Summer’s Gone/Never Arrived, or The Bliss of Suburbia and Rural America

 

 

 

 

 

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Summer’s Gone, or The Bliss of Suburbia

by: Heidi Hutner on June 4th, 2013 | 

 

  

I woke this morning, happy to greet summer and looking forward to planting seeds.

Before, there was no time. No time. Never enough time.

This morning. I would make time.

I opened my door to greet the semi-quiet morning. Birds. Lots of birds. The humming of insects. The far away hum of cars.

First, I made coffee and planned to sit on my porch and read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.


I read about the quiet and the red sand and the desert flower, the sexuality of bees and moths burrowing and pollinating. I stopped for a moment and soaked in Abbey’s words on solitude and the expansiveness of the desert and felt his thoughts link with mine. I then scribbled a few words on paper about the end of romantic love, it’s self-enclosed and selfish nature, about how I prefer the expansiveness of loving the earth, of giving to a greater cause.

What a glorious quiet, simple moment: book, pen, notebook, coffee, porch, thoughts.

Then the sound. The blast. The churning BLAST. A wood chip machine?

It is Sunday. The Christians made a law that bans the machines on Sunday.

Yet it blasts and blasts, and the partial silence is gone. The breath. The day.
I wait and hope. Maybe it will stop. Maybe it will go away. It grows louder and louder.

I try to read, to bring back that moment of Desert Solitaire and me. Gone.
The blast continues. Minutes. One hour. Two hours. Three.

I move back inside the house to escape the noise– shut my windows and doors, shut out the industrial noise that is always, always there.

The irony: following the section on the solitude of desert flowers and red rock, Abbey cries out against the industrialization of the national parks in Desert Solitaire. New wide roads were built and brought in millions of tourists and their big machines. Quiet and silence and mystery vanished.

The irony: I moved to the suburbs and bought a house with a yard so I could grow a garden. I moved to a place where I envisioned long solitary walks. A writer’s dream. I imagined peaceful summers.

I came from Manhattan [or Boston to rural Michigan, in my case] because the noise and bustle crushed my soul.

Yet the noise [and even worse...] is here, every moment, everywhere. My neighbors run machines, buzz buzz buzz. We cannot leave windows open, sleep in a hammock, or read a book in the shade.

There is no peaceful summer. Maybe there never was. Maybe Eden had leaf blowers and generators and electric weed wackers and buzz saws and Strontium 90 and plutonium and TCE and PCBs and fracking waste and DDT. Maybe google earth snapped pictures of naked Adam and Eve and posted them on facebook. Maybe Eden’s evil snake was a sneaky drone. Maybe Eden’s apple was an iphone.

Maybe the writers of the Bible left industrialization out of creation to fool us all. Maybe there have always been machines.

Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace  

AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld

70 Percent of Americans 'Emotionally Disconnected' at Work: Shocking Poll Reveals Workforce Zombieland

 

Nearly one in five hates work so much they sabotage their employers. 

June 18, 2013  |  

 

If you thought that Americans who kept their jobs during the Great Recession were glad to be working, you would be dead wrong. According to a Gallup.com report, 70 percent of American workers are “emotionally disconnected” at work, with nearly one in five employees “actively disengaged.”

 

It's zombieland out there for the American workforce. 

 

Gallup’s ongoing “State of the American Workforce” survey reveals that America is largely a nation of working automatons, with most people not feeling emotional ties to what they do and sizeable numbers actively seeking to sabotage their colleagues and managers.  

 

“These latest findings indicate that 70 percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ and are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive,” the pollers said. “Currently, 52 percent of workers are not engaged, and worse, another 18 percent are actively disengaged in their work.”

 

Which Americans hate their jobs the most? Educated young men appear to be the least committed to their employer, Gallup said, adding that lower-paying service sector jobs also have large percentages of alienated workers. In contrast, women are more loyal and attentive workers, as well as people who are at the beginning and end of their work lives.

 

“Millennials are most likely of all generations to say they will leave their jobs in the next 12 months if the job market improves,” Gallup found. “Employees with a college degree are not as likely as those with less education to report having a positive, engaging workplace experience.”

 

Gallup’s annual workplace survey is conducted as part of its effort to market its services to firms that are seeking to boost employee morale. Its findings haven’t changed over the past decade, with only 30 percent of Americans saying they are emotionally engaged at work. The recent Great Recession and spike in unemployment did not affect that trend.

 

Gallup read 12 statements to workers across the country about their work and asked for comments. The statements included, “I know what is expected of me at work,” “At work my opinions seem to count,” “I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day,” “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise,” “Someone at work seems to care about me as a person,” and “My associates… are committed to doing quality work.”

