Category: Reflections

The deluded

I find it baffling there are people donating money to the recently acquitted Casey Anthony.  She’s even gotten a marriage proposal.  After all, while Anthony will be whisked away to a secure hiding place in the wee hours of Sunday morning, it isn’t as though the jury believed her innocent of killing Caylee.  It’s simply they lacked the hard evidence. 

Two days ago, legendary baseball pitcher Roger Clemens escaped a possible jail term for allegedly lying to Congress concerning use of steroids.  In a surprising turn of events, the judge ruled a mistrial because of prosecution miscues.  Outside, fans huddled around him, wanting autographs.  Some gave hugs.  In Twitter, he has a surprising number of supporters who just can’t bring themselves to believe the Rocket has done anything amiss.

In Italy, Amanda Knox is appealing her murder conviction of her roommate.  There’s a good chance she’ll walk free as well.  I can’t judge her guilt.  It’s just that neither can her fans, but that didn’t stop them from holding a rally for her back in her home town of Seattle.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Back in 2002, there was Scott Peterson of Modesto, CA, who was found guilty of murdering his wife and unborn child while having an affair.  He’s been sitting on death row since 2005.  It hasn’t stopped him from enjoying an active correspondence with female well-wishers.

Of all things, even the notorious Charles Manson has enjoyed an epistolary harem of  female devotees. 

So what gives?

These people might ask, If I exercise kindness because it makes me feel good, am I any different from the criminal who kills for the same reason?

I’m aware of the power of groups, public opinion, and entrenched cultural mores to influence what we think and do.  This tendency may well be evolutionary, haling back to pre-history when we needed the tribe to enhance our surviving.  Weighed down by external pressures, many people live unhappy lives simply because they aren’t in touch with who they really are.  They don’t live authentic lives and, in the end, they pay the bill.  Perhaps we should admire this minority for standing tall and defying group-think.

Excuse me, I won’t go there.  Are these aficionados outside the mainstream more insightful than you and me; more courageous as well?  I contend they also need the group, but find the chance for greater solidarity, and for personal attention, in the sub, or defiant, group.  I saw the same tendency when I was a social worker dealing with troubled youth.  Almost always, they had problems with reading in their home schools and diminished self-esteem.  To cope, they found each other.

Some of us find taking the uncrowded path an easier way to garnish our need to validate ourselves.  When I was a child I played a very cunning game of getting attention by taking the contrary opinion.  If you called it “white,” I’d call it “black.”  I hope like the dickins I’ve grown out of it.  In college I was the terrorist in the classroom.

Cults are built on recruiting the disenfranchised, or those who think they’ve not been allowed to sit at the table.  Revolutions derive from resentment.

Can altruism sometimes be pathological?  I’m beginning to think so.  Studies exist indicating there are people who think wrong doing is rooted in bad upbringing or poverty.  Lavish love and you can right the wrongs and redeem a life.  Often sensitive and perhaps deprived of a happy childhood, they have a need to love those they perceive as victims.  Romantics, the true arbiters of social ferment, can walk perilously close to the edge here.   Likewise, co-dependency can also foster misuse of affection.  Love becomes an instrument of control.

I find myself wanting to say a lot more about the social phenomena of good will towards society’s miscreants; indeed, in some instances, cold-blooded murderers often masquerading as victims.  But let me end with a fascinating study focusing on the traits of gentiles who risked their safety to rescue Jews in the time of Hitler.  In his riveting book, When Light Pierced the Darkness (1986), Nechama Tec defines six characteristics shared by these rescuers:  

1.  Individuality or separateness, an inability to blend into their social environments. [See my earlier comments.]

2.  Independence or self-reliance, a willingness to act in accordance with personal convictions, regardless of how these are viewed by others.

3.  An enduring commitment to stand up for the helpless and needy reflected in a long history of doing good deeds.  

4.  A tendency to perceive aid to Jews in a matter-of-fact, unassuming way, as neither heroic nor extraordinary.  

5. An unplanned, unpremeditated beginning of Jewish rescue, a beginning that happened gradually or suddenly, even impulsively.  

6.  Universal perceptions of Jews that defined them, not as Jews, but as helpless beings and as totally dependent on the protection of others.

