"...and can absorb the certainty that some will freeload..." is a very important point in your comments on the homeless. There seems to be a trend in thinking that we should avoid doing good if even the tiniest minority will freeload. No! If we really think we are a Christian society (I'm looking at you, right wingers) then we need to help those less fortunate, even if some will take undue advantage of us.
So does your recent snarky response to the person who asked how to unsubscribe mean that by hitting “unsubscribe” I can also stop my paid subscription? Because what I thought might be a serious forum for discussion and debate has turned into the usual “social media” mutual insult contest, and I no longer wish to support such juvenilia. Serious question.
Eric, I believe you may be missing David Applegate's specific complaint. You do indeed allow contrary comments in the PS, but all too often they are attacked not with reason and logic, but simply personal insults and name calling.
Your readership largely mirrors your liberal views (although you are more a classic liberal than a far left progressive), and the use of course language and branding other views as not just incorrect, but as morally lacking and evil, simply becomes a self-gratifying echo chamber that does not in any way contribute to information and understanding.
I greatly enjoy a debate of competing ideas and policies with facts, statistics and reason, and I discern that is what David Applegate is seeking.
We have the Russians dropping ordinance close to nuclear plants and you are worried about who Pat Sajak takes pictures with? How about some perspective here!
Does the “euphemism treadmill” work? I don’t have a disability (no slur intended) so I can’t personally judge the relief it provides. Of course, the underlying urge to use differences and stereotypes as insults keeps the treadmill turning. But sometimes, for example with “deaf” there isn’t any slur. How does switching from “Are you deaf?” to “are you hearing-impaired?” change anything?
As I understand it, "deaf" is (still) considered an appropriate and welcomed term. I do think language matters and it shapes cultural attitudes, but I also think we all need to be forgiving of those who are a few terminological beats behind.
I know a guy who just calls EVERYONE "Jimmy". He's only right occasionally, but never is accused of calling someone anything considered "innapropriate".
You can be hearing impaired, yet not deaf. I consider them separate terms. Many in the Deaf community consider deafness as a difference, not a disablity, as hearing impaired implys.
There are also members of the deaf community that oppose chochlear implants which would deny the deaf identity, and 'correct' something that is a difference and not a disability.
March 30, 1998 SILENCE IS GOLDEN FOR DEAF WHO FEAR LOSS OF IDENTITY
BYLINE: Eric Zorn.
What happens when a magic snake slithers out of folklore and into reality?
The snake, a powerful talking serpent, appears in a fable that introduces "Sweet Nothing in My Ear," a play now in previews at the Victory Gardens Theater. It offers the gift of flight to one among a family of flightless birds; in ex-change, though, the bird must give up the very condition--flightlessness--that in many ways has defined its life.
"You must choose carefully," says the snake. "Where do you belong?"
The bird's dilemma is not resolved in the play, but the story raises questions about identity that for most of us and through most of history have been hypothetical. Would we magically change ourselves if we could? And if we did, who would we be?
For the deaf, that hypothetical question has become real in the '90s with the introduction of electronic devices that can be implanted in the ear to transmit auditory signals to the cochlea. In some deaf patients, particularly the young, these implants create a functional semblance of hearing.
But the deaf, unlike most others among the differently abled, have taken such pride in their distinct culture, language and sense of community that many of them now argue deafness is a blessing, not a disability. They insist they are not defective, and they hope--even pray--their own children are born deaf.
I admit that when I used to hear such talk I considered it rationalization, an admirable attempt to be content with the gifts the deaf have and not to dwell on that which nature has denied them. After all, it's easiest and perhaps best to persuade yourself you don't want something you can't have when the alternative is fruitless longing.
But it seems I was wrong. The deaf weren't bluffing. The advent of cochlear implants touched off what Deaf Life magazine called an "explosive controversy" within that community as technology appeared to offer the promise of fixing that which they strongly maintained was never broken.
"Sweet Nothing in my Ear," which premiered last year in Los Angeles and formally opens a seven-week run here Saturday, is the first mainstream entertainment to bring this issue to a general audience. The idea is not to advance one point of view, said playwright Stephen Sachs, who is hearing, but to prompt "audience members to argue about it in the car on the way home."
The metaphorical bird in the story is an 8-year-old boy who has recently gone deaf. His father, who is hearing, becomes intrigued and then obsessed with the idea of restoring at least some of the boy's hearing through a surgical implant. But his mother, who is deaf, is opposed to the idea.