 

Gallup has surveyed 25 million workers in 189 countries since the late 1990s. It describes three kinds of employes: engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged.

 

“Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward,” Gallup said. “Not Engaged employees are essentially ‘checked out.’ They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work. Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish."

 

Curiously, Gallup suggests that Americans in red states might be better employees than in blue states, because being emotionally engaged is key to better productivity.

 

Louisiana leads the country with the highest percentage of engaged workers, at 37 percent, followed closely by Oklahoma at 36 percent. South Dakota, Georgia, Arkansas, and South Carolina each have 34 percent of engaged workers. Thirty-three percent of workers are engaged in Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, Alabama, North Dakota, and Florida. At the far end of the range is Minnesota, which has the lowest number of engaged workers, at 26 percent.

 

“Gallup found that at the opposite end of the engagement spectrum, more than one in five (21 percent) workers in Rhode Island are actively disengaged, as are 20 percent of employees in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Illinois. Wh en looking at the range of actively disengaged employees, Idaho had the lowest percentage of this type of worker, at 14 percent.”

 

As you might expect, Gallop places the blame for a nation of alienated workers squarely on the desks of managers and executives, who never learned basic people skills to make others feel good about themselves and their work.

 

“Gallup’s research has found that managers are primarily responsible for their employees’ engagement levels,” the report said. “Organizations should coach managers to take an active role in building engagement plans with their employees, hold managers accountable, track their progress, and ensure they continuously focus on emotionally engaging their employees.”

 

Intriguingly, people who work remotely seem to be more emotio nally connected to their work—or at least put in longer hours, Gallup said. “Despite not always having a manager nearby to monitor their productivity, remote workers actually log more hours at their primary job than do their on-site counterparts.”

 

Gallup also found that companies of less than 10 people, or teams within companies that size, have the most committed workers, “suggesting something unique and beneficial about working in a smaller, tight-knit work environment when it comes to engagement.”

 

The polling organization also found that employers tended to treat recent college graduates poorly, instead of making them feel valued. “Despite the benefits that the increasingly educated workforce is expected to bring to the U.S. economy, it appears that employers are doing too little to engage this influx of college graduates in their workplaces.” 

 

 

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

SALON

Sunday, Jun 16, 2013 10:30 AM UTC

From Ike to “The Matrix”: Welcome to the American dystopia

Part Orwellian security state, part Huxley wonderland and part "Matrix," America is three dystopias in one!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics: Movies, Politics, Surveillance, technology, surveillance state, surveillance society, 1984, Barack Obama, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Science Fiction and Fantasy, the matrix, Editor's Picks, Entertainment News, Politics News

 

American society has been sliding toward the realm of dystopian science fiction — toward a nightmarish mishmash of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick — since at least the early years of the Reagan administration, and arguably a lot longer than that. (Since Watergate? The Kennedy assassination? The A-bomb? Take your pick.) We may have finally gotten there. We live in a country that embodies three different dystopian archetypes at once: America is partly a panopticon surveillance-and-security state, as in Orwell, partly an anesthetic and amoral consumer wonderland, as in Huxley, and partly a grand rhetorical delusion or “spectacle,” as in Dick or “The Matrix” or certain currents of French philosophy.

Let’s step away from the brainiac analysis for a second and give full credit to the small-town Republican and war hero who warned us about what was coming, more than 50 years ago. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke gravely about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that lay in the coming coalition between “the military-industrial complex” and “the scientific-technological elite.” It would require “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Ike cautioned, to make sure this combination did not “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” As we say these days: Our bad.

I can’t find any direct evidence that Eisenhower had ever read Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World,” let alone that they shaped his insights into the heretical possibility that the alternative to Soviet-style Communism might turn out to be just as bad in its own way. Ike wasn’t the country bumpkin that many East Coast intellectuals of that era assumed him to be (English was his best subject at West Point), but he favored history and biography over literature and philosophy. His dire and all too prescient vision of the American future was no doubt drawn from the cultural climate around him, so perhaps he can be said to have absorbed the Orwellian vision by osmosis and made it his own. (Intriguingly, his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, an eminent foreign policy expert, seems aware of the connection and cites “1984” as a formative influence on her own career.)

After the recent revelations about grandiose NSA domestic surveillance campaigns, complete with PowerPoint presentations that look like material from an unreleased mid-‘90s satire by Paul Verhoeven, we learned that sales of one recent edition of Orwell’s “1984” had apparently spiked by almost 7,000 percent on Amazon. Are these facts actually connected? Are these facts even facts? There’s no way to be sure, which may illustrate how difficult it is to know or understand anything amid the onslaught of pseudo-information. Maybe our current situation (as many Twitter users observed) owes more to Franz Kafka than to Orwell.

