My friend, like me, married young – at least by today’s standards. We are in our late forties. And our generation seems to be one in which women are making this decision in droves, turning the old stereotype of the male midlife crisis on its head, leaving behind hurt and often clueless husbands who are incredulous that this is happening to them.

It didn’t strike me till recently that eight of the ten divorces I’ve been aware of among my circle of friends and colleagues in the last five years have been initiated by women. In every case, these have been women with children who have been devoted to their families for years. None is wealthy, none is leaving on a caprice after which they reinvent themselves with cosmetic surgery and a convertible. And none is a pop-culture cougar, pursuing her own youth via a younger man in a new version of the classic life upheaval.

For all these women, divorce means that comfortable family homes in which they have lived for decades have to be sold, the material accoutrements of lives pruned and retooled to cram into an apartment with a daunting monthly rent. Many are struggling to bring old resumes into the 21st century digital job-seeker realm. Some have prepped in advance for this day, already lining up a couple of low-paying jobs – front office at their kids’ school, piano accompanist for the school choir – before taking the plunge.

Child custody is negotiated, usually jointly, and kids start shuttling back and forth between mom’s and dad’s new residences. And for the majority of these women who have not left their marriages for someone else, most will be facing singlehood as they approach or enter their fifties. There is the online dating realm to wade into some months later, with a steady stream of not-quite-right E-Harmony candidates to fit in dates with around the kids’ soccer games and prom dates and SAT tutoring sessions.

It’s not a very romantic picture.

Granted, while the situations I am pondering are anecdotal and each is distinct, I’ve done enough casual research since my surprising ‘discovery’ to identify a trend. It’s not just here in my Boulder, Colorado bubble that midlife women are the ones choosing to upend and move on.

Several years ago AARP magazine reported that the number of people ending marriages after 50 is increasing. Two-thirds of those divorces are requested by women. And, the article notes, while women do the walking, men don’t see it coming.

In 2008, Oprah.com ran an essay by Ellen Tien called “Confessions of a Semi-Happy Wife,” in which the author suggests her “Mid-Wife Crisis” is that of Everywoman stuck in a “thumpingly ordinary” marriage who yearns for freedom, novelty and alone time.

In “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in The Atlantic last summer of ending her 20-year marriage, garnering criticism for universalizing what some saw as a selfish, petty move to jettison a good guy (and dad). Yet she seems to speak for many women who look ahead to a second half of life in which they no longer wish to settle for tedium and mediocrity, even if it means venturing into a vast, unknown sea tossed with some frightening gales.

I remember asking my grandmother, as part of a college oral-history project, how it was that she and my grandpa had managed to stay married for 47 years, and her best friend across the street for nearly 50, when each had at least one child who had divorced.

“I don’t suppose we thought we had a choice,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s clearly not the case today.  So what is going on?

I have a theory.

I call it the gender-generation gap. Here’s what happens: you start with a woman who’s a Gen-Xer or at the tail-end of the Boomers, who came of age in a rather heady era in which she imbibed feminist visions of possibility trumpeted by her predecessors, women who had burned bras and pushed ceilings, lobbied for daycare and flextime, hashed out a new vocabulary in which ‘head of household’ and ‘housewife’ were swapped for visions of ‘co-equal’ partnership.

The young men they married in the 1980s, however, weren’t reading advice for career girls or ‘how to have it all’ in Glamour magazine, let alone Gloria Steinem in Ms. The greater numbers of girls who had joined them in college classes was an added bonus, not a social trend to scrutinize. And when they went home on weekends, typically they re-entered a nest in which their needs were cared for by a traditional mom who fed them, kept them in new clothes, did their laundry and probably made their beds.

What we are seeing some 20 or 30 years later, I think, is a glaring gap in gendered expectations of what marriage would – and should – be.  The men who are husbands in their 40s and 50s today — despite being a decade into the 21st century, despite feminism existing in the minds of their children as a history-book relic, despite taken-for-granted rhetoric of equality – are grappling with a world framed by legions of June Cleaver moms – or at least Carol Brady — yet shared with wives who thought they’d be Claire Huxtable.

And when these wives realized, rather quickly after the kids came along, that TV show images were just that, most seemed to resign, buckle down, and get on with the task of getting babies raised and keeping a family in order. All that partnership stuff they expected? Even the best-intentioned husbands seemed to be good at “helping,” for which they are commended by their wives’ more traditional female friends, suggesting they not be taken for granted. These husbands were, after all, a good step more progressive than Ward Cleaver.

But 25 years down the track, it doesn’t seem to be enough. One thing these divorcing women friends of mine have in common is years spent begging their husbands for help in improving things. To listen to them. To divide duties and manage details. To summon empathy. To support their goals and passions. To take them seriously.

In virtually every case I’ve observed, when a woman finally files for divorce she believes she has exhausted all other possibilities for a life of meaning and satisfaction. By this point, her desire to save her marriage is over. She’s already moved on, when her husband is at long last just waking up, slammed out of inertia by this utterly unexpected step – even when she’s raised or threatened it before.

“I want a divorce” falls on male ears as inscrutably as if she had been speaking Estonian or Swahili.

Tien, who like Loh has reaped plenty of criticism for seeming to advocate leaving perfectly good, well-intended husbands, has this to say:

As one girlfriend remarked, it’s the age of rage — a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it’s the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room…

In the beginning, we felt obliged to join the race to have it all; being married was an integral part of the contest and heaven forbid we should be disqualified. Flash-forward to 10 years later, when we discover that we can get it all but whose harebrained scheme was this anyway? We can get jobs, get pregnant, get it done. We can try — with varying levels of success — to get sleep, get fit, get control, and get those important Me-moments where one keeps a journal with thought-provoking lists that go ‘I’m a woman first, a mother second, a laundress third.’ We get upset, we get over it. What we don’t always get is: Why.

Conventional wisdom decrees that marriage takes work, but it doesn’t take work, it is work. It’s a job — intermittently fulfilling and annoying, with not enough vacation days. Divorce is a job too (with even fewer vacation days). It’s a matter of weighing your options.

For more and more women, it seems the option of chucking the drudgery of ‘tried and true’ for untried potential is a risk worth taking. Life isn’t over for women at 40 or 50 anymore; as Tien remarks, “We are still visually tolerable if not downright irresistible when we’re 30 or 35 or 40. If you believe the fashion magazines — which I devoutly do — even 50- and 60-year-olds are…pretty hot tickets.”

What worries me, though, is what sort of social legacy will be left by this growing heap of crumbled marriages. There is the inevitable splitting up of holidays at multiple parents’ and stepparents’ and then grandparents’ homes (for some kids – as was my case – parents don’t stop at just one divorce). There is the financial fallout. For every divorce, you’ve got families trying to get by on half (or less) of the resources that were once there, and almost twice the energy and environmental impact generated by dividing those material essentials into two households.

One of two things has to happen, I think, for marriage to revitalize its future and become appealing to women again. Either a current generation of young people needs to get in synch with their respective expectations for gender roles in a marriage, or marriage needs to be rethought and redefined, as Loh provocatively contends, to permit more autonomy and less demand for fidelity, if we’re talking how to sustain a 60- or even 70-year commitment.

As a mother of a 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, I am comfortably situated in one of those ‘stable, utilitarian’ marriages.  I worry about what lies ahead for my kids as they consider such a commitment one day. While I’d like to think my son will be a different sort of husband – a genuine partner, a true equal in all things domestic and relational – he is nonetheless being influenced by parents who fit the generalities I’ve outlined above: an aspiring, frustrated mom and a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned dad who nonetheless strives against the apron strings of his own traditional upbringing.

It distresses me that young men today still have visions of that gratifying lifestyle in which they go off to a great job and come home to a doting wife who makes their domestic realm an oasis. Researcher Barbara Kerr, who studies gender differences in gifted students, observed in a 2000 speech called Gender and Genius that most young people, even those with superior intelligence and higher goals, succumb to society’s conventional image of what constitutes achievement.

Kerr cites responses to a study she did on gifted students’ “perfect future day” fantasies, a favorite vision of what they might be doing in 10 years. I will quote her at length because the results are telling, and disconcerting:

A typical college male’s fantasy goes something like this: I wake up and get in my car — a really nice rebuilt ‘67 Mustang– and then I go to work, I think I’m some kind of a manager of a computer firm, and then I go home and when I get there, my wife is there at the door (she has a really nice figure) she has a drink for me, and she’s made a great meal. We watch TV or maybe play with the kids.’ Here is the typical college female’s fantasy: ‘I wake up and my husband and I get in our twin Jettas and I go to the law firm where I work, then after work, I go home and he’s pulling up in the driveway at the same time. We go in and have a glass of wine and we make an omelet together and eat by candlelight. Then the nanny brings the children in and we play with them till bedtime.’ What’s wrong with this picture?

Women dream of dual career bliss, while men still seem to nourish the hope that they might find a woman who wants to stay home and take care of them and the children. Despite extraordinary changes in the career expectations of women, many college men have yet to acknowledge the changes in gender roles that women’s expectations imply.

Kerr adds that “it is likely that even more men who publicly endorse equity in relationships secretly wish for a more traditional lifestyle. On the other hand, college women have as their goals romantic yet egalitarian relationships for which they have no roadmaps.” Just as their mothers did, who are now driving into a new wild blue yonder with no GPS.

How do we, as a culture, create these new roadmaps?  How do I teach my teenage son what it looks like to be a partner with women — and more importantly, to want to be?

Loh suggests we need to contemplate entirely new avenues, some that may verge into French (and other) territory in which the ideal of lifelong fidelity is put out to pasture to accommodate the vicissitudes of long relationships and the realities of day-to-day life that simply cannot sustain the romantic — and utterly unrealistic — demands we place on it.

One thing seems certain amidst all this uncertainty: now that women have a choice, marriage is going to have start adapting if it is going to survive.

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

While our family sponsors George and Monica on an ongoing monthly basis through Compassion International, organizations that care for the world’s poorest children also benefit from single donations that aid children without sponsors or which support community projects where they live. It can be a delight to give your own holiday gift recipients the chance to choose a gift in their name for a child in desperate need.

World Vision’s online gift catalog is a great portal. This relief, development and advocacy organization works with the world’s most vulnerable children, families and communities in more than 100 countries, to overcome poverty and injustice.

Consider a few statistics:

1 in 7 children in the world do not get enough food each day
1 in 6 — that’s a billion people — do not have access to clean water
1 in 6 children in the U.S. lives beneath the poverty line
1 in 3 people in the world is under 18
26,000 children under the age of 5 die each day, from mostly preventable causes
More than 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents due to HIV

It’s especially meaningful to enlist kids in the process of choosing a gift: tell them their present this year is X-number of dollars to spend on helping other children. Then, go to World Vision’s website. Allow them to select a country or a focus for their contribution that interests them. Like Heifer International, World Vision offers a chance to see exactly how far a gift will go to make a difference in people’s lives.

There are many gift options:

* $30 buys a school supply package for a child, including a uniform, backpack and materials.
* $35 buys farming supplies like seeds, fertilizer, hoes and harvest equipment, and irrigation kits, along with training in improved agricultural techniques.
* $50 buys 10 fruit trees, providing an ongoing source of healthy nourishment, shade, seedlings for other families, and in just two to three years, the trees will begin to yield enough so that a family may begin selling fruit to support its income.
* For just $18, you can purchase mosquito bed nets for a family to protect them against malaria. And in the process, use the opportunity to learn about how access to health care for easily treated diseases is an important social justice issue.

Or, a gift to World Vision’s general fund allows it to be applied where the need is currently greatest. In addition to disaster relief and refugee aid, World Vision’s community work includes water and sanitation, health and hygiene, literacy and education, food and agriculture, and economic development.