The altruistic, in other words, can take on a certain nobilty in courageously rescuing the needy and the victimized.  Not so when their recipients are themselves the victimizers.

 
 
 

Getting away with murder

Last week’s decision in the Casey Anthony trial has to be the worst since the OJ verdict back in ’96.  Some would say it was even worse, since there weren’t the pressures of celebrity, money and “the race card” defense with its famous charge to the jury to send a message.

What happened?

In looking at the case, supporters of the jury decision argue it had its hands full in a capital case where the caution of reasonable doubt has to apply.  Evidence was emotional and circumstantial at best. While Casey Anthony was proven to be a liar repeatedly, nobody could find the smoking gun.  I disagree.

I find it incredulous you lose your little girl in an alleged pool drowning, lie about her whereabouts and don’t call the police.  You put duct tape over her nose and mouth, thrust her body into a plastic bag and dump her in the woods.  Saying you panicked just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Do you go out partying, taking part in a Hot Body contest just after?

Then there’s that tattoo she got with its Bella Vida (“the beautiful life”).  Jury, you were looking for motive?
According to the medical examiner, though the body was so severely decomposed that it was impossible to detect the specific means of death, it was murder.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, parents who lose a child to an accident immediately contact the police.

For a month, Casey Anthony invented one scenario after another to account for her missing daughter.  Only when ultimately confronted by her mother did she acknowledge Caylee’s death.  It was Mom who called police.

The part that makes me reel with disgust and the closest to something strongly indicative of intent were the chloroform searches on the computer Anthony shared with her parents.  They should have led to a conviction, since the prosecution systematically tore apart defense arguments.

Anthony’s mother took the hit on this, claiming she did the searches, starting with “chlorophyll” in an attempt to discover if her little dog’s eating bamboo was causing him to get sick.  A computer forensics expert, however, testified that the search history, though deleted, had been recovered.  It showed a search for chloroform 84 times.  There was also the occurrence of “neck-breaking” and “household weapons.”  The mother claimed “neck-breaking” was a pop-up.  The forensics expert, however, said it had been deliberately searched.  No search was indicated for “chlorophyll.” Subsequent work records show the mother couldn’t have made the searches, since she was logged into a company computer at the time.

In short, we have perjury.  But it won the day.

A second piece to the puzzle was the finding of high levels of chloroform in the trunk of the Anthony car, indicating decomposition.  The defense countered that it came from a bag of decomposing garbage kept too long in the trunk.  One expert witness testified that the trunk had “the odor of death.”  The judge allowed it as evidence.

Just after the verdict, the chief defense attorney rebuked the media for trying his client in the press.  I find this ironic as he resorted to insinuation to mollify Anthony’s conduct.  Her father and brother had sexually molested her.  He gave no evidence.  He suggested the individual finding Caylee’s body was trying to cash in.  No evidence.  His remarks shouldn’t have been permitted by the judge.  Tellingly, he omitted these claims in his closing statement before the jury.

I’ve never been fond of lawyers, regarding them as a sometimes necessary evil.  Everyone’s entitled to a fair defense, but sometimes lawyers resort to the bottom of the garbage can to get a client off despite a heinous crime and overwhelming evidence.

In this case, legal chicanery prevailed as it did in the OJ debacle.  Though found guilty of four misdemeanors for giving false information to the police, Anthony was acquitted of murder.  Credited with time served while awaiting trial, she’ll be free late next week.

Even if you disagree with my previous arguments, had Casey Anthony been tried at the Federal level, things would have turned out differently.  Providing false information to police is considered obstruction of justice and carries a 5-year maximum on each count.  Moreover, judges can sentence according to the preponderance of evidence, even in a jury acquittal. At the Federal level we’d be talking of up to 20-years.

At the state level, it behooves us to press our legislatures to make non-reporting of a missing child a felony.  Had it been done in Florida, Anthony’s home state, she’d not be out on the streets next week, ready to sign movie and book contracts.

Food for thought

The news is quite predictable now, with its 24/7 coverage of unrest in the Middle East.  And the contagion is swelling _initially, Tunisia, then Egypt, now Yemen, Bahrain, and just recently, Libya.  Can Saudi Arabia, a critical source of the world’s oil, be far behind?