If people are really going to read “1984,” instead of just throwing it around as a reference, that can only be a good thing. (You can also watch Michael Radford’s excellent film version, with John Hurt and Richard Burton – actually released in 1984! — online right now.) It’s a devastating novel by one of the best writers of English prose of the last century, and a work that shaped both the thinking and the vocabulary of our age. But as a predictor or manual for the age of permanent war, permanent political paralysis and Total Information Awareness (Adm. John Poindexter’s much-mocked predecessor to PRISM), it gives you only part of the story.

If the technology of the national security state has finally caught up with, and indeed surpassed, anything imagined by Orwell’s Big Brother, who must rely on two-way “telescreens” and regular old secret agents to keep tabs on every citizen, the context is almost entirely different. Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Orwell imagined an indefinite combination of postwar British poverty and austerity mixed with the drab, monochromatic austerity of the Soviet Union during the worst of the Stalin years. He was also imagining the aftermath of a future world-transforming war that would be even worse than the last one. Although it’s more widely understood as a political metaphor, “1984” also points the way toward “Planet of the Apes,” “The Hunger Games” and countless other post-apocalyptic visions.

Our own society, with its endless array of electronic gizmos, opulent luxury goods and a vibrant and/or morbid pop culture capable of invading every waking moment (and the sleeping ones too), looks nothing like that. At least on its surface, it more closely resembles the pharmaceutically cushioned, caste-divided and slogan-nourished Dr. Phil superstate of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which is built around constant distraction and consumption and in which all desire for transcendence and spirituality can be answered with chemicals. But we certainly don’t live in the atheistic, full-employment command economy envisaged by Huxley either — he was imagining an unholy technocratic union of Lenin and Henry Ford — even if many people on the right remain convinced that Barack Obama is leading us there.

For a long time, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was customary for intellectuals who addressed the differences and similarities between Orwell and Huxley to assert that “1984” had not come true and that Huxley had come closer to predicting, as Christopher Hitchens put, it the “painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus” and “blissed-out and vacant servitude” of the postmodern age. I think the best of these comes from Neil Postman’s withering assessment in the foreword to “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a landmark work of cultural criticism published in 1985:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut. What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t be seen. Read carefully through the recent news about the NSA revelations and you can see a few tendrils of this stuff: We know more than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do. On the international stage, America plays a grotesque supervillain role, blundering from nation to nation like Robocop in an endless war that has yielded only hatred and mockery. Radical Islam has always been our enemy, except when our enemy has always been Communism.

In 1946, two years before writing “1984,” Orwell wrote an essay about the new form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:

These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

That vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in (with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group, or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in “The Matrix,” we chose the simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.

More Andrew O'Hehir.

How Class Anxiety and Masculinity Fears Push Men to Work Longer Hours

Gender  

Huffington Post / By Joan Williams

How Class Anxiety and Masculinity Fears Push Men to Work Longer Hours

A work culture in which long hours signal value and status is bad for everyone.

 

 

 

May 31, 2013  |  

 

 

How many employed American mothers work more than 50 hours a week? Go on, guess. I've been asking lots of people that question lately. Most guess around 50 percent.

The truth is nine percent.

Nine percent of working moms clock more than 50 hours a week during the key years of career advancement: ages 25 to 44. If we limit the sample to mothers with at least a college degree, the number rises only slightly, to 13.9 percent. (These statistics came from special tabulations of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey.)

This "long hours problem," analyzed so insightfully by Robin Ely and Irene Padavic, is a key reason why the percentage of women in top jobs has stalled at about 14 percent, a number that has barely budged in the past decade. We can't expect progress when the fast track that leads to top jobs requires a time commitment that excludes most mothers and, by extension, most women. A recent study by Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School found that the mothers most likely to enter the fast track -- graduates of elite universities -- are less likely to be working full-time than mothers with less prestigious degrees. Only 45.3 percent of mothers who graduated from top-tier institutions and only 34.8 percent of MBAs have full-time jobs. Most aren't full-time homemakers: in addition to parenting, they typically have part-time jobs or community service roles. But you can bet your boots it's under-valued work that rarely, if ever, leads to positions of power.

Despite the obvious importance of the hours problem, progress has been limited. An increasingly common response is to declare victory.

"What flexibility means today is not part-time," the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. "What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere." That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, "What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?"

