with those changes.
The head of an institution with a vested interest in maintaining the current college sports business model is unhappy about recent attempts to change it. Who could have predicted such a thing?
In late March a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that scholarship football players at Northwestern are employees and are therefore eligible to form a union. Northwestern immediately said it would appeal the decision, and at a press conference on Sunday the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Mark Emmert, described unionization as an almost existential threat.
"To be perfectly frank, the notion of using a union employee model to address the challenges that do exist in intercollegiate athletics is something that strikes most people as a grossly inappropriate solution to the problems," he said. "It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics."
Later he added: "There's some things that need to get fixed. They're working very aggressively to do that. No one up here believes that the way you fix that is by converting student-athletes into unionized employees."
At least he admitted that there are "problems." But the notion that colleges are "working very aggressively" to fix them is debatable. (The Division I board of directors will vote this summer on a plan to give the five largest conferences more autonomy and may adjust rules dealing with scholarship renewal and contact with agents, among other matters.) And his scolding tone was galling. The N.L.R.B. did not "convert" Northwestern players into unionized employees — it recognized that they effectively were employees.
Unionization may not, indeed, be the most elegant response to the exploitation of college athletes. As the general counsel of the American Council on Education, Ada Meloy, wrote in a letter to The Times, "applying the legal label of 'employees' to tens of thousands of student-athletes opens the door to many troubling questions, and few good answers."
There may be unintended consequences; but let's keep in mind that unionization is itself the unintended consequence of colleges requiring "amateurs" to train and compete like professionals, and making money — in some cases, a whole lot of money — off of their labor. That fact, and not unionization, is what deserves to be called "grossly inappropriate."
Nancy Varallo, National Court Reporters Association
Court reporters can now filter their shorthand through computers to provide judges, attorneys and clients with instantaneous, understandable transcripts.
Richard G. Kopf, Federal judge
Digital recordings of hearings can be uploaded to federal court servers where anyone, anywhere, will be able to listen.
Peter A. Cahill, district court judge in Minneapolis
A digital audio system can record throughout the day in all courtrooms, acting as a safety net if a stenographic court reporter falls.
Brian Green, Jefferson Audio Video Systems, Inc., in Louisville, Ky.
Why have an annual salary assigned to a function that a digital recording system can do at a fraction of the cost?
Stuart M. Auslander, New York School of Court Reporting
Court reporters can discern external noise, difficult accents, and simultaneous talking. They also produce closed captioning, which helps the hearing-impaired.
The Great Divide is a series about inequality.
Raising the minimum wage has justifiably captured policy makers' attention, but if the goal is to materially raise living standards for every American worker, we should also be calling for a minimum pension. Done right, this would not only create real wealth for the middle and working classes, it would use the power of financial markets to reduce wealth disparity instead of widening it.
There is a vast difference in the way the wealthy and the rest of Americans earn their money. In 2010, 60 cents of every dollar earned by those in the top 1 percent came from investments and businesses they owned. For the middle class, it was 6 cents.
For decades, the returns to capital have far outstripped the returns to labor. Before the mid-1980s, worker salaries constituted 65 percent of national income. In 2012, they were 58 percent. Economists rightly fret over how this contributes to wealth inequality. Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If all working people, whatever their wage, could get a piece of these gains, it would improve their financial well-being exponentially. This is where the minimum pension comes in.
We are proposing a Savings Plan for Universal Retirement account, the centerpiece of which is a 50-cent-per-hour minimum retirement contribution from all employers to virtually all employees. This is not what President George W. Bush proposed when he sought to privatize Social Security in 2005. Under our plan, Social Security remains as is, but every worker would also have his or her own private Individual Retirement Account, the way many white-collar workers do now.
Contributions placed in this account would automatically go into a privately run low-fee life-cycle fund. (Life-cycle funds comprise a mix of stock and bond investments tailored to how far the owner is from retirement.) Recipients could switch investment options to say, an S&P 500 index fund. A government board like the one that now manages the retirement accounts of federal employees would sanction the investment options.
This policy isn't meant to replace current pension plans; employers that still provide retirement benefits would satisfy the new requirement. It is geared to individuals who are not saving in the existing system. And it would be completely portable, like a cellphone number.
A 50-cent minimum pension (adjusted for inflation) would amount to a minimum yearly employer contribution of roughly $1,000 for each full-time worker. It would improve retirement security for the 47 percent of these workers who are not currently contributing to any employer-sponsored retirement plan. Contributions would begin early on so even small amounts would have decades to grow.
How much? If stocks and bonds enjoy the same average rates of return as they did over the last 45 years, someone who begins earning income at age 22, receives only the minimum contribution each year, and retires at age 67 would have a balance of approximately $160,000, in 2013 dollars. By contrast, the median couple — not individual — approaching retirement today has only $42,000 in private retirement accounts. Of course, past gains are no guarantee, but over the long term investments in diversified stock and bond funds have usually paid off. And since this is on top of Social Security, a certain amount of risk is acceptable.
The biggest winners would be minorities, who have high labor participation rates but lag far behind whites in retirement savings. Only 34 percent of working-age Latinos and 51 percent of African-Americans with full-time jobs participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans, compared with 59 percent for whites, who also contribute more to these plans.
Individuals would be able to match or exceed employer contributions (and employers could contribute additional amounts, as some do now). For those at the lower end of the income spectrum, up to half of their contributions could be reimbursed by the Savers Credit, an underused government savings incentive that became law in 2001. Simply matching the contribution yourself would increase your expected account balance at retirement to more than $300,000. This nest egg could not be raided or borrowed against, and in retirement would automatically convert to an annuity, unless you chose otherwise. So we would never outlive our savings. A $160,000 account would amount to a $790 monthly annuity.
How would this affect businesses? The 50-cent minimum contribution is only one-sixth of the proposed increase to the minimum wage. And Congress could make a number of small changes in the tax code to make this palatable to employers.
Being dependent only on wages is, unfortunately, no longer enough. A minimum pension would create a chain of wealth for everyone who works and it would allow ordinary Americans to benefit from the expansion of the world economy rather than being at the mercy of it.
Jonathan Cowan is the president and Jim Kessler is the vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist policy institute.
Jon Hamm plays the character Don Draper in AMC's cinematic and successful television series "Mad Men." Television is in a new golden age, with many A-list directors, writers and actors choosing series over films, and water cooler chat ignoring Oscar contenders to discuss shows like "Mad Men," which will soon begin its final season. Meanwhile streaming entertainment creates more obstacles for studio-produced movies while making the $15 theater ticket look more and more like a losing proposition.
Is going to the movies passé? How can filmmakers compete better with television or showcase what makes them unique?
Read the Discussion »"The willingness of parents to bear and nurture children saves us from becoming an economically moribund nation of hateful curmudgeons," Reihan Salam wrote recently in Slate. "The least we can do is offer them a bigger tax break." Childless taxpayers like himself should pay more, he said. He suggested lowering the threshold at which higher tax rates kick in, and then giving parents a new $2,500 per child credit that's included in a Republican bill in the House.
Does it make sense for people without children to subsidize tax breaks for those bearing the costs of being parents?
Read the Discussion »Climate change is drastically affecting the whole world and is likely to become much more damaging unless greenhouse gases are reduced, recent reports from the United Nations and the the American Association for the Advancement of Science have concluded. The problems are most immediate in developing nations, many of which have contributed little pollution but are most affected by rising sea levels and drought.
While experts say all nations will be harmed by global warming and all need to take more serious measures, what should be done to deal with the most threatening effects of climate change in developing countries?
Read the Discussion »