"Everything is as it should be," she says.
The play is performed in American Sign Language with oral interpretations. We learn early in the first act that ASL for cochlear implant is almost identical to the gesture for vampire--"something evil that draws the life out of you," as a character says--a conceit followed up in later clashes in which deaf characters (played by deaf actors) equate im-plants with self-hatred and cultural genocide.
"The majority always thinks that each minority wants to be like them," sneers one.
But the hearing father is no straw man, and his counter-arguments that some form of hearing is better than no hear-ing for the boy--if not his deaf mother and her deaf family--are hard to dismiss.
Deafness may not concern you, but "Sweet Nothing . . ." is really about more than that. It's about the magic snakes that are slithering into reality all over, in advanced plastic surgical techniques and genetic engineering, for example. The same sorts of once purely speculative questions that are now actual matters of choice among the deaf will face many of us someday, and it's never too early to start thinking about the answers.
Good column. I have no issue with adults choosing to live as they please. But when does the government, or society, have the right to intervene? Is denying a child a medical procedure that would correct a serious disability child abuse? If deafness is not a serious disability, then what is? Would it be ethical to allow the adult to use genetic engineering to induce the preferred disability in utero? How are we supposed to differentiate disability from difference? When science learns how to adjust gender alignment and sexual preference will that be ethical, and at what developmental age? When we are able to correct congenital diseases will that be optional or required? These issues are more acute when everything is normal. Or God's plan. Or fate.
Science has already learned how to adjust the sex of the body, but it is the current considered judgment of the medical and scientific community that gender identity and sexual orientation are essential to who a person is and cannot be changed.
“ Call me a socialist, but I think everyone should have a clean, safe, climate controlled indoor space to sleep as well as enough food to eat and access to basic health care, which obviously includes mental health care. I believe human decency demands it and that a nation as rich as ours can afford it and can absorb the certainty that some people will freeload off taxpayers.”
This is why I follow you. And though I can be a callous smartass, I agree with you on this 100%.
I would like to imagine that the drone scenario would work, and it is probably worth a try. But the Police1 scenario had two magical moments. The sudden appearance of cars that can block in the driver without the driver being aware or able to avoid it. And ignoring the likelihood that the occupants of the car would simply bale out and run, knowing the police cannot chase them on foot. But drones are far cheaper than helicopters and the ability to launch and guide a drone from the pursuing police car could be a plus. Another idea which I like, is the ability to tag a car with a tracking device launched from a police car. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/police-in-minnesota-can-launch-tracking-device-from-their-vehicles-onto-stolen-cars/
Another idea is to allow the police to access the GPS system built into the car, as when an owner can activate ONStar.
For many conservatives, the premier adage is that we should each pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. I happen to agree with that - IF people have the resources to do that. But John F Kennedy once observed that we, as a people, have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that life is fair. (If you care enough, you can look it up - start with "Cuban Missile Crisis.") My brother was a college professor who ended up homeless due to childhood diabetes that became so chronic he could not continue his career. He ended up on the streets, spent some time in shelters, and died in his car - too far gone to ask his family for help. I defy anyone to say that this was his fault. Homelessness has many faces, and it is just so sad that we expect everyone to be able to go it alone.
With reference to "fake newspapers", Mr. Zorn commented, "the fact that most recipients either don't subscribe or don't have access to a conventionally trustworthy area newspaper makes them ripe targets for ... downright false journalism". In my neck of the woods, GOP candidates for the mid-term elections are creating lengthy tv commercials blaming the Biden administration for the high price of gas and food, as well as the immigration crisis. People who aren't knowledgeable about economics and favor the red stance will believe these falsehoods.
It has often been my experience, among many friends in the often-homeless zone, that they are occasionally happy enough to find shelter and sustenance in housing communities of various degrees of severity in rules they must follow to remain there, but usually in fairly short order they are back out on the streets, sleeping in park shrubbery, makeshift tents, stairwells or open doorways, over air shafts or under bridges, telling me they need their “freedom” or “independence” or “autonomy” or “agency” or whatever word is circulating around them and their social workers to try to describe the persistent, nagging need they have (sometimes drug- or alcohol-inspired) to live their lives the way they want to, undisturbed by our world’s more common social norms — like showing up for work on time, paying rent, maintaining a civil level of sobriety or cleanliness, attending to the needs, wants, concerns, fears of others — even our concerns and fears for their own health and well-being. For, after all, that’s only OUR sense of well-being, not necessarily theirs. They will often be quick and sharp to remind me.