We can't get mothers to work more hours. We've tried, and failed, for 40 years. Mothers won't bite for a simple reason: if they work 55 hours a week, they will leave home at, say, 8:30 and return at 8:30 every day of the workweek, assuming an average commute time. Most moms have this one little hang-up: they want to see their children awake. Increasingly, many fathers do, too.

And yet, after 40 years of intensive effort, the work-life frontier looks grim. Recent events confirm this. In late 2012, Bank of America announced that it was preparing to add more restrictions to its work-from-home program, reportedly to increase efficiency. Early this year, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly ended the company's "results only work environment" (ROWE) program that judged corporate employees only on (gasp!) performance, and not where or how long they worked. And, of course, Marissa Mayer eliminated telecommuting at Yahoo! (Why have we only heard about that one? Because women CEOs are held to higher standards, that's why.)

Why are workplace flexibility programs so hard to sustain? The business case for such programs' benefits is well-known. The elimination of ROWE is particularly striking because the path-breaking work of Erin Kelly, Phyllis Moen and their colleagues has produced rigorous regressions that ROWE reduced turnover and turnover intentions, reduced employees' interruptions at work, reduced time employees' engaged in work of little value to the company, and increased employee's sense of job involvement, using rigorous social science methodology.

But the issue here is not money. At issue are manliness and morality.

For upper-middle class men, notes sociologist Michèle Lamont, ambition and a strong work ethic are "doubly sacred... as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity. Elite men's jobs revolve around the work devotion schema, which communicates that high-level professionals should "demonstrate commitment by making work the central focus of their lives" and "manifest singular 'devotion to work,' unencumbered with family responsibilities," to quote sociologist Mary Blair-Loy. This ideal has roots in the 17th century Protestant work ethic, in which work was viewed as a "calling" to serve God and society. The religious connection has vanished... or has it?

Blair-Loy draws parallels between the words bankers used to describe their work -- "complete euphoria" or "being totally consumed" -- and Emile Durkheim's classic account of a religion ceremony among Australian natives. "I worshipped my mentor," said one woman. Work becomes a totalizing experience. "Holidays are a nuisance because you have to stop working," said one banker interviewed by Blair-Loy. "I remember being really annoyed when it was Thanksgiving.

Damn, why did I have to stop working to go eat a turkey? I missed my favorite uncle's funeral, because I had a deposition scheduled that was too important."

Work devotion marries moral purity with elite status. Way back when I was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, I used to call it the cult of busy smartness. How do the elite signal to each other how important they are? "I am slammed," is a socially acceptable way of saying "I am important." Fifty years ago, Americans signaled class by displaying their leisure: think banker's hours (9 to 3). Today, the elite -- journalist Chrystia Freeland calls them "the working rich" -- display their extreme schedules.

Not only is work devotion a "class act" --a way of enacting class status -- it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their 1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina and virility."

Workplace norms cement felt truths that link long hours with manliness, moral stature and elite status. If work-family advocates think they can dislodge these "truths" with documentation of business benefits, they are sorely mistaken. The coverage of Marissa Mayer's decision to eliminate telecommuting highlights how even hard data get lost in the shuffle.

The press coverage acknowledged the robust evidence that telecommuting boosts productivity -- and then dismissed it as if productivity were a silly little side-issue. "Okay, okay, it might boost productivity," was the argument, "but it inhibits innovation." Okay, but after you spark those great ideas in the lunchroom, you need quiet time to work them through -- for which telecommuting is perfect. No mention of that, though.

So, here's where we stand. If institutions are serious about advancing women, they'll have to address the hours problem -- that's the only way to get a critical mass of women poised for leadership. But we'll never address the hours problem until we open up a conversation about what drives it.

It's not productivity. It's not innovation. It's identity. If you've lived a life where holidays are a nuisance, where you've missed your favorite uncle's funeral and your children's childhoods, in a culture that conflates manly heroism with long hours, it's going to take more than a few regressions to convince you it wasn't really necessary, after all, for your work to devour you.

This post originally appeared on HBR.org here.

Williams is Founding director, Center for WorkLife Law and Distinguished professor of law, University of California, Hastings.

We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America

Education  

Reader Supported News / By William Boardman

We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America

Crackdown on Florida high school science student is prime example of American idiocy.

May 31, 2013  |   

 

It's not as though a bunch of people in central Florida have been consciously conspiring about the best way to trash a 16-year-old girl's life, but the effect of their collective personal and institutional stupidity may well produce the same effect. At first there was no sign that any of them much cared, but now there's a ray of hope for a just outcome. Read on.

This cultural stupidity in Florida isn't an all-American sort of thing that could happen anywhere—and probably has in a variety of forms similar to the recent mindlessness that led school officials to call the police who called the prosecutor who decided, over the phone, to have a 16-year-old girl arrested as an adult and charged with two felonies under state law because she did an outdoors experiment that blew up an 8 oz. water bottle with the force of a small firecracker, doing no damage and harming no one.

