This is an exerpt from an interview I did with Alex Steed for the Millennials Changing America blog. He has been collecting perspectives from youth organizers about the successes failures and dynamics of year one of the Obama administration and was interested in my "outsiders perspective". I'm now officially a token Aussie. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiAN5l4QE]
Updates from the Civil Rights battle of our times
Gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our times, the clearest and most blatant example we still have of institutionalised discrimination against a group of peope in our society. In America the battle is primarily being fought state-by-state as progressive chafe at the lack of progress at a Federal level, where the noxious 'Defence of Marriage Act' waits to be repealed.
This has been a one-step-forward, two-steps-back week for same-sex marriage, following in a year of mostly set-backs, starting with the passage on November 4 last year of Proposition 8 which rolled back gay marriage in California and then seeing the same happen in Maine last month. Against the strong hopes of many the New York State Senate on Tuesday rejected a bill already passed in the lower house which would have legalized gay marriage. This is a particular blow given the progressive tilt of New York and the $1 million spent by pro same-sex marriage organizations over the past year. Despite the confidence of many it wasn't even close, going down 38-24.
There was some good news this week though and I'm thrilled to say it was out of Washington DC. Also on Tuesday the DC Council voted 11-2 to legalize same-sex marriage in the District. This is the first of three steps towards full legalization. A second vote is needed in two weeks, likely to pass by the same margin, and then there will be 30 days of Congressional review (because DC doesn't have true democracy) but with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress it would be very unlikely to be blocked.
This vote has come after months of heated debate. Anti-gay marriage groups (led by the Catholic church) are still advertising on buses in the District but have lost their push to subject same-sex marriage to a public referendum. On November 17 the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics ruled that the issue could not go for a public vote as it does 'not present a proper subject of initiative because it would authorize discrimination prohibited under the Human Rights Act (“HRA”).'
Quite right too, fundamental human rights should not be up for a vote. Discrimination is unconstitutional (not to mention immoral), whatever the majority might feel at this moment in time. This, by the way, is why Australia needs a Human Rights Act.
The next battleground seems to be New Jersey where there is a push for the Democrat-controlled legislature to vote on same-sex marriage within the next few weeks, before the Republican Governor-elect takes office in January.
One step at a time, this issue will go the right way, the arc of history bends towards equality. The bigots are standing against this tide, but they will lose. To see the truth of this you only need to look at this graph:
Moreso even than the normal left-right or red state/blue state divides support for same-sex marriage is determined by age. Even in the most progressive state, Massachusetts, the 65+ age group is less supportive of same-sex marriage than the 18-25 year-olds in the most conservative state, Alabama. It really is only a matter of time. But that's no cause for complacency. Every day that some people are denied rights afforded to the rest of us due to their sexual orientation is a tragedy and a crime.
If you're in the US you can get a free I love love sticker (seen at the top of this post) from Credo Action here.
The Republican Mindset
See if you can follow this logic, from an interview Republican Senator Orrin Hatch gave to a conservative outlet on Monday. Speaking about the proposed health care reforms he said:
If they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, 'All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.'
That's their goal. That's what keeps Democrats in power. Do I believe they're that diabolical? I don't believe most of them are, but I think some of them are. Maybe diabolical's too harsh of a word, but the fact is, they really, really believe in socialized medicine.
So, to recap: the Democrats are "diabolical" in their desire to expand affordable healthcare to all Americans, a scheme which will threaten the two-party system by making people grateful for policies which actually help them.
Well, yeah. A humble suggestion: try proposing policies which help average people yourself. To do that though you would have to believe in the role and potential efficacy of government, and most Republican don't.
Watch the exchange:
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more about "Senator Hatch: Healthcare reform bill...", posted with vodpod
Censorship or Protest?
I was interested to watch the kerfuffle in England over the past several days over the appearance on the BBC's premier political talk show, Question Time, of Nick Griffith, leader of the neo-Fascist and overtly racist British National Party. Critics from across the political spectrum have condemned the BBC's decision to give a far-right party such exposure while the BBC have said it is not their role to censor and if a legally-constituted political party has a fair degree of public support they should be included in the debate, and subjected to fair questioning. The BNP won two seats in the elections for the European Parliament and have several council seats, including in London where they won over 5% in the Mayoral elections.
A protest was held outside the BBC's studio during taping on Thursday which resulted in several protesters breaking through police lines and into the BBC's foyer.
A debate which began prior to airing of Question Time has continued after it, centered around the question of how to best deal with extremism in a democratic society. Is the BNP better ignored or exposed? Is it more effective to protest outside or ask informed pointed questions inside, as the Question Time audience did?
One aspect of this debate, which I've largely been reading through the pages of the Guardian newspaper, is how strikingly thoughtful it is. Unlike in America when people talk of fascism the thing they are describing is at least somewhat fascistic. The commentators seem to be geniunely wrestling with hard questions, not simply scoring political or culture war points.
