It’s that time of year again, the season when It’s A Wonderful Life pops up on every single television channel. Viewers seem not to tire of watching the story of George Bailey, the man who never left home but still managed to find meaning and a measure of success among friends and family in Bedford Falls. For Americans, known for their restlessness, George Bailey seems an improbable hero, and It’s a Wonderful Life an unlikely hit. After all, we are among the world’s most mobile people; our national icons are more often rugged individualists—pioneers, cowboys, immigrants—men and women willing to cut ties and move on, to leave home, and the past behind. Not so George Bailey, who despite his dreams for a life elsewhere, just stays put.

While viewers identify with Bailey in the movie, for much of the 20^th century, and now in the 21^st, Americans generally have regarded the George Baileys of the world as failures. Indeed, Bailey sees himself that way, longing to wipe the dust of his “two bit town” off his feet and go on to greater things. That Bailey thought of himself as a failure and that modern viewers might see him that way too reflects ideals of personality and success that emerged only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary culture frequently portrays mobility as natural and easy, as a longstanding part of the cultural DNA of Americans, but the idea that one had to move away from home in order to be a success is of surprisingly recent vintage.

Until the start of the last century, there was no shame in staying home. Unlike today, those adults who remained close to the family hearth were not labeled as unambitious. And those who felt homesickness when they were far from home were not considered immature and backwards as they are in contemporary society. Instead, love of home marked one as a refined and moral being, and homesickness was a sign of a virtuous and sensitive nature.

Notwithstanding such views, Americans in earlier centuries left home quite frequently. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans moved in unprecedented numbers, with close to 50% of the population migrating across state lines. Yet despite these peripatetic patterns, and despite our mythology of forward-looking, optimistic and highly individualistic pioneers, in reality these Americans did not find migration easy or natural. Many believed that mobility carried with it myriad risks, not least of which was homesickness or nostalgia as it was then known.

Considered a disease, it could prove fatal. During the Civil War alone, the Surgeon General attributed 74 Union deaths to nostalgia, and diagnosed over 5000 other soldiers as suffering from severe cases of the malady, the symptoms of which ranged from heart palpitations to “hectic fever” to incontinence. Soldiers were not the only ones to feel the pain of nostalgia, and newspapers routinely carried news of the sorry victims of the condition.  “Victim of Nostalgia: Priest Dies Craving for a Sight of his Motherland,” reported San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin in 1887. “Died By His Own Hand: Pangs of Nostalgia Drove Lonely Native to Meet Awful End,” reported the San Jose Evening News in 1901.  To earlier generations, leaving home often carried a hefty emotional toll, a toll that was widely acknowledged.  Mobility was not an unambiguous sign of ambition and success; instead it was often recognized as a source of pain.

Americans began to change their perspectives on home and homesickness only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as new views of mobility emerged. Nostalgia disappeared as a medical diagnosis, and the word’s meaning slowly changed. Rather than signifying a longing for a distant place, it came to be identified as a yearning for an unrecoverable time. As the diagnosis disappeared so too did sympathy for the homesick. Social Darwinists suggested that those who suffered from homesickness showed an inability to adapt to new environments. Early psychologists like G. Stanley Hall characterized homebodies as “provincial, plodding, and timid,” and later behaviorist psychologists insisted that those who could not leave home painlessly showed an alarming “infantile dependence.” They certainly would have wagged a warning finger at George Bailey, and characterized his loyalty to his mother and his hometown as vaguely pathological.

By the early decades of the twentieth century then, the conventional psychological and sociological wisdom had coalesced around the idea that the ambitious and successful moved on; the inferior, the dependent, the sissies, the failures stayed put.  Part of proving one’s maturity, modernity, and fitness for the capitalist marketplace was demonstrating the ability to cut home ties. Children were sent to summer camps to learn how to conquer homesickness; adults were told to repress it if they continued to feel it.  Only by moving away from home and its emotional entanglements might one be truly mature and truly succeed.

Yet this lesson is something that George Bailey never quite mastered, despite himself. He kept trying to shake the dust of Bedford Falls off his feet, but obligations to family and community required him to stay. Just as Bailey was unsuccessful at internalizing the demands of modern capitalist society, so many Americans have likewise discovered that the psychological mold of the rugged individualist does not accommodate their local affections and communitarian sentiments. And perhaps that explains the movie’s continued appeal, for it reminds us that America has never been only a nation of  individualists, that our past provides us with other personality types worth celebrating, and that love of home, loyalty to community, and a deep investment in a particular place need not be a source of shame nor a sign of failure.

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Homesickness: An American History.

Until the early morning of November 15, a few hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the chilly nights of a glorious autumn camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s disapproval with their politics and under the New York City Police Department’s anxious eye, the occupiers captured public attention in a remarkably peaceful way. Regrouping for the winter, they will take stock of what they have achieved so far and the work that remains.

Though the occupation was initially ignored by mainstream media after it began in September, the protest movement attracted favorable attention both nationwide and internationally. Arrests flared in other U.S. cities, notably Oakland, California, where protesters tried to recall a famous general strike of 1946 by marching to the port. But unlike in Oakland, and Portland, Oregon, the encampment at Wall Street survived the constant threat of being rousted by police action on the one hand and cold weather on the other without death, disaster or dishonor.

An official order to clear Zuccotti Park was squelched in October by the intervention of local city council members and other politicians—some of whom, not coincidentally, plan to run for office in the 2012 elections. Many local labor unions support the movement, suggesting that alliances may be possible across “police and firefighter” lines. This kind of alliance recently won a referendum in Ohio overturning a state law that would have limited public unions’ collective bargaining rights.

In Zuccotti Park protesters formed a tiny city within the city. Food, clothing and books were donated and handed out. Electric generators that were confiscated by the fire department were returned after volunteer attorneys complained on the protesters’ behalf. For public safety the occupiers relied on volunteer security guards who used nonviolent techniques to confront, isolate and occasionally expel troublemakers. Women and transgender protesters could, if they wished, sleep in separate tents. Before November 15, few people were arrested by the police for allegedly committing sexual or physical assault.

New Yorkers quickly became accustomed to this remarkably peaceful microcosm of urban life. On sunny weekend afternoons tourists thronged Zuccotti Park and its celebrated neighbors, the World Trade Center site on one side and the financial district on the other. I have never seen Lower Manhattan look more vibrant.

But Occupy Wall Street was only one of Manhattan’s tourist attractions. To put support for the movement’s proposed reforms in a realistic perspective it is suggestive to look at other sites in the city and the desires that they apparently fulfill.

Nearly 50 million men and women are visiting New York City this year. Nearly 50,000 of them ran in the recent New York City Marathon sponsored by ING Bank .

While protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in tents, the average price of a hotel room in New York City is $250 and the hotel occupancy rate is over 80 percent.

The average rent for a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment is $3,000 to $5,000 a month and the vacancy rate is practically nil . Close to Zuccotti Park you can rent a small studio apartment in Tribeca Tower for $3,395 .

Uptown, on the shopping mile of Fifth Avenue, young people line up in front of the Apple Store to buy an Iphone 4S. After registering online they arrive at the store, pick up a number and wait to be called into the store by an Apple employee. A few blocks down the street, other people line up to enter the Abercrombie & Fitch store though the young man working as a door guard tells me no special event or sale is going on. In front of Hollister, another chain clothing store, more people are waiting to enter the store which is now, a young employee says, is at its maximum capacity.

We can’t ignore that while most people are preoccupied with paying for a home and an education, they are also shopping for fun. Occupy Wall Street has won many supporters, but to win the hearts and minds of most Americans the movement must go on at least metaphorically to occupy Fifth Avenue as well.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

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The American Catholic Church of today is a product of many dramatic transformations, especially those that took place in the 1960s. Below is an excerpt from The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever where Mark S. Massa recounts some of the practices Archbishop James Francis McIntyre instituted in Los Angeles.

James Francis McIntyre entered St. Joseph’s (Dunwoodie) Seminary in Yonkers, New York, in 1916. Dunwoodie was then considered a showplace of the American seminary system of priestly formation. In interviews with fifty priests who had passed through its doors between 1915 and 1929, Philip Murnion found that almost all felt they had completed “a superior regimen of intellectual formation.” But superiority in seminary formation, as in so much else, lies in the eye of the beholder.  Michael Gannon, studying the Yonkers seminary in those very years, came to a somewhat different conclusion than the alumni. Gannon offered a bleaker picture of the intellectual world encountered by the young McIntyre: “The course work required little or no reading outside the textbooks and some notes; no papers to do; a library open to students only two hours on Sunday and Wednesday mornings; and an institutionalized four hours and forty minutes of study.”

But whatever intellectual shortchanging occurred at St. Joseph’s Seminary did not slow McIntyre’s rise into the upper reaches of the American hierarchy.  Ordained as a priest in 1921 at the age of thirty-five, he was quickly appointed assistant to the chancellor of the archdiocese of New York, and was named chancellor himself in 1934. His preeminence in that position—running the vast network of parishes, schools, hospitals, and orphanages on a day-to-day basis—brought him national visibility. McIntyre managed to refinance dozens of debt-ridden parishes under his care during the Great Depression, making him indispensable to his ecclesiastical mentor, Francis Cardinal Spellman.  But Chancellor McIntyre’s relations with the priests of New York, who actually ran the operation on the parish level, reflected the theological poverty that was his inheritance from the Dunwoodie Seminary. Things in the Church didn’t (or couldn’t) change, so that the duty of his underlings was to learn the correct answer, and simply apply it. Usually this meant McIntyre’s answers.  Thus many of the clergy who reported to McIntyre in those years found him to be authoritarian, even harsh, in dealing with subordinates. He was respected for his business acuity and for his economic abilities, but this prominent alumnus of St. Joseph’s Seminary was also “a pragmatic man not noted for the range of his intellectual interests or sympathies.”

[…]

McIntyre carried his dismissive attitude toward liberals, and indeed toward anyone who sought to change what he took to the changeless truths of Catholicism he learned in seminary, to the other side of the continent, when he was named archbishop of Los Angeles in March 1949. The death of his predecessor, the much-respected John Cantwell, opened up what had been the See of a desert city known more for its battles over water rights that its Catholic identity. But that had changed quickly after the Great Depression.  A million new parishioners had swelled the ranks of the faithful during the 1930’s and 1940’s, so that what had been a largely sleepy diocese now needed a bricks-and-mortar leader, someone who could oversee a massive expansion of parishes, schools, and Catholic social services. McIntyre’s boss, Cardinal Spellman, informed Romae that he had just the man for the job in the person of his chancellor, and (not surprisingly, given Spellman’s powerful influence at the Vatican) McIntyre got the job. He oversaw an impressive institutional expansion: the number of parishes grew from 221 to 318 during his years there, and the number of Catholic schools doubled from 159 to 351.

[…]

By November 1965 the order’s General Council decided that they needed to send one of their own to the Eternal City to report back, first-hand, on what the Universal Church was legislating regarding the reform of women’s religious orders. Mother Caspary was duly selected to make the trip and provide personal commentary on the council’s documents when those decrees were finally promulgated. But Caspary only just arrived in Rome when she received a disturbing phone call from the vicar-general, Sister Elizabeth Ann Flynn who was overseeing the day-to-day affairs of the community in her absence. Flynn informed the nonplussed Caspary that Cardinal McIntyre had decided, without previous warning, that the order was to undergo an “official visitation” from priests of the archdiocese. Theirs, moreover, was to be the only community of women in the archdiocese to be visited.

Caspary immediately intuited that something other than concern for the spiritual well-being of her sisters had motivated such a surprise visitation, especially given its irregularity in Church law. Church tradition called for the regular visitation of religious orders at five-year intervals, usually undertaken by a single priest appointed by the local bishop. McIntyre himself had undertaken a special canonical visitation of the order just six months before Caspary left for Rome. But the vicar-general informed an astonished Caspary that the cardinal had appointed not one, but a team of priests from the diocese to conduct the visitation, and this less than a year after the previous one. Flynn had protested to the chancery that such a visitation would be most inconvenient, given Caspary’s absence in Rome. But McIntyre would not be put off: the visitation would take place, and the cardinal fully expected Mother Caspary to be present for it. Caspary later reported that many in the archdiocesan chancery interpreted the visitation as a “form of persecution of the community.” What she found when she arrived back in Los Angeles confirmed her fears:

Once home, with a sense of helplessness I heard from the sisters of the humiliating interrogations by the visiting priests. The fear the sisters felt soon gave way to honest indignation as each one faced questions designed, it would appear, to undermine their faith in the renewal process… “Do you think it would take too much time to fix your hair if you were to change your habit?” “Do you have any books by non-Catholics in your library?” “Do you want to look like a floozie on Hollywood Boulevard?” “Do you have hootenanny masses?” “Do you read and approve of the diocesan newspaper?”

Mark S. Massa, S.J. is Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, at Fordham University.

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2011 will certainly be remembered as a year of uprisings and protest. Consider the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Complacency has no place in the present, but nor does violence, hopefully. From the 494 B.C. plebeians’ march out of Rome to gain improved status, to Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns in India, to the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 80s and uprisings and protests of 2011, nonviolent struggles have played pivotal roles in world events for centuries. Around each of these events a vocabulary, a lexicon, of power and struggle emerged. And Gene Sharp, the “godfather of nonviolent resistance” has been “one of the great pioneers of nonviolent theory,” according to Joseph Nye. “His writings have affected nonviolent resistance tactics around the world, most recently in Egypt. He distills…wisdom…readily accessible to activists, journalists, and researchers alike.” Below is some of that wisdom, an essay by Sharp from the recently published Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle. Let’s hope the lines of communication stay open and all parties keep it real.     -Purdy, publicity

You can also listen to an interview with Gene Sharp on today’s edition of WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.

Our world is filled with conflicts. They often cause us grave problems. However, conflicts themselves are not the real problem. Conflicts are often positive and a given conflict can have meritorious purposes. Problems arise principally from the means by which conflicts are often waged: through violence.

Many political groups and virtually all governments operate on the unexamined assumption that the means of last resort and greatest effectiveness is violence, especially in a military capacity. Violence is certainly necessary to support certain objectives, among them oppression, dictatorship, and mass killings. If we oppose those objectives we need to think about how otherwise to act so that our actions truly weaken the possibility of oppression, dictatorship, or mass killings, and do not unintentionally contribute to their growth.