This is the case of 11th grader Kiera Wilmot, a Bartow High School honor student with straight A's and a perfect behavior record, according to school officials. Sometime around 7 a.m. on Monday, April 22, she tried an experiment with a friend watching: she mixed hydrochloric acid (in a toilet bowl cleaner) with a bit of aluminum foil inside a plastic water bottle—a trick known familiarly as a "Drano bomb" or "works bomb." As predicted (and shown in video), shortly after Kiera Wilmot mixed the ingredients and put the cap on the bottle, hydrogen gas was produced, with enough pressure to pop the top off the bottle with the sound of a small firecracker.

Arguably, that was a stupid thing to do, at least on school grounds.

So the Question Quickly Arises, Are There Any Grown-Ups Here?

Then the adults got involved and took the stupidity to higher levels, quickly producing a stupidity tsumani of an all too familiar American kind.

The first adult on the scene is Dan Durham the assistant principal in charge of discipline at Bartow High. He hears the bottle pop outside the building before the school day starts. He goes to investigate. He finds Kiera Wilmot and she tells him the whole story.

She tells him it's an experiment she was doing in anticipation of the science fair. Apparently not believing her, perhaps fearing an international terror conspiracy, Durham calls the science teacher (who remains anonymous). The science teacher says that Kiera Wilmot's bottle pop has nothing to do with science class, so his skirts are clean. Of course what she does for science class is different from the science fair, but apparently no one figures that part out.

Continuing his enforcement, Dan Durham calls in the cops, which is easy enough since there's a "resource officer" on the premises.

At some point principal Ron Pritchard avoids involvement and allows the situation to continue to spin out of control. Faced with a bright young 16-year-old honor student with a perfect behavior record, who admits she just did an experiment that was louder than she'd expected, principal Pritchard doesn't act to put Kiera Wilmot's harmless behavior in perspective.

 

An Educator With a Passive-Aggressive Vicious Streak

Instead, with a kind of passive-aggressive viciousness, he ignores the best interests of a child under his care, he doesn't exercise leadership or good judgment, he stays out of the way. Maybe he thinks he's defending the institution, or himself, but whatever he was thinking, he lets law enforcement help make things worse.

And the principal knew all along what was real. Playing the kindly old duff on TV later, he said of Kiera Wilmot: "She just wanted to see what would happen and I think it shocked her that - because she was very honest with us when we were out there talking and I think, I think it kind of shocked her that it did that."

That was a few days later, when he knew full well how his own inaction had contributed to Kiera Wilmot getting arrested and charged as an adult with felony charges alleging she "discharged a weapon" and "discharged a destructive device."

Kiera Wilmot's weapon/device was an 8 oz. water bottle with toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum that hurt no one and destroyed nothing.

But principal Pritchard told a TV reporter: "She's a good kid and, you know, she made a bad choice and stuff and, uh - I don't think that - she was not trying to be malicious to harm anybody or destroy something at school or anything else."

In Florida educational circles, apparently, the offense of "a bad choice and stuff" is more than enough to put a child at risk of spending 5 years in jail and having a felony on her record for the rest of her life.

Why Would You Expect Public Servants to Exercise Any Discretion?

After school officials exercise no discretion, neither does the school's resource officer.

In his report, Bartow PD school resource officer Gregory Rhoden characterized the event as a "destructive device/weapons incident." Rhoden met first with assistant principal Durham, who was the official complainant. According to his report, Rhoden did not meet with the principal or anyone else other than Kiera Wilmot, whom he arrested, handcuffed, Mirandized, and questioned.

She told Rhoden the same story principal Pritchard said she told him, except that Rhoden reports there was a male friend who helped Kiera Wilmot do her bottle pop experiment. "At this time efforts are being made to identify Wilmot's friend," wrote Rhoden, a 1993 graduate of the same high school.

"I then contacted assistant state attorney Tammy Glotfelty via telephone. I advised a.s.a. Glotfelty of the circumstances of the case and she advised this officer to file charges of possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property F.S.S. 790.115(1) and making, possessing, throwing, projecting, placing, or discharging any destructive device F.S.S. 790.161 (A)," Rhoden's report said.

It concluded, "I completed a cost affidavit and property receipt for the plastic bottle. The bottle was impounded as evidence."

Lodged As a Juvenile, Expelled by the School, At the Mercy of the Law Kiera Wilmot was taken to the juvenile assessment center. She has remained there since April 22.

Bartow High School expelled her the same day, with no due process, saying there was no choice under the district's zero tolerance policy. At the end of that day, the school system seemed to be done with Kiera Wilmot - mission accomplished - unless she exercises her right to appeal to the school board.

Belatedly, the story emerged, apparently starting on April 24 with pretty straightforward coverage by TV station WTSP in Tampa. Posted online, the story drew almost unanimous sympathy for Kiera Wilmot, along with more general observations like "Florida incarcerates children at a rate higher than the national average. We need to stop the school-to-prison-pipeline" and "This country has become a malevolent joke" and "Where can we petition the stupidity of this paranoia?"

The answer to that question is two places: Change.org and ACLU.org.

Initial Reporting Is Shallow, Ducks Hard Questions

While WTSP reporter Melanie Michael blonde, was even-handed, her report was remarkably shallow. Although she had Principal Pritchard on camera, she didn't get him to answer questions about why he thought the school's response was appropriate, or why he thought the punishment wasn't disproportionate, or what responsibility a school has for preserving its students' futures.

The intensity of the coverage of this story Ð and increased focus on the apparent injustice to Kiera Wilmot Ð picked up with an April 26 blog post on WTF Florida, on the web page of the Miami New Times, summarizing the event with a tone of disbelief under the headline: "Florida Teen Girl Charged With Felony After Science Experiment Goes Bad."

That blog post also reported the unsigned, official statement in standard bureaucratese released by the Polk County School District, mostly if not all officials, presumably:

"Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. Unfortunately, the incident that occurred at Bartow High School yesterday was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff."

What Consequences Are There For Bad Bureaucrats' Decisions?

The school system bases its literally mindless response on its "zero tolerance" policy, which apparently includes zero tolerance for assessment, analysis, deliberation, or proportionality.

The school district statement echoes the irrelevant and completely false argument attributed to unnamed "local authorities" that: "In this day and age, in this climate, you cannot be too careful." That is the argument from panic that, in effect, says the longing for safety justifies a police state.

"Unfortunately, what she did falls into our code of conduct É It's grounds for immediate expulsion," said the district's Senior Director of Strategic Communications/Community Relations Leah Lauderdale.

The official response to Kiera Wilmot makes a mockery of the Polk County Public Schools web site's promotional video that slickly touts "rigorous, relevant learning experiences," the effort to "prepare every student to enter college," and that "graduation for all students is Goal #1."

Reaction around the internet has been building ever since, overwhelmingly in support of Kiera Wilmot.

On May 1 on MSNBC, Chris Hayes covered the story, talking to youth advocate Khary Lazarre-White, executive director of Bro/Sis. In his view, the Florida case reflects a wider American failure: "Really what it is, this is about adults who are refusing to do their responsibility—this is about parents, teachers, and school districts - and that needs to be the response, not law enforcement, because it really is a question about kind of an America do we want to see."

Florida May Be Worst Case, But the Problem Is National

Arguing that too many schools have stopped responding to children's needs in a child-centered way, Lazarre-White said:

"It's emblematic of a national issue. Over three million cases of expulsion and severe suspensions across the country, and it's a zero tolerance policy that is expelling children for the kinds of things that got us sent to the principal's office or talked to by a teacher Ð at worst Ð when we were in school."

On May 5, two days after Baton Rouge, Louisiana, TV station WAFB ran a summary of Kiera Wilmot's story, the station's online poll had 90% of respondents supporting her and calling her punishment too harsh.

Through all of this, the Wilmot family has stayed out of the public eye. Kiera's twin sister still goes to the same school, but she didn't join her friends who went on TV to talk about her. Their mother is a single, working mom. For all the support they've been getting from afar, locally they've had no openly public defenders.

But Kiera Wilmot does have an attorney, Larry Hardaway of Hardaway & Associates in Lakeland, Florida. In an interview May 3 with Business Insider, he sounded like the first sane adult involved in the case.

Kiera Wilmot's Attorney Hopes to Prevent Further Harm

Hardaway reports that he has gotten the school board to stay its expulsion proceedings "until we can work out a resolution."

He says that he is negotiating with the state attorney's office, which has not yet decided whether to charge her as an adult or a juvenile, or whether to charge her at all - "We will have further negotiations next week about how to move forward without harming her."

Hardaway speaks highly of Assistant State Attorney Tammy Glotfelty, calling her "a very fine prosecutorÉ. There are prosecutors that are sometimes hardened, and aren't as sensitive as they should be, but that wouldn't be Tammy Glotfelty."