If your heart is moved in the process of gifting others with these ‘multiplier’ gifts, consider sponsoring a child yourself. Our family has sponsored George for eight years and Monica for six. They are about the same ages that my kids are, and they have taken great interest in each others’ lives, from the boys’ shared interest in soccer, to the drawings that the girls regularly exchange. We pay about a dollar a day to support each child, and in return, we have been given relationships that have changed and blessed our lives – and which have heightened my children’s awareness of injustice and its causes.

When you sponsor a child, global poverty statistics take on a human face, and lives are changed in ways that you can vividly see and appreciate – including your own.

Compassion International just marked the sponsorship of its millionth child, and World Vision is likewise serving millions around the world. But there are still hundreds of thousands of children waiting for sponsors at Compassion and World Vision. Until they are matched, their needs are addressed through World Vision’s various programs, and Compassion’s Unsponsored Children fund. While both are Christian humanitarian organizations, they serve all children regardless of race, religion or ethnic group.

Both groups have been recognized for their financial integrity. Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator, has consistently awarded each their top ranking of four stars, meaning that each organization “exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its cause.” Eighty-seven percent of every dollar donated to World Vision goes directly to program expenses, as does nearly 82 percent of Compassion’s budget.

The fate of the earth could end up determined by which tipping point is reached first: a physical shift that ushers in abrupt climate change with catastrophic consequences, or a social one, in which public attitudes rapidly coalesce around a mandate to address climate change. Or, neither could materialize, at least not imminently.

Al Gore believes the U.S. is on the brink of a political tipping point on the climate issue. Speaking to the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Madison, Wisc., last Friday, the former vice president said, “The potential for change can build up without noticeable effect until it reaches a critical mass. I think that we are very close to that tipping point.”

So what is a tipping point, actually? The term seems to be everywhere. It’s among the latest pop-sociology phrases to dominate public consciousness, along with “going viral.” That’s in large part due to the success of Malcolm Gladwell’s book by the same name, a volume that “presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does,” according to Gladwell’s website.

Change, this theory holds, often starts in small increments before reaching critical mass. The so-called tipping point is reached “when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” says Gladwell, utilizing an epidemiological model. Past the tipping point, the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.

Crossing such a threshold in terms of the public’s commitment to address climate change is essential to solving the problem, Gore suggested. “Fortunately, political will is a renewable resource,” he quipped to the several hundred journalists and other guests attending SEJ.

Gore optimistic for real change in Copenhagen

In his keynote address [full audio text on SEJ's website] at the opening plenary, Gore expressed optimism that Congress would pass meaningful climate legislation before the opening of the UN climate summit Copenhagen in December. “There is much more bipartisan dialogue behind the scenes in the Senate than is publicly visible” right now, said Gore. He expects a Senate bill “will look like the House bill.” Though the compromise carbon reduction bill was not what he would have written, Gore said, it has put the wheels in motion.

“What is essential is that we put a price on carbon.”

If the U.S. can pass legislation before Copenhagen, it could build rapid momentum in the global community, Gore said, drawing comparisons with what happened in Montreal on ozone in 1987.

“When the evidence was indisputable, the political community joined ranks,” led by the U.S. Though the treaty was initially criticized as too weak, the signing “began a process of change that picked up momentum,” said Gore. “I believe the Copenhagen treaty is likely to serve that same purpose.”

NOAA Administrator also thinks social tipping point near

Following Gore’s speech, a panel moderated by New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin
continued the discussion on the “Countdown to Copenhagen.” Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, picked up on Gore’s reference to tipping points.

“We’ve seen major 180-degree shifts in people’s attitudes toward things that for a long time to many seemed impossible: attitudes toward smoking, attitudes toward drunk driving, civil rights, women’s suffrage, are a few examples,” Lubchenco said. “I believe there’s very good evidence that you can be making significant progress toward meaningful change without that progress being obvious. And then you hit the tipping point and things can change very rapidly.”

We’re not there yet, though, Lubchenco said. The problem with climate change is that “there are multiple tipping points” that must be reached within complex social systems. “We have reached the point at which a majority of citizens say… ‘Okay, I get it.’ But we haven’t yet reached the next tipping point which is agreement on how to address the problem.”

Lubchenco left her academic post at Oregon State University to join the political sphere when her hopes were spurred by last year’s shift in power.  “This administration represents an opportunity to get to those tipping points, to make very meaningful changes that will benefit the world.”

Only time will tell

If tipping point theorists are right – and the earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous physical thresholds– there is no time for the public to dally in achieving such agreement. Plenty of scientific evidence exists that demonstrates non-linear behavior within climate systems. A report issued by the UN and World Bank in February 2009 warns that the planet may quickly be approaching the tipping point for abrupt climate changes that could usher in outcomes like the collapse of the coral biome in the Caribbean basin and extensive rainforest loss in the Amazon.

NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen wrote in the London Observer last February that “the climate is nearing tipping points,” citing a larger expanse of dark ocean water as Arctic sea ice melts, and the increasing release of methane by melting tundra as two phenomena that could rapidly shift climate change.

Other scientists, also concerned about human warming of the planet, question the use of the “tipping point” concept, since so little about climate can be specifically predicted. Revkin explored the debate among scientists earlier this year in the New York Times.

Tipping points in human attitudes and behavior may be just as unpredictable. The H1N1 flu virus comes to mind. No one knows for sure if, or when, a major flu outbreak will occur, or how devastating it will be, or how effective the new vaccine will be in protecting against it. The public is definitely aware of the issue. The next step is to weigh the perceived risks and act accordingly. If I thought there was a small but significant risk of a massive, lethal flu outbreak — based on the best science available at the time – I’d get in line for the shot.

We’ll see whether the world community is ready to tip toward action in Copenhagen in less than two months.

I’d like to be writing about clean energy or debating health care policy. I wish I could add something astute to the discussion about the future of democracy in Iran. But to do so would mean investing the time to follow these issues closely enough to have something worthwhile to add. And then there’s the time needed to actually write something. I’ve already got four or five unfinished posts languishing on my laptop.

Yet, in the words of my 14-year-old son this morning, who is angry at my asking him to pitch in around the house prior to the arrival of weekend guests, and who can’t understand why I won’t just drop everything to pick him up from the lake with his friends later today, I don’t have a “real job” — so why can’t I be like a good stay-at-home mom and craft my life exclusively around his? If I didn’t have work to play at, I could keep the house up by myself and still have time to provide unlimited taxi service. He can’t understand why, if Dad is a doctor, I still “have to work.” (Never mind that my husband is a family physician in a small, self-owned private practice in a very affluent community – which makes us solidly middle-class amid the wealth of Boulder). My son thinks I ask him to do too much in exchange for offering too little – at least in comparison to most of his friends, whose mothers are not so audacious as to work.

No doubt his barbed comment struck too sharp a chord in me. It is too often I who question whether I have a “real job.” I mostly freelance, as a copywriter and editor. This past year, it’s been full time, which is why I’ve had to shortchange this blog, despite the gratification it’s provided for me intellectually and as a really-wanna-be journalist. On top of that, I teach off and on as an adjunct at the University of Colorado, where I finished a Ph.D. over a decade ago. No, I don’t have a “normal job with an office,” as my son pointed out. Nor benefits. Despite protestations, I don’t even get an “exclusively mine” desk at home – everyone’s always encroaching on it. Unlike more highly esteemed grad school peers, I did not pursue a tenure-track position, since I did not see how it could possibly fit with the life I had by the time I graduated, with a toddler and an infant and a husband who was often on call and never gets home till 6:30 or 7:00.

As a high school political junkie I had a T-shirt that said “A woman’s place is in the House…and Senate.” I grew up in the heady feminist days of the 1970s believing that, and believing that I could be a success in the house (small “h”) and the public sphere as well. Both, I felt, were integral to the life I wanted to craft as a woman.

I’ve done my best to cobble together a sorry-looking version of “having it all,” which means a half-assed pseudo-career; a lot of guilt about being a mother who is only half there, half the time, for her children; a house that despite my best, often solo, efforts to keep semi-ordered, usually looks like a small tornado blew through – and a chronic level of stress and sleep deprivation, not to mention perpetual frustration over not being able to do any of what I do as well as I could have if I were more singularly devoted.

Why didn’t I get a full-time nanny so I could pursue the full-time career? Which, theoretically, I might make enough at (though likely not, as an academic or journalist) to afford a housekeeper to do all the scut work I resent? I didn’t, because I chose to be a mom, and I felt it was better for my kids if they had at least one parent available to them at more than just breakfast and bedtime. And since my husband makes substantially more money than I am able to, it makes sense for him to be the primary earner. But what I didn’t know, when I made that seemingly obvious choice back when to “do it all,” is how hard it would be, and how little valued I would feel on every front, not least in my own estimation. (And yes, I realize these are the quandaries of a privileged Western woman – but that is my culture.)

The struggles that American women – and we are still talking primarily about women — continue to face as they pursue a multiplicity of identities, particularly parent versus professional, are every bit as relevant, entrenched and seemingly insoluble as they were when I graduated from high school nearly three decades ago. My conclusion, almost 15 years into parenthood, 11 years post-Ph.D. and the entirety of that time spent negotiating the “juggling act,” is that little has changed for women. I bought that whole ‘80s bill of goods that you can have it all and do it all well, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a load of crap. The reality is, in the vast majority of situations, that as a woman today you still must foreground either family or work or suffer the fallout of trying to combine them.

My husband gets to leave the house every day and go to a job that, while taxing, is still gratifying and comes with a good measure of status. He doesn’t worry about whether there’ll be clean underwear for the next morning or (imagine!) whether the kids will have clean underwear. He doesn’t think about what they’ll eat for lunch or negotiate daily battles with them over fruits and vegetables versus pop and ice cream. He doesn’t have to interrupt his day multiple times to admonish them to turn off the TV or the computer and do something more productive, or summon the emotional energy necessary to brace for yet another conflict if he dares ask them to unload the dishwasher, vacuum the cat hair off the sofa, or wipe the splatter off the bathroom mirror. He doesn’t stress about how he’ll make his 5:00 deadline if he has to leave to go pick up his son who accuses his mother of being a “micromanager” if she has the gall to ask him to pin down what time his social occasion might wind up, so she can work around it – even though she doesn’t really “work,” in his youthful appraisal.

I’ve had well-meaning individuals give me two versions of advice. The more traditional set says, “This is just a season. The kids will be grown before you know it (they will – and that’s also why the attitude issues and constant conflict hurt so much); make them your focus, don’t worry about work – there’ll be time for that” — as if it’s just a little hobby. The others say, “Just don’t do it.” Let the house go. Let them worry about their own laundry. Let them eat as much junk as they please. Forgot about monitoring grades; it’s their future. Don’t worry if your husband’s parents get birthday cards or Christmas presents – it’s not up to you.

There is truth in both perspectives. But I can’t seem to embrace either. I remain torn in a maelstrom of expectations: to nurture these children I’ve brought into the world and to keep a semblance of domestic order, since I have this flexible schedule and work at home. And also to use this able brain I was born with, this analytical mind, this creative energy that, even if I were to try to subordinate, will not be repressed. Despite my son’s puzzlement, I don’t work because I “have to,” to make ends meet. I have a luxury in that regard (though he might not be skiing and traveling like his peers, were that not the case).

What I’m holding out for, I guess, is that it won’t be all over for me by the time I hit 50. Once my kids are off to college, my time-balance should shift. What I’m clinging to is the hope that society might have changed enough since the early days of feminism so that midlife women can make fresh, vital contributions and be rewarded for them with the pay and status they deserve, even if they’ve chosen, by default, the silly-sounding Mommy Track.

