Death of the Space Program and Science in the United States?

Last week, we lost one of the truest heroes of the 20th century - and if I may, human existence.  Neil Armstrong embodied everything that a true hero should be - he had no ego in his accomplishments, he truly did do everything in his power in his "one giant leap for mankind," and he never forgot the team that helped him become the first being from Earth to set foot on another celestial body.  

It is a testament to our broken political system and our jaded public that Armstrong was overshadowed by the bloviating of one of our political parties, cowering to the demands of the super-wealthy and denying the humanity and seemingly, the right to exist, for people of color, women, and any number of those who were born without privilege.  President Clinton said it best:

"My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in," he said. "If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."   

I find it anathema that some in our country in the 21st century still are reluctant to admit that we live in a shared society, with shared responsibilities, privileges, hopes, and dreams.  Whether or not the super-wealthy want to admit it, we are all tied together in a community.  As much as they try to extract themselves from the responsibilities of public life - by enrolling their children in private schools with other of similar socioeconomic status, by lobbying politicians to entrench their privilege in legislation even more than it already is, by ruthlessly exploiting the labour of the underclasses while simultaneously catering to the xenophobia espoused by right-wing demagogues and right-wing Christianity.  I cannot for the life of my fathom why the economic policies of the Republican party should make sense to any one - tax breaks for the rich have no basis in economic research that show that this policy "trickles down" to the middle- and lower classes.  Rather, the super-wealthy instead spend their money on yachts, Gulfstreams, and secret their money away in the Caymans, Bermuda, or Switzerland.  It is appalling to me, on a human level, that these people pound their chests and wave their American flags while they do everything they can to exploit and demean those beneath them and deem it "the American way."

But I digress.  What I meant to speak of was the death of the space program.  It is so exciting to think that we landed men on the moon on a craft with the computing power of a modern calculator.  In the 1970s, we launched a craft that has left our solar system, and to my knowledge is still reporting useful data on the void beyond.  We landed an SUV-size craft on Mars, which was one of the most exciting NASA accomplishments of my lifetime.  

Yet there remains so much to be done, if only we had the gumption to continue to explore and invest in science.  I work in public education, and the recent transition to a focus on STEM learning is to be lauded.  I sincerely hope that our next generation of astronauts are today in our public schools, ablaze with the passion and wonder to explore.  It is appalling to me that we spend trillions of dollars on war while we invest almost nothing (comparatively speaking) in NASA, which has provided humankind with constant milestones in human achievement.  There is nothing more inspiring than space, and I wish that we as a society would return to an investment in science and exploration.  

Animal Rights, International Law

I've been watching Animal Planet's "Whale Wars," which follows the travels of international animal rights activists who resort to piracy, harassment, and what is probably legally termed as terrorism in order to draw attention to whale hunts across the world.  Academically, this issue has really raised several issues for me.

First, the Sea Shepard folks (the organization that fights whalers) insist on terming whale hunts as 'murder.'  I know that's propaganda, and that's the most shocking terminology they can use, so naturally, they employ that.  My first thought to that was, "these are the kinds of folks who give compassionate liberality a bad name.  Murder?  An animal?  For food?  Really?"  But the more I think about it, I think they may have a point in international law or at the very least in anthropological definition of what we term a 'society' and 'culture.'

Whales live in groups (pods).  Whales create songs, which change over time and which other unrelated whales will pick up and repeat.  One study showed that a whale song recorded near Australia was found repeated by a different group of whales near Japan without the two groups ever coming into contact, meaning that one whale song was so catchy to whales that they learned it, repeated it, disseminated it across different groups, and even improved or improvised on it (some portions had altered in minor ways).  While not to come across as a rabid animal rights activist, I am an animal lover.  I have two dogs, and they are my world.  While I haven't had much contact with whales - I've seen a few on vacation in Alaska and during my travels in South Africa - they truly are amazing creatures.  But I'm straying from my point - whales construct solid, often unrelated groups; they organize for self-defense; many different types of whales occupy only two places - the warm tropics for birthing and the cold Arctic or Antarctic waters for rich food sources - which could be construed as homes, much the same way snowbirds in the US migrate from the NE to Florida for the winter; and if we use the anthropological definition, then whales most certainly have what constitutes a 'culture' through their construction of songs and their alteration by other unrelated groups of whales.

