Month: October 2016

History is being made, and we’re ignoring it

On By Derek DanielsIn How I see the worldLeave a comment

My wife gets the bulk of the credit for this one. It’s her astute observation, not mine. I hate to say that I didn’t even notice it, perhaps blind by my comfortable seat in the world. We are on the cusp of a real historical event: the election of the first woman as President of the United States. The election is marred by an awful tone, but I think that’s been true any time in our past that barriers were broken. When Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier in baseball, it was an open invitation for some of the worst parts of America to come out and make their voices heard. We’re seeing plenty of that these days, emboldened by the candidate the GOP primary voters picked to face off against Hillary in the election; a person who couldn’t be more opposite her in many ways, including his sex and gender. On the brink of this historical event (one that is not yet certain, but odds remain quite good), where are the stories of how much this means to people? The answer: they’re out there, but they aren’t easy to find.

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Well done Brooklyn, well done.

On By Derek DanielsIn 2016 Election, Hillary Clinton, How I see the world, politicsLeave a comment

I don’t live in Brooklyn. I don’t live anywhere in New York City, but I’ve got to give a tip of the hat to Brooklyn this morning. I heard from a friend that a group in Brooklyn has applied for a permit to hold a street party, November 8th, on the corner of President and Clinton Streets. Well done. Well done.

President and Clinton.jpg

Photo from Google StreetView

What do we really want?

On By Derek DanielsIn 2016 Election, How I see the world, politics, societyLeave a comment

I’m becoming more and more tuned into how different our rhetoric is from our actions. It could be that the sense that we have about what people want simply isn’t true about the majority of people, but it also could be that we’re really bad at articulating what we want, so we say we want one thing, but then we make another thing happen. And I’m not talking about some clear misunderstandings of the topics or the questions, like in this great clip from a West Wing episode. I’m talking about the failure to articulate what we really want.

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Are we spoiled?

On By Derek DanielsIn 2016 Election, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, How I see the world, politicsLeave a comment

election malfunction.png

I spend a fair amount of time on FaceBook, and I keep a pretty diverse group of friends, so I get to hear lots of different perspectives. I have quite a few friends who are just not happy with the election. They don’t like the choices, and they think the whole thing is messed up. When people say they have to vote for the lesser of two evils, I have a tendency to feel like this says more about the nomination from the party that person is more likely to vote for, than it says about both candidates (read more here), but there are nevertheless plenty of people who just despise both choices, especially this year. When I think about the people who aren’t happy, some of them dislike the candidates as people (Hillary is a crook, Trump is a pig, etc), but I’ve been friends, at least on FaceBook, with others for long enough that I get the sense they will never be happy, with any candidate, unless that candidate fits their hopes/dreams/values/desires perfectly. It makes me wonder if we’re expecting a bit too much…maybe spoiled by modern society.

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Some thoughts on abortion

On By Derek DanielsIn How I see the world, politics, Religion, society, Women's Rights1 Comment

Abortion is a very difficult and divisive issue in today’s cultural and political landscape (that might be an understatement). I am strongly in favor of abortion rights, so I do not come to this with a neutral perspective. On the other hand, I care about people, and many people I know and love are emotionally traumatized (and I do not think that is an overstatement) by abortion. In the worldview of these people, abortion is literally the voluntary, cruel, painful, disgusting murder of a child, a child unable to defend him/herself. I think all of us who support abortion rights need to remember that, and, for those of us who actually care about other people, need to imagine how it would feel if we knew that millions of children were being killed. Imagine there was a foreign country in which babies (make them two months old for the example to work) were being taken to a hospital or doctor’s office and being killed without anesthesia, for no reason other than they were too much of a burden on the parents. That is how it looks to some people who are anti-abortion. Although I do not view abortion that way, I know what it feels like to learn that children are dying, and I can imagine the outrage that I would feel if I did see abortion that way. I think that’s critically important to keep in mind. It’s that recognition that has driven me, for the past twenty years or more, to try to imagine a compromise. To be honest, I’ve put a fair amount of thought into this, but not as much as I could have for two reasons: 1) I am fairly certain there is no compromise, and 2) even if I thought of one, I have no power to implement it. That second one isn’t as meaningful as the first, because, as anybody who reads anything I post knows, it doesn’t stop me from opining on pretty much everything else that matters to me.

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The biased media

On By Derek DanielsIn 2016 Election, How I see the world, politics1 Comment

Is the media biased? A question that many have asked, and that probably more assume can be answered “yes” without giving it much thought. I’ve generally felt that people have many biases (I certainly do, as I wrote about here), but that strong journalistic integrity helps prevent those biases from affecting reporting as much as possible. Of course we face a world of 24-hour news cycles that fill the time with editorial, that gets confused with news, but for the most part, I think the news does a reasonably good job at staying objective (a few outlets, like FoxNews are exceptions to my view on this). WNYC’s On the Media had a great episode about liberal bias in NPR news (click here). This story, and many other analyses, left me pretty firmly convinced that the charges of media bias are largely overstated (again, this does not include “news” outlets and websites that have a clear agenda). This election cycle has caused me to question my view.

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