Political Commentary

On This Labor Day, Let’s Start Respecting Laborers

by Cliston Brown | Sep 4, 2017 | Political Commentary

Since I began writing for the Observer a little over two years ago, I have done very little posting here on my own site. It seemed to me to be superfluous to write here for free when I could get paid for my writing.

However, on occasion, I stumble upon a topic that perhaps is better suited to my blog than for professional publication. And on this Labor Day, I would like to share an experience I had yesterday that seems to be a very appropriate topic for this holiday.

Recently, I moved to a new community in order to be closer to my day job, as my company is moving here in a few weeks, and I wanted to spare myself a dreary 45-minute car commute each way. I have been in the process of getting to know my new neighborhood. Part of that process, naturally, involves finding a good place to get breakfast on a Sunday morning, so I walked over to a little diner not far from my new home and sat at the counter, where a friendly young woman took my order.

The server was engaged in conversation with another customer, a middle-aged, white, male businessman, and she mentioned that when she had left work the previous day, she had forgotten to take her paycheck with her.

The businessman responded: “When you get into the professional world, there is this thing called direct deposit.”

I’m sure he meant nothing untoward by it and was oblivious to the many notions packed into such a statement. For those of us who are tremendously privileged, as he and I are, it is often easy to say things like that without thinking twice about it.

I don’t know the man’s background, but I do know mine. I grew up among union steelworkers, secretaries and servers. And I have never known any of them who are not in “the professional world.” They are engaged in professions for which they get paid; ergo, they are professionals.

But this man’s statement spoke volumes about how those of us in the white-collar world think about those who aren’t. It was dismissive. It carried the idea that if you wait tables, mop floors, drive nails (or paint nails), or do anything that doesn’t involve sitting in an office, you are less than a professional. You are less than.

His statement also carried the weight of the presumption that blue-collar jobs are just a weigh station in life until the “smart ones” find their way into the “professional world.” This is the exact sentiment that fuels opposition to a living minimum wage. “Oh, why should we pay McDonald’s workers $15 an hour? They’re just kids working their way through school.” This, of course, flies in the face of data showing that the average age of a food-service worker is nearly 30 years old.

The young server at the diner yesterday may well be waiting the counter now while she pursues an education that will enable her to enter into a white-collar career. Or she may not. She appeared to be about college age. She almost certainly was not a high-school kid waiting tables on the weekend, because she had an intricate tattoo on her upper arm, and California, like most states, does not allow individuals younger than 18 to be tattooed without parental consent. At any rate, this may or may not be a temporary career endeavor for her. It is possible that she will work this job or another service job for the bulk of her life. And if that is her choice, it deserves better than to be implicitly and thoughtlessly disrespected by someone who looks down his nose at what she does.

A lot has been said and written in recent months about the feeling of alienation that blue-collar people feel in our society. I think that to a great degree, this sentiment has been overused for the purpose of excusing or overlooking the blatant racism and sexism that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency. That said, the disconnect between the white-collar and blue-collar worlds is palpable, as is the disdain that the former too often holds for the latter.

In America, we too often judge people to be successful based on whether they work with their hands or not. If you’ve gone to college and landed an office job, you are thought to be smart and successful. If not, you are often considered to have failed, or to be stupid. Well let me tell you something: the guy who fixes my car is not stupid. The older woman who cuts my hair has worked hard for years to perfect her craft. The server who keeps multiple orders straight while dealing with her share of difficult customers is quite talented. And the people who build the roads and the bridges and the trains we use to get to our comfortable offices know what they’re doing. They work hard every day to keep this country running. They do vital jobs. But we treat them with tremendous disrespect.

If we want to bridge the chasm between the white-collar world and the much larger blue-collar America—where the overwhelming majority do not earn bachelor’s degrees—it starts with those of us in the white collars respecting every person and every profession equally. If we can’t do that, we shouldn’t be surprised when they manifest their resentment in the most inconvenient places—such as the voting booth.

The Silliest Criticism Ever

by Cliston Brown | Oct 8, 2016 | Political Commentary

Over the last quarter of a century, there have been countless allegations and criticisms hurled at Hillary Clinton. Some of them have had merit. Others have been silly. Not a small number have been outlandish. (“She murdered Vince Foster,” for example.)