The incident reminded me of a time while I was at university when the deeply unpopular (to university students) Minister for Education visited the campus to give a speech. A decent-sized student protest took place outside the hall he was speaking in. I was one of the protesters and, like most of the others, filed into the hall for the speech itself when the time came. The boos and cat-calls began during the introduction and rose to an impossible volume, accompanied by feet-stomping and chanting, when the Minister himself got up to give his speech. He soon had to abandon the attempt.
I was both saddened and annoyed at the time. Despite my passionate opposition to much the government was doing, and my active participation in the protest prior to the speech, I had wanted to hear what he had to say, and was looking forward to the tough questions I was sure would follow. And I strongly felt, and still do, that actions of this kind present the advocates for your cause, and by extension the cause itself, in a very unfavourable light.
I think all three of these actions - protest, listening, and questioning - are critical and fundamental to a democracy. When protest becomes an alternative to, or is used as a tool to prevent, either listening or genuine questioning, as has been the case with the Tea Party protests at Town Hall meetings (and, on the left, by Code Pink and others), our democracy is diminished but so too is our cause.
I find it hard to believe that anyone is ever convinced by shouting. When people shout at us our reasoning shuts down. We stop listening, because we know that there will be no reciprocity, no dialogue.
The people who most effectively stood in opposition to the vile policies of the BNP were the Question Time audience inside, who exposed these policies through informed questioning, while still giving Nick Griffith his chance to speak, not those who threw themselves at police lines and chanted outside.
Protest is a vital part of free speech and can be an effective political tactic, but when it is used to deny the speech of others it is neither.
WWII Veteran on same sex marriage
I found this video so moving. This is the heart of the gay marriage debate - the right of all people to be equal, to have their love honoured and recognised the same as anyone else. Phillip knows that giving these rights to others not only does not threaten straight marriage but ennobles it, and the country. Freedom is only real when it is shared equally. What on earth could those who oppose equal rights say to this? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrEbJBFWIPk]
Transcript:
Good morning, Committee. My name is Phillip Spooner and I live at 5 Graham Street in Biddeford. I am 86 years old and a lifetime Republican and an active VFW chaplain. I still serve three hospitals and two nursing homes and I also serve Meals on Wheels for 28 years. My wife of 54 years, Jenny, died in 1997. Together we had four children, including the one gay son. All four of our boys were in the service. I was born on a potato farm north of Caribou and Perham, where I was raised to believe that all men are created equal and I've never forgotten that. I served in the U.S. Army, 1942-1945, in the First Army, as a medic and an ambulance driver. I worked with every outfit over there, including Patton's Third Army. I saw action in all five major battles in Europe, and including the Battle of the Bulge. My unit was awarded Presidential Citations for transporting more patients with fewer accidents than any other [inaudible] I was in the liberation of Paris. After the war I carried POW's back from Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and also hauled hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany.
I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, "Do you believe in equal, equality for gay and lesbian people?" I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, "What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?" I haven't seen much, so much blood and guts, so much suffering, much sacrifice. For what? For freedom and equality. These are the values that give America a great nation, one worth dying for.
I give talks to eighth grade teachers about World War II, and I don't tell them about the horror. Maybe [inaudible] ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau. I've seen with my own eyes the consequences of caste systems and it make some people less than others, or second class. Never again. We must have equal rights for everyone. It's what this country was started for. It takes all kinds of people to make a world war. It does make no sense that some people who love each other can marry and others can't just because of who they are. This is what we fought for in World War II. That idea that we can be different and still be equal.
My wife and I did not raise four sons with the idea that three of them would have a certain set of rights, but our gay child would be left out. We raised them all to be hard-working, proud, and loyal Americans and they all did good. I think it's too bad [inaudible] want to get married, they should be able to. Everybody's supposed to be equal in equality in this country. Let gay people have the right to marry. Thank you.
Maine votes on Proposition 1, which would overturn the state's law allowing same sex marriage, on November 3. The current polling is 48% in favour, 48% opposed. Go to No on 1: Protect Maine Equality for more information.
Blog Action Day | The work that needs doing
Climate change is the over-riding challenge of our age. Even as I sometimes despair of our capacity to take action there is a small thrill in living in such a historic time. The whole of human history has come to this and we must make a choice as a civilization to adapt or, in all liklihood, die. In the very least there'll be hell to pay if we fail to rise to the needs of this moment.
As is often the case with complex problems we are challenged by climate change on two levels: adaptive and technical.
Technical challenges require the use of existing knowledge and skills to find a solution. The technical challenge here is political; we urgently require legislative action to limit and wind back our carbon expenditure. We must ensure that the price of goods reflects their true cost, not simply in the manufacture, distribution and marketing but also in the cost to the environment. We need an international agreement which has the developed world taking the lead but also the developing world following, with technology transfer to assist them along.