Very good comment regarding Helen Lewis and Chaédria LaBouvier. I have some sympathy for any public figure that would like to have control over what is written about them and are suspicious or hostile towards writers that they do not like or cannot control. But that is not possible in a free speech society. The interesting new spin is the anti-racist notion that only 'legitimate' black writers or speakers have the right to tell a story or voice an opinion about a racial issue. Ms LaBouvier certainly seems to believe that the Oxford educated, white, Englishwoman Helen Lewis does not have that right.
I think that Ms. Lewis was far too polite, borderline obsequious in fact, in her response to the insulting diatribe that the pompous priss LaBouvier sent her. The proper response to this twit would have been to simply ignore her and quit providing any further publicity that she doesn’t deserve in the first place.
I tend to agree with Eric regarding public responsibility for caring for people that are unable to care for themselves, even at the risk of a small number of freeloaders. But when someone says 'a nation as rich as ours ...' they really mean that we should all be willing to pay higher taxes to pay for something. Or maybe they imagine someone else paying the taxes for the collective moral responsibility. And since the government at all levels already spends far more than is collected in taxes, we have a way to go to add new items. As a priority, I think homelessness and mental health services should be a lot higher than a lot of other government spending, so maybe something else could be cut.
For sure America is rich enough to give everyone shelter, food, healthcare, and clothing (you left that one out.) It seems you think the downside to doing this is that there will be freeloaders. The problem is actually going to accrue to the generations of people who accept this lifestyle. Those who can’t function, or need temporary help, will benefit from a more complete safety net, but those who permanently rely on it rather than contributing productively will suffer. If I were trying to get the most people to voluntarily live as long as possible as a dependent underclass, I think I would need to implement full “no questions asked” life support.
"...and can absorb the certainty that some will freeload..." is a very important point in your comments on the homeless. There seems to be a trend in thinking that we should avoid doing good if even the tiniest minority will freeload. No! If we really think we are a Christian society (I'm looking at you, right wingers) then we need to help those less fortunate, even if some will take undue advantage of us.
So does your recent snarky response to the person who asked how to unsubscribe mean that by hitting “unsubscribe” I can also stop my paid subscription? Because what I thought might be a serious forum for discussion and debate has turned into the usual “social media” mutual insult contest, and I no longer wish to support such juvenilia. Serious question.
Give it a try!
I have been open to printing dissenting views at some length, are you missing that?
Eric, I believe you may be missing David Applegate's specific complaint. You do indeed allow contrary comments in the PS, but all too often they are attacked not with reason and logic, but simply personal insults and name calling.
Your readership largely mirrors your liberal views (although you are more a classic liberal than a far left progressive), and the use of course language and branding other views as not just incorrect, but as morally lacking and evil, simply becomes a self-gratifying echo chamber that does not in any way contribute to information and understanding.
I greatly enjoy a debate of competing ideas and policies with facts, statistics and reason, and I discern that is what David Applegate is seeking.
We have the Russians dropping ordinance close to nuclear plants and you are worried about who Pat Sajak takes pictures with? How about some perspective here!
LOL! He posted commentary about Pat being a right-wing, denier troll, he doesn't seem worried about it.
Republicans are just sad.
Does the “euphemism treadmill” work? I don’t have a disability (no slur intended) so I can’t personally judge the relief it provides. Of course, the underlying urge to use differences and stereotypes as insults keeps the treadmill turning. But sometimes, for example with “deaf” there isn’t any slur. How does switching from “Are you deaf?” to “are you hearing-impaired?” change anything?
As I understand it, "deaf" is (still) considered an appropriate and welcomed term. I do think language matters and it shapes cultural attitudes, but I also think we all need to be forgiving of those who are a few terminological beats behind.
That would be me behind the beat. “Hearing-impaired” is “highly offensive” but “Deaf” is OK, I just learned. According to some : http://www.deaflinx.com/DeafCommunity/identity.html
Pete, It's not easy keeping up!
I know a guy who just calls EVERYONE "Jimmy". He's only right occasionally, but never is accused of calling someone anything considered "innapropriate".
You can be hearing impaired, yet not deaf. I consider them separate terms. Many in the Deaf community consider deafness as a difference, not a disablity, as hearing impaired implys.