In a recent juvenile case that Glotfelty considered for about a month, she ended up deciding not to prosecute a 13-year-old boy for killing his brother when they were shooting at each other with BB guns. Some have criticized Glotfelty for calling that case, two boys, a "tragic accident," but seeming to fail to approach Kiera Wilmot with the same degree of sensitivity.

Making a recommendation over the phone, based only on third party information, may strike some as less than careful, but if the prosecutors decided not to file any charges, as Hardaway is advocating, that would at least limit the damage to Kiera Wilmot.

In a Just Country, Wouldn't Someone Try to Make Kiera Wilmot Whole?

She'll still have personal and family trauma to deal with, and a financial burden, and likely social consequences if some unpleasant sort. Maybe she can go back to school and graduate (Goal #1!) and even go to college and have a decent life in spite of it all.

And Bartow High School will have achieved its goal of giving her a "rigorous, relevant learning experience" of an unusual, unfortunate, and sadly useful nature for navigating contemporary America. She will have an object lesson that those entrusted with your care won't always care for you, those entrusted with your protection won't always protect you, and those entrusted with guarding your rights won't always guard you.

It's not a pretty picture of an insecure homeland, where it's hard to find people in authority who can be trusted - but it is real.

And it wasn't a science project gone bad. It was an experiment that worked. As predicted.

 

Will Prosecutors' Reasonableness Be Shared by Education "Professionals?"

Update: On May 15, the prosecutors announced that Kiera Wilmot would not face further charges if she successfully completes a Diversion Program agreement. The prosecutors office statement read, in its entirety:

Based upon the facts and circumstances of the case, the lack of criminal history of the child involved, and the action taken by the Polk County School Board, the State Attorney's Office extended an offer of diversion of prosecution to the child. The child and her guardian signed the agreement to successfully complete the Department of Juvenile Justice Diversion Program.

The pending case has been dismissed. No formal charges will be filed.

Attorney Hardaway told reporters the same day that he and Kiera Wilmot and her mother are continuing to discuss the situation with the Polk County School Board. After principal Pritchard recommended that the "good kid" be expelled, that recommendation was put on hold, awaiting action by the prosecutors.

The next formal step is for the expulsion appeal to be heard by a school board hearing officer.

Kiera Wilmot has now served a ten-day suspension and is completing 11th grade at an alternative school. Hardaway said his client is eager to clear her name because she's worried that people at her school think she's a "terrorist."

By their own comments, school officials have always known Kiera Wilmot was never anything like a terrorist. And now they have an opportunity to deliver a powerful, positive message by admitting they overreacted and expunging the whole episode from the record.

In education jargon, it's called a teachable moment. In life it's called fair.

And if school officials are looking for a role model, they can study the response of a former NASA engineer, Homer Hickam, to Kiera Wilmot's situation. Hickam, whose personal story was portrayed in the movie "October Sky," has given Kiera Wilmot a scholarship to the summer program at the United States Advanced Space Academy, part of the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, and he's raising money for a scholarship for her sister as well.

As a teenager in West Virginia, Hickam conducted unauthorized experiments with rockets at his high school, which also led to police taking him away in handcuffs.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Three Reasons Why State Polarization Is a Big Deal

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

Three Reasons Why State Polarization Is a Big Deal

Abby Rapoport

 

May 29, 2013

A new study shows that state legislatures are becoming increasingly divided. That matters a lot more than you might think. 

Those of us who report on state-level politics usually brag about how much better it is than following Congress. On our beat, after all, bills actually get passed and become law—unlike in D.C., where the Senate can’t even vote for lack of cloture and the House just keeps reapproving the repeal of Obamacare in some endless Politico version of Groundhog Day. In state legislatures, deals get made, budgets get passed (even balanced, if that’s your thing), and not every single issue is defined by a Democratic-Republican split.
Turns out we’ve been overstating things.

A new study shows that polarization—the ideological gulf between the average Republican and average Democrat—is growing in state legislatures. Political scientists Boris Shor (University of Chicago) and Nolan McCarty (Princeton University) combined survey results from the Project Vote Smart office-holder questionnaire with roll-call votes, comparing the average Republican and Democratic lawmakers in each state. (The data are available for anyone to play with.) Their findings tell us that state legislatures aren’t quite as polarized as Congress, but they’re moving in the same direction. What’s even more interesting, though, is what polarization actually means—and who benefits from it.

Here’s my take on what we can glean from the findings:

1. Most State Legislatures Are More Polarized than Congress

The gap between Democrats and Republicans in some state legislatures isn’t just as big as in Congress—it’s bigger. The states with the most polarization vary both in terms of geography and political persuasion. Among the five states with the biggest divide are Democratic-leaning states like California and Colorado, Republican-leaning states like Arizona, and middle-of-the-road states like Washington.