The only way we're likely to get this progress is through sustained organising and advocacy which will embolden far-sighted political leadership to facilitate a consensus. We did it with CFC's and can, and must, do it again.
This may be enough to prevent a catastrophe. The increasing cost of carbon and removal of government subsidies will make coal power increasingly uncompetitive and spur investment in renewable technologies.Cars will move through hybrids to plug-in electric vehicles and beyond. The cost of travel will rise and food grown locally will gain a cost advantage over that which prices-in thousands of miles of travel. The value of preserving forests for carbon credits will outweigh that of cutting them down, so much so that governments take their protection seriously.
We can progressively decarbonize in ways which will have surprisingly little impact on most people's lives, except those in the specific industries affected. No-one cares where their electricity comes from, they just want the light to work when they flick the switch. Likewise with cars, for most people they just need to work efficiently to transporting them from A to B. New cars invented in a carbon-conscious world will make today's internal combustion vehicles look like the dinosaurs they are.
However as we rise to the challenge of the climate crisis there is a second possible dimension we can address it on, as an adaptive challenge.
Adaptive challenges go beyond what we know how to do and require us to consider our values. Adaptive problems are often seen as threatening to someone or a group. There is often compromise and loss involved. In other words, adaptive problems are cultural, they force us to consider our values systems and priorities.
Climate change is an adaptive challenge because in addressing it we must consider our relationship with the planet. We must weigh profit in the present with environmental stability in the future; our wants against the next generations needs. We will have to give something up, from overseas trips to new appliances. For many it will cost them their job, forcing disorienting and frightening restructuring of communities. For some countries it may be the end of boom times as the world weens itself off coal and oil. While legislating is a largely technical exercise, reaching international consensus on action also requires adaptive leadership.
If we can manage these compromises, stand by those most affected both by the crisis and its solution, decarbonize our power and redesign our neighbourhoods, the change to our civilization could be much more profound than simply lowered levels of carbon emissions.
We could reconsider our relationship with the earth, understand ourselves as a part of a greater whole, and live in way which honours this symbiosis, focused on stewardship, sustainability and respect.
This is the change we should be aiming for.
This post was written as part of Blog Action Day 2009. Blog Action Day takes place each October 15 and united bloggers around the world in posting on the same theme, with the aim of sparking discussion of an issue of global importance. This year's theme is climate change.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CnIJ19EVMo]
Obama's Nobel
I've been thinking about Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize quite a bit over the past couple of days and, as excited and hopeful as I am about the Obama administration, it really doesn't feel entirely right. Regardless of how you feel about whether he deserves the award I think we would all agree that giving a President only 9 months into his term the world's foremost career-achievement award makes it only too easy for those that wish to dismiss both the President and the award while leaving many supporters surprised and non-plussed.
It is not hard to make a compelling case that Obama deserves the award according to the criteria outlined in Alfred Nobel's will:
during the preceding year [...] shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
I believe that Obama's election, in-and-of-itself, created an extraordinary change in the world's view of America and America's understanding of itself. The way he ran his campaign and the ideals he expressed empowered millions of Americans and inspired many millions more around the world to believe another world was possible.
Changes in atmosphere, in tone, in people's conception of what is possible, constitute real changes which can indicate a deep, cultural shift in a society. Communicating, defining and inspiring are important parts of the president's role, and a crucial element in what Ron Heifetz calls 'Adaptive Leadership'. This is leadership that produces a shift in values and allows society to understand and confront the real issues, in contrast to 'Technical Leadership' which is focused on the application of existing knowledge for incremental fixes.
However I still wish the Nobel Committee had waited. There's no doubt that Obama will be at the center of world events for the entirely of his presidency, and I believe, and we all must hope, that in many of the years ahead he will make more concrete steps towards peace and disarmament, the protection of human rights and real action on climate change than those that have occurred thus far.
However necessary it is to bring about changes in atmosphere and behavior it is insufficient to be considered a great, or even effective, president. For that these changes must be leveraged into legislative and policy progress. And Obama has a lot of work to do to achieve this, and the places where progress has been made are not those most related to peace building but rather domestic concerns, especially the American economy and next, it is hoped, domestic health care.
I am hopeful that over the next year or two Obama will finalize the closing of Guantanamo Bay, withdraw US forces from Iraq and lead the world to an agreement to take meaningful action on climate change (and then get domestic legislation passed to make this action real). I even hope he will find time to focus on pushing for a final Israel/Palestinian peace agreement. Any of these things might justify receiving the Nobel Prize and would make it easier for supporters to unabashedly celebrate the win and harder for critics to dismiss it. And there were certainly other strong candidates from the past year. Morgan Tsvangirai would also have been a deserving winner for instance.