But by far the most ridiculous criticism ever leveled at Clinton is that she may, on occasion, have said some nasty things about the women who went to bed with her husband. This bit of foolishness is rearing its head again today, as Donald Trump apologists attempt to draw a parallel between his outrageously sexist and porcine statements, revealed this weekend, and how Bill Clinton has behaved with women over the years. Inevitably, Clinton supporters counter that Bill Clinton, unlike Trump, is not running for office, and that Hillary Clinton is not to blame for his behavior. And Trump’s remaining apologists counter, “Yes, but she degraded the women her husband preyed on.”

First, Bill Clinton didn’t prey on anybody, despite Republicans’ repeated insistence over the years that he somehow tricked or pressured impressionable young women into bed. He committed adultery with consenting adults who, like him, should have known better.

Second, and this is an important point, wouldn’t anybody whose spouse cheated have some negative things to say about the person or people he/she cheated with?

Seriously, if you find yourself criticizing Hillary Clinton for voicing a poor opinion of her husband’s mistresses, do yourself and everyone else a favor and just stop talking. You’re being ridiculous.

Cleaning Up Other People’s Messes

by Cliston Brown | Mar 12, 2016 | Political Commentary

I live in an apartment complex in a town of about 75,000 people, right across the street from San Francisco Bay. It’s a nice place to live, and the scenery is astonishingly beautiful.

We have two shared laundry units in the complex, and this morning, when I went down to move some laundry from the washers to the dryers, I saw that somebody had left a mess of powdered laundry detergent all over the floor.

My initial reaction was to get upset with whoever had been so irresponsible as to leave such a mess for someone else to clean up. Aren’t we all taught, at some point in our lives, that if you make a mess, you should clean it up yourself?

Then I turned my thoughts to more practical considerations. It was only 9:30, and the complex office doesn’t open until 11, so it wasn’t going to get cleaned up anytime soon. And sometimes, when I am moving the laundry from the washers to the dryers, I inadvertently drop an occasional item on the floor. I realized that the only way this situation was going to get any better, for me or for anyone using the laundry room for the next couple hours, was if I went back to my apartment, grabbed a broom and dustpan, and cleaned the mess up myself.

Was it fair, or right, that I had to clean up somebody else’s mess so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it? No. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right. But I realized I could either complain about somebody else shirking his or her responsibility, and still have the powder all over the floor, or I could clean it up myself. Those were the only options.

And then I thought about this situation as a metaphor for community and country, and I thought about all the homeless people I see on the streets of San Francisco five days a week when I commute to and from the city. No doubt many of these people are just unlucky, and no doubt many of them have issues they can’t cope with. And certainly, there must be some among them who are just too lazy to take care of themselves. No doubt, there are those among them who were shipped here from Nevada, where state budget decisions have led to a phenomenon called “Greyhound Therapy.” No, this doesn’t mean giving the mentally ill kindly service animals for their benefit. It refers to putting mental patients on a bus and shipping them off to San Francisco, where some might find help, but others inevitably end up on the streets. In the latter two cases, we have examples of people refusing to clean up their own messes.

And many of us see these people and see “lazy, irresponsible drunks/drug addicts,” and gripe about how they need to take responsibility for themselves. Maybe there are some who could or should. But in the meantime, while we complain, they continue to be in the streets, and this is bad for everybody—both for them and for the rest of us. While we bitch and moan about the “takers,” we also abdicate responsibility for our communities.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a better society, if we are willing to get past what’s “fair” or “right” and just see a problem and take steps to solve it.

And it doesn’t have to be partisan either. The state of Utah, dominated by the Republican Party for generations, has all but ended chronic homelessness by essentially giving housing to the chronically homeless, no questions asked. By so doing, the state has saved itself many of the myriad costs associated with homelessness.

Sometimes, the only way to improve your own life, your relationships, your community, your society, your country, is to recognize that being part of a community—part of being alive and connected to other human beings—means that sometimes you’re going to have to clean up other people’s messes. To do otherwise is to cut off your nose to spite your face.

So let’s all pick up that broom and get to work.

