More ranting

I’ve been feeling very ranty and argumentative lately. It must be the heat or that I’m not writing academic papers anymore. Here’s another brain dump for ya.

I read a timely study this morning about how childhood adversity changes a person’s brain – like the structure of it and the way it operates. I say this is timely because just last night I had a friendly conversation about the personal responsibility vs. social support debate. I feel very strongly that as a society, we need to provide safety nets and social support, and my position comes from personal experience as much as from reading studies like the one I read this morning.

Like I explained last night, I come from a working class family and I identify very strongly with the working class, even though I have an advanced degree and sit in front of a computer hardly working all day. I say that I hardly work not because I don’t do what I’m supposed to do at work. I do research and produce reports and make fancy spreadsheets, but compared to the work I’ve done (and the work other people do everyday), this is not hard work. And I’ve noticed that each job I get as I move up the social strata gets easier and nicer, which is actually very troubling to me. Like I deserve good benefits, a decent wage, a flexible schedule, and nice working conditions because I have a degree, and those people without a degree don’t deserve these nice things. We are valued differently as human beings, which I find morally repugnant.

And I really hate it when people say that if you just work hard, you’ll “make it” because I’ve known lots of people who work very hard all their lives and never make it. The reasons people struggle all their lives has nothing to do with how hard they work. It does have something to do with opportunities, which is something I don’t think people really understand. We assume that people think the same way we do and grow up in the same type of culture as ours and then can’t understand why people don’t respond to things the same way we do.

So this study I read, which came out of the Psychology Department at Harvard, shows that kids who come from adversity don’t perceive rewards as positively as kids who don’t have a background full of adversity. So basically their brains no longer recognize positive experiences as being positive (or not as much as other people). We already know that kids experiencing adversity are more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness, but the kids in this study had not been diagnosed. These kids were adjusting relatively well, but their brain scans still showed marked differences in the way they responded to positive experiences. I don’t think I need to explain the consequences this could have on a person’s (especially a young person’s) life, but you can imagine that it has the potential to snowball pretty quickly. Yet we expect these kids to somehow pick themselves up by the bootstraps and behave the way we want them to even though we have abandoned them at every turn.

I worked in a middle and elementary school for a very brief time and got just a glimpse into the lives of “disadvantaged” kids, and I learned a lot about how different people’s lives can be. I once asked a girl how many siblings she had, and she had a hard time answering that question. She had to sit down and count all of her brothers and sisters – some lived with her and some didn’t. Her parents were not together, and each had multiple children with multiple partners. I think her final estimate was something like 12 or 13. At 12 years old, she got pregnant. Wonder why. I asked another boy where he lived, which was also not quite as straightforward as I had assumed because he lived wherever there was a place for him to stay at any given time. I was amazed that some of these kids were even able to make it to school on a regular basis.

People who grew up in stable homes assume that most parents are basically there for their kids. You hear about deadbeat dads and parents not being involved enough in kid’s lives, but the number of drug-addicted parents all but abandoning kids is astounding. These kids grow up in poverty, go to crappy schools, are raised on the streets, often by gangs, and then we wonder why they can’t just get jobs and be productive members of society. These kids are victims of a society that allows them to fall through the cracks and then punishes them for not abiding by laws that never protected them in the first place. Laws do not protect poor people. They protect rich people from poor people. And the social support systems we do have are good, but they’re like sticking a finger in a leaky dyke. They rarely address the underlying causes of social problems; they just put band-aids on symptoms.

And I do empathize. I grew up pretty darn poor. Neither of my parents graduated from college, and they couldn’t support me financially when I decided that I wanted to go. I worked full-time, paid all my own bills, and by some act of God, managed to graduate with good grades. And you know what? It was hard, but my parents were very supportive in other ways, and they were highly involved in my life growing up. They instilled certain values in me, and took interest in my development in a way that many parents do not. So even though I can relate to how difficult economic stress can be, I know I still had it better than most.