The choice to use violence is determined by our understanding of the nature of political power. We need to understand better both the power possessed by our opponents and the power available to those who reject their opponents’ objectives. Opponents in “no-compromise conflicts” are understood to be able to wield massive power. We know that the power they use for hostile purposes must be counteracted by equal or greater power. If it is not, the opponents’ objectives will likely be achieved.

Our opponents’ power is often understood to be strong, solid, and long-lasting. If we choose to act against our opponents with violence, it is because we believe that our capacity to wage violent conflict is needed—that is, our opponents’ power for hostile purposes cannot be successfully defeated without violence. But in choosing to fight with violence we have agreed to fight with our opponents’ best weapons. We think that extreme risks are justified because our opponents’ power is likely to triumph unless it is confronted by greater violence. We do not examine whether our understanding of power is accurate.

POLITICAL POWER DEFINED

In our quest for better understanding of what is possible in extreme conflicts, we must start by asking a fundamental question: What is “political power”?

Drawing on the insights of respected political theorists and analysts, we understand that political power is nothing less than the totality of means, influences, and pressures available to determine and implement policies and governance of a society. This especially refers to the institutions of government, the State, and those who oppose them. Such power may be directly applied or may be held as a reserve capacity, as in negotiations. In such cases power is no less present than it is in open conflict.

Power is intrinsic to politics. It is involved, directly or indirectly, in all political action. It may be measured by the ability to control a situation, to control people and institutions, or to mobilize people and institutions for a certain activity. Political power may be used to achieve a goal, to implement or change policies, to induce others to behave as the wielders of power wish, or to oppose—or support—the established system, policies, and relationships. Power is also used to change, destroy, or replace the previous distribution of power, or to accomplish a combination of these objectives.

We are challenged to look afresh at the nature of political power. We know that it can accomplish horrendous objectives. But is there anything about power that could reveal dictatorships to be less than omnipotent and reveal our opponents’ massive military power as a serious problem, but not a guarantor of the regime’s success in every conflict? Is there something about power that reveals a potential for serving positive goals?

IGNORED EVIDENCE

We have concrete evidence for why we should question the usual understanding of political power. Over twenty years ago, during the remarkable events in Central and Eastern Europe, my neighborhood news vendor came close to such questioning. He commented, “A funny thing is happening. The people without guns are winning!”

The successful self-liberation of Poland in a ten-year struggle, despite earlier decades of Nazi and Soviet occupations and the continued presence of Soviet troops, has not shaken our preconceptions of political reality. Similarly, note what happened in the small Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which also experienced both Nazi and Soviet occupations and had even been annexed into the Soviet Union when it was still intact. That these small nations could regain independence without firing a single shot does not amaze us. Reality is ignored. Similar refutations of our usual view of political reality came from the collapse of other dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

And then there is South Africa, where for many years intelligent, concerned people assumed there would be no liberation from the

There have been other clear refutations of our usual understanding of power in politics. We have ignored or explained them away. Apparently, the assumption of the omnipotence of extreme dictatorships and of massive violence is false. We rarely recognize the importance of occasional evidence that powerful dictatorships and great violence have been defeated through nonviolent means. We have become so indoctrinated to believe in the near omnipotence of extreme dictatorships and massive military might that we cannot see the reality of contradicting events. When supposedly “impossible” political events occur, we find “explanations” to block our seeing reality.

A more accurate understanding of political power may depend on examining afresh the basic nature of such power.

IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF POWER

Political power has sources in the society. According to respected political theorists these are authority (legitimacy), human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions (punishments). Sanctions are usually a key element of political power.

It is highly significant that political power is seen to derive from these six sources. We need to understand these sources and their fragility.

Authority is perceived legitimacy. Authority makes a person or institution accepted voluntarily as superior in some way. Persons or institutions with authority are seen to have the right to command and be obeyed or followed. Authority is clearly a major source of political power.

Human resources refers to the number of persons who obey, cooperate with, and assist the rulers, and their proportion in the population. The extent and forms of their organizations are also relevant.

The skills and knowledge of those persons, and how those capacities relate to the needs of the rulers, also are a significant source of political power.

Intangible factors as sources of power include the habits and attitudes of the population towards obedience and submission. These may be affected by the presence or absence of a common faith, ideology, or sense of mission.

Material resources also help to determine the extent of the power of the rulers. These include property, natural resources, finances, communications, transportation, and the economic system.

Finally, the type and extent of sanctions (punishments) that rulers have available to enforce obedience by the population and to conduct acute conflicts with other States are important sources of political power. Sanctions prominently include military capacity and police forces for governments and, for nongovernmental groups, selective violence and terrorism. Sanctions also include government-directed economic embargoes and nongovernmental noncooperation.

The existence of political power, and its strength, depend on the continuous availability of these sources.

VULNERABLE SOURCES OF POWER

Many people and institutions make these sources of political power available. This does not mean that all subjects of all rulers prefer the stablished order. Consent is at times given because of positive approval. However, consent is also often given because people are unwilling to endure the consequences of a refusal of consent. In essence, this type of consent arises from intimidation. Refusal of consent requires selfconfidence, strong motivation to resist, and knowledge of how to act in order to refuse.

The amount of power at the disposal of rulers depends on the extent to which the sources of power are provided. The provision of those sources depends on the cooperation, assistance, obedience, and compliance
of multiple individuals, populations, and institutions. When that support is given in full measure, the potential power of rulers will be virtually unlimited. The rulers can then do almost whatever they wish. The situation can become akin to tyranny.

Although that support may be provided most of the time, in unusual circumstances support may become restricted or refused. The withholding of cooperation, assistance, and obedience can wield great power. That simple fact explains the unusual events and major political changes in Poland, the Baltics, and elsewhere, as cited earlier.

When the reasons for obedience are weak, rulers may seek to secure reliable obedience and cooperation by applying sanctions or by offering increased rewards for obedience and cooperation. However, sanctions do not guarantee the rulers’ success at achieving their goals. Under certain circumstances, members of the population will become willing to endure the punishments that can follow noncooperation and disobedience, rather than submit passively to rulers whose actions can no longer be tolerated. A change in a population’s will, sense of purpose, or intention may lead to withdrawal of its obedience and cooperation. When important sources of power on which the rulers depend are denied for long enough, the political power of rulers weakens. In extreme situations the power potentially can be dissolved. The precise ways in which the sources of power are thereby restricted or severed varies, as does the extent to which they are removed. Some of the methods of symbolic protest will simply reveal the degree to which the sources of power have already been restricted by earlier noncooperation. Various methods of political and economic noncooperation can directly shrink or sever the supply of important sources of power.

Noncooperation becomes coercive in a conflict when people and institutions withhold or withdraw their obedience and cooperation to a decisive degree, despite penalties. This potential is of the greatest political significance. Whether the end result for resisters of a specific struggle waged by noncooperation is defeat, success, or mixed results, the power capacities of the contending parties will be
changed.

LOSS OF THE SOURCES OF POWER

If the rulers’ power is being used for purposes that we abhor, the question becomes: How can the availability of the sources of power be shrunk or severed? That would appear to be the most basic, and potentially most effective, means to halt the applications of power for purposes we reject.

The loss of authority removes the single most important reason for obedience. The loss of obedience affects not only the general population but at times also the opponents’ bureaucracy, military forces, and police. Any loss of the opponents’ authority among these bodies will weaken the opponents’ power. If the general population no longer feels an obligation to obey, if the noncooperation is powerful, and if the troops and police are no longer reliable in repressing resisters, the rejected rulers may not remain rulers much longer.

Massive civil resistance may make the regime’s ability to retain the necessary human resources extremely difficult or impossible.

Rulers may need the cooperation of some people more than others, because of the specialized skills and knowledge they possess. Therefore, the noncooperation of relatively small numbers of individuals with those capacities may have a disproportionate impact. Refusal of assistance by key subjects may make it difficult for the opponents to develop and carry out policies appropriate to the situation they face. This may lead to the acceptance of policies that prove to be political mistakes or to an inability to implement—or at least a difficulty in implementing—chosen policies.

Intangible factors, such as habits of unquestioning obedience and general acceptance of political beliefs that support reliable obedience, cooperation, and submission, may be weakened or destroyed by a widespread noncooperation movement. This can in turn facilitate additional noncooperation and defiance.

The availability of material resources may be restricted by a noncooperation struggle. Material resources include control of the economic system, communications, financial resources, raw materials, and the like. A large percentage of the many methods of noncooperation have direct economic consequences, and others do so indirectly. Large-scale strikes, economic shutdowns, consumers’ boycotts, and embargoes can have major political impacts.

The powers that be may attempt to control resisters by legal prohibitions and by actions of police and troops. However, the rulers’ ability to apply sanctions can also vary, as we have seen. This variation can at times be consciously influenced, most directly by troops or police themselves. Police and troops may carry out orders for repression inefficiently, or more rarely may ignore them completely. Even more rarely, they may actively assist the resistance. For example, in Prague, during resistance to the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, police cars transported resistance newspapers throughout the city.

APPLICATION OF THIS POWER ANALYSIS

The application of this power analysis in actual conflicts will never be simple or easy. However, compared to the applications of the doctrine that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, these difficulties are to be much preferred.

The weakening or severance of the supply of the sources of power often requires large numbers of people acting together despite repression. Individual protest and disobedience can be heroic and exemplary, but group noncooperation can wield real power. The resisting institution may be a long-established one—such as the Norwegian teachers’ organization in the 1942 struggle against fascist control of schools during the Nazi occupation—or it may be a new institution created during the struggle, such as the workers’ councils of the 1956–1957 Hungarian Revolution.

Just as individuals and independent groups and institutions may refuse to cooperate fully, so too the subsidiary units and organizations within the ruling body may at times also become unreliable. No complex organization or institution, including the State, can carry out orders and policies if the individuals, organizations, and unit bodies that compose the overall ruling institution do not enable it to do so.

Being accustomed to widespread obedience and cooperation, rulers do not always anticipate generalized noncompliance and therefore have difficulties handling strong disobedience and noncooperation. The answer to uncontrolled political power, that is, to oppression, therefore may lie in learning how to carry out and maintain withdrawal of obedience and cooperation, and to sustain that withdrawal despite repression. This will not be easy.

A REQUIREMENT FOR FREEDOM

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, in large part, a reflection of the relative determination of the population to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them. “For the tyrant has the power to inflict only that which we lack the strength to resist,” wrote the Indian sociologist Krishnalal Shridharani.

A technique of action capable of accomplishing those controls over the power of rulers, and of mobilizing the power potential of the population, should be one that will give the population a lasting capacity to control any rulers and to defend the population’s capacity to rule itself. A type of action with the potential to achieve such controls is “people power”—that is, the technique of nonviolent action.

Gene Sharp is the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author of more than a dozen books that have been translated into over 60 languages. Some of his notable works include: The Politics of Nonviolent Action and Social Power and Political Freedom. Sharp’s writings have had a direct effect on nonviolent resistance tactics around the globe, from Iran to Venezuela to Russia.

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October was National Work-Family Month and, while we have a ways to go to making work-family balance a reality for all, I also think that we have a lot to celebrate. Women’s portion of the labor force hit an all-time high in the last decade and it remains at historically high levels today. And women’s employment has helped to bolster families in these hard economic times.

One of the reasons that Sarah Jessica Parker movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, didn’t make it at the box office is that the story is less relevant than it was ten years ago when the book came out. While women (and, increasingly, men) certainly feel the strains of balancing work and family, they are also much more likely to be “doing it” these days — nearly three quarters of mothers with children under 18 work today.

I recently conducted eighty interviews with women living in New York City to investigate how they made decisions about work and family and what I found may surprise you. Nearly half of the women I met worked steadily full-time through their 20s and 30s, prime child-bearing and rearing years (and the majority of these women also found time to have children). Another 16 percent worked part-time after having kids and another quarter wanted to find stable full-time work, but struggled to do so. Only ten percent of my sample left work immediately after having children.

Women who stayed employed full-time found work provided unexpected benefits for their families. Women are now gaining higher education rates than men, so while they were rarely paid as well as their spouses, women often were in jobs that had better social networks. I met teachers, administrators and secretaries who were married to firefighters, mechanics, and prison guards. These women explained that their jobs helped them gain access to opportunities, like internships and information about good colleges, that their husband’s jobs couldn’t give them.

Women who worked steadily also felt more financially secure than their peers and could provide for families when times got tough. One of my respondents explained to me that even the best laid plans could go awry — husbands could be fired or fall ill — and continued work guarded against the unexpected.

While women are working more, there remains considerable diversity in their work-family experiences. Those of us championing Work-Family Month should recognize that this diversity demands a range of policy recommendations. Better family leave and sick day policies, as well as increased workplace flexibility, would benefit the women who stayed employed full-time. An increase in the minimum wage and universal daycare would most benefit the low-income women who wanted to work full-time but struggled to remain employed. Workplace policies that allow job-sharing or temporary part-time employment would accommodate the needs of mothers and father with young children. And re-entry programs and a stronger safety net would benefit those mothers who want to remain at home while their children are young.

My respondent, Virginia, put it best: “We all work and strive, because everyone wants the best for their kids.” If we take her words to heart, we can find the political will to implement these policies that will benefit our nation’s children and their families.

Sarah Damaske is an assistant professor of Labor Studies & Employment Relations and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University and author of For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement, several weeks strong and gaining momentum, reminds us that tea partyers aren’t the only people unhappy with the state of the nation.

The two groups are angry about some of the same things, too, especially the government bailouts for big banks — a similarity that Vice President Biden observed in remarks. They’ve taken different tacks for expressing their anger. The Occupiers camp out in New York’s Financial District, while tea partyers have elected people to fight against government spending and deficits — and against regulations or oversight of businesses, small and big.

It’s not something they’re likely to claim credit for, but members of the tea party have cleared the way for protesters on the other side of the political spectrum. The tea party demonstrated that protest works, even when government doesn’t.

Most people take to protest only when they believe that it is their best hope for getting what they want. It doesn’t have to be extremely promising, just more likely to work than anything else. Nearly three years into President Obama’s term, the Occupiers have little reason to believe that their government is going to respond to their concerns. Washington seems stalemated, and the protesters’ priorities — addressing economic insecurity and political inequality — aren’t high on the agenda. So they’ve gone to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, camped out in front of Los Angeles City Hall and marched in Washington’s Freedom Plaza.