A Time For Choosing

by Cliston Brown | Jul 6, 2014 | Political Commentary

I stayed the night last night in an unfamiliar city in southern California, and needed to get some breakfast before embarking on an eight-hour drive home. As I knew nothing about the town, I didn’t know where I could find a good breakfast place, but there was a Denny’s right next to my hotel. It’s not the most spectacular food, but it is predictable and cheap, and when it comes to road food in an unfamiliar location, predictable-and-cheap is often preferable to the alternatives.

As I ordered—a shaved ham-and-egg sandwich with Swiss and American cheeses on sourdough and hashbrowns—the server asked if I’d like anything else, maybe a short stack of pancakes.

For a second, I was sorely tempted, and then it hit me that the question—which could be paraphrased as “Would you like 600 calories’ worth of pancakes, butter and syrup to go with the 1,100 calories of ham, egg, cheese, potatoes, bread and grease?”—was really a metaphor for the last 70 years of American politics: “You don’t have to choose one tasty meal or the other, hungry patron of mediocre breakfast food! You can have both!”

This is the same idea we Americans have been sold from the political menu since the end of World War II, and by and large, we have happily consumed it. “Guns OR butter? Who says you have to choose? You can have guns AND butter—and you can put that butter on that extra side of pancakes!”

In the heady postwar era, it really did seem like we Americans could have all we wanted and never have to concern ourselves with the consequences. While most of Europe and large swathes of Asia and Africa were devastated, America was the only major industrial power that was largely unscathed. America became the material colossus of the world, the leading supplier of goods. Factories worked in three shifts around the clock, and well-paid jobs were there to be had by anybody who grabbed a high school diploma one day and walked into the local factory the next.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and it is easy to look back and realize that it couldn’t last—that sooner or later the rest of the world would rebuild itself and compete with us, and that we would no longer be the only major seller of industrial and consumer goods, with inevitable consequences for the postwar U.S. economic boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s, with skyrocketing inflation and a growing dependence on cheap imports, made it plain to people such as President Jimmy Carter that the nation’s voracious consumerism needed to go on a diet. The late 1970s was an era of downsizing and increased efficiency—smaller, fuel-efficient cars, turning down the thermostat, installing solar panels. The gravy train was also over, certainly, in the political realm; we either had to raise taxes or cut services, or some combination thereof.

However, Ronald Reagan—who ironically rose to political prominence by delivering a speech, on behalf of the doomed 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, titled “A Time For Choosing”—came along in 1980 and essentially told us all that no, we did not have to make any hard choices. We could continue to have all the essential government services, and we could also institute massive tax cuts (largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans). He gave us a third option by which we could avoid both raising taxes and cutting services, and we eagerly took it: Put it all on the credit card. We’ll pay it off later. Reagan told us we could have both the tasty sandwich-and-hashbrowns meal, AND the pancakes, and we listened because it was what we wanted to hear.

The truth is that we do face hard choices as a society, and the longer we put those choices off, the higher the bill is going to be. In the same way that a person who makes no responsible choices at the table will eventually suffer health consequences, the longer we go on failing to choose as a society, the more it will hurt us in the end.

So our choice is this: do we continue to allow a small number of extremely wealthy people to continue to hoard vast sums of money, more than many of them could spend in dozens of lifetimes, while everybody else lives either in poverty or the realistic possibility of poverty? And let’s be honest, that’s exactly the situation we face. How many Americans today live a life of quiet desperation, knowing that if they lose a job or suffer a major illness, they go from financially comfortable to bankrupt, or even homeless, in a few short steps?

Do we continue to pay our bills as a country on a giant credit card, knowing that at some point, future generations will have to pay the bill? Hell, they’re already paying the bill. As colleges have raised tuition to meet growing costs, students have had to take on massive amounts of debt that were largely unheard of prior to the 1990s. They are then entering a job market in which there are very few jobs for them, in part because older workers, whose ability to draw secure pensions has been severely eroded, lack the financial security to retire. Those same older workers, faced with working into their 70s, are also faced with partially or fully supporting their adult children—as upwards of a third of all Americans between 18 and 31 now live with their parents. And their adult offspring, more and more, are faced with delaying their careers, thereby delaying their ability to save money, pay off their loans, buy homes, have children if they wish, and eventually retire. We are just now starting to see the consequences of our failure to choose.

