Hi Friends!
After taking a month off from the Squad, I've returned to find - chaos!
This is great! I love it! If one is looking for a fight, it looks like
the Bob/elg/Carmen/Horse/Struan thread is the place to be. I'm kind of
reconstructing this post (which I had practically finished) when
Netscape decided to freeze up on me. Boy do I hate when that happens.
Now all the spontaneity is gone... ;(
Phred, peace brother. I didn't mean to come down on you so hard, and
hopefully if you reread my post you'll see that during the course of
trashing your metaphysical experience I also managed to compliment you a
couple of times (agile mind, being already prepared for Pirsig when you
first encountered him, etc.) Subtlety doesn't translate well in email
and we can't all be as tactful as Struan. Small joke at your expense,
Struan. Hope you don't mind because I do love your posts, so spare me.
I have 2 ideas floating around tonight. Perhaps its the full moon,
Rog?
#1 Affirmative Action has come up here lately. My take on it is that
it's not so much a form of restitution for past wrongs or a sop for the
disabused as it is a Consciousness Raising exercise for White Guys.
Picture this. It's 1970. A white guy, a black guy, a woman, and the
Pope (oops, wrong story - ok forget the Pope) come in for a job
interview. They are each interviewed by a white guy, a white guy, and
another white guy. The white guy gets the job. He's not particularly
over or under qualified, in fact, he's not even the best person for the
job, but he gets it because - he is a white guy just like them - and the
people doing the hiring aren't just looking for the best person for the
job, they are also looking for the person most likely to fit in. So,
affirmative action breaks the cycle of white guys hiring other white
guys. Call it white guy socialization. They are forced to learn how to
get along with people different from themselves - courtesy of the
Federal Government! Ingenious really.
#2 It's the Economy, Stupid. (In case you missed it, this was actually
one of Bill Clinton's campaign slogans) The idea here is that times are
hard in America. It's no longer possible for one wage earner to support
an entire family. I mean, after all, how could we live without 2 cars,
a house in the suburbs, $100 Nike tennis shoes for the kids, the latest
electronic gadgets, cable tv and Air Conditioning? We are Americans!
We are supposed to have the best of everything all the time, whenever we
want it, in multiple quantities!
So Mom went to work to pay for all this stuff and there is only one
small problem - what to do with the kids? Mom has a career now, but the
company she works for has made it completely unspokenly clear, in the
best tradition of corporate coercion, that it will allow her to take the
customary 6 weeks off to have the baby and get it stabilized enough to
survive the rest of its infancy in daycare, but no more - or risk being
passed over for that next big promotion. So, what's an honest,
hard-working, over-consuming family to do? Schlep tiny infants to
daycare everyday - or maybe just skip the kid routine all together.
If you agree that somebody needs to actually have some children and that
daycare may not be the best way to raise them (all arguable points) then
something needs to be done. This is worse than the Affirmative Action
problem because that problem didn't actually cost corporations any
money. They were going to hire Somebody. But asking a corporation to
subsidize a working Mother to stay at home with a tiny infant is
something else again. Other than possibly through peer pressure, there
is really no motivation for a corporation to pay a woman to stay at home
during those critical early months with her child. But raising healthy,
well adjusted children is (or should be) a top priority for the state.
Today the Federal Government pays men and women to participate in the
national defense. If they are reservists called to active duty they
receive a government paycheck for their service and are not penalized
for their absence from their corporate employer. We spend huge amounts
of tax dollars to maintain and staff an effective military force. What
if we also compensated working Mothers in the same way? What if being a
Mother to a young child was actually considered so important to the
nation that it was honored and funded along the same lines as the
nation's military? What if we lived in a world where women were not
penalized for staying home to raise young children? What if they could
enter and leave the workforce at will for this purpose? What difference
would it make?
Cognite Tute,
Mary
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