Not very long ago, this is essentially what the tea party was doing. Supporters started to appear at town meetings and rallies in 2009,demanding a more responsive government. Our political institutions, they said, no longer worked the way they were supposed to, and the concerns of regular people were being ignored. The Occupiers agree, although the regular people they represent look a little different.

The tea partyers’ success at the polls, ironically, made it even harder for the government to get anything done, as clearly demonstrated by last summer’s debt-ceiling debacle. The Occupiers watched, and learned.

One lesson was the virtue of audacity. The tea partyers who shouted down members of Congress at town hall meetings during the health-care debate in the summer of 2009 got massive media attention and built a national movement. The Occupiers went after the capital of capitalism, Wall Street, promising a long-term encampment and, more generally, to create a movement that would speak for the “99 percent” of Americans whose interests neither Wall Street nor the government is taking seriously.

Less than two months ago in these pages, I wondered where the movement on behalf of those suffering most in this stagnant economy was. I argued that for a powerful protest movement to emerge, large, established progressive organizations and labor unions had to invest heavily in organizing one. The Occupiers have so far shown otherwise.

The call to occupy Wall Street didn’t come from any of those well-funded and experienced groups, but from Adbusters, an activist magazine in Canada, and was endorsed quickly by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. At first, the turnout in Lower Manhattan was small, far less than the 20,000 that the organizers predicted. Coverage from mainstream media was slight. Yet news spread online through many activist networks, and the protest continued, with dozens of activists sleeping out on rainy nights, holding open a space for broader activism.

And it came. Activist celebrities and celebrity activists visited, and much larger crowds turned out for events including a march across the Brooklyn Bridge that disrupted traffic and led to more than 700 arrests. That made news around the world, and as mass media began to cover the protest and the stories of the people involved, new allies signed on to the campaign. Organized groups and individuals who couldn’t get to New York started other Occupy campaigns around the country, often relabeling events they had already planned.

The Occupation became a place where diverse groups could bring their grievances, as when hundreds of pilots marched, in uniform, against the very slow progress in their contract negotiations — and corporate greed more generally. National progressive groups and trade unions, which were initially wary of the Occupy effort, issued statements of support. This past week, Occupy Wall Street staged a much larger demonstration, its numbers swelled by the support of unions representing nurses, teachers, transit workers and others.

Just what the movement is is controversial. Stressing the need for consensus, the Occupiers haven’t settled on demands, expressing general criticism of inequality and telling personal stories about health-care problems, student loan and mortgage debt, and — over and over — unemployment and underemployment. Individual demonstrators have offered remedies, from tax reform to global revolution, but the Occupy movement has refused to settle on a narrow set of demands; instead, participants are demanding that others come up with answers to their problems. And it’s not hard to see a familiar left-liberal agenda offering solutions.

The Occupiers can’t control what happens next. As larger, more established groups join them, they are staking their own claims about what needs to be done, trying to contribute and ride the surge of discontent that the Occupiers have launched. MoveOn.org endorsed the protest, and Van Jones, whose brief, controversial tenure as an environmental adviser in the Obama administration eventually led to his national campaign to “take back the American dream,” credited the Occupiers with starting what might become a liberal counterpart to the tea party.

Politicians have begun to respond, as well. In Los Angeles, several City Council members visited the Occupation in front of City Hall before the council introduced a resolution of support. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sent 100 ponchos to the Occupiers’ tent city when rain came. Soon, the activists will want more than rain gear.

As with all social movements in America, this one will evolve as it grows. Some issues will come to centerstage while others will get crowded out. How the Occupiers are defined will determine their influence. Calls for progressive taxation or serious investments in education and jobs, for example, are likely to make for a larger coalition than a vague call to end global capitalism.

And what’s happening with the tea party? For the first two years of the Obama administration, it was the political right that was staging the colorful and visible demonstrations that made the news. In relatively short order, it marched into the Republican Party, invigorating electoral campaigns — at the expense of the grass-roots mobilization that first made headlines. National tea party groups, such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, have raised more money than ever before and have been fully engaged in the Republican presidential primaries.

The large demonstrations that put the movement on the political map have tapered off. Tea party activists are struggling with how to reconcile their vision with the actual candidates for office, who will always be imperfect messengers. FreedomWorks, for example, protested outside a presidential forum sponsored by the Tea Party Express because Mitt Romney was participating. What’s best for the movement? A purist who won’t be elected? A well-funded pragmatic candidate who, they fear, will sell them out once in office?

Obama is not being challenged for the Democratic nomination, so Occupy activists don’t face that same dilemma. They can press for what they believe in and watch as politicians try to deliver. They’re already trying. This past week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) proposed financing a jobs program with a surtax on millionaires. This might or might not be good policy; the Occupiers have shown, though, that it’s good politics.

But this movement is just beginning, and this is only the first political response. If the mobilization continues and grows, the offers will only get better.

David S. Meyer is a professor of sociology and political science at the University of California at Irvine and the author of The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America. He blogs at politicsoutdoors.com, where this article originally appeared.

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The Boomer Generation is entering retirement age and their “golden years.”  Hopefully they are, and remain, in great good health.  If, however, the years ahead require a hospital stay they, and their families, may wish to note certain trends researchers James S. Goodwin, Bret Howrey, Dong D. Zhang and Yong-Fang Kuo report on in Risk of Continued Institutionalization after Hospitalization in Older Adults in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A.     -Purdy, Director of Publicity, OUP USA

What percentage of long-term care nursing home admissions is precipitated by a hospitalization? How is this changing over time? How does the risk for long-term care placement vary by patient, disease, and health system characteristics?

The hypothesis is that most institutionalization is triggered by an acute event requiring hospitalization, which then interacts with underlying risk factors to result in long-term nursing home care.  Differences in percentage of patients in a nursing home 6 months post-hospitalization, by age, gender, etc. were tested.

The study, Risk of Continued Institutionalization after Hospitalization in Older Adults posted for free online by The Journals of Gerontology, Series A was

• Limited to hospitalizations in the first 4 months of the year so that nursing home residence 6 months later would occur in that same year.
• Data was generated from 1996 through 2008, the last year for which Medicare data are currently available.
• Excluded patients who were admitted to the hospital from an SNF or long-term nursing home or who had any evidence of residence in those facilities in the 3 months prior to hospital admission (or comparison date for control patients)

This criteria left a pool of 2,831,083 admissions in 1,315,272 patients. Residence in a nursing facility prior to admission and discharge to home or other health care facility was obtained from the MEDPAR files, as well as by searching for any Evaluation and Management codes associated with nursing facilities (22) in the 3 months prior to admission. Patients who were less than 66 years of age at hospitalization were excluded, leaving 2,296,083 admissions in 1,101,747 patients.

In both the hospitalized and control groups, patients with evidence of prior nursing home residence were excluded. The percentage of patients residing in a nursing home 6 months after hospital discharge (or a control date for the non-hospitalized control patients) during 1996–2008 is shown in Table 1 (see link below).  Looking at total new nursing home placements in the hospitalized and non-hospitalized groups, prior hospitalization was associated with 75.11% of all nursing home placements.

Table 1:  Percentage of Patients Living in a Nursing Home 6 Months After Hospitalization Compared With Patients Not Hospitalized in a 5% Medicare Sample, 1996–2008

Table 2:  Logistic Regression Estimating Odds of Nursing Home Residence at 6 Months Following Hospitalization in a 5% Medicare Sample, 1996–2008

Table 2 (see link above) presents a multivariable analysis of the odds of nursing home residence 6 months after hospital discharge from 1996 to 2008. In these and all other analyses, patients with evidence of residence in a nursing home or SNF any time in the 3 months prior to admission were removed. In contrast to the unadjusted results in Table 1, in the multivariable analyses:

• There was a 4% decrease per year in odds of institutionalization after hospitalization.
• The odds of institutionalization after hospitalization increased with age, in women, and in patients without a PCP.
• The odds were more than six-fold higher in patients with a dementia diagnosis and were also increased in patients with other co-morbidities.
• The increased risk of institutionalization associated with delirium seen in the bivariate analyses (Table 1) was almost eliminated in the multivariable analyses.
• In other models (not presented), adding a diagnosis of dementia to the model was the largest factor responsible for delirium no longer being strongly associated with subsequent nursing home residence.
• Risk of institutionalization also varied by diagnostic group, with central nervous system disorders having the highest risk.

This is the first study to investigate the role of hospitalization in subsequent nursing home residence in a national, population-based sample. Overall, 75% of incident nursing home admissions were preceded by an acute care hospitalization in the prior 120 days.

Patients with an identified PCP in the year prior to admission were 25% less likely to be in long-term care after hospitalization, after controlling for other factors (Table 2). We and others have shown that participation of a PCP is important in avoiding adverse outcomes of hospitalization, particularly those precipitated by the transition of medical care at hospital discharge (28–30).

Of patients examined who had a PCP prior to hospitalization and were subsequently admitted to a nursing home, only 24.4% of those patients were cared for by their PCP in the nursing home.

The decrease in risk of institutionalization after hospitalization aligns with the declines in the percentage of older individuals residing in nursing homes. For example, the National Nursing Home Survey reported a decline in age-adjusted rates in those 65 years and older from 46.4 per 1000 in 1995 to 34.8 in 2004 (34). The decline was largest in those 85 years and older (34).

The trajectory leading to long-term care placement has shifted over time. The majority of new admissions to long-term care are now preceded by a hospitalization with discharge to an SNF. Initiatives to reduce use of long-term care might focus on older patients undergoing this transition.  For more details, discussion and specific recommendations for how best to identify individuals at risk for institutionalization please visit this article at The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences.

A visibly deep pleasure is embraced by cell phone talkers. For tens of millions of Americans, there is almost nothing that can compare to the ringing ecstasy of a message. It also seems that nothing can bring down a deeper sense of despair than the palpable suffering of cellular silence.

Perhaps half of the American adult population is literally addicted to cell phones. For them, a cell, now also offering access to an expanding host of related social networks, offers much more than suitable business contact, personal safety, or even a merely prudent ability to “stay in touch.” For these anxious legions, conversing or messaging on a cell phone grants easily accessible personal therapy. It permits both the caller and the called to feel more important, more valuable, less anonymous, and (above all else) less alone. With “rugged individualism” now reduced to a convenient national myth, cellular communication in its many forms promises to provide almost everyone who is “linked in” a direct line to stature, inclusion and happiness.

“We are the hollow men,” announced T.S. Eliot, long before the advent of cell phones. Today, still, most of our “whispers” remain “quiet and meaningless.” Aside from  rare emergencies and  common daily chores, cell phone conversations or messages usually transmit only innocuous prattle, mind-numbing blather, or monosyllabic grunts. This is especially plain on university campuses, where anxiously-connecting students defensively compress their entire universe of personal meanings into the distinctly limited lexicon of “cool,” “awesome,” or the ever-popular “incredible.”

The known universe is probably many billions of light years “across.”  Yet, here, in America, and elsewhere as well, most humans are still desperately afraid to become individuals. “Why bother?” they reason. Why take the risk?

“Look at me, please,” is the unspoken but desperate cry of the public talker, or “texter,” or “Twitterer.” I am here. I am important. I have human connections. I count for something. I am not (heaven forbid) unpopular. I am not alone.”

The cell phone has not caused people to display pathos and freeze in terror. This tiny machine itself is not “the problem.” It is, after all, just a tangible instrument, a tool that identifies and magnifies what would otherwise lie dormant in our adrenalized and breathlessly-frenetic society.

Each ring promises to reveal more than just an incoming message. It also serves to confirm that we have become a very lonely crowd, an excruciatingly “hollow” society driven openly by imitation, conformance, fear, and trembling.

There exists a universal human wish to remain unaware of oneself. But this subversive hope always leads individuals to stray dangerously from their true personhood, and toward the deceptively available  security of the “herd.”  Sometimes, when a terror gang and a sports team effectively become competitors for group loyalty, any herd will do. Obscuring what might otherwise express an incapacity to belong, an inability to become a good “member,” the apprehensive American learns very quickly that authenticity generally goes unrewarded, and that courage is typically punished.

We humans sometimes fear exclusion more than anything, sometimes even more than death. Oddly, perhaps more than anyone knows, this is a vitally important personal calculus, one that may be largely responsible for war, terrorism and genocide.  The human need to belong can become so overwhelming that many will literally kill others – any others – rather than face personal isolation or ostracism.

“I’m trying to get as far away from myself as I can,” sings Bob Dylan (“Things Have Changed”). Unexpectedly, this single insightful verse  may unwittingly explain a great deal about the root causes of violence in world politics.

Although never widely recognized, the inner fear of loneliness expressed by cell phone addiction gives rise to another huge problem. Nothing important, in science or industry or art or music or literature or medicine or philosophy, can ever take place without some loneliness. To be able to exist apart from the mass – to be tolerably separated from what Freud called the “primal horde,” or what Nietzsche termed the “herd,” or Kierkegaard the “crowd” – is actually indispensable to exceptional intellectual development, and determinative creative evolution.

There is more. To achieve any sense of true spirituality in life, we must first be willing to endure at least some aloneness. For better or for worse, all of our principal religious founders consciously sought deeper meanings “inside,” in seclusion, within themselves.

I belong. Therefore I am. Turning Descartes’ fundamental wisdom on its head, and at a time when we desperately need more of what Ralph Waldo Emerson had once promisingly called “high thinking,” this pitiful reasoning is the sad credo expressed by all cell phone addiction. In essence, it presents a not-so-stirring manifesto that social acceptance is immanent to personal survival, and that any necessary individual satisfaction is simply the ironic privilege of private mediocrity.

One can be inconsequential anywhere, but a relentless sadness in America now appears to grow more intense wherever private fears seemingly become incommunicable.

Cell phone addiction is certainly less a diagnosable illness than an imagined therapy. Ultimately, in a society filled with garrulous devotees of a pretended and rehearsed ecstasy,  it offers tantalizing electronic links to presumably new forms of “redemption.”

Here, in these fearful United States, the noisy and uneasy mass has fully infested our solitude. Indeed, upon most of us, the telltale traces of herd life may already have become indelible. Now, embracing an indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse, we Americans ritually seek purpose and excitement within widening cellular-connections. It will, of course, remain an utterly disappointing, vain, and misbegotten search.

"Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back." Source: Apple

In the end,  life is always death’s prisoner.  Until we can come to grips with this disturbing but still-overriding truth, we can never experience our decisively numbered moments with any intense pleasure. Today, despite our manifold efforts at cell calls, Tweets and Twitters, our personal doubts still seem inexhaustible. This is because we continue to look to others to define who we are, and what we might still become.

At its core, even our current economic crisis was spawned by a lethal other-directedness.

Remember Bernie Madoff? The Ponzi scheme mastermind was merely microcosm. The recession and corollary commercial failures were not caused by “greed.”  Rather, it was all spawned by a widespread and totally consuming personal fear of insignificance. Now ignored by both politicians and economists (earlier, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes et. al. had actually recognized the critical importance of psychology), this primal fear is the starkly immobilizing terror that one is “simply not wanted at all.” Today, with the new voice-activated cell phones, users don’t necessarily even have to await a living human being at the other end. Still ever-fearful of being “not wanted at all,” they can now counter  personal angst with carefully cultivated delusions of authentic conversation.

In part, the immense attraction of cell phones and related social networking “apps” derive from our society’s dutifully robotic or machine-like existence. Doubtlessly, we Americans now celebrate a push-button metaphysics.  Here, absolutely every hint of passion must follow a narrowly uniform pathway. Arrogantly, to be sure, we still insist upon believing that we are somehow the controlling creators of our machines, and not their obedient servants.

Strictly speaking, this is correct. But now there is also an implicit reciprocity between creator and creation, an elaborate pantomime between users and used.  Predictably, our techno-constructions are now making a machine out of both Man and Woman. In fact, in an unforgivable inversion of Genesis, we now generally behave as if we have been created in the image of the machine.

Cell phone addiction is merely the most visible symptom of a deeper pathology. The basic “disease” that we suffer is a painfully insipid cultural order. Whether we look to politics, entertainment, or commerce (it is increasingly hard to tell them apart), our banal national life remains perched precariously upon a humiliating network of battered jingles, advertised meanings, and ready-to-wear slogans.

Small wonder, today, that our entertainments are unapologetically crass, and that overindulging on seriously bad food has become our most enthusiastic national pastime. The core reason for our programmed overeating is not that we are any hungrier, but that we have finally lost our appetite for real life.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. He is author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. Read his previous OUPblog posts here.

For further reading on how mobile technology is changing our lives, we recommend Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. View more about this book on the

with Sarah Britto

Neither Sarah nor I have met Troy Anthony Davis. I first met his family in about 2003, which was about 18 years into his death sentence when Sarah and I were working on In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families.  At the time, his sister Martina Correia’s cancer was in remission, his mother, Virginia, was alive, and very few people had heard of Troy Davis.  In my first conversation with Martina, she talked about regularly working late into the night sending out letters and press releases trying to tell Troy’s story to anyone who would listen, to gain support in her fight to save his life. At the time her effort was a lonely one.

Since then there have been many changes. We have watched Martina receive national awards for her fight for women’s health and breast cancer, and we are deeply saddened to hear that her health has become compromised again. On May 4, 2010 not long after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Davis, Virginia took a nap and did not wake up.  Martina is quoted as saying that she “died of a broken heart. I don’t think my mother could have taken another execution date.” Martina’s lonely and tireless work for Troy grew into a worldwide movement. We have seen protests and signs of support for Troy from around the globe, and the effort to save his life brought together such unlikely allies as former House of Representatives, Republican member Bob Barr and Jesse Jackson.  As Martina says, “Troy Davis has impacted the world.”

At present, I am out of the country and what I know is through friends, newspapers and, I must admit, Facebook. Responses about the execution have included shock, anger, and resolve to end the death penalty.  Today we say, “Troy Davis, Rest in Peace,” but what Troy’s death also shows us is that, as a society, our commitment to justice and our sense of humanity is tenuous.  We must “keep the faith” as Troy Davis said to his family and supporters in his final moments.  We are not alone in worrying if some day we as a nation will be saying Rest in Peace to the values of reconciliation, forgiveness, and justice. However, there is reason for hope.  The worldwide action for Troy shows that people will continue to fight for justice.  Ross Byrd’s desire to stop the execution (which occurred on the same night as Troy’s) of Lawrence Brewer, the white supremacist who killed Ross’ father James Byrd by dragging him through the streets of Jasper, Texas behind a pickup truck is but one example. And there is Martina Corriea’s reminder, prior to her brother’s execution, to not give up hope and or lose faith.

In our reflection and our grief for Troy and his family we should also reflect on the pain and anguish suffered by Marc Allen MacPhail, Sr.’s family.  Officer MacPhail died much too soon and left behind his beloved mother, siblings, wife, and children.  His family has suffered in ways unimaginable to most. The divisiveness of the death penalty issue should never make us immune to the suffering of others.  Today, our hearts go out to the MacPhail family, the executioners, the correctional officers, and judicial officers who helped facilitate the execution, the witnesses and jury members on this case, to Martina Corriea and the rest of Troy’s family, and to individuals on both sides of the death penalty debate.

Elizabeth Beck is Associate Professor of Social Work at Georgia State University, Director of the Center for Community Social Work, and Principal Investigator for the Georgia Council for Restorative Justice. Beck is also involved in a number of community-based and forensic initiatives, and has consulted on numerous capital cases and has been asked to serve as an expert in state and federal cases. She edited the volume Social Work and Restorative Justice: Skills for Dialogue, Peacemaking, and Reconciliation with Nancy Kropf and Pamela Leonard.

Beck is author with Sarah Britto and  Arlene Andrews of In The Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families. Read their previous posts on Troy Davis here.

Editor, Online Reference

A little over three weeks ago, Hurricane Irene passed through New York City. Although residents greeted warnings from authorities with wildly varying degrees of seriousness, their response was nearly uniform: hunker down. Even for those types relishing the chance to buck official admonishment, there wasn’t much point. Concerts were canceled, beaches were closed, and untold numbers of brunches went unserved.

I wasn’t, in truth, all that bothered by the state of affairs. Though I was under mandatory evacuation, it quickly became clear that this unprecedented do-nothing weekend would provide me and the friends offering me sanctuary with the cover to spend all day inside watching movies. And so, at four in the afternoon on a Saturday, as weather.com reached category five hysterics, I found myself blissfully revisiting one of my favorite movies growing up: Revenge of the Nerds.

Revenge of the Nerds is not a complicated film. In fact, its title may be one of the pithiest distillations of plot in movie history save for The Battle of Algiers. (If you insist on further explication, a quick read of one of the film’s taglines should provide resolution: “They’ve been laughed at, picked on and put down. But now it’s time for the odd to get even! Their time has come!”) Thus wholly sums up the movie’s story arc, and probably explains why, though only eight or nine years old, I could find it so satisfying. The social costs of being branded a “nerd” were impossible to miss: the chief protagonist, archnerd Lewis Skolnick, was a pocket protectored computer whiz, and his rival, Stan Gable, was a Greek Council president with a deep tan and a peppy girlfriend. Adding even more fuel to the bonfire of indignities, the only type of people willing to associate with Lewis had names like Arnold Poindexter, Harold Wormser, and Booger. Believe it or not, but America once loathed its nerds.

Revenge of the Nerds, 1984

Click here to view the embedded video.

Released in 1984, Revenge of the Nerds was only one of several films to bear witness to the nerd narrative. Though the last two movies in the series, Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation (1992) and Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994) went straight to television, that the franchise spanned four films and ten years indicates that the sad plight of the nerd has been taped to American consciousness like a pair of thick frame glasses. TVtropes.org, perhaps the world’s most assiduous chronicle of American screenwriting clichés, has detected the presence of a remarkable 60 tropes throughout the Nerds lifespan, including “Jerk Jock,” “Annoying Laugh,” and “Nerds are Virgins.” The spirit of Lewis Skolnick has endured, even if his annoying laugh has not. Best Buy’s Geek Squad, the TV show Chuck , and countless parodies have all ridden to success on the supposedly inverse relationship between intelligence and social prowess.

While this relationship may live on in a vacuum pack of pop culture mythology, that is now the only place. Today, in the real world, Harvard-educated mathematicians are some of the nation’s most popular matchmakers, and football players are doubling as Rhodes Scholars. Recently, over the course of a few hours, I kept a twitter search query open for the term nerd; by the time I closed it nearly five hundred tweets had hashtagged the term (#nerd). Judging from their photos and numbers of followers, the hashtaggers are not the sort of people who would have hobnobbed with men named Arnold Poindexter—in the 1980s, at least. Indeed, so muddled are our contemporary notions of nerds there’s actually a blog devoted to Hot Chicks Misidentifying as Nerds.

“Nerds” and “geeks” and “dorks” (I’ll leave it to somebody else to parse the difference) now rule the American cultural sphere. Beer nerds, tech geeks, Kate Plus 8 reviewers—to be a nerd or a geek in 2011 is to proudly, self-consciously assert one’s enthusiasm for the frivolous. To be uninterested in the latest 4G hardware is to be boring or uncool (epithets, once upon a time, synonymous with “nerdy”). If we’re not geeking it up over the Uerige Doppelsticke at last night’s dinner party, then we must be nerding out over the Napa cabbage in this week’s CSA. And darn right! The new “nerd” is not only happy in his esoteric knowledge, but he’s unrepentant. Often attractive, socially adept, and—horror of horrors—popular, latter-day Lewis Skolnicks blend more and more into Stan Gable with each scathing pizza critique.

In the end, of course, Lewis and his crew of lovable misfits pay back Stan and his math-allergic fraternity goons. From where things now lie, it’s more than a little amusing that this victory was once considered outrageous enough to embody yet another trope . Our nerds are no longer just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—they’re Olivia Munn and Justin Timberlake (and Booger, the name of a forthcoming solo exhibition if there ever was one). It won’t be too long, I predict, until would-be Stan Gables shed their red sweaters for a pair of suspenders, now conveniently available at Urban Outfitters. To paraphrase Lewis’s triumphant final speech: Today, we are all nerds. And that is the sweetest revenge of all.

Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex.

Toward the end of the conversation (48:16 in the video link above), Savage poses a hypothetical to Douthat: Imagine a couple in which one partner—for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s the husband—is a foot fetishist. His wife is physically repulsed by his fetish—feet gross her out—but she wants him to be happy. So she sends him to a professional, who can satisfy his fetish without involving her. Savage asks Douthat: What’s so wrong with this?

I’ll get to Douthat’s response in a second, but first, let’s note the fact that this conversation is happening at all. We often think of the conservative, particularly the social conservative, as someone who puts his head in the sand or fingers in his ears, refusing to listen to or participate in the conversation around him. Watching Douthat’s body language in response to Savage’s language language—how visibly uncomfortable he is with all the dirty talk being visited upon him—only confirms that stereotype. (Though after a while, Douthat gets into the Savage swing of things, even saying at one point that he thinks the husband who goes to the professional “is doing something less impressive than than the guy who locks his dick up.” With a mouth like that, perhaps Savage should consider hiring him as a guest columnist?)

But it’s important to remember that Douthat is having this conversation at all, as have conservatives since the Sexual Revolution. In my book, I offer an early example of this conversation from the mid-70s—Beverly and Tim LaHaye’s The Act of Marriage, which Susan Faludi rightly called “the evangelical equivalent of The Joy of Sex”—when the Christian Right was forced into the fray of sexual liberation and sought to harness its tropes to the institution of traditional marriage. The result was some fairly bawdy Godly talk.

The LaHayes claimed that “women are much too passive in lovemaking.” God, the LaHayes told their female readers, “placed [your clitoris] there for your enjoyment.” They also complained that “some husbands are carryovers from the Dark Ages, like the one who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.”

More recently, Robbie George, Princeton’s arch-conservative philosopher of sex and the single gal, told the New York Times Magazine that he’s been forced by the challenge of gay marriage to engage in all sorts of naughty talk about what constitutes good sex in a marriage.  Much to the horror of his ever-so traditional Catholic mother.

His mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, taught her children “some pretty firm ideas about sexual morality,” George told me, and then he begged me not to repeat some of his more recent arguments on the subject. “Mom, I have got to explain!” George said, raising his voice to imitate first himself and then his mother: “ ‘George’s opposition to sodomy! What are you doing talking about sodomy? You shouldn’t even know what that is! Why do people have to know your views about that?’

If my book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it disabuses us of our notion that conservatism is somehow the great Refusenik of modernity. It’s not. From its beginning, conservatism has participated in all the great conversations of modernity—often, to be sure, against its will. But even when it takes an antagonistic stance toward modern developments, conservatism is forced, by the very fact of its participation in the broader culture, to incorporate modern sensibilities and sensitivities (e.g., Beverly and Tim LaHaye instructing husbands in the ways and means of the clitoris).

There’s actually no better example of the right’s modernity than Douthat’s response to Savage’s challenge. After Savage pummels him repeatedly, asking why it’s better for the husband to repress his fetish than for the wife to grant him a reprieve outside the bedroom, Douthat says of the latter (at 51:40 in the above link):

Dan, I think it’s a sadder and more squalid and more depressing form of self-sacrifice than the guy who figures out how to live with not getting his rocks off over his foot fetish.  And there is a value judgment and I’m not going to be able to prove it to you, you’re right. [Pause and then cross talk.] And some of this comes down to a worldview…

One of the great rallying points of the modern American right has been that it stands for firm, objective, demonstrable principles of right and wrong, of good and evil, over the relativism and situational ethics, the general culture of permissive tolerance, that one finds on the left. This has been a cry not only among politicos and pundits but also among serious philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and historians like Gertrude Himmelfarb.

We just got a healthy dose of it from David Brooks. Summarizing a new study that shows that young people don’t have a clear sense of morality, Brooks concludes:

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

As proof, Brooks cites some comments from a few youngsters:

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

But now listen to Douthat, the New York Times‘s resident court philosopher of the right, and tell me if you hear anything that different. Yes, he’s saying he believes it’s better to satisfy, or repress, one’s sexual needs within the confines of a marriage, but he also acknowledges that that is  “a value judgment,” that he can’t persuade someone of a different view of the value of that judgment, and that it reflects his broader worldview, which Savage doesn’t share.

That’s a far far cry from the medieval Thomist, or even today’s neo-Thomist, who believes that reason can provide a yardstick of right and wrong, good and evil, and that it can adjudicate moral disputes between rival traditions. It’s also a far cry from Brooks’ appeal to a shared tradition, authority, and like.

