Perilous Dimes

I've been hearing a lot about the possible extension of the Bush tax cuts. I piece I heard on NPR's All Things Considered I found particularloy interesting. The title of the segment was "A History of the Income Tax". The expert they interviewed was Steven Weisman, author of The Great Tax Wars. Weisman focused on the relationship between taxes and war saying, "[The income tax is] always accepted more at a time of war and sacrifice. The income tax was a perfect way to appeal to the egalitarian spirit and the spirit of sacrifice". The parallel can be drawn between taxes and civil liberties during times of war. Americans may be more willing to sacrifice their civil liberties as well as their money when they believe it is directly supporting the war effort. Should the government have the right to raise the income tax during wartime?

Racing Against the Clock

In my math class last week my teacher was talking about his reaction to seeing "Race to Nowhere" during Institute Day. He commented that when he went to New Trier students used to typically take 3-4 majors a year at most and an average Trevian would have 3 or 4 free periods. Due to the increasing pressure to get into college students have since then loaded their schedules with classes. The only people I know with more than two free periods have to take early bird classes to free up their day.
Also last week we had a start of the season basketball meeting. My coach talked about how in order to compete the basketball program has extended to be year round including only two days off during winter break. It seems to me from these two observations that current high schoolers suffer from a shortage of time. And more importantly it seems that more of our days and years are getting filled with activity in the name of competition. When will we run out of time?

Honest Abe?

How does history get edited over time? During my Civil War Civil Liberties project research I stumbled upon an intriguing answer to this ever-present American Studies question. The example is Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe is widely regarded as one of our nation's greatest presidents. His story, or perhaps one version of his story, has been taught to us repetitively during our upbringing especially here in the "Land of Lincoln". I remember Lincoln's life story going something like this: he is born in a log cabin, defiantly learns to read, never tells a lie, out-debates some guy named Douglass, becomes President, beats the Confederacy, gives the Gettysburg Address, frees the slaves, and is shot in an opera house. Most every American's view of Abraham Lincoln is that the man could do no wrong; that he was the ultimate advocate of fairness and freedom. But upon looking closely at the 16th presidents' time in office it's clear this is not the case.
I offer to you as evidence Lincoln's Letter to Erastus Corning and Others. In which he defends his earlier suspension of the right of habeas corpus in order to silence the voice of the Confederacy by detaining Clement Vallandigham without trial. While it's not shocking to learn that for all his accomplishments in the advancements of the rights of the American people Lincoln made mistakes under the pressure of civil war, what I find disturbing is that none of his shortcomings are mentioned in a typical overview of the president. Given the current issues involving habeas corpus and Guantanamo Bay Lincoln's example seems like it would give a perfect historical perspective to the ongoing debate. 

'The credit score of the future'

Anybody who's ever spent any significant time on the web has asked the question: exactly how much does the Internet know about me? Most everyone has experienced those annoying targeted ads in the sidebar. But after reading an article in Newsweek on the topic, I was surprised to find out the extent to which personal information is being collected. The article imagines a future where anyone can access a wealth of your personal information from the web :

Think HMOs, loan applications, romantic partners. Let’s say you’ve been hitting up a burger joint twice a week, and you happen to joke, in a post on Twitter, how all the meat must be wreaking havoc on your cholesterol. Suddenly your health-insurance premiums go up. Now imagine your job is listed on Salary.com; your vacation preferences linked to Orbitz. Think how this could affect your social standing, or your ability to negotiate a raise or apply for a loan.

We talk in class about the FBI tracking seemingly innocent people without warrants. To me this trend seems to be a similar breach of privacy. What Internet sites you visit should be protected by law the First Amendment as a form of free speech. Insurance providers and employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on this information. More than anything this article definitely makes me think twice about where I go on the Internet.

Meta-Post

Looking back at the blog posts that I've done this quarter the first thing that jumps out at me is my tendency to examine the philosophical side of our class discussions. I tend to pose ideas and questions that address why things are the way they are. The two posts where I really did this are "The easiest moral question we've ever had to face" and "'Made with Organic Oats and Soybeans' (And a Bit of Philosophy)". I've said things like, "when scripture is morally wrong, where do we turn for moral guidance?", "the common belief in America is that the most efficient and time-effective way is the best" and "What if the Neo-Nazi movement could buy the rights to the history of the Holocaust?". I wasn't surprised by this trend in my writing; it's usually how I like to think about things. But I have to ask myself: by focusing on the big picture am I making my posts too impersonal and therefore unattractive to my fellow classmates?
The answer, I believe, is yes and no. In "The easiest moral question..." I keep it strictly philosophical. The post, while intellectually stimulating, could comes off as lifeless and cold. "Made with Organic Oats..." on the other hand wrapped my philosophical musings in a nice personal story about a hurried breakfast. That's probably why it got two great comments and "The easiest moral question..." got zero. This is definitely something I'll keep in mind for later posts.
Please assess this post: 'The easiest moral question we've ever had to face'

