Personality Tests

On morning walks, my husband and I spend a lot of time talking about the differences between Democrats and Republicans. This morning's conversation, spurred initially by a flat tire produced by my son's fledgling parking skills (or lack thereof) and the additional lack of a full size spare looked at the erosion of society starting with something as trivial as a tire. All cars used to have full-sized spare tires. Somewhere along the way, car manufacturers figured out that they could substitute a cheap tire for temporary use that would save them a bundle of money over time, because people would still buy the car. And how often do you really get flat tires anyway (about once every four months in our family, as it turns out). So the customer gets a worse product, and the car maker gets more money. On the surface, this one example is not the cause of the demise of Western civilization as we've come to know it and have mixed feelings about it. However, it does serve as an emblem of greed vs. altruism. So when the person who came up with the idea of a "donut" was congratulating himself (and Firestone takes credit for pioneering this idea in 1979 -- the same Firestone that helped to do away with mass transit on the west coast in the late 1930s) on helping car manufacturers make more money, he wasn't congratulating himeself for making a high quality item that would serve customers well. Firestone wins out twice. The car manufacterers love the cheaper tire, so they buy them and then the customer has to buy another tire after their son drives it into a tall curb at high speed.

So there are people who derive satisfaction from doing a good job -- from making something of high quality or helping people (think Jonas Salk and free vaccines for everyone) and society benefits by having quality goods or better health care or safer food or . . . The converse are the people like Mr. Firestone and his ilk who derive satisfaction from their stockholders response to the bottom line. Assuming (and this is not an all-encompassing rule, because there are exceptions on both sides) that Dr. Salk represents a Democrat's mind set, and the unnamed Mr. Firestone represents a Republican, the differences between the two are very clear cut, as are their overall impacts on society. There is some evidence that the root of these differences may be genetic.

And here's why that makes sense: all organisms are driven by the force to survive and reproduce. At our most base level, that's what humans do. And the Republican strategy -- to "win" at any cost, whether it be to simply make things up, or to refuse to do something for the greater good, is the perfect strategy for the individual looking for biological success.

But here's what doesn't make sense: we are humans, not bacteria, mushrooms, algae, roses, or ferrets. We are capable of reasoning. And it is reasonable to think that helping people is good for human society as a whole and good for the individual. We have managed to come up with invention after invention. In America, we turn on the tap and have clean water. People rarely die from sepsis occuring due to unsterile conditions in surgery. More people than not do not go hungry because food is cheap here. The list goes on and on. And these all stem from things that Republicans call "socialist" and try to do away with. Even though they benefit from these very same things, and we are, in fact, social creatures . So why can't we breed the Republican gene out of our society? Well, the same traits that make Republicans detract from society in other areas, make them reproduce more than Democrats. Being more altruistic leads to having fewer children because of the awareness of the impact on the environment and world population.

At the end of the day, what this means is that humans design flaw is our ability to reason and create. If we could just be more like other animals, we would not be able to produce artifacts of our humanity that can destroy the planet or wipe out most of the members of our species and others. We could follow the Republican strategy with no awareness of ill effects, and, in fact, fewer of them. Unfortunately, for those of us who do reason, the slow spiral around the drain is hard to watch.

The Liberal Elitest

Once upon a time, getting a Nobel Prize was a highly respected, much sought after accomplishment -- the pièce de resistance, the crème de la crème. Lately, the American winners in areas outside of science have been people like Al Gore and Paul Krugman. Individuals like these are shunned by a startling number of Americans as "socialist", "left-wing", "extreme". Yet, the world looks on them as bright, respectable people with views that should be embraced. If one admits that it is embarrassing to be an American in this climate, one hears the cries of "traitor", "unpatriotic"! How sad that elite is bad, mediocre is good.

The Hypocrisy of Friendship

Amistad means "friendship" in Spanish. It is also the name of a ship, recently dubbed the "freedom schooner", that in 1839 was the site of a slave revolt that took place as a vessel laden with a human cargo left Havana, Cuba and headed for the sugar fields where these slaves were destined to be worked to death. Instead, the leader of the slaves, a man given the name Joseph Cinque by Americans who even then were confounded by foreign-sounding names, killed the captain and took command of the vessel bringing it up the east coast (where newspapers continued to report on the sightings of a "long low black schooner" (if only they'd known!)). L'Amistad got as far as Long Island Sound where it was impounded by a revenue cutter and taken to the Customs Dock in New London, CT. After that, a fight ensued between the owners of the slaves, the slaves themselves, and the state of Connecticut which wouldn't abolish slavery for another nine years.

The drama reached its denoument when John Quincy Adams was selected to represent the slaves in court agains charges of murder and piracy. When he won the case two years after the initial internment, the slaves were free to return home to Sierra Leone with the aid of Christian organisations with an eye to future missionary action in Africa. Although this case gained infamy recently because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name as the ship, in fact, there was no lasting legal effect from this case, and it did not hasten the abolition of slavery anywhere. Nor did it improve the opinion of whites towards black people at the time or in the future.

What it did accomplish was to bring Christianity to Africa. The missionaries who accompanied the ex-slaves back to their continent began an assault on the inhabitants that to many seemed to bring good things: education, better nutrition, and medical care. And for what? So that ultimately dark skinned men and women could and would believe that one God created all men equally, that the black man (or woman) was not inferior in any way to his white counterpart.

It is true that there is no difference between the DNA of individuals from any ethnic group except for different alleles (or versions) of genes for superficial physical traits. It is also true whether you hide your bigotry behind the label of "Intelligent Design" or you understand the tenets of evolution, that Homo sapiens first showed up in Africa. Whether or not man was made by God in His image or by a series of mutations over time that eventually gave him an advantage over other primate ancestors, the first ones were Black.