Am I a fool to have such faith? If the past 30-40 years of feminism’s limited accomplishments are any indicator, maybe so. As long as we live in a culture in which privileged 14-year-old boys see their mother’s choice to work as self-indulgent, progress seems elusive. But I’m also holding out hope that by making the choices I have – not to abandon my children, as so many in my generation were through divorce or neglect, and not to forsake my own gifts and goals – my son and his younger sister may grow up to see the value of both sets of commitments. Whether society will evolve to support women so that they can combine them more effectively is another matter.

Wendy Redal hopes to post more regularly in the future, with a focus on the politics of everyday culture.

But I’d like to offer this wish of seasonal cheer, no strings attached. No agenda, no proselytizing, no offense. Just the outpouring of a full and warm heart on the 25th of December.

It is Christmas Day, and my heart’s naïve hope is that it could stand for what it is ought to be in the broadest cultural sense – an occasion to wish peace on earth and good will to all. Whether or not one believes in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as God come into human history, the nativity myth is filled with simple beauty, and the ancient yuletide traditions it has become associated with have for centuries celebrated the triumph of light over darkness in a bleak world. To say “Merry Christmas” is, for me, to affirm that light and share its spirit with others, whether or not we embrace the same religious practices or none at all.

I explained this to my 10-year-old daughter earlier this week, when I wished a Merry Christmas to the stylist who trimmed her hair before her picture with Santa.

“Mom!” responded my socially sensitive, Boulder-raised daughter, as we walked out to the parking lot, “What if she doesn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“Well, I suspect she will recognize that I was sharing a warm wish with her, and will take it as just that,” I replied. I was willing to chance it.

When I was in Nepal during Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, I was caught up in the revelry of the holiday, recognizing in the proclamation of light in darkness, knowledge over ignorance, and love over hatred, ideals for all humanity. I did not have to be Hindu to find an empathetic appreciation for this celebration — and far from being offended, I found it an occasion to find joy across cultural divides. Ditto for the invitation my daughter received to a classmate’s Hanukkah party. She’s begged me to try my hand at making the tasty latkes she was introduced to, and I’m going to try my progressive Protestant best to emulate them.

But as the holiday season comes round again each year in the U.S., I feel a heavier emotional burden in negotiating the unfortunate minefield that our well-wishing has become. No matter what one says, our greetings are too often seen as political statements, rather than sincerely intended.

“Merry Christmas,” in some minds, has become a militant rhetorical weapon wielded by Christian conservatives. See, for instance, Pamela White’s column in the Boulder Weekly, which condemns Focus on the Family for instigating a boycott of businesses that opt to wish “Happy Holidays” to their customers, rather than a Merry Christmas.

“Happy holidays,” likewise, which was once an alliterative phrase with an encompassing festive appeal – like “Season’s Greetings” – has now become a hallmark of political correctness and hostility to Christianity, for many. The similarly all-purpose “Have a good holiday” that the grocery checker sends me on my way with has ironically become as uncomfortable as “Merry Christmas,” (including perhaps for the atheist who rejects all “holy days”).

No matter what we choose to say – or not say — we have attached so much tense political baggage to our expressions that the season can feel harsh and scary, rather than standing as a moment in our annual calendar when we can come together in all our diversity, respect our various traditions, and celebrate peace and love amidst the ongoing horror of global wars, fears over collapsing economies, and the tedium of quotidian demands.

Even our musical heritage is reflecting this anxiety. I’ve noticed we no longer hear traditional Christmas carols on retail music systems in December – no Joy to the World or Hark the Herald Angels Sing, no Silent Night. Just an insipid barrage of Jingle Bell Rock and cheesy pop versions of Sleigh Ride. Are these old pieces of sacred music so potentially incendiary that we must remove them from our shared cultural lexicon, insisting that they stay exclusively in the private sphere so that in a generation or so, few may still be familiar with them outside a church? If we follow that logic, we may as well shun Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio from our classical radio stations (the handful that remain). I’m sorry, but I find this overly zealous self-censorship foolish.

Europeans, who are not remotely as religious as Americans but becoming just as socially diverse, aren’t nearly as hung up as we are about seasonal salutations and religious references. To my eye, they have a sense of perspective and reasonableness that we tend to lack.

Americans, we need to lighten up. Rather than impoverish our collective spirits and cultural heritage by eliminating specific expressions of the holiday season from our shared spaces, including the dominant realm of commerce – or saying nothing if we are afraid we won’t “get it right” — can’t we just enjoy our cultural collage, including our religious traditions, with a little more mercy and lightheartedness?

Delight in the glow of the Menorah, enjoy the fresh scent of a twinkling fir, burn a yule log and revel in the return of Ol’ Sol, rejoice that a humble babe born in a cattle stall was sent into the world to challenge might and materialism…

In this spirit, I wish you a very Merry Christmas indeed, and I welcome your reciprocal overtures to me, whichever kind-spirited tradition they are grounded within.

Coal River Mountain from Kayford
Mountain

Coal River Mountain is one of the highest and wildest peaks in West Virginia. Unlike much of the surrounding region, it is unscarred by surface mining. But Massey Energy and WV Governor Joe Manchin are out to change that. Subsidiaries of Massey propose to blow away 6,600 acres of Coal River Mountain — nearly 10 square miles — and the governor’s office has issued the permits. If the operation goes forward, one of the last remaining summits in the Coal River Valley will be leveled.

Despite an acclaimed local campaign to build a wind farm atop Coal River Mountain that would provide green jobs, tax revenues and sustainable energy for up to 150,000 homes for decades to come, state politicians know who lines their campaign coffers. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has rejected the public input of a majority of state citizens who support the wind project, in favor of Massey’s plans to begin imminent blasting.  But opponents are not giving up.  If anything, the fight for Coal River Mountain has only heightened attention and galvanized action.

Close-up of explosive methods used
in MTR mining

Mountaintop removal (MTR) mining is a fast and cost-efficient way to get at the rich coal seams buried within these lush, old mountains. As the coal industry seeks to keep profits high and power cheap for a nation of profligate energy consumers, Coal River Valley residents remain among the nation’s poorest, struggling to support their families’ health and economic well-being, and, increasingly, the very face of the land they have been an integral part of for generations.

But their poverty in material resources is not matched by a paucity in political will. Citizens are fighting back, buoyed by a growing national awareness of this most destructive of strip-mining methods.  And the rest of us can help.

Just a few years ago, efforts to stop MTR mining were represented by a fragmented collection of a few grassroots organizations. Today, seven of those groups from five states have joined forces in an effort called End Mountaintop Removal: Action and Resource Center.  Their clearinghouse website offers a host of ways to join the campaign to preserve what remains of America’s Appalachian heartland.

Here are seven simple steps to start with. Taking a few minutes to do even one or two of these things will help put an end to the most egregious environmental practice in the U.S. today:

1) Educate yourself.

You may have read the other pieces in this series, but there’s more to learn. Start with the National Memorial to the Mountains, an interactive site that uses Google Earth software to show the massive scale of destruction occurring in Appalachia. The memorial maps more than 470 mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal and connects visitors to stories, photos, videos and interviews of local residents to tell the stories of those mountains and nearby communities.

2) Track your own connection to MTR mining.

If you’re on the grid, chances are you are connected in some way to energy produced by MTR coal mining. By plugging in your zip code, you can find out exactly how. And then you can learn more about what you can do in response.

3) Ask President-Elect Obama to end mountain removal mining in his first 100 days.

President Obama will have the power to stop most current MTR operations if he so chooses. Find out how, and ask him to make good on his Aug. 27, 2007 statement that “we have to find more environmentally sound ways to mine coal than simply blowing the tops off of mountains.” And then remind him that no matter how coal is burned or the CO2 sequestered, coal can never really be clean when the method of extracting it is brutal and the damage irreparable.

4) Write to Congress and ask them to support the Clean Water Protection Act, H.R. 2169

This bill seeks to protect the quality of life and health of the people most affected by MTR mining in Appalachia.  By protecting their water supply, limits will have to be put on MTR activity. See if your Representative has signed on in support of this bill, and if not, beseech them to do so.

5) E-mail West Virginia’s governor and ask him to support wind energy development for Coal River Mountain

Time is of the essence if Coal River Mountain is to be saved. Add your name to an e-mail petition, or make a phone call to Governor Joe Manchin’s office to express your opposition to MTR mining, and instead, ask him to support the environmental and economic benefits of wind energy potential on the highest ridges.  Share some figures from Coal River Wind’s report that show how the wind project will benefit people much more than another MTR operation.

6) Applaud Bank of America for its leadership role in ending funding for MTR operations.

And while you’re at it, encourage other large lenders (Citi, JP Morgan Chase) to do likewise.  Michael Brune reports at the Huffington Post that “Bank of America, a lead financier of coal, announced that they will be phasing out financing for companies that practice mountaintop removal coal mining…The decision is also a testament to the hard work of Appalachian communities and anti-coal activists across the country, whose collective pressure left Bank of America with little choice but to abandon its support for this barbaric form of resource extraction. There is a powerful movement for clean energy in this country and we are winning!”  Let Bank of America CEO and President Kenneth D. Lewis know that you appreciate his company’s courageous decision.

7) Get others involved by spreading the word.

Circulate this message (via the link above) to your e-mail contact list, post a widget on your Facebook page, find out how to share and track your influence through online methods of helping others become aware of the destruction of the natural and cultural heritage that belongs to us all.

Image Credits
All images courtesy of Coal River Wind

Other posts in this series:

• “Clean” coal’s dirtiest secret
• “Clean” coal’s dirtiest secret: Part II
• “Clean” coal’s dirtiest secret: Part III

This article, third in a series on mountaintop removal coal mining, was originally titled “The poor are always downstream.” It must now be amended to add “when there is still a stream to be down from.”

In an act that puts a grossly ironic twist on its name, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved a repeal of the 25-year-old stream buffer zone rule, which prohibits surface coal mining within 100 feet of a flowing stream. The change, proposed by Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM), was finalized when it received written sanction from EPA on Tuesday.

The controversial move comes amid extensive opposition, one more last-minute effort by the Bush Administration to further erode a host of environmental regulations before its imminent departure.  This one promises disproportionate harm to some of the nation’s poorest citizens, if it’s allowed to stand.

Opponents argued that EPA could not legally approve the rule change because it conflicts with the provisions of the Clean Water Act. Apparently that was of no consequence to administrator Stephen Johnson, who signed off despite the opposition of the governors of Kentucky and Tennessee, whose states will be among those affected.

A pristine stretch of the Coal River. Photo courtesy of Coal River Mountain Watch.

EPA’s own scientists have concluded that “dumping mining waste into streams devastates downstream water quality,” said Edward C. Hopkins, policy analyst for the Sierra Club. And in some cases, streams will be obliterated altogether as the “overburden” that is blasted away to reveal coal seams is dumped into adjacent valleys, covering up seasonal water flows that comprise many Appalachian headwaters.

The EPA action is the latest in a decades-old history of political oppression that has harmed the people of Appalachia as badly as the land they inhabit. Most of the press since Tuesday’s announcement has focused on the environmental destruction wreaked by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining: the total reshaping of the region’s topography, including the destruction of more than 400 mountaintops comprising 800,000 acres, and 1200 headwater streams thus far. Less attention is paid to the human impacts of this practice, which are equally disturbing.

The counties where MTR mining is practiced are the poorest in the nation. Of the 100 counties with the lowest incomes in the U.S., 29 are in Kentucky, where the average household income is about $16,000 a year. Underground coal miners can make $40,000-50,000 a year, but in a region where the economic benefits of coal are constantly touted by the industry and the many politicians in its pocket, MTR is taking those jobs away.