When the right’s back is pushed up against the wall, it’s often forced not only to acknowledge the pluralism of modern life and intractability of moral conflict, but also to ground its claims on its own feelings and preferences, its un-argued and self-confessedly arbitrary and idiosyncratic belief system. (Douthat even admits in a later exchange with Savage, which I discuss below, that he knows he sounds “absurd.”) The right might claim that its beliefs are better, but it has no grounds, as Douthat admits, for assuming that you would agree with that or persuading you of that. (You can find a similar version of that argument in Patrick Devlin‘s classic defense of traditional morality The Enforcement of Morals, which was probably the opening salvo of the modern culture wars.)

There’s a final point I want to extract from this exchange. Toward the end, Douthat gets his mojo back and starts pressing his argument for repression. After Savage makes the case that repression is destabilizing—an interesting claim in itself that challenges our standard left-right distinction; the left is supposed to stand for liberation, while the right is supposed to stand for order, no? Well, no, as it turns out—Douthat defends repression not on the grounds that it is stabilizing but because “the nature of human excellence depends on—this, I, sound absurd—overcoming impulses for the sake of your partner, your children, the people you love.”

And here we come to Ground Zero of conservative commitment. The conservative believes in excellence, as Douthat says, but it is a vision of excellence defined as and dependent on “overcoming.” It’s a vision that abhors the easy path of acceptance, of tolerating human frailty and need, not because that path is wrong but because it is easy.  Or, to put it differently, it’s wrong precisely because it is easy. And though that vision often claims Aristotle as its inspiration, its true sources are Nietzschean.

The conservative believes the excellent person is a kind of mountain climber, a moral athlete who is constantly overcoming or trying to overcome his limits, pushing himself ever higher and higher.  When it comes to sex, he’s not unlike the Foucauldian transgressor, that sexual athlete of novelty and experiment: but where Foucault believes that taboos against sex are all too easily reached (that’s why, if we are to attain the peaks of experience, we have to move beyond those limits), the conservative’s remain out of reach. The value of a rule lies in its difficulty and potential unattainability, the ardor of the struggle it imposes upon us. We might call this ethic the ardor of adversity.*

Liberals and leftists often miss this ardor of adversity, and it’s a critical error because it overlooks just how romantic and impassioned, how fervid and fervent, conservative morality, not just about sex but about a great many matters, actually is.  And that is part of conservatism’s appeal. Savage in fact commits that very error when he says that Douthat’s vision of marriage eliminates the element of “adventure.” Not so. Douthat’s vision is profoundly adventurous—it’s the adventure of ascent, of trying to reach a summit of moral excellence that you probably cannot reach. It’s an adventure filled with risk—the risk of failure, of shame, of the self-loathing and castigation that comes with that failure and shame—and it’s one that the conservative, no matter how terrified he might be of that risk, is loathe to give up. No matter the cost: for if he were to give up on it, all that’d be left for him is the culture of mediocrity, of complacence and compliance, which defines for the conservative the liberal worldview.

That’s what connects the neoconservative, with his vision of warrior excellence, to the libertarian, with his vision of economic excellence, to the moral traditionalist. All three elements of what has been called the conservative three-legged stool—the warrior, the capitalist, the priest—subscribe to the dictum offered by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India:

The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same. The latter have their value and only the saint rejects them, but their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are held in the hand.

Or, as the Supremes put it more simply…

*     *     *     *     *

*I recognize that Douthat is saying here that it is for the sake of the partner and children that we have to overcome our impulses, but the trope of overcoming appears too often in the conservative canon to put too much emphasis on that qualifier. Furthermore, the point is that the husband will demonstrate his excellence by overcoming himself for the sake of something outside himself. That, it seems to me, is the point.

Update: After I posted this, I was reminded by a friend of this excellent article on Dan Savage by Mark Oppenheimer that kicked this whole conversation off. Oppenheimer gives us a masterful exposition of Savage’s extraordinarily adroit mind, which is on sharp display in that exchange with Douthat. Check it out.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com, where this post originally appeared.

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Sharon is a 53-year-old white woman who is unmarried and lives alone in a multi-family home in a northeastern suburb. Sharon recently lost her job due to her multiple mental and physical health disabilities.  Because of her job loss, Sharon is unable to afford her rent. She is now 3 months arrears and her landlord is demanding payment.  He recently stopped by to talk with Sharon.  She was home but did not answer the door.

Sharon struggled with gathering free things and saving too many objects for most of her life.   Her home contains tens of thousands of pieces of clothing, paper, and miscellaneous objects ranging from empty food containers to small appliances and collections of tea pots, dolls, and cuckoo clocks.  Sharon owns every issue of Newsweek and Time magazine dating back to the early 1980’s.  Her hoarding behaviors have led to a life of social isolation; Sharon never has friends to her home because she’s embarrassed by how it looks and worries about what other people will think.

Sharon is certain that she will be evicted if the landlord learns of her hoarding problem and the ways in which the amassed clutter has taken a toll on the house.  Sharon’s refrigerator hasn’t worked in over 2 years and the floorboards seem to be giving way beneath the stacks of magazines and paper.  The ceiling in the dining room leaks during rainstorms and is covered with mold in one corner. The window in the back bedroom is broken and squirrels and other rodents began entering the home some time ago. Sharon didn’t know what to do, so she closed the bedroom door.  It’s been over 9 months since Sharon entered that room.

While Sharon’s is not the most sensational or egregious case of hoarding, it absolutely highlights the more common scenario and the fact that hoarding is a mental health disorder which often results in situations that compromise a person’s physical health and housing stability. In addition, hoarding may create circumstances that put family, friends, animals and the surrounding community at risk of neglect, fire or infestations.  In Sharon’s case, being one of three residents in a multi-family home means that there is risk for Sharon and her immediate neighbors.

Many domains of human service are touched by the problem of hoarding.  In approximately 80 communities throughout the U.S.—large and small, urban and rural—human service professionals are joining networks where there is coordination and support for cases of hoarding with which they’re involved—cases like Sharon’s.  Recognizing that hoarding is not the primary domain of any one discipline (protective services, animal control, mental health or first responders) alone, there is an ever-increasing prevalence of community-level hoarding response mechanisms.

Brave and devoted human service professionals from disciplines such as public health, housing, nursing, occupational therapy and many others are coming together to form hoarding task forces, where they can problem solve, discuss and intervene with hoarding cases.

While attending a hoarding task force meeting on the West Coast, I observed first-hand this unique cross-disciplinary collaboration.  As the meeting was winding down, I noticed that a visiting nurse and an environmental health officer were gathering their things to leave together.  Through the task force, they realized that they were both working with the same person with a hoarding problem in a nearby town.  They decided that if they went together to the client’s home, they could more easily communicate both what needed to be done so the client could come into compliance with housing regulations and what supports could be offered to the person in order to help them achieve the goals.  When I asked the environmental health officer about this decision, her response both surprised and delighted me.  “Well, we know that we need both the big stick and the carrot.  I’m the stick and I can’t do my job effectively without a carrot.  I know because for 20 years I tried and got nowhere with people who hoard.  I need to do something differently and this seems to work.”

These human service workers do this not because hoarding is sexy or because there is fame or fortune promised to them but because they are deeply devoted to finding compassionate, effective and timely solutions to assist those, like Sharon, who struggle mightily with hoarding.

Inspired by the commitment of the human service professionals that volunteer time to lead and participate on community hoarding task forces, The Hoarding Handbook was conceptualized and written to assist diverse disciplines in understanding their role and the role of others in hoarding intervention.  Through the book’s case studies and practical tips and strategies, my co-authors and I sincerely hope that we are promoting movement from individual human service silos to collective community hoarding solutions where clients like Sharon are assisted effectively and empathically.

Christiana Bratiotis, Ph.D., LICSW, is a post-doctoral fellow at the Boston University School of Social Work. She is author, with Cristina Sorrentino Schmalisch and Gail Steketee, of The Hoarding Handbook: A Guide for Human Service Professionals.

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Last month, a few hours after a bomb exploded in downtown Oslo, I got a call from a journalist seeking comment. Why did Al Qaeda attack Norway? Why not a European country with a larger Muslim community, or a significant military presence in Muslim societies? I said I didn’t know.

A second media inquiry soon followed: Given NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the number of disaffected Muslims in Europe, why don’t we see more attacks like the one in Norway? This question was more up my alley. I recently published a book asking why Islamic terrorism has been rarer than many of us feared after 9/11. Before answering, I checked the news. Norwegian officials were reporting that the attacker was not Muslim. I was no longer an authority on the incident.

A third reporter called the next morning: Has the focus on Islamic terrorism distracted us from the threat of non-Islamic extremism?

I felt a creepy sensation that I have experienced often since 9/11. In the fields of Middle East and Islamic studies, bad news is good for business. The more that non-Muslims fear Islam, the more security threats are hyped, the more attention my colleagues and I get. Journalists want insights from “Islam experts” and “Middle East specialists,” regardless of how remote our area of research is from the day’s news. Universities are hiring—there were more than 40 tenure-track jobs last year in Middle East and Islamic studies. Federal research grants are plentiful, especially from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

It all points to an inescapable conclusion: Martin Kramer was right. A decade ago, just after 9/11, he accused scholars of profiting from the Islamist violence that their political correctness prevented them from taking seriously: “How many resources within the university could they command if their phones stopped ringing and their deans did not see and hear them quoted in the national newspapers and on public radio? And how would enrollments hold up if Muslim movements failed to hit the headlines?”

Scholars are not the only ones to benefit from these headlines. Kramer, a former professor who now holds positions at two think tanks, the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, benefits, too. Just like university deans, think-tank administrators and donors allocate resources based in part on presence in the news media. Kramer exemplifies this arrangement. Every time he sounds an alarm about Islamic radicalism, he helps raise public vigilance, and increase financial support for his institutions.

By contrast, I am in the awkward position of undermining the importance of my own field. My research finds that Islamic terrorism has not posed as large a threat as reporters and the public think—certainly not as large a threat as Al Qaeda and its affiliates intended. They routinely complain about the failure of Muslims to join their movement.

Of the 56 million people who die each year around the world, around two million die from HIV/AIDS. Nearly one million die from malaria. Almost three quarters of a million die from violence. According to the National Counterterrorism Center, terrorism peaked in 2007 with 23,000 fatalities, half of them in Iraq—a terrible toll, but not a leading cause of death.

In the United States, 15,000 people are murdered each year. Islamic terrorism, including the Beltway sniper attacks, has accounted for almost three dozen deaths in America since 9/11—a small fraction of the violence that the country experiences every year. The toll would have been higher if the perpetrators had been more competent; for example, if Faisal Shahzad had used higher-quality materials in his Times Square car bomb. Even so, the number of perpetrators has been relatively low. Fewer than 200 Muslim-Americans have engaged in terrorist plots over the past decade—that’s out of a population of approximately two million. This constitutes a serious problem, but not nearly as grave as public concern would suggest.

When scholars in Middle East and Islamic studies point that out, we are accused of being apologists for terrorism. Some of my colleagues have been the focus of smear campaigns. I’ve been fortunate not to experience anything of that sort, though Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called my work “biased” and “slanted.” As it turned out, King’s criticism was great publicity. I issued a press release rebutting each of his points, which wasn’t difficult, because it was clear that he hadn’t actually read my work.

The media attention was both exhilarating and troubling. It reinforced my sense that the field benefits not just from Muslim violence but also from the ignorance and paranoia of non-Muslims. As a result, my colleagues and I spend much of our time in the limelight trying to dispel the anxieties that helped bring us into the limelight.

We are not very good at this task. Our books rarely sell as well as the more scaremongering titles. Our television appearances look stiff next to the media-savvy hotheads from the think tanks. Surveys report that American attitudes have not budged over the past decade—evenly split in their view of Islam and favorable toward Muslims, by a 2-to-1 margin.

A decade after 9/11, many Americans still believe that we are experiencing a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. It’s the default, easy explanation for violent incidents like the terrorist attack in Norway. When this narrative fades, replaced by some other panic, my colleagues and I will lose the public’s eye. We’ll return to academic obscurity. That’s our goal—that, and promoting our field as energetically as we can in the meantime.

Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author, most recently, of The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists.

This article appears with permission from the Chronicle Review.
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E. B. White was correct when he wrote more than sixty years ago that New York is a city of neighborhoods, and he was even more correct that every neighborhood has its own “little main street.”   “No matter where you live,” he says, “you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar.., a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen” and on to the “hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.”  Except for the coal merchant, a little main street like that has been the mainstay of my neighborhood in Greenwich Village and the existential linchpin of my life.

But when I recently returned from a six-month sojourn in Amsterdam, I was shocked by the changes.  Though the storefronts look pretty much the same as before I left, many shops I knew have vanished.  They weren’t just victims of the owner’s retirement or economic recession.

The branch of a local supermarket chain, “family owned since 1932,” had lost so many customers to a nearby Whole Foods Market that it closed.   The longtime photo shop, which had clung to life for the past few years by taking passport pictures and digital images for eBay sellers, is now a Middle Eastern humus restaurant.  While I was away a corner diner morphed into an “artisanal gelato” shop selling small five-dollar cones.  The futon store turned into an informal but upscale “pasta pizza bar.”


• Pasta Pizza Bar

   

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• Univ Pl Pop Burger

   

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• Univ Pl Rugby

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Univ-Pl-Rugby-1.jpg

• D'Agostino's closed

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/DAgostinos-closed.jpg

• Gelato Artigianale

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Gelato-Artigianale.jpg

• Grey Dog cafe

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Grey-Dog-cafe.jpg

You should understand that University Place is a short and fairly placid shopping street.  Though Greenwich Village has been reputed to be the capital of hip culture since before the first hipster was born, you might find a local shopping street like this in Boston, Philadelphia or Dallas.  When I moved there in the 1970s I found the usual bread-and-butter stores that White describes.  I could buy a loaf of rye bread, shop for fresh fish for dinner, and have my prescriptions filled and my pants dry cleaned.  I could buy flowers for my husband’s birthday, browse a well-stocked bookshop or hardware store and tell the butcher which cut of beef I wanted.  I could get a burger at any of three diners or eat Italian or Japanese.

This wasn’t Nobu territory.  None of the stores boasted gourmet quality products.  But in those days there was no Yelp to rate the local bagel store and in most of the small shops you could talk with the owner.  This made the street feel like home, as Jane Jacobs famously pointed out for the street where she lived on the other side of the Village.