Benjamin Darling

Our focus on slavery in class recently reminded me of one of my favorite songs (imbedded above). "The Story of Benjamin Darling, Part 1" is by State Radio off of their 2007 album, Year of the Crow. The song is a retelling of a true New England legend about the slave, Benjamin Darling. In the late 1700's he was enslaved to a captain of a boat that traversed the east coast. When the boat was hit by a storm Benjamin saved his master as the boat was wrecked. In return the master freed Benjamin and gave him land on Malaga Island on the mouth of the New Meadows River in Maine. Ben started a family here which eventually grew into an isolated mixed-race community called the Maroon Society. Meanwhile nearby Phippsburg, Maine was becoming a popular summer vacation spot for rich New Englanders. To make the town more attractive the people of Phippsburg decided to rid themselves of the Maroon Society. They attacked Malaga Island by night and killed or sold into slavery all of its inhabitants.
Besides making a great song this story, while only pertinent to a small group of people, has a lot of historical importance. It disproves a number of misconceptions about slavery: that all slaves were field hands tortured by their owners, that there were no significant black communities during slavery, and that all white Northerners were sympathetic to blacks.

'The easiest moral question we've ever had to face'

Earlier this week I found enough free-time to watch one of my favorite shows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The episode concluded as always with a one-on-one interview with a guest. This night's interviewee was Sam Harris author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. It's a very compelling interview. However, a very small portion is relevant to class. When discussing why he believes science can answer moral questions as well as, if not better than, religion Harris says, "The God of Abraham gets slavery wrong. Slavery is probably the easiest moral question we've ever had to face...[Scripture] doesn't get that right."
Not being familiar with the scriptures that he is talking about, I have to take Harris' word, whose job it is to study and write about religion, as truth. While most everyone would agree that slavery is immoral, this quote made me think of a more modern debate. In my mind the same thing can be said about the interpretation of the Bible that condemns gay marriage. Those who use the Bible to support the movement to ban gay marriage need only look at the example of slavery to see that conventional wisdom can be greater than religious doctrine in moral debate.
The daunting and complicated question these examples pose, and which I now pose to you, is when scripture is morally wrong, where do we turn for moral guidance? What, if any, other guiding principles do we share to tell us when something is wrong or right? Harris would argue that the answer is science but I don't fully buy that. Then again I pretty much undecided on all aspects of this question. Slavery may have been the easiest moral question; however, it begets one of the tougher ones.

Swimming Upstream

Our recent discussions on race reminded me of an article in Sports Illustrated that I read over the summer. I thought it was relevant for two reasons. First, it addresses the fact that often when people say a race is naturally bad at something it's usually due to social, rather than physiological factors:

As African-American participation in swimming continued to lag, some came up with explanations for the inability of most blacks to swim. One popular hypothesis—which has since been discredited—proffered by Ohio University's zoology department in a 1969 study titled "The Negro and Learning to Swim," was that blacks weren't as buoyant as whites. Among the reasons cited for this were blacks' purportedly lower lung capacity, heavier bones and poor physiological response to cold. (Dodgers vice president Al Campanis repeated the buoyancy theory in his notorious Nightline appearance in 1987.)

On the other hand it provided a very specific example that affirms Barack Obama's statement that, "so many of the disparities that exist between the African-American community and the larger American community today can be traced directly to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." The fact that African-Americans represent a tiny minority in competitive swimming, while black kids have three times the chance of drowning than white ones is not a result of biological ineptitude, but is instead a remanent of white-only pools. When I think of the places I most often swim in pools (at country clubs, resorts, etc.) it's obviously why economical disadvantaged black families would have a hard time teaching their kids to swim.