Photo: Vivian Stockman via SouthWings

An MTR operation exposes shallow coal seams with heavy equipment and dynamite using a fraction of the human labor force of conventional underground mining. As MTR has increased, industry jobs have shrunk. About 17,000 people currently work in the central Appalachian coalfields compared to 150,000 in the 1970s and ‘80s, said Chuck Nelson, a West Virginia miner-turned-activist who spoke to a group of journalists that toured two MTR sites in West Virginia during the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in October. Industry figures put the employment figure nearer 20,000, but it’s a far smaller number than it was two or three decades ago, since the advent of MTR.

Chuck Nelson

While MTR is less expensive for the industry, “it’s not so cheap for the people who have to live around it,” said Nelson.

When 3 million pounds of dynamite are detonated every day in Appalachia, residents of these remote hollows live with constant noise, rattling windows, cracked foundations, and tainted wells. Regulations allow explosions within 300 feet from a house. Flying debris has destroyed structures, and in one case killed a young boy as he lay sleeping when a boulder crashed through his bedroom wall.

Coal dust coats the inside and outside of houses near such operations. The result may be silicosis, rather than black lung disease, but the outcome of such lethal respiratory diseases is the same.

Then there is the cost of cancer. It’s the biggest killer in Appalachia, said Larry Gibson, an activist whose family has lived on Kayford Mountain, W. Va., for 230 years, surrounded now by the bleak devastation of 7500 acres of adjacent peaks that have been blown away. The problem is poisoned water.

Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment, not yet filled to its 9 billion gallon capacity. Photo: Vivian Stockman via SouthWings

Up to 60 different chemicals are used in the slurry process that washes the coal once it is separated from the blast debris. The heavy metals that occur naturally in coal, including mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, and selenium, leach into the water used in the coal washing process and subsequently can permeate groundwater. The wastewater is either injected into mountainsides, often into abandoned underground mines, or penned up in gigantic, unlined slurry holdings that also contain diesel and fertilizer residue from the explosives.

Though EPA’s latest ruling allows a dramatic expansion of what can be legally dumped, water tainted by toxic sludge is nothing new to many residents of the remote hollows where MTR mining occurs.

Just ask residents of Prenter, W. Va. When they turn on their taps, the water runs black for 250 households in a 10-square-mile area, Nelson said. A YouTube video shows a penny held under a bathroom faucet tarnished in seconds by hydrogen sulfide, a neurotoxin in the community’s well water. Vegetable gardens die. And the people of Prenter are dying, too. An informal survey of residents showed exceptional rates of gallbladder disease, skin conditions, kidney and liver disease, brain tumors and thyroid cancer. Prenter is three miles from a slurry injection site, yet state and local officials say they can’t do anything because they can’t confirm that coal mining is responsible for the problems.

And Prenter is not alone. In nearby Mingo County, reports Dana Kuhnline of The Dominion, residents near another slurry site also suffer from high rates of rare diseases, where the same chemicals found in coal slurry have been found in well water at rates thousands of times the legal limit.

While polluted water is usually a problem emanating from below, there is also the risk of a slurry dam break, threatening to inundate whole communities and their natural environs with billions of gallons of thick chemical soup.

Photo: Benji Burrill, via SouthWings

Marsh Fork Elementary sits at the base of one of those impoundments. Just 400 yards away, 2.8 billion gallons of opaque black slurry is contained behind an earthen dam directly above the school. Years of efforts by local residents to get the state of West Virginia to relocate the school have been fruitless.

Thirty minutes from Gibson’s home on Kayford Mountain, the biggest slurry impoundment in the nation, Brushy Fork, is designed to hold a staggering 9 billion gallons of sludge. The ‘lake’ surface is the size of a football field, and the dam wall, constructed of rubble left over from blasting, is permitted at more than 900 feet. The impoundment happens to be built on top of a maze of underground mine shafts, with blasting occurring nearby.

Coal slurry “lake” at Brushy Fork. Photo: Vivian Stockman, via SouthWings

Despite assurances by industry that such impoundments are secure, evidence exists to the contrary. A slurry dam collapsed at Buffalo Creek, W. Va., in 1972, sending 132 million gallons of liquid waste in a 20- to 30-foot torrent that killed 125 people and left 4000 homeless. More recently, 306 million gallons of toxic coal sludge was released near Inez, Kentucky, on Oct. 11, 2000, when a rupture occurred in the bottom of a holding impoundment owned by a subsidiary of Massey Energy. The sludge leaked into an underground mine, then burst out two portals into two creeks, eventually oozing 100 miles downstream to devastate the Tug Fork and Big Sandy rivers. Community water supplies were closed, aquatic life eradicated, and yards and gardens buried beneath feet of sticky, chemical-laden goo.

Coal sludge spill on Kentucky’s Big Sandy River, October 2000. Photo courtesy of West Virginia Blue.

The EPA called it the worst environmental disaster east of the Mississippi. It was the nation’s worst-ever blackwater spill, 30 times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, though few Americans outside the region knew about it. That’s not surprising, given the Bush Administration’s efforts to cover it up.

Structural conditions are similar at Brushy Fork, a much larger impoundment, which has been chronically cited for permit violations by the WV Department of Environmental Protection. The United Mine Workers has issued a dire warning for miners and coalfields residents, and Marfork Coal Company’s own emergency plan
predicts that 990 people could die if the impoundment were to be breached.

Traditional mountain folk music flourishes in Appalachia

A bumper sticker on a pick-up truck parked at Larry Gibson’s camp on Kayford Mountain read “Save the Endangered Hillbilly.”  While “hillbilly” has negative connotations for many Americans, the culture of Appalachia’s “mountaineers,” as locals call themselves, is among the most unique in the United States. Many here have lived off the land for generations, Nelson said, harvesting nuts, gathering medicinal herbs, hunting and fishing. Some of the country’s richest musical traditions hail from deep within these mountains, home to the Carter Family. bluegrass legends like Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, and contemporary country singer Kathy Mattea, whose latest album, Coal, is a tribute to miners and a call to end the destruction of mountaintop removal.

But the term “hillbilly,” synonymous in many minds with poverty and ignorance, hints at why the long-demeaned people of Appalachia have been impotent to stop mountaintop removal mining and its devastating effects on their communities and traditions.

Gibson calls residents of the coalfield hollers the “forgotten people of Appalachia,” whom politicians do not need to court for votes. Theresa Burriss, professor of Appalachian studies at Radford University, says Appalachia is an “internally colonized region,” where residents are constructed as the exotic other, a stereotype journalists often can’t see beyond. When NBC’s Andrea Mitchell visited Bristol, Virginia, during the fall election season, she referred to it as “redneck Nascar country,” a crude offense to the region’s mountain people, said Burriss.

The fact is, most residents of Appalachia are poor. Many lack the education taken for granted in other parts of the country. Those factors conspire to limit political power, but they do not squelch political will. In the past several years, a hodge-podge of grassroots groups opposed to MTR have come together to create an activist coalition growing in size and influence. Central to its efforts are citizens like Judy Bonds, daughter of an underground coal miner and an 8th generation resident of West Virginia’s Coal River Valley. Bonds, a former waitress and convenience store clerk, has become a vocal community leader as head of Coal River Mountain Watch.

“My daddy was a mountaineer before he was a coal miner,” said Bonds, who speaks reverently of her family’s natural heritage. Appalachia is an Indian word, Bonds said, for “endless mountain forest – but not anymore.” In 2001, Bonds and her family were the last residents to evacuate from Marfork Hollow, which was virtually destroyed by MTR mining by that point. Like many children in the coalfields, Bonds’ grandson was suffering from asthma, induced by the dust and polluted air. The catalyst for her activism, she said, was the day her grandson stood in a stream in Coal River Valley with his fists full of dead fish and asked, “What’s wrong with these fish?”

Bonds told SEJ members of other atrocities she has witnessed, including the deliberate killing of a mother black bear when a worker waited to detonate a charge till she walked atop it. She relayed another story of a “mama bear bawling when her babies were covered up by dumping” rubble.

The ruination of the forests, wildlife, and the ancestral home of her people has turned Bonds into a crusader. As for the promised economic benefits of MTR mining for her community? “I can’t find that prosperity anywhere,” she said. “We have the worst health in the country.”

Bob Dickerson, on the left

Not all coalfield residents think MTR is egregious, however. Some, like Bob Dickerson, who works for Pritchard Mining, thinks there are some benefits to leveling the summits. Flat land, which doesn’t exist naturally in southern West Virginia, is valued for building schools, airstrips and shopping centers. While it is unfortunate, he acknowledges, that some people have to leave the hollers, it has its upside, too: “It’s a lot more convenient to go to Wal-Mart…It’s progress.”

“Some people are more set in their ways. The coal has provided for them for their whole lives, but now when it can provide for others’ lives, they don’t want to go.”

Dickerson believes the challenges of living in the coalfields go with the territory. “There’s always been the trucks, the dust, the poverty…You hate it for the ones that are displaced, but it’s always been a fact of life in the coal industry.”

He himself has gotten over it. Now 48, he left his home in Cabin Creek half a lifetime ago, when he was 24. “I enjoy being out of the holler now,” he said, though he still returns to visit the family cemeteries on Memorial Day.

“I’m proud of what I do. I provide energy,” Dickerson said.

The U.S. gets about 50 percent of its total energy from coal. West Virginia produces about 15 percent of that total. Coal mining jobs, both direct and indirect, make up about 5 percent of the labor force of West Virginia. Seventy percent of mining jobs in West Virginia are underground, with the remaining 30 percent in surface mining, including mountaintop removal and long wall mining.

It’s evident that MTR mining provides an insignificant portion of the total U.S. coal production. Given its massive environmental and human impacts, any person with a conscience should argue that there are other ways to produce the energy it provides.

The next – and final – installment in this series will provide a list of actions readers can take to help end mountaintop removal coal mining.

“Think about what this means, and what almost happened to this country. Frankly, the people who knew this about her and were still directly responsible for ‘vetting’ her, putting her on the ticket, attempting to foist this idiot on the American people, and protecting her while there was still a chance (however theoretical) that she could become Vice President and possibly President of the United States ought to be arrested and tried for treason.”

While it is remarkable, indeed surreal, that a vice-presidential candidate could have been selected lacking knowledge of the world’s most basic political geography, it is also a testament to how grave the inadequacies of our education system are. Palin might be an anomaly as a governor, but as a citizen she most surely is not.

Witness for example my 5th-grade daughter’s P.E. teacher.  She planned an outdoor “Olympics” for my daughter’s class, dividing the students into five competing countries: United States, Canada, China, India and Africa.

When my daughter told me she was competing for Africa, I said, “But Africa isn’t a country.  Those are all countries – Africa is a continent!”

“Oh, it’s no big deal, Mom, it’s just for P.E.”

I wanted to make sure she understood: “But it does matter, honey. Think of all the countries you know that are in Africa. Africa is a continent.”

“I know, Mom. It’s just a game, though. And she’s my P.E. teacher, not social studies.”

But she is my daughter’s teacher, nonetheless. And she is a voting citizen of the United States. What’s wrong with a nation that can’t even educate its teachers to know what the seven continents are, or what makes a country different from a continent?