For a long time University Place shared the area’s rakish reputation as a breeding ground for artists, writers and political radicals.  The Hotel Albert, built in the 1880s, had hosted Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.  In the 1950s the owner commissioned Salvador Dali to design an open-air bus called a Loconik, named for both the railroads’ means of transportation and the Village’s denizens, beatniks, to give free tours of the neighborhood.  Also in the postwar years the Abstract Expressionist artists and their literary friends drank and argued through the night at the Cedar Tavern, two blocks away.

By the end of the sixties, though, the street’s reputation for louche rebellion had run aground.  Some of the Albert’s last celebrated guests, rock bands, fell apart because of drink and drugs, and the hotel declined into seedy disrepair.  Like a dowager forced to pawn her last string of pearls, the Albert was sold and transformed into condos.

At the same time the blocks around University Place were also being transformed.  The brownstone houses were still as grand as they had been in Henry James’s lifetime, but the loft buildings where small factories, artisans’ workshops and artists’ studios had coexisted peaceably for years began to be converted to living lofts and offices for psychotherapists, architects, and small film companies.

While the creative class was setting up shop, the two nearby private universities, New York University and The New School, began to expand.  There were financial problems and hasty acquisitions but overall their student bodies and tuition revenues grew, which gave them motivation and capital to expand even more.

As a result, “studentification” is reshaping University Place in the universities’ image.  Though this has been a neighborhood where white-haired residents are not afraid to pick their way with their caretakers or walkers, the crowd of pedestrians grows younger and faster every year.  A good portion of the young women are so tall and skinny they look like fashion models.

I don’t mind the mix of ages and body types but the stores are changing to meet a young, affluent and mobile market.  My “little main street” is losing the local character praised by E. B. White and mimicking the food court in an upscale mall.

This is happening not only on my shopping street, but in neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.  The stock market, recession and U.S. debt limit crisis haven’t stopped the upward trend of real estate prices here.  Young white families with children are still moving in, balancing the demographic trend toward lower-income nonwhites and single member households that began in the 1950s and 1960s.  Young families and older folks are the ballooning extremes of Manhattan’s demographic dumbbell.

Yet both groups face a crunch of public services, starting with overcrowded classrooms in public schools and the fiercest ever competition for private school enrollments, and a shutdown of senior citizen centers. Meanwhile the city and state governments have joined the nationwide uprising by public officials to curb the costs of the public labor force by all possible means.  Though it isn’t easy to fire teachers and other employees who are still protected by labor union contracts with local authorities, the retrenchment of the public sector makes life in the city harder.

During this torrid summer I am painfully aware of the city’s always needy infrastructure: the uneven surfaces, not to mention potholes of midtown streets, the hot and airless subway platforms, the aged water and sewage pipes that need to be replaced.  Money, as always, is tight.

I know that Amsterdam, like all European cities, faces similar problems.  Cutbacks to public services and their continued privatization provoked brief labor strikes and a lot of grumbling during my stay there.  Individual homeowners and the city government as well face the high costs of replacing old building and bridge foundations, for the beautiful 17th century canal houses of Amsterdam’s UNESCO World Heritage Site were built in the water.

Despite the unrelenting homogenization of city life though I have found one thing in New York unchanged.  New Yorkers still love this city because it is gritty and lively, and probably the most sensually diverse city in the world.  But their sense of feeling at home in their neighborhood depends on keeping their little main street truly local.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

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By Tom Dening

 
Suddenly care homes are hot news. As I drove to work this week, the two leading national stories were both on this topic. First was the shocking care provided to the residents of Winterbourne View in Bristol. As one scene of abuse was followed by another, the whole effect was increasingly distressing and I could only watch to the end in order to ensure that action was going to follow. ‘Call the police’ was going through my head throughout. The second story was about Southern Cross, the care home provider that expanded rapidly but has now run into trouble as its income can no longer finance the rents for the homes. The debate continues as to whether Southern Cross should be allowed to reduce its rent payments and whether (or when) the government will need to step in to protect the 30 000 residents.

Everyone knows that society is getting older. Many more people live beyond the age of 80 than has ever been the case and there may at the moment be more centenarians alive than have ever previously existed in the whole history of the world. Along with the increasing numbers of very old people, it is estimated that the numbers of people with dementia will rise dramatically, approximately doubling to about 1.5 million in the UK by 2050. And although most older people live most of their lives in their own homes, nonetheless, despite all the community care that is available, a large proportion require 24 hour care eventually, which in practice means moving into a care home. There are about 500 000 people in care homes across the UK. The number of long term care places fell slightly for about 10 years from the mid 1990s – this was the result of changing provision, with fewer long stay hospital beds and local authorities ceasing to provide their own homes, instead commissioning care from independent care home providers. The fall probably reflected investment in community services. However, we are now probably reaching another phase where more care home places will be required.

There are plenty of indications of public concern. For example, the National Dementia Strategy, which has successfully highlighted that dementia is a massive health and social care issue, supported for example by recent evidence that people with dementia fare badly in acute hospitals. The Law Commission has just published its proposals on the future of social care and the Government will need to respond in the next year or so with new plans for affordable services. Age UK has in the last month issued a report describing care for older people as ‘in crisis’. Many of those of us who are not yet of retirement age will be carers for older people or relatives with other needs and, even if we are not, we will still be wondering about what the future holds and who is going to pay for it.

As an old age psychiatrist, I see a lot of older people in care homes. There are about ten of them in my part of the city. Over the years, the homes themselves have changed. They are no longer eccentric conversions of Victorian houses run as family businesses by nurses who used to work at the psychiatric or geriatric hospitals. They are now mainly larger, purpose built and run either by not-for-profit organisations or private companies. They still vary a lot in terms of whether you could imagine living in the place yourself! The ambience varies as does the extent to which the home feels ‘homely’ or ‘institutional’. Some smell more fragrant than others. The managers have a huge influence on the atmosphere and on the staff group working there. Personally, I have long been impressed by just how many people in care homes have dementia. The proportion is about two-thirds, even in homes that do not purport to care for dementia. Therefore, I have argued for over 10 years now, dementia is really the main business of most care homes and dementia is the main reason why most people enter institutional care. I think that this message is staring to get through and be more widely recognised. It has profound implications for the skills required of care staff.

My passion for this subject is shared with my colleague Alisoun Milne, from the University of Kent. We have often discussed these issues from our slightly different viewpoints – me as an NHS psychiatrist, Alisoun as a researcher in social sciences – and it was this complementarity which led us to write our book. We have aimed to provide a text that not only describes common mental health issues in homes and their management but also sets out the legal, policy and regulatory framework, and then describes good practice, research and future trends. We have had great support from our wonderful contributors, including a resident in her 90s. We have discussed many of the issues that underpin the Winterbourne View and Southern Cross stories. Although our book focuses on older people, we have also discussed residential care for people with intellectual disabilities. We include a chapter on safeguarding and abuse; and another on funding of care homes. The final section of the book is firmly looking forward to the future, trying to anticipate the needs of the older population and the skills that will be needed to care for them.

Perhaps because we are optimists, our conclusions are cautiously positive. Of course, there is no shortage of stories of terrible, abusive care. These are often criminal acts and should be dealt with as such. There are the current demographic trends and the present recession and curbs on public spending, which are hitting local authorities very hard right now. Providing care is not an easy business and for care workers it is hard and demanding work. And living in a care home is not like being independent in your own house. Nonetheless, there are welcome developments that we should not lose sight of:

-  the quality of homes and the care they provide is, overall, better than it was
-  the importance of dementia is better recognised and there is far more knowledge about how to care for people with it
-  it isn’t inconceivable that future medical advances may delay the onset or advance of dementia – even slight gains could make a difference
-  most of the need for residential or nursing care is at the end of people’s lives, so the fact they are living longer doesn’t necessarily mean they will need longer periods in care homes
-  there is more training available for staff with more opportunities to gain qualifications such as NVQs
-  the current debate is welcome and a good antidote to the traditional neglect of older people in care homes.

Tom Dening studied Medicine at Newcastle University and trained in Psychiatry in Cambridge and Oxford. Since 1991 he has been Consultant Psychiatrist in Old Age Psychiatry in Cambridge. From 1999 to 2002 he was seconded part-time to the Department of Health as a Senior Professional Adviser, including work on the National Service Framework for Older People. He is now is the Medical Director of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. He is the co-author (with Alisoun Milne) of Mental Health and Care Homes.

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By Michael Biggs and Steven Knauss

The BNP’s membership list was leaked in November 2008 by a disgruntled activist who had been expelled late in 2007; he has since admitted responsibility and been convicted. The BNP never challenged the list’s authenticity, merely stating that it was out of date. The list is apparently a complete record of membership at November–December 2007. Of the 13,009 individuals listed, 30 were missing a current address, 138 had a foreign address, and 41 lived in Northern Ireland. Of the remaining members, 12,536 (97.9 per cent) can be precisely located in Britain using the postcode field of their address (Office of National Statistics, 2004, 2008). Postcodes provide exceptionally fine resolution, down to the street level.

The distribution of members diverges significantly from the distribution of voters.  The correlation of votes with membership, across the 628 constituencies in Britain, is surprisingly modest (r ¼ 0.46). The party contested only one in five seats, but the correlation is scarcely higher in those alone. Voting also gives a misleading impression of the national distribution of the party’s support. Wales and Scotland provide over three times the proportion of members compared with voters.

Members must be matched with a population denominator. Data come from the 2001 Census, conducted in April. The great majority of members on the leaked list had joined since this date, as the BNP had 2,173 members in November 2001 (Copsey, 2008: 137). The BNP recruited only ‘indigenous Caucasian’ people (Copsey, 2008: 238). We count adults who defined their ethnicity as ‘White British’, including ‘White Scottish’. The proportion of white British adults belonging to the BNP was 0.032 per cent across Britain.

For statistical analysis, we use the finest geographical unit defined by the Census, the ‘output area’. This is a very small neighbourhood; the median covers an area of 6 hectares and contains 280 people. There are 218,038 neighbourhoods (as they will be termed) in Britain: the BNP was present in 10,165 (4.7 per cent) of them. Most of those had a single member; 11 was the maximum. The highest proportion was 5.7 per cent.

We begin with independent variables capturing economic insecurity. These are measured ecologically, as the fraction of people in the neighbourhood with a particular characteristic, though they are proxies for individual characteristics predicting support for the BNP. Education is divided into three categories: no qualifications, qualifications below university degree, and degree (denominated by people aged 16–74 years). Class is divided into five categories, from routine and semi-routine to managerial and professional (denominated by occupied population). The unemployment rate is also measured (denominated by the economically active). Alongside these sociological staples, housing is included because the BNP promotes the myth that foreigners are given privileged access to public housing. Housing tenure is divided into three categories: owned or mortgaged, rented from the local authority, and private rental (including other arrangements). Overcrowding, as defined by the Census, is also measured. (In both cases the denominator is households.) We expect, then, that white British adults are more likely to belong to the BNP in neighbourhoods with lower education, lower social class, higher unemployment, more private renting, and greater overcrowding. Control variables are entered to reflect findings that BNP voters are disproportionately male and middle aged (Ford and Goodwin, 2010; Cutts et al., 2011). Additional controls are population density and the proportion of people living in communal establishments like prisons.

For Hypotheses 1–3, we define minority—from the viewpoint of white British—in various ways. The simplest is non-white. Non-whites comprise 8.1 per cent of the population (whites who do not identify as British comprise 3.7 per cent). A second classification differentiates the largest non-white ethnic groups: South Asian (3.6 per cent) and black (2.0 per cent). For convenience, we refer to South Asians, but it should be emphasized that people in this group are identified as ‘Asian or Asian British’, and half are British born. The BNP has come to define their enemy in religious rather than racial terms, especially since 2001, focusing on Muslims. Most Muslims originate from the Indian subcontinent, and voting for the BNP responds to South Asians rather than to blacks (Bowyer, 2008; Ford and Goodwin, 2010). We can also measure religion directly. Muslims comprise 2.8 per cent of the population. Alternatively, we can measure country of birth. 8.5 per cent of the population were born outside the UK.

The above is an excerpt from the paper ‘Explaining Membership in the British National Party: A Multilevel Analysis of Contact and Threat’, which appears in the European Sociological Review, posted with permission from Oxford Journals. Click here to read the full version of the paper for free.

Michael Biggs is Lecturer in Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford. Steven Knauss is a graduate student working with Dr Biggs.

By Joshua Knobe

Imagine that tomorrow’s newspaper comes with a surprising headline: ‘Scientists Discover that Human Behavior is Entirely Determined.’ Reading through the article, you learn more about precisely what this determinism entails. It turns out that everything you do – every behavior, thought and decision – is completely caused by prior events, which are in turn caused by earlier events… and so forth, stretching back in a long chain all the way to the beginning of the universe.

A discovery like this one would naturally bring up a difficult philosophical question. If your actions are completely determined, can you ever be morally responsible for anything you do? This question has been a perennial source of debate in philosophy, with some philosophers saying yes, others saying no, and millennia of discussion that leave us no closer to a resolution.

As a recent New York Times article explains, experimental philosophers have been seeking to locate the source of this conundrum in the nature of the human mind. The key suggestion is that the sense of puzzlement we feel in response to this issue arises from a conflict between two different psychological processes. Our capacity for abstract, theoretical reasoning tells us: ‘Well, if you think about it rationally, no one can be responsible for an act that is completely determined.’ But our capacity for immediate emotional responses gives us just the opposite answer: ‘Wait! No matter how determined people might be, they just have to be responsible for the terrible things they do…’

To put this hypothesis to the test, the philosopher Shaun Nichols and I conducted a simple experiment. All participants were asked to imagine a completely deterministic universe (‘Universe A’). Then different participants were given different questions that encouraged different modes of thought. Some were given a question that encouraged more abstract theoretical reasoning:

In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?

Meanwhile, other participants were given a question that encouraged a more emotional response:

In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.

Is Bill fully morally responsible for killing his wife and children?

The results showed a striking difference between the two conditions. Participants in the abstract reasoning condition overwhelmingly answered that no one could ever be morally responsible for anything in Universe A. But participants in the more emotional condition had a very different reaction. Even though Bill was described as living in Universe A, they said that he was fully morally responsible for what he had done. (Clearly, this involves a kind of contradiction: it can’t be that no one in Universe A is morally responsible for anything but, at the same time, this one man in Universe A actually is morally responsible for killing his family.)