So this gets me back to my point:  if whales constitute a culture, then why is it that their hunting does not result in murder charges; or at the very least, why are we not having a serious discussion about what human laws apply to animals?  I think the immediate response of many people would fall somewhere along the lines of, "oh, they're not human.  This is just another obnoxious, insufferable, and paternalistic liberal ploy."  And to a degree, they have a point, at least in theory.  But it also seems to me, at least in theory, that this is very resemblant of another discussion we had among different ethnicities not too long ago.  In the early 20th century, people of color the world across were denied rights on the basis that they were "not fully human," "not ready for political inclusion," "too intellectually inferior," or simply "not ready" for political rights and the legal protections that those entail.  And these were people of the same species who were levying these charges against one another, never mind a trans-species accusation of inhumanity.  My larger point is this:  at least by the definition we are using at the moment to define 'society' or 'culture,' many groups/species of whales are societies.  They are part of our world, and although they don't respect internationally-recognized boundaries (the bastards!), they should at least, if we are being consistent, be protected by international law in the same manner that a captain murdering a first-mate at sea would be tried.  I think if we say "oh, they're just animals" we are forgetting our own process of evolution (in a biological sense, we are animals), and we are falling back into the mire of "ranking" based on intelligence, place of habitation, skin color, or any other odious mode of measure that has been employed over the centuries.  And, my friends, if we have learned anything else from the last two centuries, let us remember what a slippery slope that is.  It was not too long ago in this country - the United States - that African-Americans were considered subhuman, Native Americans were viewed as part of the natural landscape at best (in the same way as pronghorn antelopes or cougars) [and this simplifies an extremely complex process:  Native Americans are of course not the monolithic society that Hollywood portrays them as, and approaches by European-Americans to Native Americans has been hugely variant over time], women were considered incapable of much of anything but birthing children, and our methods of industrial maintenance was to send children into mill machines to release stuck blades.

However, I also think the Sea Shepard folks are no better than the imperialists of old.  In the episode(s) that is on now, the Sea Shepards are trying to end the Faroe Island cultural tradition of driving whales to shore and then dispatching them with knives, hatchets, et cetera.  That tradition dates back to the Vikings - in other words, about a thousand years (or more).  The Faroese aren't taxidermying whales and placing them above their mantles; they are legitimately using them for food.  As a historian of the developing world, and as a human with a healthy resentment of the constant Western attempts to shape the worldview and social practices of others to conform with their own beliefs and world views, this bothers me on an instinctual and on a personal level.  Who is a Canadian Greenpeace founder to judge the cultural practices of Faroe Islanders over the course of a thousand years?  The Faroese are not killing for killing's sake.  While I personally would not participate in such a practice, as long as their prey is not endangered (and thus, at risk to disappearing to the detriment of the human society and human experiment as a whole), I cannot condone the Sea Shepard approach, and I fail to understand how what they do is fundamentally different from what goes on in the waters off the Horn of Africa.  The pretentiousness of Paul Watson (the Sea Shepard chief) is no different than that of missionaries, capitalists, or the Peace Corps folks who spread their gospel worldwide without any kind of understanding of the fact that traditions usually evolve in one place or another for a particular and pragmatic reason.  Didn't build what academics call a "complex society?"  Rather than think it was because natural resources weren't there to exploit (even ones such as water, pastureland, or fuel), these kinds of missionaries always think it is because of some moral shortcoming or societal failure, and never the fact that it is just not practical to build a metropolis in the Namib, and that it is a much better approach to discard agriculture and focus on taking advantage of seasonal bounties across a wide area (as the Khoi and San have done).  Collecting ivory illicitly is one of the worst things one can do?  Tell that to a father with four children to feed, no kind of education, and no kind of access to land to grow his own crops.  Hunting whales is the worst thing one can do?  Well, the Faroese aren't exactly known for their economic prowess the world over, and in the process - again, one that I would not personally involve myself with and that I am not advocating - they get food for their families, which they actually consume?  In addition to that, they contribute to solidifying a cultural and social identity that connects them over time and space to their families, neighbors, and ancestors?  I don't think a Canadian zealot and a ragtag group of international activists have the right to make these kind of judgements and assumptions about other cultures as wantonly as they have done.

That's the end of my musings for the evening - as always, comments, debates, observations, and critiques are always welcome!    

*Please do not let this post be interpreted as my belief that we should be writing huge tomes on the human efforts at mosquito genocide or war crimes against venomous snakes.  I think this is a valid intellectual discussion, and I'd like to hear a trained lawyer's (or better yet, legal scholar - I'm looking at you, Mendenhall, at my first guest blogger) perspective on it.


**Secondly, don't read or distort my opinions to form some belief that I'm comparing people of color to animals.  If that is what you come away with after reading this article, you need medical care.  I am simply making a political, anthropological, and historical point about how the ways in which laws - and those to whom they apply - have changed radically over time, to now including even women, people of color, children, and people of the working class of any race or creed - historically, the most marginalized groups throughout history.


***For the record, there are between 400,000 and 1.3 million pilot whales (the whales hunted in the Faroes) in the North Atlantic.  They are not on the endangered species list.

JOB!!!