The essential need for such elementary, fundamental principles of citizen education is why I chose to enroll my two kids in a Core Knowledge school. It’s a public focus school within the Boulder Valley School District, one that parents must open-enroll their children into, which offers the specific, content-rich curriculum developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation. The non-profit, non-partisan organization, dedicated to promoting excellence in early education, was founded in 1986 by E.D. Hirsch, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

Hirsch has been vilified by many liberal-types in the public education establishment, who question how he or anyone else can determine “what Americans need to know.” Such a title smacks of a colonial-patriarchal canon, they wail, fearing that it’s a ploy of conservative elites to trash diversity and re-implement an authoritarian back-to-basics that stifled a whole generation of kids who didn’t get the privilege of a self-esteem boost through creative spelling.

They find arrogance in the notion of the Core Knowledge Sequence, a detailed outline of specific knowledge to be taught in grades K–8 in Language Arts, American and World History, Geography, Visual Arts, Music, Math, and Science.

Never mind that my kids mastered their continents in kindergarten, were introduced to world religions in first grade, learned who Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson and Cesar Chavez were in their second grade discussions of civil rights, and put on an abridged version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in 5th grade – and reveled in its humor. Or that my daughter can identify Degas ballerinas or a self-portrait of Frido Kahlo. Or that my son, on hearing that we commenced an attack on Iraq in 2003, when he was 8, remarked in shock, “They can’t do that! They’re bombing the cradle of civilization!” He had just studied Mesopotamia, and knew where it was on a map.

The criteria for teaching P.E. doesn’t require a map skills course. But that doesn’t diminish my dismay at a situation in which any American citizen thinks Africa is a country. The only relief is that she is not second-in-line to respond to genocide in Darfur, civil war in the Congo, ethnic unrest and corrupt elections in Kenya, or the continuing legacy of apartheid in South Africa – yeah, that part down there that’s the southern part of Africa.

Want to test your own knowledge of geography?  See how you square up against the abysmal results of the U.S.’s 18-24 year-olds on National Geographic’s test.

Ivins – populist wisecracker, incorrigible riler of conservatives, feisty foe of George Dubya Bush – was an ardent defender of democracy. And surely with the historic election of an African-American president outside the conventional boxes, she would have concurred that we were witnessing the democracy she cherished struggling back onto its wounded feet. For if Obama’s victory is anything, it is an achievement that happened from the bottom up, from grassroots volunteerism and $25 donations (though Ivins would have castigated him for flip-flopping on public financing), from the willingness of a populace to embrace words that they – like Ivins — refused to see as hollow, like hope, and change.

But it helped that Obama had a little extra moxie to him, too: shortly before she died, when Ivins was asked in December 2006 whether Obama should run for president, she said, “Yes, he should run. He’s the only Democrat with any ‘Elvis’ to him.”

Obama’s inner Elvis may have been muted at times beneath his steady, cool campaign exterior, but Ivins recognized leadership mojo when she saw it. And it was a new kind of leadership, the kind Barack Obama embodied to the American public as it went to vote Tuesday, that Ivins yearned for along with the rest of the electorate. In a January 2006 column she opposed a Hillary Clinton candidacy as more of the same, tired Washington, saying, “Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone.”

What the country needed was someone shaped in a different mold, even a mold-breaker. How prescient her words seem now, reflecting on the death of Eugene McCarthy:

“The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It’s about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief. If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it.”

McCarthy’s bid for the presidency wasn’t successful, but the junior senator’s from Illinois was. And in that, Ms. Ivins would have almost certainly seen further encouragement for her call to democratic renewal.

Her liberal populism and glee in flouting propriety developed in the most unlikely of circumstances.  A Texan through and through, Mary Tyler Ivins was born and raised in privilege in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, daughter of a powerful Republican oil man.  At a friend’s house she discovered The Texas Observer, a muckraking periodical that fueled angry arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War. She carried her independent thinking into journalism, which she pursued with a master’s degree at Columbia University, following studies at Smith College and the Institute of Political Science in Paris.

In 1970, Ivins leapt at an offer to become co-editor of The Texas Observer after starting out at the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Tribune. Here, she honed the irreverence for which she became (in)famous, finding in the Texas legislature endless political hilarity to lampoon. Her renegade style didn’t fit in so well at the New York Times, which wooed her away in 1976: she often showed up to the newsroom barefoot, in blue jeans, accompanied by her dog named Shit. The Times obituary for Ivins said she complained the paper’s traditional editors “drained the life from her prose. ‘Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,’ she later wrote. ‘The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.’”

Ivins returned to Texas in 1982 when the Dallas Times Herald offered her a column in which she could write whatever she damn well pleased. She did, to the consternation of politicians, industry executives, advertisers, and plenty of conservative Texas readers. Ten years later her column was nationally syndicated, leaving more than Texans to ask, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” — the title of her first book.

Her career grew as big as her personality, with more books, magazine articles in all the big-league intellectual periodicals, TV appearances, and speaking tours. I laughed till I cried every time I heard Molly address the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she was a beloved raconteur. In 2005 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

It’s a shame Ivins hasn’t been here to opine on the campaigns, to share in the magnitude of what American voters did last Tuesday, and to skewer what’s left of the Bush Administration as it skulks out, leaving a swath of financial and environmental wreckage on its way.  But the model she left behind exemplifies the potency of being both scholar and rogue.  While her wit and style were uniquely her own, she grounded her opinions with the solid reporting of an old-school journalist. She was never a blowhard, shouting obnoxiously about things she didn’t understand. Her knowledge of politics and culture was both broad and deep. Yet she wasn’t afraid to push and challenge, to irritate and enervate, to speak truth to power wrapped in humor that could dupe and delight even the targets of her invectives (she would have relished Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin).

Molly, iconic Scrogue, we miss you. May our humble efforts here at S&R pay a smidge of earnest homage to the example you have set. And may our new president help democracy bloom, now that we’re finally getting a chance to whack back the bushes. I hope that somehow you can see it.

Most already had. And in more than one case, the person answering the door was not too happy to see me. One woman had gotten six phone calls today, and I was the third Obama volunteer to come to her door. Another man opened the door, looked at me and said, “Please do not ask my anything about voting,” and quietly shut the door in my face.

Earlier today, when I was on the phone bank making calls to get out the vote, one man was furious at me. “You’re sure aggressive down there, aren’t you?” He told me he was planning to vote for Obama as soon as he got off work, but the repeated calls that he was receiving as a voter who had not yet cast his ballot had incensed him. He asked for the address of the local campaign headquarters so he could come down and complain about how many phone calls he had received in the last few days.  There were too many lists going, too much duplication, and too many repeated efforts to hound voters into casting their ballots if they weren’t among the majority of Coloradans who had done so early.  

A few thanked me for my volunteer work, but there was a definite sense by late this afternoon that many voters had had enough. And that fact, ironically, is a testament to the scope, the vigor and the tenacity of the grassroots effort that has sustained the Obama campaign from its inception. Just as with the deluge of small donations that have consistently buoyed the campaign’s coffers to unprecedented levels, the groundswell of volunteers has carried the effort forward to a degree few in this community – and around the nation — have ever seen.

Each time in the past couple of days that I’ve gone into the makeshift campaign command center, filling a vacant storefront in a strip mall in suburban Louisville, there has been a line of volunteers 10-deep, waiting for assignments. Some brought their kids, who colored posters while their parents made calls. Most of those there to man the phones and knock on doors are neighbors to those they are calling on. I saw a couple of my own friends tonight – regular citizens, donating time, avid in their hope.

Although my address is over the line in solid-blue Boulder, I was doorbelling in a nearby community that is classic American suburbia. The 1980s tract homes I was visiting were modest. Many residents were young families. Cars parked in driveways around the cul-de-sacs were station wagons and older mini-vans. Unlike Boulder, Louisville doesn’t have a reputation as one of the country’s leading bastions of liberalism. Yet yard signs were abundant. And most were for Obama.

Despite the tired and frustrated reactions from a few election-weary voters, there was a palpable sense of excitement in the air. Anticipation. Promise. The hope that democracy, in practice, can still offer. Sure, the expectation that one individual can single-handedly change the country‘s course is naïve.  But what I encountered today, in spades, was a willingness among these ordinary suburban voters to set aside apathy and cynicism and to flirt with a belief in the ideals of democracy again. The fact that some of them got 20 or 30 phone calls since Saturday just reflects the magnitude of that faith.

But enough already. The returns are flooding in now, and my son just yelled, “Mom, Obama is taking Ohio.” Time to go reap a few rewards.

I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a bit of Halloween humor, and I’m not supposed to take it so seriously. But ever since John McCain seized on Barack Obama’s comment about spreading the wealth around, there has been a barrage of such sentiments that I find ugly.

Implicit in this “joke” is the assumption that any income redistribution through progressive taxation gives undeserved benefits to people who don’t work hard or make a contribution to society. The flip side to this pretentious smugness is a suggestion that rich people got that way through greater effort or superior character.  Frankly, I find that offensive.  And usually inaccurate.

If the cartoon is correct, I guess that means that my kids’ teachers, or my local cops, or the hospital nurse on a 12-hour shift who changed my father’s bedpan while he was dying of cancer, just didn’t do enough to earn their own candy. If they only have a roll of Smarties while the rich folk are gorging on whole bags of Snickers, then it’s their own damn fault.   It’s not about community, it’s about getting — and keeping — mine.  How dare they think more should be asked of those to whom more is given, when it comes to funding the public’s highways, schools, libraries, national parks, and dare I say wars?

I live in Boulder, Colorado, so I know a lot of wealthy people. And I know some of them didn’t get there solely through their own sweat equity and tenaciousness. Some are TFBs (that’s my realtor’s shorthand for trust fund babies, all those 40-year-olds who can afford $2 million houses). Some had a leg up in a family business. Others went to Stanford or Dartmouth because their parents helped get them there, whether through connections or just via membership in a socioeconomic class that values good grades, SAT prep, and the ‘right’ colleges.

What about kids who grow up in communities that don’t offer such privileges? It’s a tougher road to wealth, that’s for sure. God forbid they reap any advantages from redistribution. And what about kids who don’t want to be orthopedic surgeons or corporate attorneys, but want to teach school in inner-city New Orleans, like my friend Ryan?  Or the repairman who fixed my dishwasher, or the guy who changes the oil in my car? Lazy. Plumb lazy, lacking in ambition. No Snickers for them, by golly.

Happy Halloween, selfish Republicans. I hope you get lots of cavities.

Part II: Almost Heaven Level: The Mechanics of Moving Mountains

In the heart of Appalachia, knobs, gaps and hollers define the undulating green landscape. Life is old, travel is slow, and it’s a daunting job to get a bus full of journalists up the steep, rutted dirt road through Cabin Creek Hollow to Larry Gibson’s cabin on Kayford Mountain. But no photos or descriptions of the devastation we are about to witness can do justice to a close-up look at a mountaintop removal mining operation. That is why we are here. That is what Larry wants to provide for reporters on this Society of Environmental Journalists field trip to the coalfields of southern West Virginia in October 2008, in hopes that we will be a conduit for the story he spends his life telling.

Larry’s cabin on Kayford Mountain

Larry Gibson: standing against Big Coal

Larry has been facing down the coal industry for more than three decades, fighting for the survival of this mountain that has been his family’s home for 230 years. Much of the original homestead was seized by devious land companies in the early 20th century, but 50 acres remain. Back in 1993 a spokesman for the Sago Mine told Larry the property was worth $1million an acre to the coal industry, but he was offered $140,000 for all of it. He chose to put it in a land trust instead, and keep it as a base from which to fight against the destruction that now surrounds him and threatens many similar locations in the region.

“My mother gave me birth,” he said, “but these mountains give me life…There should be something in your life that money can’t buy. To me, it was my heritage, my culture, my way of life, of the Appalachian people.”