In the end I hope that this Nobel Peace Prize is, as Obama said, "a means to give momentum to a set of causes." These causes need all the momentum they can get.
How late is too late?
Last night The Day After Tomorrow was on cable. It was one of the spate of big-budget Hollywood disaster porn films which came out in the late-nineties and early noughties which I had not seen before. The disaster in this film is a sudden and catastrophic ice age, triggered by the melting of the Artic and Greeland ice sheets, stopping the North Atlantic Current which keeps most of Europe and North America habitable and which, over the course of just a few days, freezes half the Northern Hemisphere, setting the scene for the heroic "struggle to survive" scenes always featured in movies of this ilk. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnvqsWVluCE]
So the film is, obviously, a bit over the top, and riddled with scientific inaccuracies as these things always are. But the general premise of government's refusing to take action on global warming until it's way, way too late is something that it's becoming increasingly hard to believe won't happen. Being in America is filling me with despair about our capacity to respond in time to avoid catastrophe and never more-so than when I saw this poll conducted by the University of Maryland, which asked people in 19 countries to rank on a scale of 1-10 how high a priority their government should place on addressing climate change:
America stands out as being, of the countries polled, uniquely disinterested in government action to address climate change. And whereas the Iraqi's and Palestinians justifiably have other things they think their government should be focusing on, in America the blame can only be placed on the presence of a well-funded denialist lobby, replaying exactly the delaying tactics of the tobacco industry. Their goal is not to prove that climate change is not happening, but to sow enough doubt about the science to forstall real action. So far they've been extremely successful, especially in the US and, sadly, Australia. The above poll shows just how successful, and what a steep hill we have to climb to get real action here in the world's greatest carbon emitter, without whom no strategy to address climate change can be successful.
This reminded me of a letter I read years ago, by Paul Gilding, former CEO of Greenpeace International, on the 10th anniversary of the founding of Ecos Corporation, which he has since left. The letter was entitled Scream, Crash, Boom. In it he declared that environmentalists had lost, that despite thirty years of concerted efforts, the development of huge global NGOs and contribution of millions of hours of activism, the chance to avert catastrophic climate change had passed. The forces resisting this change were just too big, or the tactics used had been insufficient, whatever the reason all the shouting for change (the "Scream" of the title) had failed to move enough people to force the world's governments to take action. "We tried. We failed. It is what it is."
Therefore the Crash is coming, where we will see the impact of climate change in very real and terrible ways, whether through a Day After Tomorrow-style snap ice age, pandemic bird flu, peak oil or drought for decades without end (which seems to have already arrived in much of Australia). Millions will be displaced or, potentially, killed. "However it unfolds, it is certainly in my judgement going to be ugly, probably very ugly. You can’t keep messing with the system that feeds you, eating away at your capital without bad stuff happening in response."
However then would come the "Boom", the explosion of human ingenuity possible when we are mobilized around an immediate problem. Humans are unique in our ability to adapt and change, we are just not very good at doing so until we absolutely have to (and sometimes not even then). When we are confronted with problems we experience first-hand, when people start dying (in the Western World) we will respond. "When we do, it’s going to be really interesting. We’ll reinvent cars that make today’s technology look as primitive and stupid as it is. We’ll have energy created everywhere as our roofs and cars become generators rather than consumers of power. Water will just go around and around our houses and we’ll use it on the way through."
I wish I was as optimistic as Paul. I think the Crash is inevitable, we are doing pitifully little to prevent it, and most Americans think we should be doing little more. Where leadership is needed we instead have denial, obfuscation and confusion. So long as there are dollars to be made. But the Crash is coming, and there are dollars to be made in helping us respond to this challenge as well. So how late will we wait, how bad will it need to be before denial turns into action?
Even if we have lost the opportunity to prevent destruction and displacement there is still so much to fight for, every day we lose to inaction will make the Crash worst, the correction harder, the loss of life greater. Every day is another chance to turn it around, before it is truly too late.
While looking up the link to Paul's original Scream, Crash, Boom letter from 2005 I discovered he wrote an updated, Scream, Crash, Boom II letter last year, where he claimed that the "Great Disruption" has already begun:
I want to be clear though that this is not the “end of the world”. It does, however herald an unparalleled era of system stress, economic stagnation and social tension – a global emergency during which we’ll evolve a new economic model and then rebuild. I call it The Great Disruption because it is most likely to be a disruption in society’s evolutionary process, rather than the collapse of civilisation.
It's worth reading in full. And then it's worth considering what you can do, to change both your lifestyle and the minds of your fellow citizens, to help bring about the change we need.
Related: the Pentagon has begun studying the national security implications of Climate Change, which may require military intervention to "deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics".