Author: Ruth Ogles Johnson

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

If We Lose the Oak Court Mall

If not repurposed, the Oak Court Mall will be torn down, causing environmental harm. (Photo: Shara Clark)

When it was announced that the Oak Court Mall was to be auctioned in December, I was saddened but not surprised. Malls in general have been on a slow death march for years, and every shooting at Oak Court has made it more of a ghost town than it already was. No amount of marketing lipstick was ever going to return it to its former beauty-queen status. And if not repurposed, it will be torn down like the Mall of Memphis and others throughout the country. Amazon has destroyed the retail landscape, and the pandemic helped to make office space less necessary, so those two adaptive reuse options are off the table.

Whatever will replace the mall is guaranteed to harm the environment. Massive amounts of pollutants spewing into the air as it’s razed, thousands of truckloads to remove the debris, causing gallons and gallons of diesel to be emitted, and a landfill devoted to what is an unnecessary exercise in demolishing a perfectly good building. And it is almost certain that anything resembling green space will be destroyed in the name of increased density.

What I am proposing would save Oak Court and create prime real estate that developers would rush to buy: Move White Station High School to the mall and tear its campus down for residential use. This solution would allow both entities to reach their highest and best use.

As a bonus, developing the WSHS campus would not run afoul of the usual neighborhood association concerns related to height, density, and traffic. That’s because on its west are two high-rise apartment buildings; on its south, commercial development and a church; and on the north, Pecan Grove Condominiums. I’m certain there isn’t a single developer who would miss the endless rounds of neighborhood meetings that delay their projects.

Pecan Grove residents would have few concerns if a thoughtful configuration were created along their southern perimeter. Examples could include things such as making the main entrance run along the northern edge where the parking lot is now, and locating a dog walking area there. In other words, no tall buildings towering over their homes. On the east where the current football practice field lies might make a good location for green space, a pool, tennis courts, clubhouse, etc., so that the owners in Wellington and the lone house behind the eastern edge of the property could be assured of the same privacy as residents of Pecan Grove.

As for traffic, I can attest that having once picked up my own children from WSHS, there will be no grieving by the residents at the Embassy, who would love not having traffic blocked twice a day for 180 days of the year, not counting baseball and basketball games.

What I am not suggesting is another zero lot development or one of single-family homes. What I am envisioning is a Lexington-style complex that would answer the need for one-story homes that offer a garage. If one wants to downsize and remain in East Memphis, there are few options. Zero lot homes might reduce yard maintenance, but there are still gutters to be cleaned, trim to be painted, and stairs to be climbed. Yes, there are plenty of condominiums available, but almost none with garages. And since many of the developments are two stories, you’re back to the stair question.

Downsizing at my stage in life, however, doesn’t mean living in 1,200 square feet and two bedrooms. So I’m hoping that were it to be developed, more square feet would be part of the plan

Many questions remain about the existing anchors of the mall, but there are plenty of adaptations elsewhere in the country that could be used as models. Perhaps the upper parking deck adjacent to Dillard’s could be resurfaced for a baseball field, while the area closest to the tracks, if there were room, could be turned into a football stadium where games could actually be played on campus, with no residents to be bothered by lights. And unlike the current site, there is ample parking for students and faculty. The existing food court could function as a cafeteria, and since the mall interior is already green, gray, and white, no loss of school identity would occur.

And with the ubiquity of school shootings, proper design decisions could make the existing mall virtually impregnable.

So here’s to preserving the mall. And building my old-age dream home.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is an occasional contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Socialism’s Okay. We Already Have It.

CREDIT: CNN screenshot

It is said that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. May I add that if you believe government is always the problem and never the solution, your philosophy needs a reality check.

CNN screenshot

Bernie Sanders

As the 2020 primary season begins and the poor and working classes threaten to coalesce around a “socialist” candidate, the GOP has predictably trotted out its latest version of the Red Scare. And, bless their hearts, Democratic candidates are too terrified or inept to explain what socialism really is. Not to mention that “democratic” socialism, such as that practiced in much of Europe, including Germany, is a system of the people, by the people, and for the people. Which, of course, is what terrifies the powerful.