Larry Gibson

Larry is a lone hold-out on this mountain, which was once home to 60 families before the industry bought them out. He tells visitors, “I don’t need your help getting off this mountain; I need your help staying on it.”

He used to stand on this land and look up at green summits rising more than 3000 feet, surrounding the collection of cabins in the woods. Now, this lone forested flank at 2400 feet is the highest point around. The mountains encircling it have been blown up with millions of tons of dynamite in order to remove the shallow coal seams that lie buried within the layers of rock.

If I hadn’t heard the sounds of heavy equipment in the distance – the grinding engines of earthmovers and massive dump trucks beeping in reverse – I might never have realized what lay just a few hundred yards up a wooded rise from Larry’s cabin. We would discover it, he said, by walking through “Hell’s Gate,” the barrier marking the property line between his family’s land and the Samples Mine, where a subsidiary of Massey Coal has blown away 900 feet and 7500 acres of Kayford Mountain over the last four years. Another 6000 acres on adjacent Coal River Mountain are slated for the same fate. The first blast there went off the week before our arrival, Larry said, even though the permits are not yet final.

Central Appalachian Range in its natural state

Ancient landscapes, lost forever

To understand the atrocity of mountaintop removal mining, you must first have a sense of what is being eradicated. In central Appalachia, lush hardwood forests cover the slopes in a mélange of green, beech, buckeye and maple, ash, shagbark, hickory and oak, tulip tree and flowering dogwood. Beneath their leafy canopy lies an understory of shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron, and hundreds of flowers and herbs, including medicinal plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. Moss and fungi thrive where water is plentiful, as do an amazing assortment of freshwater fish, salamanders and frogs. Deer and black bear drink from the clear streams that fill the narrow valleys, forming the headwaters for the rivers of the Eastern seaboard.

Fall foliage near Larry’s cabin

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, this region and its ecosystems have been a long time in creation. Some of earth’s most ancient mountains comprise this range, birthed 300 million years ago when North America and Africa were still connected: the Appalachians were formed as part of the same mountain chain as the Anti-Atlas in Morocco.

Deep within their folded slopes lie some of the world’s richest carbon deposits, the product of millennia of compression, the anthracite and bituminous coalfields that hold much of the U.S.’s most plentiful fossil fuel stores.

Intensive efforts to retrieve that coal have been a defining part of the natural and cultural landscape in Appalachia since the Civil War. Where Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia & West Virginia share borders, beauty and pain have resided side by side for 150 years. Coal barons of the 1920s sought to smash miners’ unions in a push to increase production and profits from underground mines, but today’s captains of industry have managed to find a way around the cost and conflicts associated with labor while taking coal out of the earth via a faster mode. In so doing, they are undoing the earth’s geology and devastating whole ecosystems. They call it mountaintop mining. Opponents call it mountaintop removal.

We walk through a golden tracery of lacy maples and red sumac to Hell’s Gate, a low black bar, and approach the rim of a vast pit. As bleak and gray as the clouds overhead, it stretches 270 degrees around us to the horizon. It is as if we have come to an overlook of the surface of the moon. Few people are present except us. Most of the work is being done not by miners, Larry tells us, but by heavy-equipment operators.

But a fraction of the minescape panorama SEJ tour members
viewed at Kayford Mountain

How to move a mountain

Destroying mountains to extract coal requires surprisingly little manpower. Just 19 men do what it used to take 650 to do in an underground mine, Larry says. “It is the most barbaric form of mining I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

First, the trees are clear-cut and removed. The trees on Kayford Mountain were burned, Larry said, though occasionally they are sold for timber in some operations. Explosives are then buried in the ground and detonated. The mountaintop shudders and shakes apart into rubble. Ten to 12 blasts a day split the air at the Samples Mine, just a portion of the 3 million pounds of dynamite exploded every day in Appalachia, Larry said. He added that a single blast in 1999 costing $1 million was the largest non-nuclear blast to be detonated since World War II. Only on Sundays is the mine quiet, when Larry can hear the birds. There used to be 147 species native to Kayford Mountain, but just 39 remain, he said, according to a group of birders who monitor their numbers.

The blasting is hard on other animals, too, Larry says. He tells us that 14 bears were killed on the side of his land, tracked in to the mine zone via radio collars, but never out again.

Huge dump trucks haul away the rock, topsoil and waste that become
valley fill. I am standing next to the front tire.

After the blasting is finished the loose debris – or ‘overburden’ – is placed into enormous dump trucks that hold 240 tons and placed into adjacent valleys as “fill.” Once enough rock is removed to get at the coal seam, it is ripped out by gigantic drag lines and scooped into buckets big enough to hold 24 small cars. Then the process begins again. Each successive blasting round creates a deeper incursion into the mountain until ultimately it resembles a ravaged crater like the Samples Mine.

At the Four Mile Mountain Mine, our second stop, we learned that 25-30 feet of rock are blasted away to reach coal seams that are typically 10-18 inches deep and about 400 feet long. It seems like a lot of effort for a relatively little amount of coal versus rock. That tells you something about how lucrative coal is, and how cheaply it can be mined using these low-labor methods.

Andrew Jordon, CEO, Pritchard Mining

Andrew Jordon, CEO of Pritchard Mining and immediate past chair of the West Virginia Coal Association, told reporters at the site that much of the coal removed in mountaintop mining could not be accessed via traditional underground mining methods, and that which could would require a much greater expense and threat to human safety if surface mining methods were avoided.

Once the coal is removed, it is washed and loaded into trucks and eventually onto trains for transport across the country. Left behind are millions, even billions, of gallons of sludge. Black, stagnant and laden with toxic metals, the waste liquid is injected into old underground mines or impounded behind huge earthen dams that comprise “valley fills.” Hundreds of feet high, these piles of rock and dirt are often dumped into seasonal streambeds, wiping out the flow of water and affecting adjacent stream quality for more than 100 miles downstream.

Bill Raney, president of the WVCA, takes issue with this notion of “dumping.” “A valley fill is one of the most sophisticated structures in earthmoving engineering,” he said. And as for streams obliterated when such fills are placed in hollows?

Brushy Fork impoundment on the the west side of Coal River Mountain,
WV; built to hold 8 billion tons of coal sludge. Photo: Vivan Stockman,
courtesy of SouthWings Air

“Those aren’t streams,” said Rocky Hackforth, Pritchard’s vice president of operations and general manager at Four Mile. Because they only run when it rains, for instance, they are “ephemeral streams,” a term Raney offered, and thus do not meet the definition of a “navigable” waterway off limits to dumping under the Clean Water Act. Currently, law exists to prohibit mining activity within 100 feet of a stream. But the law is blatantly flouted on a regular basis by mountaintop removal operations that skirt the Act through claims that such ephemeral run-offs are exempt from the legal provision.

“Reclaimed” Kayford Mountain MTR site

The semantics of reclamation

Reclamation standards require that mining companies restore the land to a close approximation of its “original contours,” including reinstating streams, but in most cases what results is merely a layer of grass seed tossed over the topsoil-barren moonscape. And even industry leaders admit that attempts to recreate vital streams that offer a natural habitat for fish and other aquatic life have been less than successful.

Jordon’s operation has received recognition for industry best practices in reclamation, however, and a survey of the no-longer-active sections of the Four Mile Mountain mine show 10- to15-foot tall native trees that appear to be coming back nicely. “Our success rate with reforestation has been very, very good,” Jordon said.

Of 6000 acres under lease to Pritchard, 2200 have been mined and reclaimed so far. “We’re here to recover the resources that we’ve been blessed with in West Virginia and then to put it back,” Jordon said.

But to suggest that such replanting will do anything more than provide a veneer of green for decades to come defies reason. It has taken a thousand years to generate the layer of topsoil on the Appalachians, and thousands more to evolve the multitude of species of flora and fauna that reside in the undisturbed forest. Just because wild turkeys and deer “immediately” return to the reclaimed site, according to Hackworth, it’s hard to imagine convincing anyone that the scale and scope of damage inflicted has been mitigated.

Twisted Gun golf course, Mingo County, W. Va. Recreation in one of the
poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation.
Photo: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

In other cases, there is no mandate to restore the land to any semblance of its original character under the Interior Department’s 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act if a “higher and better use” can be demonstrated. This includes economic uses of flat property deemed to benefit the public with the construction of airstrips, schools, prisons, shopping centers and golf courses. The previous, largely vertical landscape was only useful for hunting or timber, while flattened mountaintops expand the range of uses and thus the value of the land, say proponents.

Larry Gibson, and many residents of coal country whose mountain roots and cultural heritage go back centuries, disagree.

At any rate, less than 5 percent of mountaintop removal sites have undergone any sort of economic development, despite the former coal mines being touted by industry and government as ‘gold mines’ for commercial growth.

The National Mining Association now estimates that 14 to 15 percent of the nation’s coal production comes from mountaintop removal mining.  In Appalachia, the number of surface mines now exceeds underground operations. The effects of such extreme methods on the face of the land in Appalachia are profound.   But the effects on Appalachia’s people are also deeply disturbing, as Part III of this series will examine.

Coming up:

Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: The tenacity of hope

Journalists survey a mountaintop removal mine operation at Kayford Mountain, WV. Photo: Dennis Dimick

Some 470 mountaintops in central Appalachia look like Kayford. Once blanketed in hardwood forest, their ancient slopes laced with clear streams and inhabited by more species than any place outside the tropics, nearly a million acres of these mountains have become casualties of America’s addiction to cheap energy.

The coal industry has been using mountaintop removal, a radical form of strip-mining, since the 1970s. By clear-cutting the forest and blasting away the rock beneath, mining companies are able to recover shallow seams of coal and expend far less on labor than conventional mining methods involve. The millions of tons of debris left over after the coal is extracted are dumped into adjacent valleys, obliterating 1,200 streams to date and polluting hundreds more. Residents of these remote mountain hollers have been displaced by explosions, dust, flooding and intimidation. As their homes are destroyed, their unique culture and traditions, so closely tied to place, are also endangered.

I traveled with a busload of reporters on a field trip organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) last week to get a close-up look at mountaintop removal mining, and to hear from residents, activists and industry personnel in the process. This series unveils what we learned, and with it, a moral challenge to reject the notion that coal taken via such means can ever be “clean,” regardless of how it is burned.

Aerial shot of Samples Mine at Kayford Mountain.
Photo: Theresa Burriss, via SouthWings Air

Most Americans don’t know about this form of environmental destruction that author Wendell Berry has called “the ecological equivalent of genocide.” Berry, 74, a resident of rural eastern Kentucky where mountaintop removal has been practiced since the 1970s, spoke Sunday at the SEJ annual meeting in Roanoke, Va., suggesting that civil disobedience may be the only means left to effectively resist this “permanent damage to the world.” The political process hasn’t worked, since state governments in coal country, like Kentucky’s, are “wholly owned subsidiaries of the coal industry,” Berry said.

And if the Bush Administration has its way, mountaintop removal mining will become even more widespread. Earlier this month the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) moved forward on a proposed change to the Stream Buffer Zone rule that would overturn the restriction in place since 1983 that forbids mining impacts within 100 feet of a stream. The proposal has now gone to the Environmental Protection Agency for approval, before being published into law. While the existing buffer zone rule has been widely disregarded by mining companies, and legal follow-up is rare or inconsequential, a change in the ruling would effectively encourage as rampant practice what is now done subversively. Comments to the EPA Administrator are being taken through Nov. 23.

Coming up in this series:

Part II: Almost heaven level: the mechanics of moving mountains
Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: Seven simple steps to save Appalachia

James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise.  Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore.  Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.

