Taking Note: Keep Handguns Away From Teenagers

In response to the Isla Vista rampage, legislators in California are introducing a bill that would let the police and private individuals ask a court for a restraining order to deny guns to those who pose a threat to themselves or others.

The bill would be an advance in gun-control legislation. Before now, the notion of gun restraining orders had mainly captured the attention of mental health experts and academic researchers, but not legislators.

Still, there is another step California has already taken to keep guns out of the wrong hands that should be emulated elsewhere: setting the age to buy and to own a handgun at 21.

Currently, federal law and most states  let 18-year-olds purchase and own handguns. That flies in the face of research and common sense.  Studies have documented the prevalence of heightened risk-taking among teenagers.  Statistics show  that homicide rates rise in the late teens and peak at age 20. A Justice Department study from 2012 found that many young gun offenders incarcerated in states with the weakest gun control laws would have faced bans on gun ownership in states with the strongest controls.

Raising the handgun ownership age would not apply to rifles and shotguns, and would not prohibit parents and children from going hunting together with a long gun. (Most of the states that limit handgun sales to those 21 and older allow 18-year-olds to buy and possess long guns.) Handguns, however, are the weapon most often used in gun shootings and deaths.

Pro-gun lobbyists will invariably point out that rampages like the one in Isla Vista have been committed by people over the age of 21. That is willfully off-point: The idea that gun control shouldn't respond to obvious gun dangers because they didn't play a central role in a particular crime amounts to fatal abdication of adult responsibility.

They also say that setting the age at 21 for handguns, as California, New York, New Jersey, and 10 other states have done, punishes law-abiding 18- to 20-year-olds for the transgressions of the few. But all 50 states have set the drinking age at 21 out of concern for increased risk-taking by teens and the threat that poses to them and the public. The same concern applies to gun ownership, and the solution is the same. Raise the legal age for handguns to 21 in every state.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Can Therapists Prevent Violence?

Loosen Restrictions for Therapists to Report Danger

Sally Satel, American Enterprise Institute

All states should mandate clinicians to tell officials and relatives if a patient may be a danger, even if there is no clear victim.

More Treatment, and Openness With Parents

D.J. Jaffe, Mental Illness Policy.Org

Parents should know what has been diagnosed and what drugs have been prescribed to make sure treatment isn't ignored.

Act Fast on Mental Health Concerns

Kevin Nadal, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Police officers need better training to deal with people with mental illness and could also deploy mobile crisis units of mental health professionals when concerns arise.

Laws Need to Be Updated

Steve Leifman, judge, Miami-Dade County Court Criminal Division

Our most important mental health laws are based on legal foundations from the 1700s, which considered dangerousness, but not need for treatment – because no treatment existed at the time.

Speak Up More on Red Flags

E. Fuller Torrey, Treatment Advocacy Center

Mental health professionals are, as a group, politically liberal and strong defenders of civil liberties, so initiating an action that is likely to curtail a person's civil liberties is contrary to their mindset.

Communicate With Police Officers

Tom Dart, Cook County Illinois Sheriff

There needs to be greater communication and partnership between law enforcement officials and mental health providers to protect the most seriously mentally ill from hurting themselves or others.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Reining In the N.S.A.

Reform Could Create More Privacy Concerns

Nathan A. Sales, former Justice Department official

If phone companies, instead of the government, kept control of records, they may not be as secure.

Light Version of Oversight

Faiza Patel, Brennan Center

The bill leaves untouched N.S.A. authority to search another vast trove of information: what we say on the phone and write in emails to friends and family abroad.

Secret Last-Minute Changes Broadened Powers

Kate A. Martin, Center for National Security Studies

A precise, limited definition of the scope of data collection was replaced with one that is ambiguous and expansive.

Limiting N.S.A. Tools Makes Us Less Safe

Stewart Baker, former Homeland Security Department official

If the agency identifies a suspect foreign number, it will no longer be able to do a quick search to find who is calling from this country.

Include the Public in the Debate

Khaliah Barnes, Electronic Privacy Information Center

The current bill leaves in place the one-sided proceeding that allows the government to argue for expanded surveillance of Americans without anyone on the other side to make the opposite argument.

A Platform to Build Real Reform

Gabe Rottman, American Civil Liberties Union

This is the first time since passage of the Patriot Act that Congress has acted to restrain, rather than expand, foreign intelligence surveillance authority.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Draft: Poet vs. Novelist

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

The word novel carries for me a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created. I stayed up all night, writing description, dialogue, plot curlicues, stories within stories, convinced that anything fewer than 10 pages was wasted time. One wrote the way Thomas Wolfe did, I thought, with fury and hubris, translating everything one read, experienced and felt into glistening, unswerving prose. I didn't need drugs, cigarettes or caffeine; writing was my drug of choice. And the novel was the high point of literary achievement.

Over the next 20 years I wrote novel after novel, all of which were rejected by publishers. They were about my experiences growing up in a family of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants and various troubled relationships. But content was never more than an excuse to display my talents over hundreds of pages. I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move. No single book inspired me more than Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March." The gorgeous onslaught of highbrow thought and febrile emotion was conveyed in a poetry of intense, nonstop filibustering language unlike any I'd ever read before. Who remembered or cared what novels like his were about? Percy's "The Moviegoer" was about a guy who went to movies and fell for his cousin Kate, whom he tried to save. One didn't need much more plot than this. To me Bellow's Augie was about great drive and a love of the English sentence and being a writer at the height of his creative passions. It was about writing a masterpiece.

In between novels I wrote poems, mostly to console myself for the novels' failures. Mysteriously, all my heartache, worry and grief went into these poems, which felt more like private notes to myself than professional attempts at writing literature. Even more mysteriously, most of them were getting published. I worked hard on them, to be honest, perhaps even harder than on my fiction, paying attention to the heft and balance of each word and idea. With my fiction I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance. Each finished poem felt realized, arrived at directly by way of an inner struggle between whatever emotion had inspired it and the nuanced thought needed to both express and propel its forward movement.

Was I on some unrealized level granting permission to the poet that the novelist was being denied? In any case, The New Yorker magazine, the place I most wanted my fiction published, started taking my poems when I was 28. When one, "Like Wings," generated a great flurry of letters (including marriage proposals and requests for advice, equaling a record at the magazine, the then poetry editor, Howard Moss, told me), I immediately explained to anyone who dared compliment me that, yes, it was very nice, but just wait till the story I was working on came out. That would be a real record-breaker.

Finally, in my late 40s, after a new round of rejections, I gave up writing fiction and began to concentrate full time on my poetry. This, after some 30 years of struggle. It was a memorable, if not happy, day.

I've often suspected that the novelist in me resents everything the poet writes, maybe especially the very desire to write poetry. Claiming such a division of purpose may sound dubious at best, because how can one person harbor envious feelings toward himself? But, as my friends and students all learned soon enough, complimenting one of my poems often meant insulting the failed fiction writer within me, and I suspected that my feelings of accomplishment in poetry were tinged with a noticeable under-taste of nostalgia and regret. It's probably not too surprising that the name of my book of poems that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 is "Failure." I thought the subject was my father's business failures but have good cause to think otherwise now.

Perhaps the more interesting perspective is that of the poet in me toward the novelist. Courteous and cautious, the poet is something of a gentleman in his behavior toward the fiction writer. He tends to be deferential, even encouraging. The fiction writer could be equally successful if he just tried a little harder. The fiction writer, on the other hand, never wanted anything to do with the poet. His sole ambition was conquest and domination.

In some ways this relationship reminds me of my two sons. It's a complicated relationship born of great love and intense competition. But there, necessity arbitrates a truce of sorts. They need each other on some keenly felt primal level and know it. The novelist can't stand the idea of needing poetry, however much he likes nice-sounding language. Perhaps sharing the same brain is more provocative and internecine than sharing the same DNA and household?

Twelve years ago, I began work on a long poem about a subject I'd tried dealing with in several novels, my experience while working in a welfare building in San Francisco in 1969. I decided to combine this idea with new material about a pogrom in Poland in which 1,600 Jewish men, women and children were murdered. The many narratives and characters required balancing techniques I'd learned in writing all those failed novels.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize had ended the rivalry, I thought. The poet in me was triumphant. I was never meant to be a novelist. But when I finally finished the book in the spring of 2013, my editor suggested calling this long poem "a novel in verse." I protested somewhat but finally gave in; both my identities were too exhausted to continue the struggle.

It's hard not to smile when I hear myself explaining to people that "The Wherewithal" is a poem that uses some novelistic techniques. The novelist seems to be taking all this in his stride. He knows that the poet got the book published, and that the lines are broken into stanzas, not paragraphs. He's even being, well, something of a gentleman about it. Forty-two years is a long time to struggle to do anything. And the poet is more than willing to share credit, if credit is due. In fact, we are on our best behavior. Maybe, after all these years, we're finally learning to cooperate, or at least live like brothers.

---

Philip Schultz is a poet whose most recent book is "The Wherewithal, a Novel in Verse."

A version of this article appears in print on 05/25/2014, on page SR8 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Poet vs. Novelist.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Disunion: A Mysterious Map of Louisiana

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

These days the intersection of cartography and Big Data is all the rage: Using information from the 2010 census, countless news outfits, including The New York Times, have created tools allowing readers to make customized maps of everything from trends in ethnic and racial composition to the dynamics of housing development. Indeed, we have come to expect that any large body of data will be visualized through maps and infographics. Such tools help to transform information into knowledge, and at their best allow us to see patterns that might otherwise be lost.

But while the technology may be new, the idea of mapping data in the United States can actually be traced to the Civil War. Earlier posts in Disunion have discussed the maps of slavery generated by the United States Coast Survey. At the same time, the Census Office (also part of the Treasury Department) was experimenting with maps of not just one but multiple types of data. These were designed to aid the Union war effort, but perhaps more importantly to plan for Reconstruction.

One of the most fascinating — and mysterious — of these experiments is an unsigned, undated map of Louisiana, buried within the voluminous war records of the National Archives. The map contains almost no environmental information save for the river systems and a few railroads. Even roads are omitted, truly unusual for any 19th-century map.

Instead, the emphasis is on parish boundaries, within which are listed free and slave populations alongside data about resources, from swine to ginned cotton. While this population data would have been available as early as 1862, the agricultural data was only published in 1864. With this information, officers and administrators moving through the state could locate the richest parishes, the largest sources of labor and the easiest means of river and rail transportation. (Oddly, the map does not list the output from over 1,500 sugar plantations located along the lower Mississippi River.)

The Census Office was experimenting with this type of map throughout the war. At the request of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, for instance, the superintendent of the census annotated a previously printed map of Georgia with information on livestock and crop yields as the former embarked on his ambitious march in the fall of 1864 deep into enemy territory. But Louisiana presented an entirely different — though equally unprecedented — challenge to the Union Army: how to control and administer a conquered region where nearly half the population was no longer strictly enslaved, but which was largely exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation.

The quandary began in April 1862, when Adm. David Farragut captured New Orleans. Soon after, President Lincoln appointed Gen. Benjamin Butler as commander of the gulf. Lincoln hoped to cultivate Unionist sentiment in New Orleans, and thereby lure Louisiana out of the Confederacy. But Butler's rigid policies and questionable confiscation of cotton alienated many in New Orleans and the parishes beyond, even though his military quarantine effectively ended the murderous yellow fever epidemic that had ravaged the city for decades.

Butler's tenure was brief, and by the end of 1862 Lincoln had replaced him with the former governor of Massachusetts, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. As commander of the gulf, Banks's military charge was to expand the realm of Union control into Texas and up the Mississippi. But equally complex was the political task of governing an area under Union occupation. In 1860 Louisiana had a population of 600,000, slightly more than half of whom were white. Yet in some of the parishes with large plantations, blacks far outnumbered whites, especially after the war took men of military age to the Confederate Army. The Confiscation Act of March 1862 prohibited Union soldiers from returning slaves to their masters, and thereby the very presence of the Army disrupted slavery. But without any clear mandate for emancipation, many of the conditions of slavery remained. Louisiana was in limbo.

Thus Banks faced the problem of rebuilding an immensely fertile region with a profoundly unstable (and still unfree) labor system. That's where the map came in, for it allowed Banks to see the general economic capacity of the state. While such data would have been available to anyone with access to the published records of the 1860 census (published in 1862), to see such information organized geographically enabled Banks to think strategically about managing the population, its chief crop and its food supply.

Related

Disunion Highlights

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

Banks's system of labor contracts drew intense criticism from all sides, including freedmen, former plantation owners and especially antislavery Republicans in the Union. Historians have also judged it harshly for its repressive techniques, which reflected a desire to control the black population and keep plantations functioning. At the height of its operation in 1864, Banks's system of labor contracts involved 50,000 laborers on 1,500 estates. And in part because of his labor policies, the state's agricultural production grew significantly in 1863. In this situation, Banks probably used the map to measure the strength and resources of individual parishes. The map probably also aided Banks as he began to conscript blacks (sometimes forcibly) into the Army. By the end of 1864 he had organized more than 28 regiments, which meant that Louisiana contributed more black soldiers to the Union Army than any other state.

In these various ways, the map measured the population and its resources. In this respect the map anticipates the extensive Federal mapping efforts of the Census after the war; by the twentieth century, such cartographic and statistical tools of governance had become routine .

The map probably also aided Banks in his project of conscripting blacks (sometimes forcibly) into the Army: By the end of 1864 he had organized more than 28 regiments of black troops, more than any other commander in the Union Army. In both the management of labor and soldiers, the map enabled Banks to govern and control by seeing the aggregate strength and composition of the population and its resources. In this respect the map anticipated the extensive federal mapping efforts of the census in postwar decades; today we live with such tools as a matter of course.

In the summer of 1864, Louisiana designed a new state constitution that abolished slavery. Thereafter, in some respects, the map was immediately outdated, and in fact it may be one of the last maps that used the term "slave." Yet while such a category was crumbling throughout 1864, the conditions of true freedom lay far in the future, and in fact Banks' strict efforts to regulate the movement of African-Americans laid the groundwork for the punitive black codes of the early Reconstruction period. After all, his primary goal was to control the population, and in this respect the map was no mystery at all, but the result of the logic of war.