Most media report the unrest as an unprecedented quest for democratic government and the choices it provides to individuals.  I argue that this over simplifies, not the first time media has done this, of course.  The root causes rest in the economic and, more specifically, in sharply escalating costs for foodstuffs.  To cut to the chase, these are food riots.

According to the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAQ), food prices on the world market have risen 30% over those of a year ago.  In January, these increases reached their highest point in 20 years, plunging 44 million into the already swollen ranks of the impoverished.  According  to World Bank president Robert Zoellick, “It is poor people who are now facing incredible pressure to feed themselves and their families as more than half a family’s income goes just to buy foodstuffs.”

In Egypt,  56% of a person’s income is spent on food.  In Yemen, prices for wheat and wheat products have doubled over the past year.  Wheat dominates North African and Middle East imports of foodstuffs. Gulf countries import 100% of their foodstuffs, offset by oil revenues.

According to the FAQ, which traces monthly international prices of commodity products, including meat, dairy, cereals, oils, fats, and sugar, in just the last 3 months, sugar has risen 20%, oils 22%.  It’s worse with corn, now priced 73% higher than in June, 2010.

The contributing sources to these ills are multiple and largely of human mischief.  


1.  natural calamities:  2010 saw wildfires in Russia due to record breaking temperatures and prolonged drought.  Floods devastated Pakistan and Australia.  In Sri Lanka, floods destroyed 30% of its wheat harvest.  Drenching rains despoiled South Africa of much of its anticipated harvest. (I have written of the connection of volatile weather with global warming in an earlier post.) 


2.  escalating oil prices, driving up transportation costs. 


3.  diversion of cropland for production of biofuels to offset oil import costs.  In the  U.S., government grants oil companies a tax credit for each gallon of ethanol it produces, costing American taxpayers 6 billion dollars annually.  This has resulted in a 40% rise in corn prices on the world market.  

To these factors, I would like to add another often missed: the exponential increase in human numbers and its corollary, increased demand.  In the U. S,, one of the world’s fastest growing industrial nations, population increased from 130 million in 1940, to 150 million in 1950, and now doubled to a current 308 million.  

The UN anticipates a 9 billion world population in 2050, up from just under 7 billion presently. To feed everybody will require more land and water use and decimate forests still further.  Even if we were to succeed, many would remain malnourished and impoverished.  70 million, or two Californias, are added annually to the world’ s population.  While some take solace in declining fertility,  two thirds of Egypt’s population is under age 30.

And whatever happened to the Green Revolution with its high yield grain varieties, innovative pesticides and fertilizers?  The grim  reality is that its initial gains have been swamped by increases in human numbers.  Initially, a catalyst to its early promise was an increasing reliance on irrigation, with unforseen consequences for all in dropping water tables.  India, which became a food exporter, now imports rice, mostly from Australia,   Unfortunately, that windfall may be drying up quite literally.  Australia has cut its rice exports 90% because of prolonged droughts and more recent cyclones.

In China, the water tables are dropping 10 feet a year.  In the U. S, it’s worse, with water levels over past decades dropping 100 feet in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.  By 2025, two thirds of the world’s people will live in locales lacking sufficient water.  Water, not oil, may well mitigate future conflict between nations.

Meanwhile, upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East signals warning of history’s tendency to repeat itself.  Tomorrow, the just returned exiled Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi will address a mass rally in Cairo in Tahrir Square.   A brilliant articulator of purist Islam (100 books), he despises the West and loathes Israel.

Food prices?  More important than you thought: they can determine history, affecting us all.

Let’s designate a woman for a holiday

Sometimes I get these crazy thoughts that hit like mortar rounds lobbed from some hidden source, shrapnel everywhere.  They come unprovoked, often when I’m taking a shower, or most inconveniently, when I’ve turned the light off, anticipating a good night’s sleep.  Such unexpected musings doubtless find their sources in the vestiges of a day’s stimuli: TV news, a chance website, a desultory  conversation, something I read.  

Last night, I started thinking about  American heroines, and there are many, and who they are, and why we don’t celebrate them more consistently and noticeably, as in a day set aside, a holiday if you will, something akin to International Women’s Day (March 8), though not a holiday.  Why not a Women’s Day in America, and with holiday status?  We have two specific holidays when American heroes, Washington/Lincoln (President’s Day) and  Martin Luther King, Jr. are honored, and yet no women, who outnumber males. Mother’s Day doesn’t count as a holiday any more than Father’s Day, though they’re great for mall sales.