The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization.  The document is so over the top that it’s garnered the usual media buzz, which is the goal of the group’s media strategy, according to Focus senior vice president Tom Minnery.  Unfortunately, the press finds such extremism more riveting than the message of a Christian political organization like Matthew 25 that supports Obama and candidates who are likely to promote the moral values expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and which takes as its scriptural mandate Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Whoever crafted the 15-page letter clearly had a creative heyday while indulging paranoia at an unprecedented level.  The letter, which is as likely to amuse as to appall most Christians who are more moderate and rational than Dobson’s devotees, outlines a world so transformed in just four years that it has become unrecognizable.  Consider these 15 (and the letter contains more) “natural” outcomes if Obama is elected, most of which are fomented after a 6-3 liberal majority takes over the U.S. Supreme Court:

• Boy Scouts disband after refusing to allow homosexual scoutmasters to sleep in the same tent as young boys

• First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids

• Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples

• Military must offer “sensitivity training” for troops forced to accept enlisted homosexuals

• The Supreme Court declares that “proselytizing speech” does not have the same protection as other speech, and Christian ministries are banned from college campuses

• Nurses who do not wish to participate in abortions will lose their jobs, and doctors who deliver babies at hospitals must perform abortions or lose their licenses

• The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn

• States are allowed to ban guns, and illegal gun-owners face stiff fines or prison terms

• Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions

• The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq prompts a take-over by Al Qaeda, which in turn has carried out terrorist attacks on four U.S. cities

• Russia reclaims most of the old Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria while UN & NATO fail to take action

• Latin America topples toward communism as the U.S.’s pro-Chavez policies give Venezuela more weight

• A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80

• Periodic blackouts are the norm after a moratorium is instituted on new oil drilling, nuclear plants and CO2-emitting coal power plants

• Business owners and entrepreneurs have moved overseas in droves to avoid higher taxes, with a huge loss of U.S. jobs

Wow, that’s one efficient administration.  Even when G.W. Bush had both houses of Congress, a majority of Supreme Court appointees, and two-thirds of federal judgeships in his court, the American political and cultural landscape held relatively steady.  That’s not to say that another four years of Republican control wouldn’t instigate a significant shift farther right – or that change won’t happen under Obama — but a scenario like the one Focus paints in this letter is as ridiculous as it is underhanded in its efforts to exploit the worries of religious conservatives who are beholden to fear rather than faith.

And to push the insult further, it turns out that some Christians themselves will be to blame.  As the letter’s author, “A Christian in 2012,” states in an effort to explain how all this happened, “In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

As a result of these naïve voters’ ignorance, the country has become a pawn in the takeover by “the agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, [and] the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe.”  Heaven help us.  That’s a lot of agendas.

Capitalizing on fear has been a mainstay in the religious right’s persuasion tactics, just as absolutist governments have perpetuated through history.  Fear has always been the most powerful weapon tyrants have utilized to engineer consent to power, or to mobilize people into attacking other nations, races, ethnic groups or cultures. It is always fear that precedes fascism.  And it is ironic that in trumpeting the threats to freedom posed by this litany of “leftist” agendas, Focus on the Family and its ilk would seek to replace existing freedoms with a form of government that leans dangerously toward theocracy.

But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.”  The Book of Matthew tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers.  It is these, the scriptures say, who will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.

Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God.  Rather – as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.

In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat.  I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.  Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you?  He answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail.  Now that would be a transformed world.  In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd, whom shall I fear?”  Indeed, the most frequently expressed command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.”  Focus on the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.

In a manner imitable only by Tina Fey, Palin gave this response after Couric pressed the question:

“You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with, with these impacts.  I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical, and over history we’ve seen changes there.”

It was what Palin said next that made me hit replay twice to make sure I heard her correctly:

“But it kind of doesn’t matter at this point as we debate what caused it.  The point is, it’s real, we need to do something about it.”

Well, at least the governor of Alaska sees that imperative as her state’s permafrost is melting, glaciers are galloping backward, and polar bears are drowning – though the latter is no motivator for Palin, who opposes listing them as an endangered species so they’ll pose no impediment to accelerating oil and gas development. But to suggest that the cause of the unprecedented heating-up of our planet is irrelevant?

How do we “do something about it,” as Palin suggests, if we don’t understand it?  How does she propose to deal with the effects without knowing from whence they’ve come, and whether they may get worse?  Just how does one address the impacts of global warming if we can’t acknowledge that human-induced carbon emissions are the major driver of the problem, along with 99% of the world’s reputable scientists studying the issue?

While those scientists would not claim certainty about exactly how much of the earth’s warming is human-caused, nor that they can precisely predict the effects to come, they speak with one voice in asserting a basic law of physics that seems to elude Palin: the Earth’s temperature rises when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap energy from the sun, and the more such gases are pumped into the atmosphere, the greater that heating effect will be.

Jim White, director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a paleoclimatologist who does research on ice cores from the earth’s polar regions.  The bubbles found in the ice core samples White studies hold molecules of atmosphere from up to one million years ago, placing natural variability into an extended context and revealing that humans’ fossil fuel burning over the past 150 years has raised CO2 levels higher than at any previous moment in that million-year timespan.

How can Palin, who notes that she heads the only state in the Arctic, not have even this most basic understanding of scientific principles and research methods that are explaining –- in frightening specificity — the destabilization of the earth’s climate that is underway and is inevitably going to become more extreme?  While the Bush Administration disdains science and seeks to keep it from influencing policy, Palin appears to disregard it altogether.

Maybe it is because she doesn’t avail herself of the news and information sources that would force her to confront the science on climate change that says uh, yes, we have a problem and we do know what’s causing it.  In tonight’s interview with Couric, Palin could not name one specific newspaper or magazine she reads regularly, even when Couric asked the question three times.  This is the response I often get, ironically, from many journalism undergraduates I teach, but Palin, herself a journalism major, is running for vice president of the United States.

With three opportunities, surely she could have come up with a handful of convincing responses, even if she was posturing: the New York Times?  No, too liberal.  The Washington Times, then?  Wall Street Journal?  How about the Anchorage Daily News, or the Juneau Empire when the Alaska legislature is in session?   Newsweek, TIME?  The Economist?  National Review?  Maybe The Nation, to keep tabs on the spin those crazy liberals are contriving?  Not one title came to Governor Palin’s lips.

I want to give her the benefit of the doubt.  I want to believe she does follow the news –- even as a citizen — at least in her own state.  It’s too embarrassing, with Palin on the world stage, to imagine otherwise.  But what we are seeing and hearing is a candidate whose anti-intellectualism would appear to trump even Dubya’s – and in spades. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

The meltdown of the economy is very frightening.  The meltdown of the poles is, by any long-term measure, even more frightening.  And the prospect of a potential U.S. president, which all veeps are, who doesn’t care why that’s happening should up the fear quotient by at least another factor of 10.

Image credit: by Robert A. Rohde, Global Warming Art

“This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country.” 

That’s John McCain’s take on why the House failed to pass a bipartisan Wall Street bailout bill today, according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s economic adviser.  The McCain camp cites Nancy Pelosi’s “strongly worded partisan speech” that “poisoned the vote” as the deal-breaker.

So, let me see if I understand this correctly.  McCain’s campaign theme is “Country First.”  McCain, in step with President Bush, championed the passage of this compromise bill.  And a host of House Republicans refused to get on board because they were upset at Pelosi’s rhetoric, so they sulked, rejected their own president’s impassioned insistence, and voted no. (Identify them here.)

Legitimate concern about the bill’s specifics aside, if that is indeed why it failed, McCain is shooting himself in the foot to suggest that such pettiness reigns among Republicans that they cannot– or will not – rise above partisan sensitivities for the nation’s welfare.

And it’s not just McCain’s ambition that’s shoving country aside in making such absurd claims, it’s Republican ideology as well.  Consider this remark from Representative Darrell Issa, the conservative multi-millionaire California Republican, whom the New York Times reported today was “’resolute’ in his opposition to the measure because it would betray party principles and amount to ‘a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.’”

Again, let me make sure I’m clear on this: what is most important at this moment of collective crisis is that we put philosophy over pragmatics to ensure that we do not dishonor Reagan’s legacy.  Is there nothing that has happened this week to suggest to Congressman Issa that perhaps the Reagan philosophy has been a failure?  That indeed, it has driven the catastrophic deregulation that’s defined virtually the entire McCain tenure in Congress, which has led to the current economic implosion? 

Oops — I keep forgetting that logical analysis has no place in politics anymore.

That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with. He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man. He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November. Nor will he be voting for John McCain. He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot. He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise. Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.

The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion. Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception. Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.

Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress? Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred? I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves.

If you’ll stay with me in this somewhat lengthy exposition, I’ll do my best to lead you through my reasoning. Along the way, I want to call liberals and conservatives alike to a fresh engagement with these most critical of issues, questions of the nature of our humanity and our obligations to one another, scrutiny of our mutual hypocrises, and a renewal of our willingness to tackle these profound dilemmas in a manner that can help us reach “common ground for the common good,” an expression used often at the inaugural Faith Council caucus at the Democratic National Convention, and at the DNC panel discussion of Democrats for Life. Only by refusing platitudes and rejecting ideology will we ever begin to achieve progress on these divisive concerns that continue to rend our body politic and erode our civility.

Although I am not Catholic, I am drawn to the “seamless garment” perspective that proclaims a holistic reverence for all life, and calls for a consistent pro-life ethic that seeks to protect life wherever it is threatened, whether by abortion, war, poverty, racism, capital punishment or euthanasia. I share the goal expressed by Consistent Life, a network of progressive pro-life interests, that what we are trying to achieve is “a revolution in thinking and feeling, an affirmation of peace and nonviolence, an infinite gentleness, a value for the life, happiness and welfare of every person, and all the political and structural changes that will bring this about.”

Within that overarching moral framework I see complexity, particularly when the pro-life interests of individuals conflict. Which is more deserving of protection, embryonic stem cells, or an adult suffering and ultimately dying from Parkinson’s disease? Is it ever justifiable to sacrifice thousands of civilians in a war to resist an evil regime that would otherwise kill even more innocents? Can one insist on the birth of all conceived babies while at the same time support, even laud, the use of capital punishment in a race- and class-biased system where innocent people are wrongly killed? Are the lives of babies lost to abortion more important than the lives of AIDS orphans in Africa lost to poverty and disease and warfare? Is one murder by intention and the other murder by neglect, and are there therefore moral distinctions between the two?

The challenge for shaping public policy in a manner that honors life amid such philosophically complex and often conflicting “life interests” does not lend itself to cut-and-dried, black-and-white terms or positions. What does “pro-choice” really mean? Does the fetus get a choice? Does it deserve one? Are conservatives willing to create a social structure in which a mother can choose life and be confident that the quality of her child’s life is also part of that ethos? Are liberals willing to examine the moral inconsistency of a worldview in which prairie dogs are accorded more value than unborn human life? There are plenty of folks in Boulder, Colorado, where I live, who regularly campaign for the welfare of the proliferating rodents yet refuse to recognize that a woman’s “right to privacy” involves a private choice to kill developing human life, which is what happens when you “terminate a pregnancy.” Their opponents on the right, however, disdain the importance of protecting the very ecosystems on which all life relies, failing to recognize, for instance, that the prairie dog is a keystone species whose presence contributes to a rich diversity of life that sustains us. Often, those who are first to speak against abortion are the same people, like Sarah Palin, who are also quickest to advocate destruction of the very environment that a Christian worldview deems God’s sacred creation, to be stewarded with care for all generations (for more on this, see Tom Yulsman’s 9/17 post).