Map courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

---

Susan Schulten is a history professor at the University of Denver and the author of "The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950" and "Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America."

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Draft: Poet vs. Novelist

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

The word novel carries for me a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created. I stayed up all night, writing description, dialogue, plot curlicues, stories within stories, convinced that anything fewer than 10 pages was wasted time. One wrote the way Thomas Wolfe did, I thought, with fury and hubris, translating everything one read, experienced and felt into glistening, unswerving prose. I didn't need drugs, cigarettes or caffeine; writing was my drug of choice. And the novel was the high point of literary achievement.

Over the next 20 years I wrote novel after novel, all of which were rejected by publishers. They were about my experiences growing up in a family of Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants and various troubled relationships. But content was never more than an excuse to display my talents over hundreds of pages. I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move. No single book inspired me more than Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March." The gorgeous onslaught of highbrow thought and febrile emotion was conveyed in a poetry of intense, nonstop filibustering language unlike any I'd ever read before. Who remembered or cared what novels like his were about? Percy's "The Moviegoer" was about a guy who went to movies and fell for his cousin Kate, whom he tried to save. One didn't need much more plot than this. To me Bellow's Augie was about great drive and a love of the English sentence and being a writer at the height of his creative passions. It was about writing a masterpiece.

In between novels I wrote poems, mostly to console myself for the novels' failures. Mysteriously, all my heartache, worry and grief went into these poems, which felt more like private notes to myself than professional attempts at writing literature. Even more mysteriously, most of them were getting published. I worked hard on them, to be honest, perhaps even harder than on my fiction, paying attention to the heft and balance of each word and idea. With my fiction I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance. Each finished poem felt realized, arrived at directly by way of an inner struggle between whatever emotion had inspired it and the nuanced thought needed to both express and propel its forward movement.

Was I on some unrealized level granting permission to the poet that the novelist was being denied? In any case, The New Yorker magazine, the place I most wanted my fiction published, started taking my poems when I was 28. When one, "Like Wings," generated a great flurry of letters (including marriage proposals and requests for advice, equaling a record at the magazine, the then poetry editor, Howard Moss, told me), I immediately explained to anyone who dared compliment me that, yes, it was very nice, but just wait till the story I was working on came out. That would be a real record-breaker.

Finally, in my late 40s, after a new round of rejections, I gave up writing fiction and began to concentrate full time on my poetry. This, after some 30 years of struggle. It was a memorable, if not happy, day.

I've often suspected that the novelist in me resents everything the poet writes, maybe especially the very desire to write poetry. Claiming such a division of purpose may sound dubious at best, because how can one person harbor envious feelings toward himself? But, as my friends and students all learned soon enough, complimenting one of my poems often meant insulting the failed fiction writer within me, and I suspected that my feelings of accomplishment in poetry were tinged with a noticeable under-taste of nostalgia and regret. It's probably not too surprising that the name of my book of poems that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 is "Failure." I thought the subject was my father's business failures but have good cause to think otherwise now.

Perhaps the more interesting perspective is that of the poet in me toward the novelist. Courteous and cautious, the poet is something of a gentleman in his behavior toward the fiction writer. He tends to be deferential, even encouraging. The fiction writer could be equally successful if he just tried a little harder. The fiction writer, on the other hand, never wanted anything to do with the poet. His sole ambition was conquest and domination.

In some ways this relationship reminds me of my two sons. It's a complicated relationship born of great love and intense competition. But there, necessity arbitrates a truce of sorts. They need each other on some keenly felt primal level and know it. The novelist can't stand the idea of needing poetry, however much he likes nice-sounding language. Perhaps sharing the same brain is more provocative and internecine than sharing the same DNA and household?

Twelve years ago, I began work on a long poem about a subject I'd tried dealing with in several novels, my experience while working in a welfare building in San Francisco in 1969. I decided to combine this idea with new material about a pogrom in Poland in which 1,600 Jewish men, women and children were murdered. The many narratives and characters required balancing techniques I'd learned in writing all those failed novels.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize had ended the rivalry, I thought. The poet in me was triumphant. I was never meant to be a novelist. But when I finally finished the book in the spring of 2013, my editor suggested calling this long poem "a novel in verse." I protested somewhat but finally gave in; both my identities were too exhausted to continue the struggle.

It's hard not to smile when I hear myself explaining to people that "The Wherewithal" is a poem that uses some novelistic techniques. The novelist seems to be taking all this in his stride. He knows that the poet got the book published, and that the lines are broken into stanzas, not paragraphs. He's even being, well, something of a gentleman about it. Forty-two years is a long time to struggle to do anything. And the poet is more than willing to share credit, if credit is due. In fact, we are on our best behavior. Maybe, after all these years, we're finally learning to cooperate, or at least live like brothers.

---

Philip Schultz is a poet whose most recent book is "The Wherewithal, a Novel in Verse."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: The Thai Army Repeats History

On Tuesday, the Thai military imposed martial law on the country and insisted it was not staging a coup. On Thursday, the army dispensed with these niceties and took power, overthrowing a government that has been besieged by street protests since late last year.

The head of the army, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, said he had to take power "in order to bring the situation back to normal quickly." There is no question that Thailand has been unsettled for months – violence involving pro- and anti-government protestors has killed at least 25 people in the last six months. But anyone who has followed Thai history should know that military rule is not the answer to the country's problems.

In 2010, it used force to disperse protestors from the "red shirt" movement that supports Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister who lives outside the country, from the streets of Bangkok, killing about 90 people. And in 1992, when I was living in the country, a military government cracked down on Thais calling for a restoration of democracy, killing about 50 people in what came to be known as "Black May." Many more disappeared and were never accounted for.

Mr. Prayuth does not appear interested in the lessons of history, but he does have big ambitions. In a televised address flanked by senior military officers, he said that the military would "reform the political structure, the economy and the society." But he offered no details about what a new Thailand would look like or how long it would take the military to remake the country — something it has already attempted to various degrees in the course of about a dozen coups.

Thailand is a treaty ally of the United States and has been an important force for stability in Southeast Asia. On Thursday, the secretary of state, John Kerry, issued a blunt statement. "There is no justification for this military coup," he said. "While we value our long friendship with the Thai people," the statement went on, "this act will have negative implications for the U.S.–Thai relationship, especially for our relationship with the Thai military."

In the past the Thai army has made political crises worse, not better, and there's no reason to think this coup will be any different.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: The Grandchildren of Divorce

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

BOLINAS, CALIF. — Two years ago, my mother called.

"Let me talk to my granddaughter," she said. I handed the baby the phone, and they gurgled at each other. When I picked up again she told me that, after 45 years of marriage to my father, she had hired a divorce lawyer.

This wasn't so much a shock as a deep, glacial shift. My father, a doctor, has long battled addiction. He is a loving man, hilarious on some days, but frightening on others. And my mother loved him, too much to walk away. We all did. So we lived with the storms and waited them out. This resulted less in visible scarring than in a sort of wry emotional stoicism that has become our family stamp.