'Made with Organic Oats and Soybeans' (And a Bit of Philosophy)

I really enjoyed this week's discussion that arose out of talking about Chicago's grid system. I think a lot of people in the class, myself included, believed that the layout of our sidewalks, roads, and other infrastructure reflected a linear philosophy held by American society. By linear I mean that the common belief in America is that the most efficient and time-effective way is the best. With this in mind I was enjoying a hurried and rather unbalanced breakfast the other day, consisting solely of a "Crunchy Peanut Butter" Clif energy bar. I've come to overlook Clif's dogfood-esque taste and lack of desirable texture for the entertaining anecdotes printed on the back of the bar's wrapper written by Clif's founder and owner, identified there only as "Gary". However, the one I read that morning on my way out the door was especially interesting in light of our discussion:

For me, European bike trips have never been about riding from point A to point B. My buddies and I far prefer the explorative method of riding. Rather than being blown off the bigger red roads by the noise and dust of passing semis, we seek out the serenity and quiet of remote alpine valleys on the smaller white roads - views of massive rock faces and glaciers at every turn. We've carried road bikes on our shoulders over high mountain passes, slid down vast glaciers along side our bicycles, and stumbled upon more quaint villages than I can count. As with our cycling epics, it is the winding road - not the destination - that drives Clif Bar. It's a simpler, more rewarding style of riding - and doing business. From our people, to our products, to our planet, it is on the smaller white road that we choose to travel.

Gary is saying more or less the same thing that Mr. O'Connor did about linear philosophies. What is interesting to me is that we can assume Gary's primary concern is selling Clif bars. Clif's logo is a man climbing an actual cliff with several mountains in the background. It seems to me that Gary and the rest of the Clif company are marketing their energy bars away from mainstream society to the Jon Krakauers and Chris McCandlesses of the world; the wanderers, critical of the status quo. Of course the great irony of this whole story is that while pondering all this I was in the midst of eating the Clif bar as quickly as possible rushing out my door to catch the bus, determinedly trying to get from Point A to Point B is as straight of a line as possible, with no thought for valleys or glaciers.

9/11 and the Redemptive Curve

In class this week we talked a lot about the Redemptive Curve, identified by Dan McAdams as the definitive American story model. This graph begins with a fairly well off person whose life falls to decadence only to swing into a meteoric rise landing them in a better position than they began in. I was thinking of that when I found this opinion column on the New York Times website. The article's author, Tom Sorell, criticizes the natural human response of "returning to normal" after suffering a tragedy. Sorell focuses on 9/11 and its aftermath. Sorell states that he believes that after 9/11, and any emergency for that matter, that it is imperative to avoid the urge to try to simply return everything to normal to show resiliency. Rather, he argues, we should look to change our way of thinking and living to better our lives. To me this represented the crucial moment in the Redemptive Curve, an event so extreme that it causes the protagonist to realize he/she has hit rock bottom and needs the begin the climb back up.
Naturally the question that follows is this: did America make a change for the better or simply return to normal after 9/11? In my opinion the answer is simple. The Patriot Act, an unnecessary war, and discrimination against Muslims in the US all followed the attack that day. In my mind, the attacks on the World Trade Center didn't mark a turning point for the US, in fact they may have accelerated this country's decline. And almost 10 years after 9/11, I have to ask: if that didn't stop it what will?

Million Dollar Idea?

In these first couple weeks of AS it seems a lot our discussions have revolved around the idea of intellectual property. First, Mr. O'Conner rallied against the tried and true, "do your own work," rule in favor of a classroom which relies on collaboration. Mr. Bolos, on the other hand, led an interesting discussion on the privatization of the Internet through Apple's app system. Thinking about these two discussions I had to ask myself, does putting a price-tag on ideas threaten the right to information?
Take for instance the controversy over Myriad Genetics patenting a section of the human genome (Judge Invalidates Human Genome Patent). Myriad is a company that creates and sells breast cancer test kits. If their proposed patent had been validated it would have given them and only them the right to do research and testing with these genes. The ruling in my opinion was the fair one, and Myriad's claim seemed to me obviously ridiculous. But even in failure the patent sets precedent, it challenges the difference between common knowledge and private intellectual property. It conjures up all sorts of terrifying hypothetical scenarios. What if I had to pay Jon Krakauer each time I quoted from Into the Wild? What if the Neo-Nazi movement could buy the rights to the history of the Holocaust? Or if the Suns could patent the pick and roll?
In my opinion ideas and information ought to be as accessible as possible. Ideas, after all, are meant to be shared. Patents and copyrights are meant to defend against theft of intellectual property, not to be used to restrict knowledge and take down the competition, like in Myriad's case. As a full-time student and a part of the Internet addicted generation I depend upon free, accessible, and up-to-date information, and I believe in my right to educate myself free of charge