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that experiments like this one can somehow solve the problem of free will all by themselves. Still, it does appear that a close look at the empirical data can afford us a certain kind of insight. The results help us to get at the roots of our sense that there is a puzzle here and, thereby, to open up new avenues of inquiry that might not otherwise have been possible.

Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher affiliated both with the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is editor with Shaun Nichols of Experimental Philosophy. Watch a video introduction featuring the comedian Eugene Mirman here.

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By Ron Avi Astor

Imagine attending nine schools before graduating from high school. Dealing with the emotional strain of having to end and restart friendships every year. Never establishing a lasting relationship with a favorite teacher. Being barred from participating in a favorite sport because you don’t meet residency requirements.

Further imagine the frustration of falling academically behind because completed courses in one state aren’t credited in another. And all this is happening while mom or dad is on his or her fourth tour of military duty overseas.

For the 1.3 million children of military families currently enrolled in public schools, this world is not imaginary. It’s a cost of national security that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets. Yet many struggle through public schools that are unaware of — and unprepared for — the special challenges of the military lifestyle.

In January, President Obama took an important step in addressing the generations-long neglect of military children by issuing a directive, “Strengthening Our Military Families,” that proposed ways to help these children get the best public education possible. Congress, meanwhile, can make an important difference now as America continues its longest war in Afghanistan and remains engaged in Iraq and Libya.

Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 2 million children in military families have attended public schools. Most of these schools are near military bases. But because both campaigns relied heavily on the Reserves and National Guard, many military students also enroll in schools far from a base.

How are they faring academically? A Rand Corp. study released in April shows how a parent’s deployment can affect their children’s work in school. Researchers looked at the achievement test scores of more than 44,000 Army children in North Carolina and Washington state whose parents were deployed 19 months and longer between 2002 and 2008. They found that the students’ reading and math scores were significantly lower than their civilian peers, and that falling achievement was greater the younger the student.

Problem is that teachers, principals and staff in public schools are ill prepared to provide support for military students with falling grades. Only a handful of university schools of education currently offer any program or course on the special challenges of the military lifestyle — frequent mobility, prolonged deployment and sudden death. In addition, educational research literature doesn’t coherently provide guidance for teachers on how to handle the classroom challenges surrounding this lifestyle.

No wonder a 2010 Blue Star Family survey found that one of the main reasons why military families believe that the general public does not appreciate the sacrifices they make was the absence of support for their children in the public schools.

Not all schools are unwelcoming. With the help of the U.S. Navy, some in San Diego and Hawaii, both hosts of major military bases, offer a one-stop shop on the first day of school where entering military students and their parents can survey potential classes, check out available tutors, learn about extracurricular activities and meet new classmates. Other schools celebrate military culture by setting aside days – the Marines’ birthday, for example — to recognize important events in military history.

The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act offers several opportunities to help military students.

For starters, Congress should fund an electronic system that would send the academic records of transferring military students to their new schools. This would minimize any delay in delivering tutoring or counseling support to students who need it and help prevent them from falling behind due to a loss of course credits.

As part of reauthorization, Congress should fully fund the Military Impact Aid program, which provides supplemental money to public schools serving military students. This is especially important at a time when states are cutting public school funding to balance their budgets.

And the best teaching practices found at public schools with large numbers of military students — and in Department of Defense Educational Activity schools – should be extended to all military families. For example, some schools in Hawaii have transition centers where volunteers or paid staffers help arriving military students adapt to their new schools and hear out their parents’ concerns. Such centers should be common to all military-connected schools and should be a condition of receiving additional federal money.

Longer term, helping military children get a good public education may require that we view them as members of a distinct American cultural group. Military families readily agree they make up a subculture with its own history, rituals, values, music and experiences. Department of Defense schools on bases accommodate this culture in their curriculum and support networks — and student achievement is comparable to that of their civilian peers.

Public schools serving a high percentage of military students could similarly create a welcoming and supportive environment by adjusting their curriculum and holiday schedules to respect the military culture. The payoff could be better academic performance.

The men and women of our armed services deserve all the support they need to do their jobs. Making it easier for their children to navigate and achieve in public schools should be part of that support.

Ron Avi Astor, a professor in the schools of social work and education at the University of Southern California, is project leader of Building Capacity in Military Connected Schools, a partnership between USC and a consortium of eight public schools districts that aims to improve the educational experiences of military students. He is author with Rami Benbenishty of School Violence in Context: Culture, Neighborhood, Family, School, and Gender.

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By Mariko Lin Chang

This year’s Equal Pay Day falls on April 12, marking how far into 2011 the average woman must work in order to earn what the average man had by the end of 2010. In the 15 years since Equal Pay Day was established, the gender wage gap has barely budged, moving from 74 percent in 1996 to 77 percent in 2010. This amounts to a three-cent increase in women’s wages for every dollar earned by men. Given that women make up half of the workforce, the gender wage gap does not generate the outrage that it should, as is clear from the failure of the Paycheck Fairness Act last November.

Polls confirm that most people believe women and men doing the same job should receive the same pay. But many are unaware of the extent of the problem, believe the wage gap is a result of women’s choices or think that the gap is a relic of the past. Thus, Equal Pay Day is the perfect time for some myth busting.

Myth #1: The wage gap is a result of women’s choices.

We’re less likely to think the wage gap is a problem if we believe it stems from women’s individual choices—to choose one job or field of study over another, to “opt out” of the workforce to raise children, or to fail to negotiate for higher pay. These arguments, prevalent in the media, overlook important research to the contrary. For one, men are perceived as more accomplished than women even when they have the same resumes. As for women “opting out” to become mothers, author Pamela Stone shows [PDF] that many professional women who leave their jobs to engage in full-time caregiving are not “opting out” but are “pushed out”: They are stigmatized and their attempts to stay on the career track are stymied. Correspondingly, Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll found that mothers are less likely to be hired and are offered lower salaries than fathers and women without children.

Furthermore, while it’s true that men are more likely to be working in higher-paid fields, women make less money than men even when they occupy the same jobs. Researchers at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that in the largest 108 occupations, men outearn women in all but four: (1) life, physical, and social science technicians, (2) bakers, (3) teacher assistants and (4) dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers. With respect to negotiation, researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have demonstrated that although women are less likely to negotiate, they are penalized more heavily than men when they negotiate.

Myth #2: The wage gap is a relic of the past.

Concerns about equal pay may have been mitigated by recent reports that in major cities, single, childless women in their 20s are out-earning their male counterparts. But several important details are often left out of the headlines. First, the pay gap between women and men is smallest when they are young and just entering the workforce, occupying lower-paid positions. As time passes, the wage gap increases as men move up the ladder more quickly and receive bigger raises. Second, young women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, allowing more of them to find higher-paying entry-level jobs. Controlling for education, college-educated men who work full-time earn 33 percent more than college-educated women full-time workers. Third, the good news holds only for young, unmarried, childless women. This might be a harbinger of good news if women were likely to remain single and childless for their lifetimes. However, almost all women marry and/or have children, both of which lower their earnings. Married women earn only 72 percent as much as married men, compared to an overall wage gap of 77 percent. Women with children suffer a wage penalty of 4 percent for the first child and 12 percent for each additional child—a penalty that is not explained by work experience, education, or other factors that affect pay.

Myth #3:  The economic recession favored women.

The recent economic recession was dubbed a “mancession” because the male-dominated construction industry took the first major blow. But now it’s women’s jobs that are disproportionately on the line as cuts to professions such as education and nursing are becoming more frequent. Even as the unemployment rate has dropped again, to 8.8 percent for the general public, it’s still 12.3 percent for women who maintain families.

Women are also less likely to have jobs that come with important fringe benefits such as paid sick days and employer-sponsored retirement benefits. Without such benefits, women’s ability to save money for a rainy day is hindered, leaving them more economically vulnerable when they lose their jobs.

Myth #4: The wage gap affects only women.

It’s time we realized that equal pay is a pressing social issue that affects not only women, but also families. Women’s incomes are critical to families’ economic well-being. The majority of married couples depend on earnings from women to support their households, and close to one-quarter of children live in single-mother families. Experts estimate that there would be at least a 50 percent reduction in poverty if women earned the same incomes as men in their field.

Imagine how much stronger families could be economically if the wage gap were eliminated. Perhaps the safety net would not have to be as wide. Perhaps fewer families would be facing foreclosure. It’s time that the issue of equal pay attract the attention that it deserves.  The economic strength of our families and our nation depend on it.

Mariko Lin Chang, PhD, is a former Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She currently works with universities to diversify their faculty and also works as an independent consultant specializing in data analysis of wealth inequality in the US. Chang is the author of Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It. This article is reposted with permission from Ms. Magazine.

By Michelle Rafferty

As most of you probably know by now, there’s a new stage in life – emerging adulthood, or for the purposes of this post, the unmarried young adult. Marriage is getting pushed off (26 is now the average age for women, 28 for men) which means…more premarital sex than ever!

According to sociologists, emerging adults are all part of a sexual market in which the “cost” of sex for men and women in heterosexual relationships is pretty different. Out of this disparity has risen the theory of “sexual economics,” which I recently read up on in Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. At first glance women appeared to be the clear losers in this market. See this passage:

Sexual economics theory would argue that sex is about acquiring valued “resources” at least as much as it is about seeking pleasure. When most people think of women trading sex for resources, they think of prostitution and money as the terms of exchange. But this theory encourages us to think far more broadly about the resources that the average woman values and attempts to acquire in return for sex – things like love, attention, status, self-esteem, affection, commitment, and feelings of emotional union. Within many emerging adults’ relationships, orgasms are not often traded equally.

Basically, the sexual economics theory says that while women and men are doing the same thing during sex, socially they are doing two different things. Women can and do enjoy sex, but they also have an agenda, while men…just want to have sex. Which to me just seemed, well, sad. Hadn’t women all finally agreed that a man can’t ever make you happy, only you can? But the more I read up on the theory of sexual economics, the less cut-and-dry it became. Women might use sex to get commitment, but they’re also getting things like advanced degrees and independent financial stability  - which also play a role in this new sexual economy. This led me to ask: are men really the clear winners in this game? I scoured the countless studies and interviews in Premartial Sex in America and came up with the following chart to sort all the data out.

Wins in the Emerging Adult Sexual Market by Gender

Tally:
Women – 3 wins
Men – 3 wins
5 washes

By my calculations men and women are breaking even.  But I realize this conclusion is partly due to the fact that I’ve categorized the financial advances of women as part of a tradeoff, rather than a clear win for the other side. Ironically, the more power they get in terms of knowledge and jobs, the less they seem to have in terms of sex. I’ll also concede that “possible antidepressant qualities of semen” is a weak win. So, when it comes to sex amongst heterosexual emerging adults, men do seem to have the advantage.

Now. Given some of the reasons behind this win, I’m still feeling optimistic for womenkind. But that’s just me. Ladies, gentlemen, emerging boys and girls, take what you want from this, and good luck out there.

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By Gregory S. Parks & Matthew W. Hughey

On Tuesday, January 25, 2010, Arab television network Alhurra interviewed Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA).  During the interview, Congressman Moran stated that Republicans made big gains this past November because “a lot of people in this country . . . don’t want to be governed by an African American.”  To some, these statements were not only controversial, but false.  This is because we live in a supposedly post-racial America since the election of our first black President.  For example, the 2008 voting booths had barely cooled before the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that Obama’s victory meant that we could “put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”

There have been sweeping changes in legal equality between blacks and whites since, say, the 1950s.  Moreover, white’s racial attitudes have also shifted during that same period. For example, in 1958 most whites indicated that they would not vote for a well-qualified, black presidential candidate; by 2007, almost ninety-five percent said they would.  Measuring racial progress and determining the degree to which race actually matters in America, however, is not simply—or even best—reflected in people’s expressed racial attitudes as measured through surveys.  Rather, a better measure might be the examination of people’s automatic, if not unconscious, racial attitudes.  This includes how Americans decided whether to vote for, weigh the policies of, and even re-elect the first black President.

For over the past quarter century, psychologists have found that people make automatic associations between black and white racial categories, and negative and positive words, respectively.  Even where individuals appear to harbor explicit, racially egalitarian attitudes, their unconscious racial attitudes may be wholly inconsistent.  Numerous studies find that anywhere from 75-90% of whites, roughly 65% of Asian and Latino/a Americans, and from 35-65% of blacks harbor these automatic, unconscious, pro-white/anti-black biases.  Not only do college first-year students—the typical participants of university-based psychological studies—harbor these biases; studies show that judges, lawyers, physicians, black professionals, and a broad swath of the American public hold these biases as well.  These biases are important because the influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior.

More specifically, the rhetoric against and opposition to candidate Obama can be traced, at least in part, to these unconscious anti-black biases. Undoubtedly, many conservatives probably would not have voted for candidate Obama simply because of his political leanings, party affiliation, and policy positions.  However, this point does not provide an end to the analysis of whether race matters in how Americans are influenced by Obama’s race. With regard to the run-up to the 2008 election, there are some important things to contemplate:

First, liberals and conservatives do not differ much with respect to their unconscious racial biases.  But while there is little difference between conservatives’ explicit and unconscious racial biases (both being relatively high), liberals have relatively high unconscious—but low explicit—anti-black biases.  Comparatively, conservatives’ greater consistency in their unconscious and explicit social evaluations suggests that they may be more inclined than liberals to use their unconscious biases for explicit judgment, including voting.  Second, the rhetoric around whether or not Obama is a “legitimate” American citizen appears to have substantial roots in his race. For example, in one study, participants were shown images of black and white, American Olympic athletes.  Participants found the black athletes to be more recognizable.  Nonetheless, the participants unconsciously associated American symbols with the white, rather than the black, athletes.  In another study, participants unconsciously associated American symbols with Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair (yes, the British Tony Blair) than with Obama.  In a third study, when subliminally primed with American symbols, participants’ attitudes toward Democrats remained unchanged.  Their attitudes toward blacks, generally, and Obama, specifically, became more negative.  Accordingly, whites seem to associate being American—which the POTUS must quintessentially be—with whiteness, something Obama is not.  Concerns about whether Obama is unpatriotic—concerns of the far-Right and the Tea Party movement—seem to have their roots in Obama’s race.  In a recent study, researchers found that participants responded the criticism with a diminished preference for and more negative beliefs about Obama, but only when they were subliminally primed with African–American, as a racial category.  As such there should be no surprise as to the rise of the birther movement and lingering questions as to whether President Obama is actually an American and whether he is committed to American ideals. Third, two studies specifically found that independent of political conservativism and self-reported racial attitudes, unconscious race bias predicted whether or not individuals voted for Obama.

As to Congressman Moran’s contention, there is no research on point that lends itself to support his claim.  Nonetheless, one recent study found that participants with higher levels of implicit pro-white associations took greater issue with a proposed health-care plan when the plan was represented as Obama’s but not when the exact same proposal was represented as Bill Clinton’s plan.  This research suggests that the fall-out over “Obama-care,” at least for some, had less to do with the government taking over health care and more to do with the racial background of the President.  As to reverberations felt by Congress members who supported President Obama’s agenda, theoretical research which imports the legal doctrine of third-party associative discrimination into the political contexts, suggests some Democrats may have indirectly felt backlash from those who held unconscious race biases toward president Obama.

Looking forward, race will likely matter just as much—if not more—during Obama’s re-election campaign than it did during his first run for President.  Moral currency research suggests that when people do good in one instance it may later, in their mind, justify them doing bad.  For example, in one study President Obama’s election lead to both an increased perception among participants that racism is no longer an issue and their decreased support for policies designed to address racial inequality.  In another study, participants who endorsed Obama were more likely to engage in discrimination against blacks and in favor of whites on experimental tasks.  That being said, whites who cast their ’08 vote to get us to a post-racial America may feel as though Obama’s election did just that.  Moreover, they may unconsciously see themselves as having “done their part” in making post-racialism a reality.  Accordingly, they might not be as generous with their vote for Obama the next time around.

Gregory S. Parks, PhD, JD is a lawyer, living and working in Washington, D.C.
Matthew W. Hughey, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University.
They are the editors of The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?.

Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 100th International Women’s Day. Since one of the early demands of the women who founded IWD was for better pay, I’ve invited our wonderful publicity intern Aryana Fargo to choose passages from Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It, in which author Mariko Lin Chang explores the wealth inequality and explains how she thinks it can be resolved. Women have come a long way in the last 100 years, but the truth is that contemporary social structure still puts women at a disadvantage to their male counterparts, especially when it comes to generating wealth. While the income inequality between men and women is common knowledge, many are unaware of the more subtle ways in which women have less access to and control over wealth.

THE GOOD NEWS:
The American gender wage ratio is at an all-time high, 77.8%.

THE BAD NEWS:
Single women ages 18 – 64 have only 36¢ of wealth to the single man’s $1.
Due to the racial wealth gap, women of color are at the bottom.
In 2004, single white women had around $24,000 in wealth.
African-American women at the median had only $2000 extra.
Latina women had $0.

*          *          *

Some may wonder if gender differences in wealth are important. After all, don’t most men and women marry, rendering any gender wealth difference relatively unimportant? Actually, about half of all households are headed by single (never-married, widowed, or divorced) persons, which makes the wealth gap between men and women a reality for a large percentage of people. Also, prominent social circumstances prevent women from closing the wealth gap through marriage. First, the protection that is offered by marriage will disappear for large groups of women, since about half of all marriages end in divorce. Second, men and women are marrying at later ages, leaving women with more years in which they are self-supporting. In fact, women now spend more of their adult years single than married. [...]

Sociologists studying power dynamics within families have shown that if one partner is economically dependent on the other, the more dependent partner will have less power in the marriage. Since women often earn less than men, they are more likely to be the economically dependent spouse. Women’s economic dependency has been identified as a primary mechanism contributing to gender inequality more broadly. For example, economic dependency makes it more difficult for women to leave dysfunctional marriages and abusive relationships.

Even in less extreme situations, a woman’s economic dependency often renders her needs or desires secondary since she is not the one bringing in the money. It also sets the stage for further economic dependency. For example, if a couple with a new baby would like one parent to stay home, even though most egalitarian couples will likely decide that, all else being equal, the one who earns less and has lower potential future earnings should exit the labor force. Women’s economic dependency thus reinforces the traditional division of labor, in which men work in the labor market for money and women take care of the family. Although women’s work at home is important and valuable, it is not financially rewarded. If a woman re-enters the labor market at a later time, her years at home rarely add to her reservoir of job-related skills, and no one in the United States earns pension or Social Security benefits for unpaid caregiving (although people in some other countries do). [...]

In American society, it is customary to think of the wealth of a married couple as belonging to both the husband and the wife equally. Consequently, many might assume that the women’s wealth gap wasn’t an issue for married couples; however, research indicates that the reality is much more complicated than we might have imagined. With marriage, the gender difference in wealth is transformed from having less of one’s own wealth to a latent inequality in which women often have less control over the wealth. The shift is subtle, but it demonstrates that the women’s wealth gap exists even in marriage and is therefore salient for all women.

Easily quantifiable gender differences in wealth for single people do not translate directly to marital relationships. Marriage involves its own set of norms and expectations that shape the ways that gender influences control over wealth in marriage. Married women may experience a wealth gap in terms of control over marital wealth, but this aspect of the gender wealth gap is oftentimes “hidden” within the bounds of marriage. The tendency to view marital wealth as communal has undermined our appreciation of the pervasiveness of the women’s wealth gap…tensions between equality in marriage and traditional gender roles (often strengthened by men’s greater access to the wealth escalator) are reconciled in ways that limit women’s access to and control over wealth.

Mariko Lin Chang is a former Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She currently works with universities to diversify their faculty and also works as an independent consultant specializing in data analysis of wealth inequality in the US. She is author of the book Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It.

By Susan Pick

With all the ambitious international goals and targets that developing countries have committed to, from poverty reduction to universal education and access to health care, we’ve observed a not uncommon response by the governments: too strong a focus on the public image of the new programs, not strong enough a focus on making the programs truly accessible. Here’s an example to illustrate our point: On a daily basis, Mexicans are exposed to immeasurable social development propaganda from government agencies. The propaganda is unavoidable because these messages are disseminated via commercials on public transportation, highway billboards, TV and radio, and posters in the most rural communities. Some of the current hot topics of these campaigns are diabetes and childhood obesity, nonviolence toward women and anti-corruption laws.

“Vivir Mejor” (“Live Better”) is the federal government’s umbrella strategy behind many of these flashy ads, and its aim is to eliminate extreme poverty and promote sustainable human development throughout the country. The rainbow-colored logo is impossible to miss and is stamped on nearly everything the government is involved with. “Vivir Mejor” social development campaigns share with the public the services they are entitled to. A man that never got the chance to study when he was young is now completing his secondary education – and you can do the same, for free! A smiling woman is receiving free prenatal health care –and you can sign up for it as well, it’s simple! In addition, many of the “Vivir Mejor” campaigns encourage the public to exercise their rights. This involves procedures like signing up for government health insurance, filing a report in the case of sexual harassment, and requesting information from the government’s transparency portals.

Making people aware of their rights and the social programs they can benefit from is indispensable…in theory. How can these types of public campaigns possibly be inefficient? Why aren’t poor people in Mexico seeking health care or going back to school or reporting abuse of their basic human rights? The first problem is most obvious: there are incredible structural barriers to accessing social services in Mexico; widespread corruption and absurdly bureaucratic procedures prevent Mexicans from registering for social programs or filing reports when their rights are violated.

The second problem is less obvious, but its solution is essential for Mexico to achieve its development objectives: there is a severe lack of civic engagement in Mexico. The lack of participation in public affairs that this implies results in the absence of social action and citizen monitoring, as well as the underutilization of government programs. The unengaged citizen lacks psychological preparedness for accessing his or her rights and seeking opportunities for personal development. Some examples of psychosocial barriers to participatory citizenship include the internalization of feelings of inferiority, a lack of intrinsic incentive to bring about change, and insufficient communication and team work skills. All of these factors are directly related to what’s been labeled “low intensity citizenship” in Mexico (Ochoa Espejo).

The solution to the problems we mention lies in the development of an individual’s personal agency. In other words, she needs to feel empowered and entitled to make changes in her life. If social programs were designed to facilitate the acquisition of psychosocial tools like assertive communication, autonomous decision-making, and critical thinking in addition to classic welfare services, citizens would become participatory agents of change. Once engaged, the everyday citizen has an incredible power to put social and legal pressure on his or her government and hold it accountable for making the advertised services more efficient and accessible.

The missing ingredient, civic engagement, must be promoted at all levels of government in order for the social programs themselves to change in nature. Of course, it’s easier for the government officials to publicize a luxurious clinic than an empowered adolescent, a newly built school than teachers who know how to use participatory teaching strategies. But the opportunities for social development are in place. “Vivir Mejor”, though it exists within an environment of bureaucratic and psychosocial barriers, represents a starting point for the empowered citizen to contribute to its reform. Now the Mexican government must do its part and abandon its tradition of excessive devotion to loud advertising. Resources should go toward strategies for encouraging participatory citizenship so that individuals have the tools to both seize the social development opportunities and also demand improved services.

Mexico’s development depends on whether its citizens truly become agents of change in the next four years. Under international political pressure to meet the established UN Millennium Development Goals in the next four years, it is essential that Mexican social development programs become inclusive and functional rather than promotional. The Mexican government, and all governments with the historic tradition of “development shortsightedness” have an ideal opportunity to establish a new image for themselves, one that relies on less “in-your-face” campaigns, and more on empowering citizens to engage in the process of their own social development.

Susan Pick is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. She is author and coauthor of over 270 works, has received numerous awards, holds the highest level in the National System of Researchers, and is also the former president of the Interamerican Society of Psychology. She is author with Jenna T. Sirkin of Breaking the Poverty Cycle: The Human Basis for Sustainable Development. Read her previous OUPblog post here.

By Sharon Zukin

This winter I left my inland loft in Greenwich Village for an apartment on a canal in Amsterdam.  From my desk in the living room I look out over the cold gray water and also, with a slight swivel of gaze, over the Amstel River itself.  On this river at the beginning of December I saw Sint Niklaas, dressed less like a jolly Santa Claus and more like a stern Catholic bishop, arrive with a flotilla of small boats for the holiday season.  On New Year’s Eve, my fellow city dwellers set off amateur fireworks that lighted the sky over the river for several hours.

On the other side of the river is the famous Canal Belt, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, where small gabled houses and broad stone mansions date from the seventeenth century, the city’s golden age.  Though I live in a modernized warehouse that was built in the eighteenth century, after the major aristocratic canals were expanded to the east, most of the houses around me were built only a hundred years ago.

Yet like the Canal Belt, this district bears almost too much history for its own good, for the East side of the Amstel River is where the Jews of Amsterdam settled, built synagogues, traded diamonds and old clothes, and were rounded up and deported by the occupying Nazis and Dutch collaborators in the 1940s, to be killed in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.  Bridges in this part of town are named for those Jews; when you cross a canal by bike or on foot and read the name on the bridge you enter the living memory of a traumatic past.

Less tragic but also somber, my office at the University of Amsterdam is in the eighteenth-century Spinhuis or Spinning House on an even older canal.  This red-brick building was a workhouse for young women of lower-class and peasant backgrounds who came to the city, found themselves penniless and turned to illegitimate activities, usually prostitution, to survive.  Every time I walk into through the big blue gates into the courtyard I think of how these women were imprisoned here for being poor.

In large part this city’s memory lives on in the body—not in the smell of sewage thrown into medieval canals but in the continuing rhyme of street names and rhythm of feet on cobblestones and brick sidewalks.  Most streets in the historic center have the same names that they had in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and they certainly are no wider than they were then.  When you cross the Amstel at night, you are enveloped by a magical quiet.  In the darkness of the river and the dimness of streetlamps the lights on old church towers glow golden like the city’s fabled golden age.

The feeling of living in memory contradicts the beautiful, harsh statement of Geert Mak, author of a well-known history of Amsterdam.  “Most of the life of a city dies in a single generation,” Mak writes.  “After that, faces, smells, sounds, and atmospheres can only be reconstructed with the help of fragmentary sketches or the occasional preserved picture.  Our collective memory, whether or not it is receptive to the written word, is as loose as dry sand; apart from the most essential facts, the rest is guesswork.”

Amsterdam’s living memory does not only depend on the preservation of the city’s physical fabric.  True, most impressions of Amsterdam are formed by the expanse of old houses along the major canals and by the quaintly winding streets of the popular, nineteenth-century working class and artisans’ districts, the Jordaan and De Pijp, which were saved from demolition in massive urban renewal schemes by sporadic popular protests from the 1970s to the 1990s, which made them useful for the infrastructure of contemporary cosmopolitan consumption: boutiques, cafés, and gentrified houses.

The ground underneath is swampy and historic preservation laws are strict, so transnational corporate offices are relegated to new, glass and steel districts to the southeast and southwest of the city.  The streets are still shaped to human scale; only one lane of cars can wedge its way between the canals, the narrow pavements and cyclists.

There is a lot here that is just old.  A store owner on Utrechtsestraat tells me he has an old well in his basement.  Though I haven’t seen any Goodwill thrift shops, there seem to be more stores that sell vintage clothing and old objects than elsewhere.  The second-hand street markets are very visible in the center of the city at Waterlooplein and Noordermarkt.  Waterlooplein is in fact part of the old Jewish district, and on the backs of some stalls you can see blown-up, black-and-white photos of scenes of the huge Jewish street market as it was in horse-and-buggy days.

Geert Mak says that in the economic decline of the nineteenth century that followed Amsterdam’s golden age, the city already felt old.  “One enters a museum,” the de Goncourt brothers wrote when they visited from Paris in 1861, “and one meets the house or the canal exactly as one has seen it in a painting by Pieter de Hoogh.”

True enough, as the UNESCO World Heritage site designation suggests.  But when we walk around Amsterdam today, do we perhaps feel the unease of all our older cities, a malaise accentuated by the rising towers of China, a cascade of New York the capital of the twentieth century, London the capital of the eighteenth century and Amsterdam the capital of the seventeenth century?

The race to modernize as well as to sustain the cities of the past is a challenge that we are not yet been able to imagine.  We think of banning tall buildings while more are built every year, of redeveloping the waterfront despite forecasts of rising ocean tides, of patching up the subway system without investing in faster and broader kinds of mobility.

Is Amsterdam, then, not a living memory but a model for how cities can survive?

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.