The irony, the non sequiturs, the hypocrisy, are enough to turn anyone into a cynic, or at least further jade an already polarized society unwilling to engage one another in good faith on these enduring concerns that continue to split our electorate. Is it foolish to speak of “common ground for the common good”? Can we, amidst a field of always-flawed candidates, still find enough faith to vote in relatively good conscience and hope that within the parameters of our decisions, we can work toward policy outcomes that reflect at least some of our basic shared values? In this regard, should we not be able to agree on at least the fundamental premise that reducing the number of abortions in this country, or the number of lives lost to war, is a desirable thing?

To do that, we must summon the willingness, the energy, and the character to plunge into further discussion on life issues in a manner that seeks such bridge-building. The Democratic Party was right to include events such as the first-ever interfaith caucus, and to sanction Democrats for Life, as part of this essential effort. At the same time, the party is home to secularists as well, with whom we – including conservative Republicans — must co-exist.

As Jim Wallis, moderator the DNC Faith Council, said, the answer to the religious right is not a religious left, but a moral center. But few on either side seem invested in trying to get there.

My sense on the streets of Denver during the DNC was that many convention-goers were tired of, dismissive, even bored with the graphic photos of dismembered fetuses held high on signs outside the gates to the Pepsi Center and displayed in bloody, brutal relief on the sides of the Operation Rescue truck driving through downtown. Some turned away but most ignored the images, including that of a perfect, miniature hand laid against a quarter, perhaps the size of George Washington’s head. More chose to pay attention to equally gruesome photos of Falun Gong torture victims, whose faces were methodically burned by electric batons, or whose genitals were torn off.

I was arrested by all of these images, which were paraded side by side along a full block of 15th Street. Though I adamantly reject the harsh, often hostile efforts to engage passersby by many anti-abortion demonstrators in Denver (I was told by one that I was “going to hell” when I challenged him to use more Christ-like methods in his delivery), I just as adamantly believe there is a place for their message, including such photos. If liberals are going to argue against Chinese terrorist methods used in religious suppression but support the suctioning of late-term fetuses’ brains while their heads are exposed outside their mothers’ bodies, there needs to be an honest, explicit engagement with that apparent moral disconnect, and non-combative efforts to explain why. If conservatives are going to reject all embryonic stem cell research, they need to make a careful case as to why the sacredness of those microscopic cells is greater than that of my uncle who is declining with Parkinson’s and will likely see a premature end to his life as a result.

And if Senator Obama agrees that it is infanticide and a crime when a new mother discards her newborn infant in a trash can, yet supports doing nothing when a fetus survives an abortion and is placed in a medical waste can, then he needs to be forced into an engagement with the moral incongruity of that position. Obama has claimed that the reason he did not support a similar Illinois state version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was simultaneously passed by a unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate is because of a concern (and I am paraphrasing here) that it would create an undue burden on the mother who sought the abortion, and would create a slippery-slope situation potentially leading to an undermining of legal abortion access of any kind.

Obama has claimed that his position on abortion is one that respects the plurality of moral views in American society. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons but seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

With regard to the overwhelming bipartisan support for the Born Alive Infants Act, Obama is clearly outside the critical mass that deems that fully born infants should not be left to lie alone to die. Obama’s critics are correct: he is in effect saying that the potential erosion of a woman’s right to choose is more important than the life of a baby that emerges alive from an abortion. It is more important to let that baby die than to jeopardize – even hypothetically — abortion rights.

I could not disagree more. And yet I am going to vote for him in November. As my Catholic friend beseeches me to explain, “Why??” How could I?

And there is where my pragmatism comes in. On virtually every other issue that ties into the preciousness and quality of life, an Obama presidency would be more beneficial than another round of failed Republican policies and philosophies that serve the rich and powerful far more than those most in need. From the economy to health care to energy to climate change and the very future of our ability to live on this planet, an Obama administration would be more likely to effect policy change that would realize the social justice aims that are so important to many voters of faith, including my own progressive Christian faith.

One prominent Catholic is in agreement with me, and it’s gotten him banned from taking communion, just as Joe Biden has been. Douglas Kmiec is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former law faculty member at Notre Dame and Catholic University. He was also head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He spoke on an interfaith panel at the DNC Faith Council where he provided an answer to that posed in the title of his new book, “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.”

Kmiec has stunned fellow conservatives with his endorsement of Obama, acknowledging as he addressed Democrats of faith at the DNC that “It’s unusual to be here.” Challenging those “who are making the argument under the guise of faith that it is a sin to vote for Barack Obama,” Kmiec has come to see Obama as “the best representative of the Catholic ‘path of life’” and a man of “deep faith…great intelligence, great integrity and great honesty.”

“That label of pro-life has to be a commitment to all of life, to a culture of life,” Kmiec said, contending that such a culture includes things like a living wage, adequate shelter, access to health care, and a recognition that we must live in community together.

But how does Kmiec, or how do I, or any other voter concerned about abortion as a moral crisis, ignore Obama’s views on such a central component of a consistent life ethic? We don’t. We search for and work together for that common ground. A Catholic, Kmiec argues in his book, can support the “non-negotiability of protecting human life” through the use of “imaginative means within Catholic social teaching to supply that protection.”

Kmiec quotes Obama:

“And so for me, the goal right now should be – and this is where I think we can find common ground, and by the way I have now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform – is how do we reduce the number of abortions, because the fact is that although we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortions over the last eight years [not to mention a majority of Supreme Court justice and federal judges who are Republican appointees – my addition], abortions have not gone down.”

Kmiec continues:

“If Republican Faith Partisans [those who condemn a vote for Obama as a sin – my addition] were actually capable of protecting human life through their singular focus on overturning Roe, the claim might have greater plausibility.”

Here again my pragmatic bent enters in, yet it is not incompatible with my overarching philosophical/religious orientation: I do not believe that Obama’s extreme views in support of abortion rights — and they are extreme, if we look at a basic bell curve of American opinion, with Obama on one end and Sarah Palin on the other – are likely to gain real traction in Congress or among the judiciary. Nor, for that matter, would Palin’s or McCain’s positions be likely to be turned into policy, given the moderate views held by most Americans. I do not anticipate that the Freedom of Choice Act will be passed, nor that Roe vs. Wade will be reversed, and even if it were, how likely is it that real inroads would be made in reducing the abortion rate as a result? The matter would merely be thrown back to the states for even more contentious and vitriolic political wrangling. The approach advocated by Obama and embraced by Kmiec, to enact policies that would reduce current abortion rates, is much more likely in the realm of political reality to be effective.

Polls continually show that Americans see abortion as a complex, multi-faceted moral issue. Most make distinctions between taking a morning-after pill that would expunge a fertilized egg versus a partial-birth procedure that sucks the brains out of a potentially viable, developed baby’s head. And most see a difficult continuum of developmental stages, each with ramifications for the morality of “choice,” in between. In a 2008 Gallup poll that asked voters whether they supported abortion in “all circumstances, some circumstances, or no circumstances,” respondents came down largely in the middle.

Many Christians, even Catholics, see such a spectrum of gray. My Catholic friend does not, and I respect him for the consistency of his position. Within his moral framework, human life – human personhood – begins at conception, and to destroy it for any reason is equivalent to committing murder. We have laws against murder in our society, and they trump our right to privacy. A woman enduring domestic abuse may wish to make the private decision to murder her abuser, but society says his right to life trumps her individual choice. If one believes, as my friend and many Christians do, that abortion is no different from murdering anyone already born, then there is a moral imperative to deny the legality of such a practice. To his credit, he is consistent on sanctity of life issues: unlike far too many religious conservatives, he doesn’t oppose abortion, then turn around and vote for a candidate who supports the war in Iraq or policies that keep kids in ghettoes well stocked with machine guns and assault rifles so they can keep killing each other (the same invalid slippery slope argument Obama makes applies most of the time to gun rights advocates, too).

I cannot make that same choice not to participate. As I see it, we humans are fallen and flawed and our institutions are, too. But they are the only structures we have within which to work toward our nobler goals of justice, fairness and the common good. There is a lot we can do outside of government. But government, whether a “necessary evil” or agent of our “better angels,” is a fixture in our collective welfare, and I believe we have a moral obligation to participate in it.

When it comes to resolving the social problems that prompt so many women to have abortions, I have faith that Democrats can do more to solve them than anything Republicans are proposing, despite their claim to be the pro-life party. As Kristen Day, head of Democrats for Life, said in an interview with the New Republic last month, “Republicans do nothing to help pregnant women who are facing pregnancy…Many women don’t have the resources to sustain a healthy pregnancy, let alone a child.” Data shows that Democratic policies such as those espoused in the Pregnant Women Support Act endorsed by Obama – providing prenatal resources, expanding health care – are effective in helping to reduce abortion rates.

It is one thing to speak out about against abortion, as Republicans do, but quite another to take action that makes meaningful inroads against its prevalence. Toward that utilitarian realization of an end, as Day said, “If a voter’s top priority is reducing abortion, she should vote Democratic.”

For many Catholics, abortion is that top-priority issue. For me, the whole gamut of issues that concern our quality of life as human beings, on earth, in community with one another, are just as central. Those are central concerns to many conservatives, too. As my staunchly Republican cousin claims whenever we talk politics, “We really want the same things in the end…we just disagree on the means to get there.” In many respects I think he’s right. But where I think he is wrong is in believing that yet more Republican policies will get us anywhere near our shared desire for a more humane society. My faith is buoyed, however, that we are talking, that I am talking with my Catholic friend, that we are being honest and respecting one another while cultivating conversation. The seeds of that elusive common ground we so desperately need in this country can only germinate in the soil of civility fertilized with integrity.

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Perhaps I sound uncharacteristically snide in making an (intentional) animal comparison, but I’m sorry, the disingenuousness of the McCain campaign has just done my civility in at the moment.  The doublespeak continues: on the one hand, her extensive executive experience is supposed to make her perfectly competent to wrangle with President Putin, her neighbor across the Bering Sea — not to mention affairs of state in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea — yet when it comes to talking on her own to voters, or especially to journalists, well, that’s far too dangerous territory to navigate by herself.

So what’s the problem?  Is Palin still such an unknown quantity to McCain campaign strategists that they don’t dare risk playing another wild card?  Is she a loose cannon, where all that tough talk could become friendly fire?  Is it a reluctance to let McCain go solo anymore, because he’s too obviously Republican standard-issue without his provocative new sidekick?  All of the above?

Though I’ve not been feeling too encouraged lately about the rational state of the electorate, I can’t help but think many voters will see through such a ploy.  I  think many want to see and hear Palin on her own, to test her mettle, to watch her handle impromptu answers to unexpected questions.  I think they want to get a sample of the methods she used to handily beat party rival Frank Murkowski when she ran for governor of Alaska.  I think voters will be suspect, if she’s kept so carefully protected and paraded only as a crowd-seducing campaign accessory.  But I THINK, and that may be my problem.  After all, we’ve been told by McCain’s own campaign manager that “this election is not about issues.”  Maybe it really is about lipstick, and hockey, and the latest trend in eyeglasses.

Come on, Republicans, prove me wrong.  Loosen that tether and let your pitbull run a little.

Even though Obama’s tax plan would cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, polls show that more than half — 53 percent — believe John McCain when he says a vote for Obama is a vote to raise taxes. Unless you’re in that lofty top 5 percent, you’re in for a break. How much? Go here to have yours instantly figured out, using computation by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.

Once you’re there, take a look at the graphs that show exactly who will get what benefits under an Obama vs. a McCain administration (you’ll need to click the link that shows how your result was calculated).  It’s clear whose pockets the McCain campaign is in.

And while you’re at it, be sure to Digg the site — obamataxcut.com — so the McCain operatives can’t squelch it. A link is available when you get there.