There are also members of the deaf community that oppose chochlear implants which would deny the deaf identity, and 'correct' something that is a difference and not a disability.
March 30, 1998 SILENCE IS GOLDEN FOR DEAF WHO FEAR LOSS OF IDENTITY
BYLINE: Eric Zorn.
What happens when a magic snake slithers out of folklore and into reality?
The snake, a powerful talking serpent, appears in a fable that introduces "Sweet Nothing in My Ear," a play now in previews at the Victory Gardens Theater. It offers the gift of flight to one among a family of flightless birds; in ex-change, though, the bird must give up the very condition--flightlessness--that in many ways has defined its life.
"You must choose carefully," says the snake. "Where do you belong?"
The bird's dilemma is not resolved in the play, but the story raises questions about identity that for most of us and through most of history have been hypothetical. Would we magically change ourselves if we could? And if we did, who would we be?
For the deaf, that hypothetical question has become real in the '90s with the introduction of electronic devices that can be implanted in the ear to transmit auditory signals to the cochlea. In some deaf patients, particularly the young, these implants create a functional semblance of hearing.
But the deaf, unlike most others among the differently abled, have taken such pride in their distinct culture, language and sense of community that many of them now argue deafness is a blessing, not a disability. They insist they are not defective, and they hope--even pray--their own children are born deaf.
I admit that when I used to hear such talk I considered it rationalization, an admirable attempt to be content with the gifts the deaf have and not to dwell on that which nature has denied them. After all, it's easiest and perhaps best to persuade yourself you don't want something you can't have when the alternative is fruitless longing.
But it seems I was wrong. The deaf weren't bluffing. The advent of cochlear implants touched off what Deaf Life magazine called an "explosive controversy" within that community as technology appeared to offer the promise of fixing that which they strongly maintained was never broken.
"Sweet Nothing in my Ear," which premiered last year in Los Angeles and formally opens a seven-week run here Saturday, is the first mainstream entertainment to bring this issue to a general audience. The idea is not to advance one point of view, said playwright Stephen Sachs, who is hearing, but to prompt "audience members to argue about it in the car on the way home."
The metaphorical bird in the story is an 8-year-old boy who has recently gone deaf. His father, who is hearing, becomes intrigued and then obsessed with the idea of restoring at least some of the boy's hearing through a surgical implant. But his mother, who is deaf, is opposed to the idea.
"Everything is as it should be," she says.
The play is performed in American Sign Language with oral interpretations. We learn early in the first act that ASL for cochlear implant is almost identical to the gesture for vampire--"something evil that draws the life out of you," as a character says--a conceit followed up in later clashes in which deaf characters (played by deaf actors) equate im-plants with self-hatred and cultural genocide.
"The majority always thinks that each minority wants to be like them," sneers one.
But the hearing father is no straw man, and his counter-arguments that some form of hearing is better than no hear-ing for the boy--if not his deaf mother and her deaf family--are hard to dismiss.
Deafness may not concern you, but "Sweet Nothing . . ." is really about more than that. It's about the magic snakes that are slithering into reality all over, in advanced plastic surgical techniques and genetic engineering, for example. The same sorts of once purely speculative questions that are now actual matters of choice among the deaf will face many of us someday, and it's never too early to start thinking about the answers.
----------
Good column. I have no issue with adults choosing to live as they please. But when does the government, or society, have the right to intervene? Is denying a child a medical procedure that would correct a serious disability child abuse? If deafness is not a serious disability, then what is? Would it be ethical to allow the adult to use genetic engineering to induce the preferred disability in utero? How are we supposed to differentiate disability from difference? When science learns how to adjust gender alignment and sexual preference will that be ethical, and at what developmental age? When we are able to correct congenital diseases will that be optional or required? These issues are more acute when everything is normal. Or God's plan. Or fate.
Science has already learned how to adjust the sex of the body, but it is the current considered judgment of the medical and scientific community that gender identity and sexual orientation are essential to who a person is and cannot be changed.
“ Call me a socialist, but I think everyone should have a clean, safe, climate controlled indoor space to sleep as well as enough food to eat and access to basic health care, which obviously includes mental health care. I believe human decency demands it and that a nation as rich as ours can afford it and can absorb the certainty that some people will freeload off taxpayers.”