But during my mid-20s, my daughterly role morphed from protected vessel of innocence to sought-after confidante from whom nothing — nothing! — was withheld. I listened as my mother divulged increasingly alarming stories. Still, it was obvious to me the split would never really happen. Come on, I thought. Let's stop kidding ourselves. We're all old now.

Then, at the age of 72, Mom reached a threshold. As much as she hated to do it, she finally had to free herself.

There is something decidedly disorienting about becoming a child of divorce at 40. For one thing, my brother and I are extravagantly late to the party. During the first wave of divorces among my parents' group when I was 8 or 9, I pined for the family breakup. It wasn't that I was terribly miserable. (Moderately, maybe.) The real draw was that the attention seemed glamorous. Today, my daughter's father and I totter after her with snacks and books, catering to her every emotional need. This was not the style when I was a kid. Mom and Dad were wonderful parents, yet my brother and I were largely along for the ride on their social train, sometimes getting accidentally mislaid in airports and at house parties. It wasn't negligence; it was just the way it was for their set in the early '80s. To have your mother and father fight for you in court, now that seemed cool.

And the guilt presents! As my girlfriends with divorced parents got older, the spoils became more desirable. Bags of new clothing from Esprit. Tickets to unchaperoned Jefferson Starship concerts. I remember one of my friends receiving a new Honda wrapped in a bow. And certainly there was nowhere sexier to be in eighth grade than at a sleepover in a friend's divorced-dad condo, where the "Porky's" movies looped unchecked, and for breakfast one might be served pizza and warm New Coke.

At 40, for me my parents' separation draws no pity slumber parties, no new cars. Blank stares are usually what I get when I drop the sad news. Though it rarely comes up. Why would it? There are no arrangements to make to pick me up from dance class, no birthday parties to choreograph.

What does it mean, when your parents split apart after you yourself have lived half of your life? For one thing, there isn't a shred of innocence left. I know exactly what my mother and father are losing, because I've known these people for four decades. I've witnessed their stubborn affection for each other; I'm old enough to get their private jokes. If I were younger, perhaps I could trick myself into imagining a cute "Parent Trap" situation, but my middle-aged mind knows reconciliation is not possible, not after almost half a century of two people struggling with a disease no one beats. Certainly, I am less shattered than I would have been as a kid. But I am sadder, too.

And then there is the new chill that has permeated my own household. I'm in a happy relationship that I can't imagine wanting to leave. But will the statistics about children of divorce suddenly apply to me, now that I'm the product of a broken home?

It's important to note that it's been two years, and the papers have not been signed. My mother is a very determined person, and I think she still believes she can, even now, will my father into health and take him along on one of her birding cruises. But the separation has happened, residences have changed. For this reason, I recently poured out large respective glasses of wine and milk, then sat down with my daughter, now 4, to clear it all up.

"Mommy's mommy and Mommy's daddy don't live together anymore, " I told her.

She blinked at me. I took out some crayons and drew her a picture. The yellow house is Grandpa's house. The white house, Grandma's.

"Who gets the toys?" she asked. It was a good question, one my brother and I have been idly wondering ourselves. Where are the toys? Are there even any left?

"Everybody," I lied.

"Who gets me?" she asked.

"Everybody." This is the truth. Since this new family arrangement, she has been in hot demand. Constant phone calls, Skyping sessions twice a week.

She considered this. "That sounds fun," she said.

And then I saw it all happening. She would be the one to get the clothes, the trips to Disney World, the New Coke. I could almost hear the tagline. Grandchildren of divorce: All of the spoils, none of the pain. It's kind of nice to imagine, isn't it? Someone, after all these years, might finally get to win.

---

Katie Crouch is the author of the forthcoming novel "Abroad."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Did the Bank Bailout Do Enough for the Country?

Housing Crisis Was Overlooked

Amir Sufi, Univesity of Chicago

Letting bankruptcy judges write down mortgages and providing an ambitious mortgage refinancing plan would have reduced foreclosures.

Our System Is Safer and More Stable

Lee Sachs, Former counselor to the treasury secretary

Radical reshaping should not be an objective for its own sake. Rescue efforts and reforms protected consumers, taxpayers and the flow of credit.

Better No Bailout, Than the One We Got

Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Banks weren't forced to shrink and get boring. If they were allowed to fail, federal spending could have kept the economy afloat and led to recovery.

Too Much Debt and Not Enough Equity

Anat R. Admati, Stanford University

Tougher requirements would have prevented banks from hiding their true losses, and loosened credit for businesses and individuals.

More Focus Is Needed on Deep Economic Flaws

Edward Harrison, Credit Writedowns

Until we address stagnant income, high household debt, insufficient bank capital and excessive risk, another crisis may be inevitable.

Too Narrow a Focus on Banks

Glenn Hubbard, Columbia University

There was little discussion of financial institutions other than banks and government institutions, which helped spread contagion.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Tongue-Tied on Campus

This spring, universities across the United States have fielded requests from students for "trigger warnings" to accompany certain books, films, lectures and works of art that they deem troubling. And more recently, several colleges have found themselves dealing with protests from students outraged by their institutions' choice of graduation speaker, and thus recipients of honorary degrees.

Are conservative and liberal orthodoxy stifling thought on college campuses?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Great Divide: The Republican War on Workers’ Rights

Midterm elections are like fancy software: Experts love them, end-users couldn't care less. But if the 2010 elections are any indication, we might not want to doze off as we head into the summer months before November. Midterm elections at the state level can have tremendous consequences, especially for low-wage workers. What you don't know can hurt you — or them.

In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a "cookie-cutter" pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.

Take the case of tipped workers and the minimum wage. In most states, tipped workers earn an hourly wage that is less than the federal minimum — the federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour — because they're supposed to make up the rest in tips. (They often don't; the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force.) But non-serving staff who don't get tips must be paid the minimum wage.

Republican state legislators have devised a way around that. In 2011, lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill that would have allowed restaurants and other employers to force their serving staff to pool their tips; tips would be redistributed among the nonserving staff, who could then be paid the subminimum wage. That same year, Maine legislators passed a bill declaring that "service charges" were not tips at all. Because they aren't tips, they don't belong to the serving staff. Employers can pocket them — without informing customers — whether they redistribute them among the staff or keep them.

In both cases, conservative Republicans supported the right of employers to take money that workers had earned. This disregard for the earnings of workers is only an extreme manifestation of a more common phenomenon among Republican legislators: their indifference to the problem of wage theft.

Wage theft refers to the practice among employers of taking money from their employees by illegally paying them less than the minimum wage or not paying them overtime. According to one multicity study, in a single week, nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers had, on average, 15 percent of their pay stolen by their employers.

One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft — which, according to Mr. Lafer's E.P.I. report, involves sums "far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience store robberies in the country" — is lax enforcement of the country's wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. "The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year," Mr. Lafer estimates. Because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.

In 2010, liberal legislators in Miami-Dade County decided to take matters into their own hands. They passed an anti-wage-theft ordinance, resulting in more than 600 prosecutions and $1.7 million recovered in stolen pay in the first year alone. Miami-Dade's success inspired Broward and Palm Beach Counties to propose similar measures.

In response, Republican legislators in Tallahassee tried to pass a bill that would prohibit any "county, municipality, or political subdivision of the state" from enacting laws, rules, ordinances or regulations "for the purpose of addressing wage theft." They failed, so they tried again. This time, the bill passed the Florida House, but failed in the Senate.

Where conservatives often style themselves as the champions of local control — Ronald Reagan called for a government with "as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level" — the Florida example suggests that they have no compunction about sacrificing that principle when it threatens business interests.

Over the last four decades, for example, low-wage workers have been hit hard by the declining value of the federal minimum wage. In the absence of federal action, states, cities and counties have increased the minimum wage or indexed it to inflation (or both) to ensure that it keep pace with rising costs.

Republican politicians in state capitals have tried to check them at every point. Florida, Indiana and Mississippi have banned local governments from increasing the minimum wage. In Nevada, Missouri and Arizona, state legislators tried to overturn constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives. In 2011, New Hampshire's Republican legislature simply abolished the state's minimum wage.

State legislators have also overridden local efforts to grant employees a right to paid sick days. Nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers have no such right. So Milwaukee and Orange County in Florida tried to establish one within their jurisdictions (as New York City did recently). In Wisconsin, state legislators overturned Milwaukee's ordinance. In Florida, they simply prohibited any city or county from passing such an ordinance. Other states, including Louisiana and Mississippi, have done the same.

Perhaps most surprising is the willingness of Republican legislators to expose the individual to the intrusion and interference of the state. In Tennessee, a bill sponsored by ALEC members that was passed in 2012 stipulated a series of deadlines at which an unemployed worker would have to start accepting a lower-paying job or lose her unemployment benefits. After 13 weeks, she would have to accept any job paying at least 75 percent of her previous wage; after 25 weeks, 70 percent; and after 38 weeks, 65 percent. To ensure compliance with these byzantine regulations (the red tape Republicans so often claim to oppose), the bill required anyone receiving unemployment insurance to submit detailed weekly reports showing that she had applied for at least three jobs per week. It also mandated that the State Department of Labor to audit 1,000 recipients per week. This time, Republicans managed to find the personnel.

The overall thrust of this state legislation is to create workers who are docile and employers who are empowered. That may be why Republican legislators in Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota, Utah and Missouri have been so eager to ease restrictions on when and how much children can work. High schoolers should learn workplace virtues, says the conservative commentator Ben Stein, like "not talking back." Early exposure to employment will teach 12-year-olds, as the spokesman of an Idaho school district put it, that "you have to do what you're asked, what your supervisor is telling you."

And if workers don't learn that lesson in junior high, recent Republican changes to state unemployment codes will ensure that they learn it as adults. In 2011, Florida stipulated that any employee fired for "deliberate violation or disregard of the reasonable standards of behavior which the employer expects" would be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Arkansas passed a similar amendment ("violation of any behavioral policies of the employer"). The following year so did South Carolina ("deliberate violations or disregard of standards of behavior which the employer has the right to expect") and Tennessee. The upshot of these changes is that any employee breaking the rules of her employer — be they posting comments about work on Facebook, dating a co-worker or an employee from a rival firm, going to the bathroom without permission — can be fired and denied unemployment. Faced with that double penalty, any worker might think twice about crossing her boss.

What might Adam Smith, often claimed as the intellectual godfather of the American right, have said about these legislative efforts? "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen," wrote Smith in "The Wealth of Nations," "its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."

Indeed.

Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin."

A version of this article appears in print on 05/19/2014, on page A17 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Republican War on Workers' Rights.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: How Strong Is the Tea Party?

Tea Party candidates are having a rockier time in Republican primaries than in previous years. The movement's candidate in North Carolina lost to the party establishment and Sen. Mitch McConnell seems to be holding off a challenge in Kentucky. But fervor among the committed is high.

Is the Tea Party over, or could it still be powerful force?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Stone: A Life Beyond ‘Do What You Love’

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Student advisees often come to my office, rubbing their hands together, furrowing their brows and asking me to walk along with them as they ponder life after graduation. Just the other day, a sophomore made an appointment because he was worrying about whether he should become a doctor or a philosophy professor. A few minutes later, he nervously confessed that he had also thought of giving stand-up comedy a whirl.

As an occupational counselor, my kneejerk reaction has always been, "What are you most passionate about?" Sometimes I'd even go into a sermonette about how it is important to distinguish between what we think we are supposed to love and what we really love.

But is "do what you love" wisdom or malarkey?

In a much discussed article in Slate early this year, the writer Miya Tokumitsu argued that the "do what you love" ethos so ubiquitous in our culture is in fact elitist because it degrades work that is not done from love. It also ignores the idea that work itself possesses an inherent value, and most importantly, severs the traditional connection between work, talent and duty.

When I am off campus and informally counseling economically challenged kids in Northfield, Minn., a city of about 20,000, the theme is not "do what you love." Many of them are used to delivering papers at 5 a.m., slinging shingles all day or loading trucks all night. They are accustomed to doing whatever they need to do to help out their families. For them, the notion of doing what you love or find meaningful is not the idea that comes first to mind; nor should it. We put our heads together and consider, "What are you best at doing?" or "What job would most improve your family's prospects?" Maybe being licensed as a welder or electrician? Maybe the military? Passion and meaning may enter into the mix of our chats with the understanding that they sharpen your focus and make you more successful.

My father didn't do what he loved. He labored at a job he detested so that he could send his children to college. Was he just unenlightened and mistaken to put the well-being of others above his own personal interests? It might be argued that his idea of self-fulfillment was taking care of his family, but again, like so many other less than fortunate ones, he hated his work but gritted his teeth and did it well.

It could, I suppose, be argued that my father turned necessity into a virtue, or that taking the best care you can of your family is really a form of self-service. But getting outside yourself enough to put your own passions aside for the benefit of a larger circle, be it family or society, does not come naturally to everyone.

Not all take this path. You may know the tale of Dr. John Kitchin, a.k.a. Slomo, who quit his medical practice for his true passion — skating along the boardwalk of San Diego's Pacific Beach. But is it ethical for the doctor to put away his stethoscope and lace up his skates?

Thinkers as profound as Kant have grappled with this question. In the old days, before the death of God, the faithful believed that their talents were gifts from on high, which they were duty-bound to use in service to others. In his treatise on ethics, "The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals," Kant ponders: Suppose a man "finds in himself a talent which might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than take pains in enlarging his happy natural capacities." Should he?

Kant huffs, no — one cannot possibly will that letting one's talents rust for the sake of pleasure should be a universal law of nature. "[A]s a rational being," he writes, "he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him, and have been given him, for all sorts of purposes." To Kant, it would be irrational to will a world that abided by the law "do what you love."

Perhaps, unlike Kant, you do not believe that the universe is swimming with purposes. Then is "do what you love," or "do what you find most meaningful" the first and last commandment? Not necessarily.

The faith that my likes and dislikes or our sense of meaning alone should decide what I do is part and parcel with the gospel of self-fulfillment. Philosophy has always been right to instruct that we can be as mistaken about our views on happiness as anything else. The same holds for the related notion of self-fulfillment. Suppose that true self-fulfillment comes in the form of developing into "a mature human being." This is of course not to claim that we ought to avoid work that we love doing just because we love doing it. That would be absurd. For some, a happy harmony exists or develops in which they find pleasure in using their talents in a responsible, other-oriented way.

The universally recognized paragons of humanity — the Nelson Mandelas, Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Luther Kings — did not organize their lives around self-fulfillment and bucket lists. They, no doubt, found a sense of meaning in their heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but they did not do what they were doing in order to achieve that sense of meaning. They did — like my father and some of those kids from town — what they felt they had to do.

Dr. King taught that every life is marked by dimensions of length, breadth and height. Length refers to self-love, breadth to the community and care of others, and height to the transcendent, to something larger than oneself. Most would agree with Dr. King's prescription that self-fulfillment requires being able to relate yourself to something higher than the self. Traditionally, that something "higher" was code for God, but whatever the transcendent is, it demands obedience and the willingness to submerge and remold our desires.

Perhaps you relish running marathons. Perhaps you even think of your exercise regimen as a form of self-improvement. But if your "something higher" is, say, justice and equality, those ideals might behoove you to delegate some of the many hours spent pounding the track on tutoring kids at the youth center. Our desires should not be the ultimate arbiters of vocation. Sometimes we should do what we hate, or what most needs doing, and do it as best we can.

Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College and the editor of "The Quotable Kierkegaard."

A version of this article appears in print on 05/18/2014, on page SR5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Life Beyond 'Do What You Love'.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: What's Next for Net Neutrality?

Let the Internet Evolve

Larry Downes, Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy

Some want the Internet to become a "public utility" to guarantee neutrality. But there's a reason why our public infrastructure is crumbling.

If Only the Rules Matched the Rhetoric

Tim Wu, Columbia Law School

The F.C.C. chairman spoke of the need for an open Internet, but the agency's proposed rules seem to call for preferential fast lanes.

Don't Harm the Start-Up Economy

Julie Samuels, Engine

Without guaranteeing that all providers will have equal ability to provide their services, we will create an Internet of haves and have-nots, and it's not just consumers who would suffer.

Regulation Could Slow Our Future

Brent Skorup, George Mason University

Harsh new rules would preclude future prioritized traffic for online gaming, cheaper television packages, and other services on the horizon.

Equal Access for All

Rashad Robinson, ColorOfChange.org

Wheeler's proposal leaves the door open for an exclusive fast lane for wealthy corporations, while relegating the rest of us to a second-class, censored Internet.

Maintain the Web's Youthful Idealism

David Gelernter, professor of computer science

Soon the Internet will be transformed as companies pre-position data in your computer. For now, let Net democracy continue.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Nitpicking a Lousy Policy

Base Policy on Science

Richard Pollack, public health entomologist

School officials who support science-based policies to keep kids with lice in school tend to relent to the pressure of dissenting parents.

Keep Them in School

Barbara L. Frankowski, pediatrician

There are more important health concerns to deal with than lice. Treat kids who have it but don't take them out of the classroom to do so.

No Nits, No Chemicals, No Excuses

Deborah Z. Altschuler, National Pediculosis Association

The mentality that head lice are only a nuisance keeps children unnecessarily vulnerable and chronically infested.

There Are Worse Vermin

Sandra Tsing Loh, author, "The Madwoman in the Volvo"

After surviving fleas, spiders, maggots and Indian meal moths, I consider lice the kinder, gentler pest, and their removal as special bonding time with my children.

Send Them Home

Tamara Flannagan, public school parent

Children with lice will miss out on learning in one way or another, so we should take the time necessary to deal with infestations properly.

Regardless of Policy, Lice Are Not Going Anywhere

Ryan Bourke, public school principal

Lice have been around for millennia. They are a part of the human condition, and despite our best efforts, a part of school, too.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Secret Pension Fund Deals

As managers of public pension funds realized that what they had would not fund what they needed, many shifted money from plain vanilla bonds and mutual funds into riskier "alternative investments," like hedge funds that promised high return and required strict confidentiality. But as Pando Daily and others have shown, that secrecy can hide high fees, low returns, excess risk and the identity of politically connected dealmakers.

Should the multibillion-dollar state pension industry be more transparent and less prone to influence and corruption?

Read the Discussion »

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Stone: What Do Guns Say?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Earlier this month, in Bunkerville, Nev., representatives of the Bureau of Land Management withdrew from a tense standoff with supporters of Cliven Bundy, a rancher who owes the federal government over $1 million in unpaid fees for allowing his cattle to graze on public land. The hundreds of self-appointed militia and "states' rights" activists who flocked to support Bundy, many in full tactical gear and openly carrying assault rifles, blockaded a federal interstate and trained their weapons on B.L.M. employees who sought to negotiate with the rancher and his family. Fearful of a pitched gun battle, the B.L.M. departed, leaving Bundy and his supporters to celebrate, emboldened, with a barbecue.

Toting a weapon in a demonstration gestures as close as possible to outright violence while still technically remaining within the domain of speech.

Bundy, who does not "recognize the federal government as even existing," has gone on to leverage his spotlight to air a variety of retrograde, racist views. But the ensuing media kerfuffle has deflected attention from the fact that his armed supporters remain, dug in.

On one level, the affair in Bunkerville can be seen as a vestige of Old West range-war mentality, opportunistically remixed with overtones of the militia movements of the early 1990s and an identity-politics firestorm that's very 2014. But as a transaction between the state and citizens decided not by rule of law, nor by vote or debate, but rather by the simple presence of arms, Bunkerville is deeply troubling. Guns publicly brandished by private individuals decided the outcome. For all Bundy's appeals to constitutional justification, what mattered at the end of the day was who was willing to take the threat of gunplay the furthest.

Bunkerville is simply the next step in a trend that has been ramping up for some time. Since the election of Barack Obama, guns have appeared in the public square in a way unprecedented since the turbulent 1960s and '70s — carried alongside signs and on their own since before the Tea Party elections, in a growing phenomenon of "open carry" rallies organized by groups like the Modern American Revolution and OpenCarry.org, and in the efforts by gun rights activists to carry assault weapons into the Capitol buildings in New Mexico and Texas (links to video). According to open carry advocates, their presence in public space represents more than just an expression of their Second Amendment rights, it's a statement, an "educational," communicative act  — in short, an exercise of their First Amendment freedom of speech. (See this, from the group Ohio Carry, and this Michigan lawsuit.)

This claim bears serious consideration.  The First Amendment has historically been much harder to limit than the Second, and so extending the freedom of speech to the open display of weapons raises several urgent questions about how we understand the relationship between expressing ideas and making threats, between what furthers dialogue and what ends it.

But are guns speech?  Is carrying a weapon as an act of public protest constitutionally protected under the First Amendment? And if so, what do guns say?