Democracy is a political system. It is frequently conflated with capitalism, which is an economic system. One can exist without the other, and this obfuscation is no accident. Somewhere in the rugged individualist propaganda is the use of the word “freedom,” which is a well-worn rhetorical device used by conservatives to make sure the inflation-adjusted rate of CEO pay doesn’t keep pace with that of the federal minimum wage.

So, as you step into the voting booth amid this Chicken Little hysteria about the dangers of “gubmint,” please consider the following set of qualifying questions:

Do you live in an enclave of hearty pioneers who dug their own wells rather than rely on a municipal water supply? Do you travel on taxpayer-funded roads? Did you grow all your own food instead of purchasing comestibles inspected by the FDA and the USDA? Was that food nourished by clean air, soil, and water protected by the EPA? If these stores of food are threatened, do you have your own security personnel and have no need to rely on law enforcement? Were your homes built under construction codes designed to protect against an electrical fire? If such a fire occurs, is it extinguished by other residents armed with buckets instead of a fire department? If you live in a flood zone, do you self-insure? If that flood occurs, do you refuse FEMA assistance? Does your outpost have its own sewer system and power grid, too?

Speaking of utilities, does your band of rugged individualists eschew any entertainment that involves satellites? Does whatever news you receive about the socialist horde come from a traveling town crier who brings news of the outside world without any need of the internet?

Were your children born at home without the assistance of university-trained physicians and without modern medicine and equipment developed by government research institutions?

Will your travel plans eliminate using a publicly built airport to travel to a federally operated national park or to visit a war monument commemorating the military fallen who were paid with defense department checks? And if you wish to read what the Founding Fathers actually had to say about our origins, will you refuse to view these documents being housed in a taxpayer-provided facility known as the National Archives?

Long ago and far away, in the mythical America of Republican wet dreams where there existed no federal income tax and few laws constraining behavior, it might have been possible for those who lived in near isolation on a mountaintop to do as they pleased. Curiously, Republicans and libertarians (aka “closet anarchists”) never seem to consider the negative impact of this theoretical citizen if he dumps his garbage on a slope that rainfall sends flowing to his downhill neighbor. Nor does it occur to them that the power of the government is what protects the rights of the minority, including what remedies exist for the guy downhill.

Government can’t do everything, but neither does it achieve nothing. Government creates the thin veneer of civilization that mitigates “might makes right” and, in doing so, protects all of us who aren’t rich enough to purchase our own elected official or private army.  

At the core of the most ardent anti-government zealot is an opportunist who seeks to gain maximum social benefit with a minimum of financial responsibility. A citizen whose true philosophy and definition of socialism can be summed up as “any government largess from which I do not personally benefit.”  

So does that make all of us socialists? Unless your answer to all of the questions above was “no,” the answer to that one is “yes.”

Ruth Ogles Johnson is an occasional contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Testosterone Matters

Another day, another murder, another march against violence. When will it all end?

When America decides that you cannot have both a peaceful society and cheap goods.

If we cannot reverse the decline of the middle- and working-classes that started more than 30 years ago, then America’s violence will continue. If leaders around the world do not — or will not — find a way to create prosperity for their citizens, their countries will experience more violence, as well.  

Violent and unstable individuals have always been with us, but gang affiliations, ethnic nationalism, and religious extremism all come from the same place: hopelessness. And when hopelessness meets testosterone, too often, there will indeed be blood.

Testosterone has to have somewhere to occupy itself, and if there is no secure job with a decent wage, a young man’s endocrine system will find something else to do with it. Who thinks that poor people find manufacturing meth preferable to building cars, or that strapping on a suicide vest is more appealing than donning a Moby? Who truly believes that men with jobs and families would rather be criminals, given other choices?

With or without an education, where will a young man go to feel necessary when more and more jobs are being eliminated through technology, while the wealthy and their paid-for politicians scoop up what prosperity remains? 

We must acknowledge that when young men have no healthy outlet for their drives, they will seek fraternity and purpose wherever they find it. Often, the siren call of gang affiliation, racial or ethnic nationalism, or violent jihad are the only sounds alienated young men hear as an alternative to feeling worthless. 

That’s why I’m skeptical that our mayor, or any political leader anywhere, can have much impact on poverty and crime in a climate where human beings, particularly young men, are becoming superfluous to society. Improving the lives of young men will also improve the lives of young women.