Examination of 'Kony 2012'

A few days ago, a new cause celebre exploded onto my Facebook timeline (the discussion about world events and crises on Facebook is for a whole other post entirely):  the viral video 'Kony 2012.'  My first reaction was disgust - not only of the man himself, but that the rest of the world is just now beginning to pay attention to the wars of central Africa.  This is not a new conflict:  this is a decades-old conflict, depending on how you want to determine the genesis.  For the long duree, the Cold War led to both the USSR and the United States propping up reprehensible regimes, in Africa and elsewhere.  Apartheid-era South Africa, Mobutu's Zaire, and white Rhodesia were all supported, in some degree by the U.S.  You can go further back and point towards the tensions established by colonial rule, where 'tribes' were created by white colonialists for the purpose of 'rule'  (Again, 'ethnicity' and 'tribe' in African history and African politics is a discussion for another day).  When African countries began to earn their independence (there was a vast wave of decolonization in the post-war years, although it took decades to change over in some places), they were dependent on one-product economies, usually composed of raw materiel:  oil, diamonds, cocoa, coffee, bananas, et cetera because of the lack of opportunity given to African men and women and because of the desire of imperialists to control these new nations post-independence in an economic sense.  Longer story short, it became harder and harder to run and order these struggling nation-states, and certain tensions began to arise:  ethnic tensions, government resentment, et cetera.  The Rwandan conflict in the mid-1990s should not even be remembered as an exclusively 'Rwandan' conflict:  this was a conflict that raged all over central Africa, transcending ethnicity and national and international borders.  That is our backdrop for Kony's rise, in the riotous, convoluted, on-a-knife-edge order that came to be in the aftermath of the central African genocide.

Something immediately bothered me about the sudden interest in central Africa.  I couldn't put my finger on it - perhaps it was arrogant intellectual indignity on my part ("Jesus, I can't believe these people are JUST NOW paying attention to this - what dunces") or guilt because I hadn't been paying the attention I should to these conflicts in my post-university life - but there was something inherently wrong about people who couldn't find Uganda on a map, knowing nothing of the history or the legacy of imperial rule, the political situation in central Africa suddenly pontificating about events that they, in all probability, fundamentally misunderstood (again, my intellectual arrogance shining through:  apologies to the reader for my faults in this regard).  An old professor of mine - a wonderful woman whom everyone should have the joy to meet - linked to an article by Max Fisher at The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-soft-bigotry-of-kony-2012/254194/) which perfectly described the situation for me.  To Fisher, these philanthropic movements are nothing more than colonialism in new clothes:  attempting to instill Western values and Western solutions to African problems  Before I go further, and lest I lose you, dear reader, let me point out that many charities across the world do wonderful things.  I have no problem with charity groups and aid organizations, so long as they are well-tuned to local concerns and local societal norms and local politics.  The problem with organizations such as the Peace Corps and this Invisible Children catastrophe is that they refuse to include Africans in the solutions.  Fisher says it much better than I can:

"Worst of all, the much-circulated campaign subtly reinforces an idea that has been one of Africa's biggest disasters: that well-meaning Westerners need to come in and fix it. Africans, in this telling, are helpless victims, and Westerners are the heroes. It's part of a long tradition of Western advocacy that has, for centuries, adopted some form of white man's burden, treating African people as cared for only to the extent that Westerners care, their problems solvable only to the extent that Westerners solve them, and surely damned unless we can save them. First it was with missionaries, then "civilizing" missions, and finally the ultimate end of white paternalism, which was placing Africans under the direct Western control of imperialism. And while imperialism may have collapsed 50 years ago, that mentality persists, because it is rewarding and ennobling to feel needed and to believe you are doing something good." (Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012,")


In my personal experience, I have met Peace Corps men and women who were wonderful, idealistic, and energetic individuals who were nothing but a positive for their organization.  I have also met PC individuals who were the worst embodiment of what Fisher describes:  the post-modern 'missionary' (both literal and figurative), spreading the love of America or of Jesus Christ or new technology while denigrating African methods as 'primitive' or 'backwards.'  I once met an American Peace Corps volunteer in Johannesburg who was, and I do not exaggerate, one of the most reprehensible human beings I have ever encountered.  He knew absolutely nothing about the people where he was going, and his impressions of Africa were troubling, to say the least.  Yet again, this one individual is not my overall impression of the Peace Corps, nor do I mean to single out the Peace Corps for my literary venom.  My larger point is that we, as Westerners, have never lost the guilty feeling that we are responsible for uplifting the poor 'savages.'  These organizations, in an intellectual sense, are simply the newest 'sterile' version of colonialism - imposing our values on a political environment, on a culture, on a society that we do not fundamentally understand.  My plea is that we take the time to learn about the new cause celebre before we jump in - and come to the understanding that a bracelet or a video 'repost' on social media is only a method of assuaging guilt, or of saving face in one's social community.  We should be very concerned about the situation with Kony - but we surely cannot be so arrogant that we believe that Africans are not able or willing to solve their own problems with African solutions.  That has been the Western mindset for centuries, and it has only brought misery.  Let us remember to keep faith in our fellows, and remember that local solutions are almost always the best option.