So how did we come to a place and time where we have not only rejected human ancestry but are trying to marginalize it even more today when what we have in front of us is perhaps one of the most highly evolved individuals living. Much has been made of Barack Obama's past in terms of his associations that shed a negative light on him.

The Jeremiah Wrights of the world were born when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and it became clear that smart black men scared white people. He was nurtured when other supporters of MLK and his ideas of a peaceful revolt were stripped of power. He blossomed when senators like John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday. It turned out that white "Christians" didn't actually think all men are created equally. White "christians" even now liken black people to monkeys, not, more appropriately, Adam and Eve. So race riots, street gangs, angry rappers, and incendiary preachers grew in the void left by the dearth of peaceful dialogue.

If the Chicago welfare queen that Ronald Reagan used as a means to try to eliminate public programs that help the needy had been presented as white, his case would not have been very strong. If the CEOs that were just on the receiving end of obscene salaries and now a huge bailout were black, there would never have been a bailout plan in the first place.

And yet, through all of this, Barack Obama has perservered as the Democratic nominee. Doesn't this say something about this man's character, intellect, and vision? Here is a man who once again embraces peaceful dialogue, behaves in a charitably Christian manner, and is now on the threshold of reaping the benefits promised to the inhabitants of Sierra Leone by Connecticut missionaries nearly two hundred years ago. But the fearful white Christians, instead of embracing what they themselves have ostensibly been preaching about God's love for more than 2,000 years, are instead behaving like the politicians of 1839, selling the myth that people of African-American descent are somehow less human than white men. They cannot come out directly, so they call it by other names: terrorist, Islamic extremist (and it's no wonder so many blacks turned to Islam after Christianity let them down), That One, unpatriotic. It's not very Christian is it.

I'm Angry

For the last several weeks, Americans have been demostrating just how dumb they are. It is a testament to not only how "no child left behind" has failed in engendering any kind of critical thinking skill, but how the constancy of lies in our culture has just made people too apathetic to look beyond the initial report regardless of the source. In fact, the more we rely on the internet and FOX for information, the less fact checking, nay THINKING seems to be going on by the average American and his or her counterparts in government.

Not long ago, there was a news story about a stock dip that United Airlines experienced because someone reported to Bloomberg that the company had filed for bankruptcy. In fact, the news story was six years old, but because the reporter had learned how important hype and sensationalism are, he had neglected to do the first thing a reporter should do and check his source. Had his little exercise in negligence actually bankrupted United, there might have been repercussions. However, it was just another little blip on the news; an oh well, there's another thing, big deal.

But it is a big deal. Why isn't anyone incensed about all the lies. Sure if you read the comments in the New York Times op ed pieces, there sure are some angry people. However, generally the people who are already reading the Times are choosing education over ignorance. Why then are so many others going the opposite route, complacent in their beliefs even if they are completely wrong.

This blatant disrespect for the powers of reasoning that we as humans have -- one of the very things that sets us apart from other species is frightening. And fear, as is so often the case, can spawn irrational anger, which has now got me in its ugly grasp. So when a student of mine says to me, "John McCain has the best record on the environment," all I can do is gasp, horrified, and say, "how so?" At this point, the student tells me all the bad things he can about Obama instead of answering my question, sounding at best like an anchorman from FOX News, at worst a message that was approved by John McCain. Thank goodness the young man is actually too young to vote. Instead of climbing over my desk and strangling him, which is the reaction brought on by the emotionality of this election, I direct him to a website that tracks the candidates actual comments made about each topic.

Will he go check it out? Of course not. For we are no longer a nation of intellectually curious individuals, striving to better ourselves. Instead we are content being mediocre, and are looking for candidates who are just as bad as us so we can relate to them.

There was a time when the greed and entitlement that seemed to grow in the 1980s, seen in students from high school through college and into the "real" world was looked down upon. Now it is the norm, and those who deviate and believe that it is hard work and sound judgement based on research that merit success are branded "liberal", "elitist", "condescending". Is it any wonder that we embrace such backward thinking as stripping women of the rights they so recently fought to receive, rejecting the scientific learnings of brilliant men and women collected over the last several thousand years, and ignoring the environmental changes that are occurring every year, now wreaking havoc on the very states that disacknowledge global warming and seek to teach creation in schools.

Is it any wonder our dollar has plummeted in value, the young men and women just learning how to vote will find their college acceptances displaced by draft cards, we have the highest infant mortality rate of developed nations, and our environmental and educational views make us the laughingstock of both nations that already embrace democracy and those on which we force it.

I wonder if anger begets revolution. And I wonder if there are enough of us out there, because this has become a very uncivil war in a nation not divided so much by politics as by ignorance.

Politics

I've been trying to come up with some reasons someone like me (who nearly voted for Hillary in the primary) might cross over and support McCain now that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. Here's what I've got so far:

1. We will save taxpayer dollars because we won't have to pay Palin as much as we would a man.

2. More jobs will be created when prisons have to have nurses and midwives on staff to deal with all those pesky pregnant victims of incest and rape who were arrested and convicted when they tried to obtain illegal abortions once Roe v. Wade is overturned.

3. More parents will have their children apply to the private school I teach at because independent schools will be the only ones that teach about evolution. So my job is more secure.

4. We'll taxpayer money on rape kits.

5. Polar bear rugs should be really inexpensive for a bit while there's a glut on the market, and then they should be worth a LOT. It's a great investment.

6. I haven't quite figured out how this works to my benefit, but I'm pretty sure in that administration "liberals" will be treated kind of the same way that "Jews" or "gypsies" or "homosexuals" were treated in Germany in the late 1930s to mid 1940s. If anyone has an idea about this might be a good thing, let me know.