And sometimes I do resent kids whose parents pay for every penny of college and then give them spending money so they don’t have to work. College campuses are awash with rich kids who don’t work hard, graduate with crappy grades, and then believe that they are entitled to a job that pays them well and has all kinds of perks and benefits. Meanwhile, working class people work their asses off and are forced to accept substandard working and living conditions just because they’re poor, which I think should be a crime. Clearly, I’m not hiding my biases here. Of course there are rich kids who work hard and appreciate what they have and are good people, and there are poor kids who slack off and don’t care about anything, but they aren’t the ones I’m really worried about. It’s that we expect poor kids to think, learn, and behave like rich kids even though they have vastly fewer resources upon which to draw.

So what’s my point? Wild tangents are brewing, and I’m all over the place, so I’ll try to reign this in before it gets out of hand.

I guess I should conclude with what I think can be done about this mess, but even that gets sticky once you look at our political climate. Bleeding heart liberals (like me) want to see a comprehensive support system and a welfare state in order to “lift all the boats.” Hearts of ice conservatives preach personal responsibility and consequences. And somewhere in the middle is the system we have – a system of compromise between two political parties, where the liberals get what they want by having social programs and the conservatives get what they want by putting limits and restrictions on these programs. Win-win, right? Well, except that while these programs help people in the short-term, they rarely help people in the long-term, and they certainly don’t address underlying causes.

And I guess that’s why I’m a Green. We don’t accept comprises if it means that the root of the problem goes unaddressed. We don’t like band-aids nearly as much as we like antibiotics. And truth be told, even antibiotics aren’t proactive enough, but I risk sounding like a hippie if I start talking about wholesome food to nourish our bodies, but that’s really where the analogy should go. The wholesome food is healthy communities, where I think we have to start. The solutions to these problems are disturbingly basic. It’s like we forget that a safe neighborhood, decent housing, and a good education is a good start. Instead, we run expensive tests on kid’s brains to show that growing up with adversity, adversely affects kids. No kidding.

ADA states the obvious – everyone goes nuts

So the American Dietetic Association came out with a new research report showing that vegetarian and vegan diets have health benefits over omnivorous diets for all people in all age groups (including children and breastfeeding women), but only if you eat a balanced diet.

This irks me. It is almost like saying that it is important to eat a balanced diet if you’re going to be vegetarian, but if you eat meat, it doesn’t matter. Because meat will make up nutritional deficits? In America, omnivorous diets are the norm, and because you’re suggesting a change from the norm, everyone has to make a big deal about it, but it makes it sound like omnivorous diets are inherently more healthy, but this latest ADA study shows they are not.

Any diet is more healthy when it’s balanced. Obviously. And I have my doubts about whether most people eating meat really eat a very “balanced” diet, but no one cautions against omnivorous diets because of it. You know?

The other thing about the warnings and cautions for vegetarians is that it makes people think it’s harder than it is. I have been vegetarian and vegan on and off for years. I found being vegan a little more difficult because your “on the go” options become a little slimmer, but once you learn which processed foods are vegan it gets easier (unless you like subsisting on gas station apples). For example, did you know that Oreo’s are vegan? They aren’t healthy, but they are vegan. You’re allowed eat junk food as a vegan. Just like any other diet, it’s all about moderation. My dad would say, “It isn’t what you do sometimes; it’s what you do all the time.”

I was at my aunt’s house this weekend, and she said that she feels like whenever she makes vegetarian dishes she has to go all out - find a recipe, spend hours cooking, and drop hundreds of dollars on strange vegetables. And I think this is a common concern, but it isn’t true. I can’t tell you how many nights I eat plain old spaghetti, which costs about $3 for 8 servings. Sometimes I put extra veggies in the sauce or have a simple side salad. Veggie lasagna is also much simpler than it seems – you can use frozen veggies and jarred sauce. I don’t even cook the noodles ahead of time. You can make soups and stews and tacos (just substitute beans) and veggie burgers with fries and casseroles and stir-fries and basically anything except for meat. I think the trick is not to look for complicated vegetarian recipes, but to revamp what you normally eat. And if you enjoy cooking complicated recipes, then do that too. Just don’t feel like you have to in order to be vegetarian.