The Perils of Homeownership and Similar Occurrences

Let it be said, first of all, that I absolutely love and adore my house and my property.  I could not be happier here - I'm perfectly situated for the best view in the world (in my opinion, at least), I have good, supportive neighbors, I have nature surrounding me in all her glory, and I have room to breath fresh air and to run without impedance.  That being said, country home ownership is much more difficult than city ownership, as I have had to learn the hard way.

I have never been on a septic system personally.  When I was a senior in high school, my family moved to a house on the local lake that was on a septic, but I really only lived there for a few months before I left for a job in Mississippi and then for college.  I remember hearing a story from my father about the time a 'dozer  backed over his septic line and caused a problem, but I didn't realize how bad it could potentially get.

A few nights ago, when nothing out of the ordinary was happening (be warned:  this is PRECISELY when you should be scared to death, horror movie connoisseurs; not when the virgin goes alone into the woods), I had a minor septic backup.  I say 'minor' because it could have been a heck of a lot worse - I had backup in places it could be relatively easily cleaned - tubs, showers, and the like.  Nothing got into my carpet, so all things considered, I (naively) thought, things could be a lot worse.

Like any good homeowner, I called the local plumbing service I trust to give me an estimate.  They came out, on Sunday, on one of our worst winter days of the year (30s, rainy, windy, just generally brutal).  They couldn't finish their work with the equipment they had, so they returned today (naturally, as I would have, when it was nice and sunny and in the 50s).  They got a mini-dozer on my very hilly yard, with about 10 inches to spare.  I was scared to death the entire time they dug - I had visions of the 'dozer operator sliding off the berm, then off the next two berms, and then finally onto my asphalt driveway.  Anyway, they found that my septic system had the worst root infestation they had ever seen.  One of the workers could almost stand on the roots infiltrating the roof of my septic system - it was that bad.  So, after some more digging and some more conversation, I learned that remedying this problem is going to cost somewhere in the general proximity of several vintage motorcycles, a mysteriously procured human organ in some particular localities, and probably an average Tuesday afternoon for Lindsey Lohan.  It's not looking good.

This seems bad, but I keep reminding myself to take this all in stride.  Things could be a lot worse - I could be like the majority of the world and not have a way to fix this; it could have flooded my entire main floor; my dogs could have drank from the septic system and gotten horribly sick; it goes on and on.  In the past few years, I've really begun to realize how much I have to be thankful for.  Maybe it's age, maybe it's finally slowing down, maybe it's finally starting to be an adult, rather than the perpetual childhood that accompanies graduate studies.  Maybe it's finally getting tired of feeling sick and sad at times, and realizing that positive thinking and keeping a positive attitude is such an important component of 'happiness' in and of itself.  I've witnessed over the past few days precisely the kind of havoc unhappiness can wreak upon a family, upon an individual, and upon a community.  A significant part of depression is finding little slivers of happiness or enjoyment and finding ways to hang on to them with all you've got.  Once you turn the corner to resentment and anger, it's hard to remedy the destruction that that thought process engenders.  The victim mentality sets in, and all of the sudden it seems like the entire world is against you - rather than relying on what you do have, you focus on the negative aspects and suddenly the world is a much darker and more dangerous place.  Alienation instead of support; exile instead of community.  Which, to my thinking, is really the coward's way out.  It's very easy to quit once difficulty arises - that's as apparent in sports, relationships, and work as it is in life.  But in my mind and in my experience, finding ways to stay positive in the face of adversity is part of what defines us as a person.  One can decide the world is against you, and quit - quit trying to better yourself, your community, and those around you.  Or you can redirect that energy into the positive - if you feel something is wrong, work to remedy it any way you can - through volunteerism, through music, through trying something new and untested instead of the misdirected anger and resentment that has untracked you in the first place.  It just takes so much energy to remain angry and resentful - it brings everyone around you down and more importantly, it brings you down yourself.  There's enough hate and incompassion in the world - why contribute your own considerable energies and talents to it?  Why not try to be happy in the face of adversity, despite the very presence of said adversity?  Resentment and unhappiness, in my personal experience, begin within - and spitting forth venom serves to weaken not only those around you, but most importantly, you.

That's enough proselytizing from me for the night.  Just know that no matter how poorly things seem now - and how bad this cliche is - things are brighter in the future, once you dedicate your energy to your capacity to develop and to change.  Negativity breeds negativity, and positivity breeds good things in yourself and in those around you.