Regardless of what industry our economic development efforts may bring to Memphis, companies of the future are creating fewer positions for people and more for robots and machines — robots who communicate with and even repair other machines.

If the future means industries will be creating jobs that are done with more technology and less labor, that’s what we’ll have to deal with. But it’s worth considering that the costs of not engaging young males in the labor pool are far greater than whatever money we think we’re saving in pursuit of an efficiency that is making human beings optional. 

It is inarguable that such efficiency is a snake eating its tail. Taken to its logical absurdity, it means that one day even the robots will not have enough to do, because there will be too few people who can afford to buy whatever the machines are making.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes is reputed to have said: “Too many individuals … want the civilization at a discount.” We must stop worshiping at the altar of unbridled capitalism, thinking there is no human cost to be paid. 

I have said for years that without men, colonization of far-off lands would never have occurred, because women are entirely too smart to have gotten into tiny wooden boats and sailed over vast, uncharted waters. That’s where testosterone kicks in — for better or worse.  

But sarcasm aside, I know ascribing differences between the sexes to nature more than nurture is likely to meet with accusations of sexism. But there are immutable chemical differences between men and women. Thankfully, our concepts of gender are becoming more fluid, but that doesn’t mean we can bend the endocrine system to our societal will. 

So we can continue spending billions on prisons, military intervention in global hotspots, and NSA surveillance to prevent terrorist attacks. But wouldn’t creating jobs for alienated and idle young men, both here and abroad, be cheaper in the long run?

In the name of political correctness, we can continue ignoring the fact that men colonize and women civilize. But chemistry says we’re different — and you can’t fool Mother Nature.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Trump and the “H” Word

Donald Trump’s emergence as the presumptive GOP nominee should be anything but surprising, given the party’s racist strategy for the last 50 years.  What is shocking is that GOP leaders did not know this at the beginning of the campaign, which is a measure of how out-of-touch they are with the white working and middle classes. That any Americans voted for Trump is a measure of how desperate they are for change. But voting for Trump because you want to shake things up is like burning your house down because you need to clean out your closets. A President Trump will almost certainly take us down the path to nationalist politics that could destroy our republic. And despite all the polling that indicates his support is waning, a Clinton landslide is far from certain.

In a recent interview on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, Larry Pressler, a former Republican senator from South Dakota, mentioned his academic work as a Rhodes scholar on the German elections of 1927-28 and how our current political climate contains parallels. I am loath to compare politicians to Hitler, but it may be time to get over my squeamishness, because the wave of sentiment that has carried Trump this far is not unlike Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. And Germany’s elites objected to him, too.  

All revolutions spring from dissatisfaction with the status quo. From Louis XVI’s date with the guillotine, to the murder of the Russian czar, to the overthrow of Batista in Cuba, citizens chose to man the barricades and risk death, rather than starving while the oligarchs stuffed their bellies.  

Into this political maelstrom comes a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Castro — and the rest, as they say, is history. How much difference is there between a “strong” leader and a “strongman”?

My mother came of age in the Depression and regaled me with stories of how Germans would roll wheelbarrows of cash into stores in their efforts to stay ahead of an exchange rate that at its height in 1924, was 4.5 trillion German marks to one U.S. dollar. Then came Hitler, swept along by nationalist fervor and economic insecurity. Compare his propaganda regarding Jews with Trump’s on Hispanics and Muslims, and his promise to make Germany into a major power again, and one cannot easily ignore the parallels.  

Insecure, fearful people are, by definition, not rational. They care little for what history has to teach — they only know that once they had a secure place in society, and now they don’t. They’ve heard all the promises before, but their jobs disappeared anyway.

So, when House Speaker Paul Ryan blathers on about the “dignity of work” while opposing an increased minimum wage, people intuitively understand how little the GOP has done for them. When conservative pundit David Brooks allows the phrase “creative destruction” to float so effortlessly across his lips when discussing technology’s elimination of jobs, workers hear that the elites don’t give a damn about the dislocation of flesh-and-blood human beings.  

What’s truly laughable is the GOP’s sudden interest in “conscience” as they try to engineer the ousting of Trump. Ever since LBJ’s civil rights legislation was passed, Republicans have been playing to the racial fears of the people whose jobs they were simultaneously helping CEOs to outsource. Now they’re unhappy with the GOP People’s Choice? 