Boris Shor, The American Legislatures Project

In the past, party was not the only indicator of where state legislators fell on the ideological spectrum. Rural Democrats might overlap with urban Republicans on social issues, for instance, while urban Democrats and rural Republicans might agree on public-school funding. Those areas of agreement are increasingly few. In 2013, if a lawmaker supports affirmative action, odds are she also supports abortion rights and a progressive tax structure. “If you tell me one element of your beliefs, I can predict all the other elements of your beliefs,” Shor says. “I’m gonna be right 90 percent of the time.”

One reason for the shift: increasingly, national groups call the shots for Republican state lawmakers. Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge, signed by 1,037 current state lawmakers, helped create a method for nationalizing state issues. Groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have successfully pushed “model legislation” to Republican lawmakers around the country, accounting for the proliferation of voter ID laws and stand-your-ground laws, among others. Increasingly, big-money conservatives such as the Koch brothers support challenges to “moderate” Republican lawmakers on the state level to enforce ideological purity. The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) spent around $30 million to elect GOP lawmakers in 2010 and another $25 million in 2012. (Democrats are playing catch-up, having spent nearly $11 million in 2010 and around $10 million in 2012.) In many state-level races, a few thousand dollars can make an enormous difference; the big national spenders help ensure that state lawmakers will be more in line with the national agenda.

2. Polarization Doesn’t Always Mean What You Think

Polarization at the state level doesn’t necessarily lead to congressional-style gridlock. For instance, California has by far the biggest ideological gap between state Democrats and state Republicans. But because Democrats thoroughly dominate the state, it hardly matters; they can pass bills to force fracking companies to be more transparent or help give flexibility to transgendered students. Similarly, in GOP-dominated states like Texas, Republicans have had little trouble passing a laundry list of conservative legislation.

A bigger surprise: Less-polarized states are not necessarily more moderate. Take Louisiana, which is one of the least polarized states according to the study—because its minority Democrats are so conservative themselves that the gap between the parties is very small. On the left, Massachusetts also has a small gap between the parties; the average Republican officeholder there is more liberal than the average Democrat in Louisiana.

The legislation passed in those states generally reflects what most voters want. That’s not true in heavily polarized states with closer partisan divides. Wisconsin is among the states with an ideological gap bigger than Congress’s. Even though the state votes blue in presidential races, Republican Governor Scott Walker, along with a GOP-controlled legislature, have successfully passed right-wing anti-union and voter ID laws. Similarly, Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature passed voter ID and an extreme brand of welfare reform, even as Democrats won statewide on more moderate agendas. Michigan is another easy example, where GOP legislature of the historically pro-union state passed right-to-work laws designed to weaken the labor movement. It’s no coincidence that all three states are Republican.

3. Polarization Helps Explain the Uptick in Conservative Legislation

It’s easy to argue that Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible for the growing polarization. But who benefits the most from ideological gaps? The study doesn’t attempt to answer this question, but it gives us tools to understand why Republicans have more successfully exploited polarized legislatures at the state level—just as they have in Congress.

There’s no progressive equivalent to the power that right-wing groups like ALEC and Norquist’s Americans for Tax Fairness have over Republican lawmakers. These groups have been notably active in creating a common conservative agenda across the states, promoting everything from lower taxes and budget cuts to anti-union measures and voter ID. It doesn’t hurt that Republicans dominate significantly more capitols, thanks to their greater investment in state-level races. In 23 states, Republicans control the senate, house, and governor’s office; by comparison, Democrats control all three in only 12 states.

Voters in the Republican-controlled states aren’t necessarily extreme—but the legislation coming out of them often is. In North Carolina, Virginia, or Ohio, all battleground states at the presidential level and all more polarized than Congress, the legislatures have pushed far-right legislation. Ohio’s GOP legislature passed anti-labor laws, only to see them repealed by voters through referenda. Virginia’s pre-abortion sonogram bill prompted national outrage, while North Carolina’s legislature, which first turned red in 2010, is slashing benefits for the needy and pushing to pass voter ID. While Democratic states like Maryland and California have pushed unabashedly liberal agendas, both states are also left-wing bastions. Across the Midwest, meanwhile, Republicans are passing extreme legislation in much more middle-of-the-road places.

That’s possible, in part, because Republicans have another new advantage. Progressives and conservatives have “sorted” themselves geographically, so that Democrats tend to live in densely populated cities while Republicans control more suburban and rural areas. Since districts are drawn geographically, Democratic votes are too tightly packed and count for less.

About the Author

Abby Rapoport is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She was previously a political reporter for the Texas Observer.

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