This is why I follow you. And though I can be a callous smartass, I agree with you on this 100%.
The visual Tweets were quite good this time. I had a hard time choosing the best one.
I would like to imagine that the drone scenario would work, and it is probably worth a try. But the Police1 scenario had two magical moments. The sudden appearance of cars that can block in the driver without the driver being aware or able to avoid it. And ignoring the likelihood that the occupants of the car would simply bale out and run, knowing the police cannot chase them on foot. But drones are far cheaper than helicopters and the ability to launch and guide a drone from the pursuing police car could be a plus. Another idea which I like, is the ability to tag a car with a tracking device launched from a police car. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/police-in-minnesota-can-launch-tracking-device-from-their-vehicles-onto-stolen-cars/
Another idea is to allow the police to access the GPS system built into the car, as when an owner can activate ONStar.
For many conservatives, the premier adage is that we should each pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. I happen to agree with that - IF people have the resources to do that. But John F Kennedy once observed that we, as a people, have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that life is fair. (If you care enough, you can look it up - start with "Cuban Missile Crisis.") My brother was a college professor who ended up homeless due to childhood diabetes that became so chronic he could not continue his career. He ended up on the streets, spent some time in shelters, and died in his car - too far gone to ask his family for help. I defy anyone to say that this was his fault. Homelessness has many faces, and it is just so sad that we expect everyone to be able to go it alone.
With reference to "fake newspapers", Mr. Zorn commented, "the fact that most recipients either don't subscribe or don't have access to a conventionally trustworthy area newspaper makes them ripe targets for ... downright false journalism". In my neck of the woods, GOP candidates for the mid-term elections are creating lengthy tv commercials blaming the Biden administration for the high price of gas and food, as well as the immigration crisis. People who aren't knowledgeable about economics and favor the red stance will believe these falsehoods.
It has often been my experience, among many friends in the often-homeless zone, that they are occasionally happy enough to find shelter and sustenance in housing communities of various degrees of severity in rules they must follow to remain there, but usually in fairly short order they are back out on the streets, sleeping in park shrubbery, makeshift tents, stairwells or open doorways, over air shafts or under bridges, telling me they need their “freedom” or “independence” or “autonomy” or “agency” or whatever word is circulating around them and their social workers to try to describe the persistent, nagging need they have (sometimes drug- or alcohol-inspired) to live their lives the way they want to, undisturbed by our world’s more common social norms — like showing up for work on time, paying rent, maintaining a civil level of sobriety or cleanliness, attending to the needs, wants, concerns, fears of others — even our concerns and fears for their own health and well-being. For, after all, that’s only OUR sense of well-being, not necessarily theirs. They will often be quick and sharp to remind me.
Very good comment regarding Helen Lewis and Chaédria LaBouvier. I have some sympathy for any public figure that would like to have control over what is written about them and are suspicious or hostile towards writers that they do not like or cannot control. But that is not possible in a free speech society. The interesting new spin is the anti-racist notion that only 'legitimate' black writers or speakers have the right to tell a story or voice an opinion about a racial issue. Ms LaBouvier certainly seems to believe that the Oxford educated, white, Englishwoman Helen Lewis does not have that right.
I think that Ms. Lewis was far too polite, borderline obsequious in fact, in her response to the insulting diatribe that the pompous priss LaBouvier sent her. The proper response to this twit would have been to simply ignore her and quit providing any further publicity that she doesn’t deserve in the first place.
I tend to agree with Eric regarding public responsibility for caring for people that are unable to care for themselves, even at the risk of a small number of freeloaders. But when someone says 'a nation as rich as ours ...' they really mean that we should all be willing to pay higher taxes to pay for something. Or maybe they imagine someone else paying the taxes for the collective moral responsibility. And since the government at all levels already spends far more than is collected in taxes, we have a way to go to add new items. As a priority, I think homelessness and mental health services should be a lot higher than a lot of other government spending, so maybe something else could be cut.
For sure America is rich enough to give everyone shelter, food, healthcare, and clothing (you left that one out.) It seems you think the downside to doing this is that there will be freeloaders. The problem is actually going to accrue to the generations of people who accept this lifestyle. Those who can’t function, or need temporary help, will benefit from a more complete safety net, but those who permanently rely on it rather than contributing productively will suffer. If I were trying to get the most people to voluntarily live as long as possible as a dependent underclass, I think I would need to implement full “no questions asked” life support.