I guess they’d like to forget that Reagan’s 1980 campaign was announced in Philadelphia, Mississippi — site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.  If that doesn’t explain their strategy, I don’t know what does.

Not that Democrats have much to brag about in protecting the interests of the everyday American. Their own standard bearer is pretty cozy with some of the same elites. If you doubt this, ask if Goldman Sachs would pay Hillary Clinton a quarter of a million dollars to take them to the proverbial woodshed.  

Neither candidate is likely to significantly improve the outlook for the working and middle classes, but our descent into anarchy will be slowed if Clinton is elected. In the meantime, maybe we can avoid societal chaos by convincing former Trump supporters and other constituencies that our best shot at making this country great is by working to elect more “small d” democrats.

America is not so special that we cannot fall under the spell of a Hitler-like demagogue during uncertain times. Those times are here and that demagogue’s name is Trump.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
News News Feature

Just Say “No More” to the War on Drugs

If Mallory Kathleen Maxey had been born in Switzerland, it is likely she would be alive today. But she had the bad luck of being born in the United States.

We don’t tend to think of being born here as a disadvantage, and that is particularly true when one reflects on how many millions of people try to enter this country every year—legally or otherwise. They come here because, as one of the least corrupt nations on earth, America is the envy of the world in terms of individual rights and the rule of law.   

But one of the ways in which we might as well be living in the developing world is our treatment, or, should I say, non-treatment of drug addicts. Here in America, we view those caught in the vise grip of addiction as either criminals or sinners, with prison or indifference being our only two responses. In this era of bipartisan support for prison reform, true change will happen only if we are also willing to discuss remedies for drug addiction, which is a principle driver of incarceration rates.  

If you do not recognize Mallory’s name, it is because you missed the heartbreaking account last spring by Commercial Appeal journalist Ron Maxey of the first anniversary of her death from a heroin overdose — shortly before her 27th birthday. I thought about her as I read a recent report about the increasing number of heroin deaths here in our region.

And why might she still be alive had she been born in Switzerland, or Portugal, or any number of other European countries? Because there, drug addicts are seen as patients deserving of care and compassion rather than condemnation and punishment.  

In Switzerland, if you are a registered heroin addict, you are allowed to get your pharmaceutical-grade heroin free of charge at a clean, safe clinic. And each time you are injected by a medical professional, you are offered treatment. You may decline help, and there are no punishments forthcoming — other than the punishment that is drug addiction itself.

In countries where decriminalization has been tried, overdose deaths and homelessness have declined, as have the property crimes associated with feeding one’s habit. Treatment is up dramatically, and the degradation that comes with doing whatever must be done to acquire the next fix is eliminated.  Too, it doesn’t take a math prodigy to see how much money isn’t being spent on the extensive law enforcement system that is necessary to keep drug use “criminal.”

By the way, even European opponents of decriminalization have had to admit that none of the doomsday scenarios they predicted came true.

Experts in the field of heroin addiction explain that an overdose is more likely when an addict begins using again after a period of abstinence. This is because the amount necessary to achieve the desired results when using regularly is higher, and so it is easy to misjudge the dose. Which is probably why Mallory, like so many other addicts, died just when she seemed to be turning her life around. 

 Winston Churchill said: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” Like so many problems here in the richest country on earth, we reject the idea that America can be taught anything by anyone else in the world, whether it is universal single-payer health care, an affordable college education for our young, or to see drug addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. 

The drug war has cost billions of dollars and done nothing to stem either the supply or the demand, making criminals out of vast numbers of our poor, while consigning wealthier addicts to a life of misery and likely early death. All in the name of some Puritanical idea of morality that says addicts are transgressors who must feel the sting of the lash in order to find redemption.

Maxey ended by saying that if telling his family’s story would help just one person, then there might be good to come of it. So let’s help him find some meaning in the loss of his beloved Mallory and perhaps save other parents from a similar nightmare by talking about the myriad solutions that have been utilized successfully elsewhere and begin implementing them here.  

But first we must abandon our stupid ways of dealing with addiction instead of abandoning the addicts and those who love them.

Shouldn’t a “Christian” nation already be doing this?