Me, I’d like to see a day commemorating a specific American heroine who has contributed richly, and vitally, to the American fabric. Yes, I’m a male, but I would like to think in a day of shrinking gender boundaries it doesn’t matter.  What we do need is understanding, fair play, and good will.  We need each other.

And whom would I pick?

In her recent book, American heroines: The Spirited Women Who Changed Our Country, Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson features her roll call of fourteen heroines, among them stalwarts like Emma Willard, Amelia Earhart, Mary Austin Holly, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Sallie Ride.  Heroines they surely are, yet I want more than that.  Hutchinson has written a safe book, free of controversy, a rendition of the feminine scene, sanitized and plastic wrapped like a dry-cleaned comforter.  I want a heroine transcending occupational breakthrough, or singular achievement. I want a heroine fashioned on the anvil of heated struggle for emancipation from the weight of custom in its myriad guises: social, political, economic, and religious.

I want a heroine with an enduring, formidable legacy, effecting change in social consciousness.  I hold that truly great heroes do not merely inspire; they transform.  I have employed this tenet as a litmus test to assess our greatest presidents, for me, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.  We are profoundly affected by their deeds, which also define us as a  nation committed to social justice.  By this standard, I nominate Margaret Sanger.  

She came from poverty, the 6th of 11 born to her mother, who ultimately had 18 pregnancies, before succumbing to tuberculosis  at an early age.  Sanger, called home from school to assist , contracted tuberculosis.  Her mother’s circumstances in a society outlawing contraception would define Sanger.

Becoming a nurse, she gave her efforts to the poor on New York’s East Side, often besieged by women desperately seeking counsel on limiting their offspring.  Courageously, she championed their right to such counsel, coining the term birth control we now use freely. At that  time, advocating contraception was a criminal act, or violation of the Comstock Law (1873), outlawing contraception devices and literature promoting their use and abortion.  Along with pornography, sending such material through the mail could result in prosecution. Sanger was imprisoned eight times. This didn’t deter her from founding clinics to advise on family planning and distribute diaphragms. She is regarded as the founder of the Planned Parenthood organization.

The law remained on the books until 1965, when it was modified, though not revoked, to allow dissemination of contraception devices and literature for married couples. Not until 1972 (Eisenstadt vs. Baird) was it allowed for the unmarried. The pornography provision of the post office act remains.

Sanger is not without controversy, especially for those on the  Christian right.  In 2010, Fox’s Glenn Beck called her “ one of the most horrible women in American history.”  She is often associated with eugenics because she held that the mentally enfeebled shouldn’t be allowed to have children.  She has been called a racist because many of her clinics were located in urban minority areas.  Sanger’s defenders contend that this is simply where the demand was highest, representing impoverished women.  Martin Luther King, Jr. apparently endorsed these clinics and was given an award by Planned Parenthood shortly before his assassination. In truth, she opposed abortion, regarding it as a taking of life no matter when performed.  Birth control was its preventative.

In the mid 60s, the contemporary feminist  movement got underway in earnest with Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem.  Certainly, Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) can be regarded as the movement’s manifesto and one of the last century’s most influential books. Still, Sanger made the way easier and paid for her struggle with repeated imprisonment and ostracism.  With her began an incipient shift in the social paradigm, a growing consciousness of a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body, freeing her with opportunity for greater self-realization and emancipation from poverty.  Without the right  to birth control, the feminist movement  could not have achieved its revolutionary  breakthroughs. 

Today, birth control is exercised as a right, covered by most health insurance, and practiced even among many Catholics.  Sanger lived to see the birth control pill, a pharmaceutical development she had encouraged, her successful efforts in combatting laws restricting contraception easing the way for its distribution.

She is remembered in the Wellesley College Library, where a room bears her name.  There is a building at Stoney Brooke University named in her honor.  In New York City, there is Margaret Sanger Square in Greenwich Village.

Her life story is presented in two films:

    Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story

     Margret Sanger: A Public Nuisance

She needs more than this.  She needs a holiday in her honor.