The courts have traditionally recognized "symbolic speech" — actions that convey a clear message — as deserving of First Amendment protection (by, for example, protecting the right of students in Des Moines to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam War). As "the expression of an idea through an activity," symbolic speech depends heavily on the context within which it occurs. Unlike pure speech, symbolic speech is more susceptible to limitation, as articulated by the Warren court's 1968 ruling in United States v. O'Brien. The outcome of that case, the O'Brien test, establishes a four-pronged series of qualifications for determining when symbolic speech can be limited: (1) Any limitation must be within the state's constitutional powers; (2) the limitation must be driven by a compelling governmental interest; (3) that countervailing interest must be unrelated to the content of the speech, touching solely on the "non-communicative aspect" of the act in question; and (4) any limitation must be narrowly tailored and prohibit no more speech than absolutely necessary.

In practical terms, this litmus test suggests that you can carry a gun as symbolic speech, particularly in the context of a pro-Second Amendment demonstration. The state's clear interest in maintaining public order can be narrowly satisfied by demanding that protesters either carry guns that are unloaded — at least with an open chamber — or which otherwise have the barrel or action blocked. Thus far, open carry protesters have largely followed this rule, notably by sticking tiny American flags into their guns. "If the SWAT team comes down and starts surrounding us with tactical gear, it only takes a minute to pull them out," the organizer of one such event told reporters. "But that's not going to happen."

Seeing weapons featured in a public protest might strike many Americans as outrageous or alarming — something more out of a CNN segment from a foreign conflict zone than in a live broadcast from the steps of the local state capitol. But the courts have held that distressing and outrageous speech is still protected, and that even calls for the overthrow of the government made at armed rallies are protected unless those statements are expressly intended to provoke "imminent lawless action." The Supreme Court has also extended protection to hyperbolic and figurative speech even when it involves ostensibly threatening the president.

The paradoxical upshot: if you and I get into a heated dispute at the local watering hole, and I say something ambiguous about how you'd best be quiet while casually pulling back my jacket to reveal that I'm packing heat, there's a solid chance I've just committed felony brandishing — but if I stand outside an event featuring the president of the United States with a loaded handgun and a sign invoking Thomas Jefferson's injunction that the "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," I'm in the clear.

But what does it mean, in a democracy that enshrines freedom of speech, to publicly carry a gun as an expression of political dissent? Toting a weapon in a demonstration changes the stakes, transforming a protest from just another heated transaction in the marketplace of ideas into something else entirely. It's bringing a gun to an idea-fight, gesturing as close as possible to outright violence while still technically remaining within the domain of speech. Like a military "show of force," this gesture stays on the near side of an actual declaration of war while remaining indisputably hostile. The commitment to civil disagreement is merely provisional: I feel so strongly about this issue, the gun says, that if I don't get my way, I am willing to kill for it. As Mao understood, the formal niceties of political persuasion are underwritten by the very real threat of harm. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Related

More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

We should also note that not all symbolic speech is created equal. On the contemporary stage, those bearing guns in protest are most likely to be white, right-leaning, and rural. As the historian Adam Winkler has documented, this represents a more or less direct reversal of the upheavals of the late '60s and '70s, when Republican politicians pursued new gun control legislation in response to armed protests by urban African-American leftists. Today, it is those most sheltered from actual state violence — from the day-to-day reality of police brutality — who also feel most threatened by the state, most free to threaten violence against hypothetical violations, and most entitled to opt out of civil discourse by reaching for their weapons. Our racial double standards for who can safely gesture at political violence are enormous. At least before his racism became public, Bundy and his supporters could point assault weapons at federal agents and be lionized as "patriots" by a United States senator and celebrated on Fox, whereas a single New Black Panther standing near a polling station while holding a billy club prompted calls on that same network for former Navy SEALs to show up in force and "fight back."

Where does this leave us? Now more than ever, the state's putative monopoly on violence has been counterbalanced by the free market proliferation of weapons. With over 300 million firearms in private hands in this country, there are nearly as many guns as there are Americans. By this measure, we've become a crude democracy not just of the vote or of the idea, but of the bullet.

Contemplating guns as speech, we confront a kind of autoimmune disorder: The tools once instrumental to the birth of our nation, and to the protection of the individual and the state alike, are increasingly turned against both. Guns historically used to midwife and safeguard the right to free speech are now growing ever more cross-wired with it, and speech cannot but be degraded in the process.

Citizens in a democracy make a certain pact with one another: to answer speech with more speech, not violence. No matter how angry what I say makes you, you do not have a right to pull a gun on me. But now the gun has already been drawn, nominally as an act of symbolic speech — and yet it still remains a gun. A slippage has occurred between the First and Second Amendments, and the First suffers as a result. The moral bravery political protest demands is no longer enough; to protest in response now requires the physical bravery to face down men with guns.

This situation is alarming, but it is also tragic.  Asking after the propriety of guns in the public square ignores a basic reality: They are already there, and not just in ambiguously threatening demonstrations. We live in an era in which mass shootings have become a tacitly accepted feature of social life. Any space, public or private — offices, movie theaters, malls, street corners, schools — can be transformed at a moment's notice into the site of a blood bath. Wherever we go, our existence as social selves — our vulnerability to one another in democratically shared spaces — is in the firing line.

Patrick Blanchfield is a doctoral candidate and Woodruff Scholar in Comparative Literature at Emory University and a graduate of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about American gun culture at carteblanchfield.com.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 5, 2014

An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed a photo of an armed gun rights supporter in Michigan to Jason Bean of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was taken by Rebecca Cook of Reuters.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: Missouri Keeps Tumbling Rightward

The Missouri legislature had no trouble passing a big tax cut today over the veto of Gov. Jay Nixon. As a Missouri native, I'm probably more irritated by this than most Times readers are, but my state is only one of many that have been sharply pulled to the right in the last few years. What's happening in Jefferson City is already familiar to residents of Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, North Carolina, and many others.

The main difference is that Mr. Nixon is a Democrat, a relic of the days when his party dominated the state. But Republican leaders are working on that. Last month, they had a serious debate in the House on whether the governor should be impeached for allowing same-sex married couples to file joint tax returns. Gay and lesbian people can't get married to each other in Missouri, which has a constitutional amendment prohibiting it, but Mr. Nixon had the temerity to allow the joint returns for couples married elsewhere.

"This is such a blatant and serious violation of Missouri's constitution and Missouri law that the governor should be removed from office," said Nick Marshall, a state representative from Parkville.

In case that didn't work, there was another impeachment resolution filed that would have ousted Mr. Nixon for failing to properly discipline state workers who released a list of concealed gun permits to the federal government. The resolution began, "Whereas, the people of the State of Missouri cherish their right to bear arms…" and went downhill from there.

A few weeks ago, the legislature approved a measure that would nullify all federal gun laws and allow residents to sue federal agents for enforcing them. It carries no legal weight, and Mr. Nixon vetoed something similar last year, but the true believers apparently feel the need to re-establish their credentials repeatedly.

Although the impeachment efforts were dropped today, Republicans have managed to push through their agenda. As a Kansas City Star editorial noted, today's tax cut doesn't even benefit the people who could use the money the most. A family making $44,000 a year will get a $32 break, while one making $1 million will get $7,800. Most of the benefits, in fact, go to one special-interest group.

"It is a gift to businesses whose owners declare their business incomes on their personal tax forms," the Star wrote. "Up to one-fourth of their income could eventually be tax-free if the bill becomes law, whether or not they create jobs."