A note about tofu and soy “meat” since people seem to feel very strongly about it: I eat very little tofu, which I do like. I grew up eating it, so I think that helps, but the trick is not to expect it to taste like meat because it is never going to. You can drown it in BBQ sauce and deep-fry it, but it will just taste like deep fried BBQ tofu – not fried chicken. And the same goes for soy burgers and tofu hot dogs – they are not going to taste like meat. They taste very good, but in their own way.

But you know what? Who says you can never ever eat meat again if you declare yourself vegetarian? You could be a weekday vegetarian. You could plan yearly “veg breaks.” If you think you’re really going to miss the hamburgers at your 4th of July picnic every year, then have that burger once a year. I promise there are no vegetarian police to come arrest you.

I would also just like to say that my boyfriend has been a vegetarian for a lot longer than I have… something like 7-10 years, and he says he never thought he could be a vegetarian. In fact, the story goes that he became vegetarian on a bet – someone bet him that he couldn’t go without meat for a month and he just kept going. So this isn’t just a chick thing. Men will survive without meat. I even have a couple of raw vegan friends who lift weights and are all muscle-y. So being really active isn’t even an excuse.

There are plenty of good reasons to be a vegetarian, like it's healthier for you, it's better for the planet, and you don't have to worry about cruelty to animals. Well, you still have to worry about cruelty to animals, just not the ones you're eating.

The *What* Test?

Warning: This post contains an F-Bomb (but not until the end).

I see subtle sexism everywhere, which almost bothers me more than overt sexism because it’s the kind of thing that is shrugged off as a cultural norm or remnant of the 1950’s family structure, but it’s pervasive, and it perpetuates stereotypes and false ideals. I came across a blaring (to me) example of this in a presentation on policy evaluation given by the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. To be fair, I think the offender is merely contracted by the federal government as a consultant, but still; if the government is hiring consultants who say idiotic things, then it needs to hear about it.

So this guy is talking about how to report the results your policy evaluation, and he makes a couple of recommendations such as keeping the message simple and using the “Mom Test.” The “Mom Test” involves presenting your message in a way that “your mom could understand it.” Now, I’m not a mother myself, but I can think of plenty of moms who might have been a teensy bit offended by this statement: Hillary Clinton, for example. But this shit is not acceptable even if he just meant his cute little old lady mother who is a very sweet, but simple woman. His mother should smack him for being such a condescending dolt.

Firstly, and most obviously, mothers, as a rule, are not a bunch of doe-eyed women, sitting around the house, waiting for someone (hopefully a man!) to tell them what to do next (hopefully using small enough words so their mushy brains can comprehend)*. Most mothers are out in the workplace, understanding all kinds of complicated things in order to do their jobs. My brain is reeling at the fact that I just had to say that.

Secondly, even mothers who do stay at home, often make the decision to do so, not because they are too dull for the workplace, but because they view childrearing as a valid and important job (yes, a real job). Society does not value this type of work because it does not increase our GDP, but it is valuable work that takes careful planning and, frankly, policy evaluation. Moms have been evaluating their policies and programs for years. In fact, they could give this guy a run for his money.

Maybe on its own, this is not that big a deal, but the “Mom Test” is just one example of insidious sexism that’s played out daily in our culture. Pay attention to gender roles in movies and TV shows. Commercials are the worst. And like I’ve said before, gender is just the tip of the iceberg. Heteronormativity is rampant. Racial stereotypes abound. And transgendered folks can’t get a break to save their lives.

I wish I had been at the training where this presentation was used, so I could have explained that my mom can understand highly complex, technical information regarding policy evaluation and asked if the “Mom Test” is really the best standard to use if the purpose is to keep the report simple. Fucker.

*I tried to contain all of my sarcasm in parentheses, but it might have (accidentally) seeped out in some places.