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Keep Common Core

It should be obvious to our legislative minority that when Eagle Forum operatives are suddenly their new best friends, something is rotten in the state of Tennessee. I’m talking about Ron Ramsey and his recent successful campaign using Democrats to help defeat Common Core.

I know they’re outnumbered, but Tennessee Democrats are crazy to make common cause with conservatives on this issue, and the fact that they don’t understand this is troublesome.

Are Democrats so desperate for a legislative rapprochement that they’ll trust partisans who claim that commie pinko liberals are trying to destroy America, one capitalist cornerstone at a time? Or are liberals simply too busy “protecting” the public teaching profession to see that they are instead, helping to destroy it? Anyone who pays the slightest attention knows that America’s public schools are not getting the job done and major reform is necessary. Standards are lax in most areas of the country and a significant number of schools are either diploma mills or drop-out factories.

My experience in Memphis City Schools classrooms in the late 1990s taught me that there is virtually no rigor in many public schools that serve the disadvantaged. I taught history to 8th and 12th graders, and there were far too many students who could not pick out key facts in a textbook passage. How did they get that far without being able to read and interpret language at grade level? Colleges of Education and the teaching lobby have much for which they should apologize, as do parents who can’t or won’t see that few things in life worth having are easy or fun.

The conservative critique is that Common Core is “federal intrusion” into state matters and that local control is optimal. But what this is really about is best seen through Ramsey’s quote that our legislature needs to replace Common Core with “Tennessee standards based on Tennessee values.”

That, my fellow liberals, is code for teaching creationism as science and stripping history texts of any facts that cast America in a less than flattering light. All this in the service of turning our public schools into religious ones, brick by ideological brick — schools that will then serve Neocon Kool-Aid with lunch.

After that victory, vouchers for Christian schools (their real goal) may not even be necessary if they can use the concept of “Tennessee values” to convert public schools into shadow seminaries.

On the other hand, liberals complain that Common Core’s emphasis on testing of facts places too great a burden on educators’ energies and prevents them from stimulating creativity. This, too is nonsense. “Teaching to the test” is a tired shibboleth that ignores the fact that effectiveness of curriculum and instruction can only be measured if there is a testing mechanism.

Part of the testing criticism is the baloney about standardized tests not measuring everything a kid knows. Of course, they don’t. What tests do? When you took the driving test in your teens, were you asked absolutely everything you would ever need to know about operating a car? If you believe that testing gets in the way of learning, perhaps you’d like to dispense with those tedious licensing exams for attorneys and CPAs, not to mention medical school residents. I mean, how much creativity can there be in the process of learning human anatomy, although I’m guessing that your doctor knowing the difference between the sternum and the sacrum is pretty important.

Memorization and tests are not “creative,” but they are the foundation for the much-lauded idea of “higher order thinking skills.” Which, in any rational universe, must be preceded by lower order thinking skills, aka facts. The work world, for which we claim to be preparing our children, will not care if they’re having fun at their jobs. Employers will impose their own “tests” on employees’ knowledge, and there will be no one to intervene and save the workers from failure.

Democrats need to recognize that high standards will produce the ability to read, reflect, and write about “boring facts” and that fun should be a by-product of education, not its goal. Such rigor will then help to inoculate public education against conservative claims that the reason we have so much unemployment is that there is a skills gap. Which is just code for wanting to outsource or mechanize what they can and to pay lousy wages for what they can’t.

Wake up, Democrats, and smell the duplicity. Tennessee’s future depends on you.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A School-Schedule Fix

A real estate principle known as “highest and best use” posits that a property’s use should produce the highest value, regardless of its actual current use. Such is not the case with middle and high schools, here and across the nation, where these multi-million dollar buildings pretty much lie fallow between the hours of 3 p.m. and 7 a.m. Taxpayers deserve better.

So do the students. A spate of recent articles reminds us that sleep cycles of older adolescents differ from children and adults, in that their melatonin does not kick in until nearly 11:30 p.m. and they need approximately 9 hours of sleep each night. This means that waking up before 8:30 a.m. is bad for their health. This research has been validated and globally replicated for decades.  

We already know that metabolism in adults is affected by sleep deprivation and that weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease often result. But we want to shoe-horn teens into an adult schedule that we know harms human health for few reasons other than tradition.

Prominent psychologist John Rosemond argues that later start times for teenagers merely coddle them and they need to just turn off their electronic devices and get to bed early. But the endocrine system does not take its orders from even well-meaning and learned adults.  

The solution lies in arranging our school schedules in a way that benefits students and prevents the necessity of building separate middle and high schools. Collierville and Lakeland, take note.

My own Florida school was forced to revamp its schedule when our senior high experienced crowding so great that the school day was divided into two sessions: 7 a.m. to noon for sophomores and noon to 5 p.m. for juniors and seniors. A similar rethinking of start times and grade segmentation ought to be seriously considered in Shelby County.

As any parent of a young child will tell you, keeping them in bed past sunrise on the weekend is no easy task. So, start the youngest children (grades K-5) at 7 a.m. and end their day at 3 p.m. or thereabouts, which would necessitate providing only after-school care instead of both before- and after-care.  

For middle schoolers (grades 6-8), the day would begin at 8:30 a.m. and end five hours later at 1:30 p.m., at which time high schoolers (grades 9-12) would start their day, ending at 6:30 p.m. 

Since sleep science has proven that absenteeism and tardiness decline when older adolescents start later, and grades and scores go up while car accidents go down, this would prove beneficial for everyone. We also know the time for teenagers to engage in risky behaviors is when they are most awake: between the end of school and the time their parents arrive home.

The four basic courses with time for changing classes and a healthy, on-the-go meal would substitute for the speed-dining 26 minutes our kids get now. Both would fit into the new five-hour schedule, while electives and extracurricular choices would occur after school for early students, and before classes for later students. Since buses do not currently function as a private limo service by waiting around for students according to their activities, nothing would change except that we might need fewer buses because they’d be more efficient. 

Here’s an example: After delivering elementary kids, drivers would be picking up middle schoolers. While the middle-schoolers were in school, the buses would pick up high schoolers, who would be disgorged in time for the middle schoolers to board immediately. In the lull between the beginning of high school and its end, elementary kids would be picked up. After depositing them, drivers would go back to the high school to pick up the last session. As a result, there would be far fewer empty buses rattling around town.

Since many after-school jobs are fast food and retail, both of which stay open late, and since high schoolers would be waking later, working until closing would not rob them of sleep.

Fewer dollars tied up in construction and maintenance means more money for full-time art and music teachers and coaches who just coach, while a shorter class day gives teachers more planning time. Administrative functions would require a few more people, but not an entirely separate staff. There are teachers and others who won’t like a new schedule, but school is for kids; their needs come first.

And taxpayers’ interests shouldn’t be sacrificed to erect buildings that stand as monuments to nostalgia and inefficiency for 16 hours a day.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Hail the Man!

Some years ago, my older son took part in a first-grade career day, where students were asked to select a profession and dress up to illustrate their choice. He picked painter, and I don’t mean Monet.

Although his father went to work every day in a suit, he didn’t choose a white-collar job. At the time, his dad and I were renovating houses and apartments and he was around a lot of tradesmen, many of them painters, so, to his 6-year-old eyes, I guess climbing ladders looked like way more fun than carrying a briefcase. I got him white cargo pants, a white T-shirt, a white cap, a brush, and an empty paint can.    

When I was a child, my career dreams were decidedly less physical than house painting: nurse, teacher, artist. But one thing I never wanted to be was a garbage man. You probably didn’t, either.

This is something to keep in mind as we debate the much-opposed Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) plan to fund increasing waste management costs.  

It seems that whenever sanitation employees are mentioned, some outraged citizen will write a letter to the editor whining that it’s just not fair that these workers get to go home after completing their routes, even if they haven’t worked eight hours. One of our city councilmembers recently opined that before adopting PAYG, we need to demand that the workers become more “efficient.” And by that, he meant working a “full” day. Yeah, like salaried, white-collar workers never leave early or take a long lunch.  

Sanitation workers toil in oppressive heat, bitter cold, and driving rain. And let’s not even dwell on what their olfactory senses have to endure. Then there are the crazy motorists who between texting and emulating NASCAR drivers must make a sanitation employee’s days seem like a game of deadly dodge ball. I say if sanitation crews get to go home early after performing a job every bit as essential as a policeman, I’m glad to pay them and let them enjoy the rest of their day.  

If you think sanitation workers are overpaid and underworked, then you should be advising your children to skip all that college debt and snag a cushy job as a garbage collector. And although the number of sanitation workers is shrinking due to automation, there will always be garbage and there’s probably more job security in that than as a middle manager in a corporation.  

But you won’t do that, because hardly any of us wants to work at something that is both physically punishing and thoroughly unpleasant, not to mention accorded so little societal respect. And we sure don’t want our kids to. I suspect most of the workers themselves are salting away money so their own children can aspire to an easier way to make a living.

Sanitation workers aside, PAYG has become necessary because it is cheaper in America to replace than to repair. Because we throw away some 133 billion pounds of food each year at the retail and consumer level. And because there are those who believe that recycling is either too much trouble or some socialist plot to take away our “freedom.”

For those who won’t compost or recycle and who think that those choices do not incur additional expense, consider that although the trucks have to run routes anyway, the city derives some revenue from recycling, but none from garbage. Plus, acreage has to be continually purchased for landfill, which then has to be covered over when it is full. Recycling even reduces the number of trash can liners you have to buy. Refusing to reduce, reuse, and recycle costs us all money.

So, instead of criticizing sanitation workers and trying to squeeze them to make up the shortfall, we should be honoring them. Their vocation allows us to live in a clean world that many Americans a century ago could only dream about. Their work prevents disease and the degradation of our soil, water, and air. They are no less necessary than a physician and way more useful than a politician.

And if you don’t want to pay for extra garbage bags, start filling up those plastic recycling bins or that second rolling can the city has provided. And leave it at the curb for people whose jobs most of us wouldn’t do for twice the money and half the hours.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Kin to Michael Brown?

Although he is a law-abiding grandfather today, 40-odd years ago my younger brother was on a path to incarceration. When he was just 13, our father died, and while Dad’s death made me grow up overnight, my brother became angry at the world.   

For the next decade, his life was a string of altercations with authority figures of every stripe. When a thuggish kid moved into the neighborhood, my brother gravitated to him like a magnet. When stopped by a cop for speeding, my brother had to be a wiseacre. When something went missing, law enforcement rounded up “the usual suspects,” one of whom was always my brother.

Ultimately, he got a probably undeserved break from a wise judge, who sensed that sending him off to prison benefited no one. That kind act probably saved my sibling’s life, because he finally grew out of whatever ailed him without doing a stint in the penitentiary.

While he was doing his best to acquire a lengthy rap sheet, I was laboring feverishly to escape my impoverished circumstances by getting good grades and working full time as a supermarket checker during high school.  

When I was 16, my boss asked me to represent the store in the town beauty pageant, which necessitated having an evening dress. Even new clothes at Sears were a luxury for us, and the duds I wore then were what we would today call “pre-owned.” What I definitely didn’t possess was a long, fancy gown — new or otherwise.  

On our shopping errand, I must have been seized by momentary insanity, because when my mother and I walked past the most elegant and expensive boutique in town, I suggested we go in. Perhaps she figured it couldn’t hurt to indulge me, so she agreed. She might even have wanted me to imagine a better future in the shimmering fabrics of those expensive frocks.

The reception to our presence was, to put it mildly, less than warm. For the few minutes that we dared to look at things far beyond our means, we were followed around as if we might snatch something and run for the door. Remember the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts is told she can’t afford anything in the snooty shop where Richard Gere sends her? It was like that, only I never got to go back with a fistful of shopping bags from pricey boutiques to inform those broads that they had made a “big, big mistake.” 

We got the message and left, but not without feeling like the proverbial fecal deposit in the punch bowl. We ended up borrowing a dress from my cousin. And I won — so maybe I did have the last word.

I hadn’t thought about that day in years, until I read Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s recent essay arguing that the events in Ferguson, MS, are more about poverty than race. After that, I could not help but think about my own childhood and the “profiling” I endured for no reason but my appearance.  

I found myself thinking about my brother’s tangles with police and their suspicion of him, regardless of circumstances. I thanked providence that at least we had a loving mother at home and that those early experiences did not permanently embitter us.  

That’s why it’s not a big stretch for me to understand why Michael Brown might have developed an attitude. It would be a pretty easy thing to do if every time you went somewhere, a store employee or a police officer hassled you. At some point, you might even make the calculation that if you’re going to be treated like a criminal, you might as well act like one.

Smarting off to a cop is just plain stupid — as I often tried to explain to my brother. For one, they have the power to arrest you, and then there’s the fact that they carry a gun and are licensed to use it. If Michael Brown had just gotten back on the sidewalk, he’d probably be alive today. But he’d still be an interloper in a society that has pretty much declared war on the poor — of any hue.

I’m about as white as white gets, and so is my brother, and so were my parents. But I cringe to think that when I was that teenager daring to assume that even poor, white kids were entitled to dignified treatment, how much worse it must have been for black and brown kids.

And 40 years later… it continues to be.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Demography Trap

In light of the shellacking the Democrats took in 2010, you can’t blame them for wanting to revel in the changing demographics that contributed to their 2012 win. But their belief that demography is destiny may cause them to ignore partisan realities.

It is one thing to win the White House due to a growing electorate of nonwhites. It is quite another to govern, especially when the GOP is spending every ounce of energy on the gerrymandering and vote-suppression efforts that have helped to create and sustain the New Solid South. To achieve any significant legislative victories, progressives must win the white working class, and to do that, they must answer the question: Why do so many of them vote against their self-interest?

A hint lies in an email I received not long ago. In it, the new leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, formerly an organizer with the SEIU labor group, explained why she was heading up the new faction. Among her reasons: a desire to battle “patriarchy and white supremacy.” C’mon guys — really?

No decent person thinks gender and racial discrimination is a good thing. But you cannot enlist the natural constituency of the white working class by insulting them, which this woman managed to do in a single phrase.

This tired “victim class” rhetoric only exaggerates the caricature of an egghead liberal from the big city. As a progressive, I find this woman’s language silly and offensive, not to mention lazy and anachronistic. If my female, college-educated, solidly middle-class eyes glaze over when I hear this liberal blather, imagine the reaction of a male laborer with only a high school diploma.

There are, no doubt, white people, some of them men, who would love to discriminate against those who do not share their skin color or gender. But there are far more who fear the future because the people in charge look different than they used to. That doesn’t make them racists or sexists — it makes them human. Just ask an evolutionary biologist.

Long before the development of language and mass communication, human beings appear to have been wired to be suspicious of those from outside their tribe. Evolutionary biologists believe this was a necessary trait that increased a group’s chances of survival. Since evolution tends to lag behind social forces, living in a more enlightened age hasn’t altered our deepest survival instincts.

But political operatives on the left, bless their hearts, appear to be incapable of tailoring their rhetoric to an audience which sees “change” not as something synonymous with hope but with fear. Fear that what little they have will find its way into the pockets of those who do not look like them.

This emotion is what the KKK exploited in the years during Reconstruction, when they made chumps of desperately poor white Southerners by convincing them that desperately poor black Southerners were their enemies.

Today’s oligarchs and their mouthpiece, the GOP, are simply running the same divide-and-conquer play in an effort to keep their stranglehold on power.

If the left has any chance of winning nonminority working-class folks, they’re going to have to craft messages that resonate with white people who didn’t go to Harvard and who think The Feminist Mystique is some kind of drugstore hygiene product.

Appealing to self-interest is not selling out or “flip-flopping”; it’s what skilled politicians everywhere do. It’s what Madison Avenue has made its bones doing and what the political right has honed to a fine edge. 

When a whole lot of beleaguered, white working-class folks are convinced that rich guys who have never worked at a job that dirties their hands or bends their backs are the best men to protect their interests, we cannot continue to think racism is the only cause.

No one is going to make Ivy League liberals throw away their old copies of Ms. or their Malcolm X T-shirts if they learn a little from Mad Men. They just need to hire an agency that can create political ads that appeal to Mike the mechanic.

The alternative is to be strident ideological purists, reciting old shibboleths that do nothing but alienate those who should rightly be on the left.

Only days after their own shellacking, otherwise out-of-touch Republicans got on a cruise ship and started crafting new messages aimed at Latinos. When are Democrats going to hop on the clue bus to Madison Avenue?

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent Flyer contributor.