Naturally, Missouri isn't coming close to fully funding its public school and university system, and is one of 20 states that refuses to expand Medicaid, turning down $2.2 billion from the federal government because that would mean accepting the reality of the Affordable Care Act. But when businesses raise their voices for a tax cut, they are answered.

It's not the state I grew up in, which is exactly the way a new generation of leaders like it.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Taking Note: Another Idiot With a Gun

One of the many problems with the growing normalization of gun ownership is that a growing number of idiots will want to buy and keep guns for no particularly good reason, and a subset of those idiots will go on to kill people.

Witness the latest horror story, in which an 11-year-old New Jersey boy, Hunter Pederson, was shot dead by his uncle, Chad Olm.

Mr. Olm said Hunter and Mr. Olm's son asked to see his collection of firearms. So he obligingly whipped out three guns, including a Glock 27 .40-caliber pistol with a laser sight. (Why Mr. Olm felt he needed such a weapon, or such an attachment, has not been explained, probably because there is no satisfying answer.)

After showing his 11-year-old nephew a deadly weapon with a laser sight, he turned on the sight, putting a red dot on the boy's forehead. For laughs, or something. Mr. Olm said Hunter reached for the gun, and it went off, hitting him above the eye.

Mr. Olm said he keeps his guns unloaded (obviously not), but that he had not checked to make sure before he aimed one at a small boy's head.

Mr. Olm was arrested and is facing charges of criminal homicide, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children.

Anyone with the slightest shred of sense knows that you check weapons for chambered rounds before you put them away — not when you're showing them off — and that you should never point a gun at anyone unless you think you might need to shoot.

(My wife comes from a gun-owning family. When she was growing up her father would become enraged if any of his kids pointed so much as a plastic toy pistol at someone.)

Before the comments start piling up from the anti-gun control crowd, I am not saying that all guns should be outlawed or that a better background-check system would necessarily have prevented this senseless death.

But the killing of Hunter is a sign of how out-of-control the gun-owning fetish has become, and how little it has to do with anything the writers of the Constitution envisioned.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

See Something Say Something

• Log In
• Register Now
• Help

• © 2014 The New York Times Company
• Site Map
• Privacy
• Your Ad Choices
• Advertise
• Terms of Sale
• Terms of Service
• Work With Us
• RSS
• Help
• Contact Us
• Site Feedback

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Professional Pompom Problems

This week New York became the 35th state to declare high school cheerleading a competitive sport. ESPN wouldn't argue: it televises the highly athletic college and high school national championships every year.

But when cheerleaders turn pro their respect gets sidelined. Most cheerleaders for sports teams make less than minimum wage and are subjected to humiliating treatment, according to several recent lawsuits.

How can cheerleaders keep their competitive edge as they enter the working world?

Read the Discussion »

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Doctors in the Death Chamber

As a lethal mix of drugs left the murderer Clayton D. Lockett writhing and gasping before dying of a heart attack in the Oklahoma death chamber Tuesday night a doctor stood by to see if he had lost consciousness, and then died.

Doctors have participated in lethal injections since they were first used, even injecting prisoners, despite professional guidelines that proscribe this. Should they be allowed to participate in executions without being disciplined?

Read the Discussion »

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: Mice and Mothers

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

The needle penetrated my latex glove and slipped into the soft skin of my finger. It was quick and painless. I was in the animal lab of Children's Hospital Los Angeles, buried under Sunset Boulevard. Despite the thousands of mice within, the lab was peaceful. I was alone.

In front of me, in a vented, pressurized hood, lay a small white sleeping mouse. It wore a tiny plastic mask around its nose, which pumped in anesthetic. But the drug wasn't working well enough. I was about to inject the mouse with an unusually aggressive strain of H.I.V., taken from the spinal fluid of a young man who succumbed quickly to AIDS and made more deadly in the lab, when the mouse suddenly jerked. I stuck myself with the needle instead.

This was six years ago, the third year of my doctoral studies. I hadn't lived in Southern California long. Los Angeles didn't feel like my city. It still belonged to my mom. Four years earlier, only a few miles away from the lab, my mom had killed herself. When the mother you love decides to leave you, in the most final way a person can, it changes you forever. She didn't have to die. But she did.

A suicide turns you into a meticulous researcher. I have spent hours, weeks, perhaps months of my life repeating the exact words of our last phone conversation. I have agonized over her final days, analyzed her receipts, re-enacted her last meal, worn her jewelry and even emailed her high school boyfriend. Few other deaths can lead family members to this level of detailed personal research. Every book will tell you: You can never know why. But the only thing that's important is understanding why. The path is a circle.

After my research I came to a definite conclusion. I was a terrible person. I was responsible for my mother's death. There seemed to be only one solution: Become a scientist. Like millions of sinners before me, I chose redemption. Science offers the promise of reason. It answers the question that haunted me every day: Why?

I had always loved biology but wasn't so sure about graduate school. With my mom's death I was suddenly alone in the world and desperate to make amends. It was this semi-delusional state that led me to the Ph.D. program, made me fall in love with molecular biology, and ultimately put an H.I.V.-laced needle in my hand.

I looked at the little mouse in front of me. How could I have done something so foolish? No one was supposed to do this risky procedure alone. I knew what I was supposed to do next — I had written the safety procedure myself. I should call for help and then begin washing the wound, taking my time to prevent infection. But what about the mouse, and its littermates still waiting in their cage? They were all under anesthetic, and if I left their masks on for too long, they would die.

Most accidental needle sticks occurring in a hospital don't result in an infection. But inside the needle that stuck my finger was a highly concentrated virus designed to overwhelm and take over the body. I needed antiviral therapy immediately, within the hour, to reduce my chance of being infected. And yet I did nothing.

Instead, I returned to the procedure. I prepared another needle, gave the mouse the deadly dose and stopped the anesthesia. Tenderly, I placed the mouse back in its cage, then watched to make sure the drug wore off.

Only after repeating the procedure with each mouse and cleaning the work station did I allow myself to break down. I washed my shaking hands for 15 minutes, the minutes seemingly stretching into eternity. As I scrubbed the iodine soap into the tiny wound, a few tears fell on my cheeks. I willed myself to stop, to be calm. And then, before the hour was up, I walked into my academic adviser's office and told her what had happened.

After a month of antiretroviral medication, I found I was lucky. I didn't get H.I.V. The mice were not so lucky. As Steinbeck wrote, "Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em." Except in science you don't say kill. You say sacrifice. Usually it's abbreviated to "sac" as in "I sac'd the mice." I had loved those mice, cared for them from birth to death. But I had also injected them with millions of human stem cells, and then with a virus that had killed an estimated 36 million humans.

When I sacrificed them it made way for a new way of treating H.I.V. That strategy, using a gene therapy to cure the disease, is now being pursued in human clinical trials. Perhaps it will someday be worth it and the brief, brutish lives of those mice will save many humans.

Whether you're speaking of mice or mothers, when you love someone you want to understand their death. There needs to be a reason. I will never know why my mom had to die. Perhaps that's why I tried to give meaning to the lives of those mice. I just hope that they didn't suffer. I hope none of us do.

---

Nathalia Holt is the author of "Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More