Sooner or later, we Americans are going to have to understand that we have to choose the sandwich or the pancakes, and maybe eat only half of what we ultimately do choose. We have to unlearn the lie, which we have eagerly accepted, that we can have everything we want and that we never have to choose—that we can continue to spend trillions of dollars on a bloated military budget, and idiotic wars of choice like the war in Iraq, and that we can simultaneously continue to give tax breaks to bloated billionaires and corporations. Meanwhile our cities fill with the homeless and hungry; our bridges and roads crumble; we are losing an entire generation of Americans whose careers and paths to financial security appear hopelessly blocked; and our educational system continues to collapse, in part because of continued political meddling, and in part because teachers are so poorly paid and underappreciated that the most promising college students choose fields such as finance. We need to decide whether it is more important to fund the things that will benefit our society as a whole, or if we are going to continue to buy more of what we don’t need and can’t afford.

Even if you disagree, as I do, with the solutions Reagan advised us to choose in 1964, he was right about one thing: that we do, in fact, face a time of choosing. But he was wrong, when he told us in 1980, that he was just kidding.

Ridgemont High and the Changing Cultural Treatment of Abortion

by Cliston Brown | Dec 4, 2013 | Political Commentary

When I got home from work last night, HBO West was showing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I hardly ever miss a chance to see this classic, which I believe came out in 1983. (For anyone who has been living in a cave for the last 30 years, the basic storyline is a year in the life of a group of teenagers at a typical American high school, learning how to be adults one youthful mistake at a time.) I’ve always thought it was a pretty good representation of that era, as best as I can recall (I was 10 at the time). Every time I see the movie, I can’t help but ponder the societal differences between then and now.

It struck me last night that the society of the 1980s, in some ways, was simultaneously more naive and less sheltered than today’s society. To wit: Stacy and Damone never gave a second’s thought to using birth control when they had sex—and yet, when Stacy became pregnant as a result, she immediately owned and took charge of the situation in a decisive, clear-headed way that I don’t think some adults could do today.

And that brings me to a related point which I think also demonstrates a major societal change in the last 30 years: confronted with an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 15, Stacy decides to have an abortion. The movie conveys that this is just a matter-of-fact thing: She’s 15 years old; of course she’s going to have an abortion. End of story. She has the abortion and goes for ice cream. There’s no long, drawn-out, agonizing decision-making process, no wailing, no seeking out of counseling, no crisis of conscience—either before or after the abortion.

Does anybody think that situation would be dealt with in the same way on screen today? I think it is clear that it would not. In most TV or movie productions we see today, characters who face unplanned pregnancies do not even consider abortion except obliquely and momentarily (such as in Juno, Knocked Up and Fools Rush In, to provide three cinematic examples), and then, they dismiss the option almost immediately. In fact, it seems the very word “abortion” can’t even be used. The most outlandish circumventing of the word comes from a character in Knocked Up, who hints that the procedure the Katherine Heigl character should consider “rhymes with shmashmortion.” Seriously?

Even more interesting is the fact that when abortion is summarily dismissed as an option in these films, it always results in a positive and “ideal” outcome. Let’s examine the three movies I’ve cited:

• In Juno, the title character is “saved” from her appointment at an abortion clinic by a well-meaning protestor, and she ends up finding the perfect person to adopt the child she will bear. Of course.

• In Fools Rush In, two total strangers, connected only by the fetus they conceived during a one-night stand, magically overcome tremendous cultural differences and fall in love.

• Worst of all, in Knocked Up, a successful career woman’s pregnancy, resulting from a one-night stand with a perpetually stoned slacker, causes said stoner to straighten up, overnight, and fulfill his responsibilities.

So this is what the American cinema is selling—just have the kid, ladies, and everything will work out? Yeah, sure, because that’s realistic.

I wonder if anybody in 1983 thought we would be at a point today where we can’t even hear the word “abortion” in a movie, much less see a female character actually decide that abortion is the most appropriate choice for her. What’s next? Are we going to get to a point where we cannot view a movie about Charles Darwin in most American theaters because it focuses on his Theory of Evolution?

Oh, wait.